Nancy Guthrie<\/a> vanished, and a third, more recent \u200cmessage from someone claiming to know the kidnappers’ identities, the official said.<\/p>\n“None of the ransom notes are believed to be genuine,” the FBI official told Reuters, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss details of an active investigation.<\/p>\n
A second law enforcement source familiar with the matter confirmed the FBI assessment of the ransom notes.<\/p>\n<\/p>\nThe disclosure that the FBI has discounted the veracity of the three notes – two of which were widely reported to have been communications from kidnappers – seemed to raise doubts \u200babout investigators’ fundamental premise that Nancy Guthrie was abducted for ransom to begin with.<\/p>\n\nArizona sheriff has no updates on the investigation<\/h2>\n
A spokesperson for the Pima County Sheriff’s Department, which is leading the overall investigation, declined to comment, citing its \u200bagreement to refer all inquiries regarding ransom notes to the FBI.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n“We don’t have any updates, other than this is still an active investigation,” the sheriff’s spokesperson, \u2060Angelica Carrillo, said. She added that DNA samples and video evidence collected in the case “remain under forensic analysis.”<\/p>\n\nAll three messages in question were initially delivered to various media outlets, including celebrity news outlet TMZ, before \u200bthey were turned over to authorities for review.<\/p>\n\nSavannah Guthrie, 54, longtime co-anchor of the NBC morning news program “Today,” has referenced ransom demands in video messages she and her siblings have posted on social media, urging kidnappers \u200bto open a direct line of communication with her family and pleading for her mother’s return, saying in one video, “we will pay.”<\/p>\n
Cryptocurrency payment went unclaimed<\/h2>\n
The elder Guthrie, who had been in frail health with limited mobility, was last seen alive at her home in Tucson, Arizona, on January 31, after spending an evening with her older daughter, Annie Guthrie, and son-in-law.<\/p>\n
The FBI, which has taken the lead in examining any purported ransom notes or other communications from suspects in the case, \u200bhad previously declined to say publicly whether any of the messages under review were considered credible. Investigators determined that the first two originated from the same sender, the official told Reuters, though how that conclusion was \u200bdrawn was not specified.<\/p>\n
The first note, according to TMZ, demanded a sum “in the millions” to be paid in cryptocurrency and set two deadlines for payment – on February 5 and February 9. The second note was reported by NBC News \u200clast week to \u2060have referred to Guthrie at that point as having died, without making an apology or demanding any payment for the return of her body.<\/p>\n<\/p>\nIn a bid to test the authenticity of the first note and possibly trace the ransom demands back to the perpetrators, the FBI early on deposited a small amount of cryptocurrency in an account as instructed in the message, but the money was left untouched and never taken, the official said.<\/p>\n\nIt was on that basis and by other unspecified means that the FBI reached the conclusion that the two ransom notes that it determined to be of a common origin were nevertheless \u200bsent by a person or persons not actually connected \u200bwith Guthrie’s disappearance, according to the official.<\/p>\n
The \u2060FBI has additionally discounted the authenticity of a third note that TMZ reported it received last week from someone claiming to know the identities of Nancy Guthrie’s abductors and to have video of the “main guy” involved in her kidnapping, as well as of the victim on the day she died.<\/p>\n
The FBI official did not \u200breveal how investigators ruled out the third note as fake.<\/p>\n
Savannah Guthrie asked public to come foward with information<\/h2>\n
Reacting to last week’s ransom note headlines from NBC News, the home network of “Today,” Savannah Guthrie \u200btook time on her show \u2060to appeal to the public again for answers to the fate of her mother, urging anyone who might know something to come forward. Guthrie also reminded viewers of the $1 million reward being offered by her family, whom she described as being in “agony” since her mother vanished.<\/p>\n\nAuthorities confirmed soon after her disappearance that DNA tests showed that blood found on Nancy Guthrie’s front porch came from her.<\/p>\n
Media attention on the case has waned considerably since mid-February, \u2060when the sheriff \u200band FBI released surveillance footage of an armed prowler in a ski mask shown tampering with Nancy Guthrie’s doorbell camera shortly \u200bbefore she was abducted.<\/p>\n
But DNA samples obtained from a glove found near her home and resembling the pair the prowler was seen wearing failed to produce a match against known genetic profiles in a national database.<\/p>\n
Savannah Guthrie later said her family was still “blowing on \u200bthe embers of hope” that her mother was alive, while also acknowledging that “she may already be gone.”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.usatoday.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Jana Winter and Steve Gorman \u00a0|\u00a0 Reuters Savannah Guthrie pleads after ransom note claims mother’s death TODAY Show anchor Savannah Guthrie makes an emotional on-air plea after a reported ransom note claims her mother has died. All three kidnapping-related messages that have surfaced in news media reports about the disappearance of “Today” show co-host Savannah […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2482921,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25177],"tags":[22164,305246,305253,322004,353329,365495,314673,305247,438757,22420,371172,22240,239389,74947,21738,30600,239343,239420,328631,351836,30252,314674,354375,354379,354376,239344,34080,239422],"class_list":["post-2482920","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-celebrities","tag-abuse","tag-crime","tag-crime-u0026-justice","tag-enforcement","tag-fbi","tag-guthrie","tag-investigations","tag-justice","tag-kidnapping","tag-law","tag-law-enforcement","tag-life","tag-life-now","tag-negative","tag-news","tag-now","tag-overall","tag-overall-negative","tag-savannah","tag-savannah-guthrie","tag-scandals","tag-scandals-u0026-investigations","tag-sensitive","tag-sensitive-subjects","tag-subjects","tag-u0026","tag-violence","tag-violence-u0026-abuse"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/Nancy-Guthrie-kidnapping-notes-determined-to-be-fakes-FBI-source.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2482920","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2482920"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2482920\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2482922,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2482920\/revisions\/2482922"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2482921"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2482920"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2482920"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2482920"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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