The disappearance of Today Show co-host Savannah Guthrie’s mother, Nancy Guthrie, continues to be a mystery as the police have not been able to track the woman down even after nine days of her going missing from her home. The 84-year-old woman was reported missing on February 1, as she did not show up at church on that Sunday morning after being dropped off at her home the previous night.
Following her disappearance, there were two random demands that were delivered to media houses and considered to be potential ransom situations. Nancy’s children, Savannah, Camron, and Annie had then made a video and put it on social media that said that they were ready to pay the ransom to get their mother back. However, there has been no update on that front either.
Now, former FBI supervisory special agent James Gagliano sat down for an interview with CNN’s Pamela Brown to talk about the nitty-gritty of the case. Gagliano’s main concern appeared to be how absurd the abduction was, given the old age of Nancy. Talking about the same, he said, “So we have an octogenarian, a woman who’s 84 years old. She obviously has heart conditions, needs medications.”
“Kidnappings happen for one of two reasons: it’s either for profit or it’s for revenge.”
Retired FBI Supervisory Special Agent @JamesAGagliano breaks down why the search for Nancy Guthrie is “baffling” investigators. pic.twitter.com/cObSbI1J29
— FOX & Friends (@foxandfriends) February 6, 2026
Gagliano then added, “And Pam, I’ll give you a stat here. Do you know the percentage of kidnappings that occur of 80-year-olds? It’s like infinitesimal. It’s less than one half of one percent. That’s why this case, again, is so baffling and confounding.” He then explained that he was not very convinced that it was actually a case of kidnapping.
When Pamela asked him the question about his opinion on this being a case of Nancy’s abduction, he said, “No, and I’ll give you this-, yeah, and I’ll tell you this: there are number of ways to conduct kidnappings, right? There’s a new craze of this, and again, we saw this south of the border when I was stationed there called virtual kidnappings, where they do everything they can to make you believe that they have your loved one in their, quote, unquote ‘possession’ when they don’t.”
It should be noted here that previously, another retired FBI agent, Greg Rogers, had also talked about the disappearance and highlighted how certain factors, including Nancy’s age did not make much sense when looked through the lens of an abduction case.
He had also shown his skepticism regarding the ransom note since generally people involved with the kidnapping send the note to the family and not to media houses. Moreover, the identity of the kidnappers also appeared to be elusive as Rogers highlighted that it was rather unlikely that someone who had no idea about Nancy would have kidnapped her just randomly.
Gagliano also spoke in the same direction regarding the case being too baffling as he said, “It’s just, there’s so many questions here and the fact that the kidnappers, if this was a kidnapping, had a 14-hour head start from the time she was dropped off at home, supposedly at 10 o’clock, until the family notified law enforcement sometime around noon the next day, and you see the flurry of law enforcement efforts back and forth. I don’t think there’s anything to be taken from that.”
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He then added that to solve the case, police should focus on footwork and go from door to door to collect data. It should be noted here that the FBI had previously announced a $50,000 reward for any information related to the case though that has not yet yielded any positive results.
Gagliano also added, “The second piece of this, and the biggest one, is the digital imagery, the digital exhaust that investigators are going through right now from the kidnappers, quote unquote, ‘kidnappers’, random note.”
He continued, “From the door ring bell that was removed, but they might still be able to harvest some forensic evidence there. Things like that are probably gonna solve this case, and we all hope and pray it’s gonna have a good conclusion.”
With days going by without any major breakthrough in the case, Nancy’s abduction appears increasingly confusing as her family continues to wait for an update both from the police and the abductors.
