By GREG WOODFIELD IN TUCSON, ARIZONA and RUTH STYLES IN TUCSON, ARIZONA and ALEXA CIMINO, US REPORTER
Nancy Guthrie’s neighbor gave police vital information that prompted them to search the roof of her home Friday after she went missing last weekend.
The neighbor who tipped off cops about Nancy Guthrie’s suspicious looking pristine roof has told the Daily Mail: ‘This obviously made me think someone has been to her property recently.’
Police swooped for a third time on the $1 million foothills home in Tucson, Arizona, on Friday and crawled all over the structure, seizing a camera.
They swarmed the house belonging to the 84-year-old mother of NBC Today show co-host Savannah Guthrie after neighbor Laura Gargano raised the alarm over who might have recently done construction work there.
‘I have had my roof recoated and right after that it’s pretty white,’ Gargano said. ‘But it gets dirty pretty quickly and we’ve had a lot of rains in the last month. But not in the last few days.’
Gargano, 63, noticed on media footage that Nancy’s roof was shiny white, which immediately raised her suspicions that contractors had been on site and cops should investigate.
She spoke with a detective on Wednesday. On Friday law enforcement seized a vehicle from the garage as well as the roof camera.
‘If the roof was recoated, who’s been there to do that work? Usually a roofing company will do that kind of work,’ she said.
Laura Gargano tipped off cops about Nancy Guthrie’s suspicious looking pristine roof. She told the Daily Mail: ‘This obviously made me think someone has been to her property recently’
Nancy Guthrie (pictured with her daughter Savannah in 2020) went missing from her home in Tuscon, Arizona, on the night of Saturday, January 31
Aerial footage of FBI agents conducting a search at Nancy’s home on Friday, February 6
‘But it doesn’t have to be a roofing company, it could be construction company, it could be a handyman. It’s not hard work. It’s not highly skilled labor.’
She continued: You know, you have to notice things. It’s not like I saw her roof a month ago and noticed that it was dirty and now it’s clean. My friend actually pointed it out to me and then I looked at it, and I said, yes, that looks like it’s newly recoated.
‘And that made me think, maybe somebody has been her property.
‘You’re always looking to see who’s been to your property, because we have big properties, big homes here, expensive by probably general U.S. standards. And so you’re always looking to see who has been there recently.’
She said roofing companies continually leave advertising fliers in residents’ mailboxes ‘but I nearly always just throw them away.’
Gargano added the Guthrie abduction has made locals far more wary about anyone coming to their homes in the affluent Catalina Foothills area.
‘We don’t know if Nancy was targeted,’ she said. ‘We don’t know if it was random. I have spoken with neighbors and I know people are re-examining their security systems and cameras.’
Gargano added: ‘I assume police are looking at everything. But another thought is, if she had work done, did she pay by check, Apple Pay, a credit card?’
Clarke, the private investigator, believes something may have went wrong in the alleged kidnappers’ plan that has prevented them from contacting Nancy’s children
Nancy’s supposed abductors have not contacted the Guthrie family, even though they have made multiple videos pleading for their mother’s safe return
Nancy was reported missing on Sunday after she didn’t show up to church.
Just the night before, she was last seen by her family at game night before returning home around 10pm.
In the early morning hours of February 1, her doorbell camera was disconnected, and 30 minutes later, software detected movement in her home, but no video is available.
Around 2.30am, her pacemaker was disconnected from her phone.
Around 11am, a friend called the family to say Nancy hadn’t shown up to church, and shortly after, the family contacted police.
Authorities searched her home and found blood on the door, and her Ring camera was removed. Her disappearance is being investigated as a kidnapping.
Since the investigation started, the Guthrie family has put out a video to beg abductors to return Nancy home safely. Investigators have also searched her home, seized a blue SUV, and more.
Multiple ransom notes have also been sent to local news stations, but abductors have not given the family any signs of life.
Savannah Guthrie is pictured with her mother on the Today show in June 2023
Investigators have been operating under the assumption that she is still alive.
On Friday, forensic FBI teams scoured the roof of her home in Tucson, Arizona, and reportedly found a mounted camera that had been missed in previous searches.
The same day, Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos told reporters he believes she is out there and was taken against her will.
‘What I believe is that Nancy was removed from her home against her will, and that we need to find her. That’s what I believe. She’s still alive,’ Nanos said. ‘I believe that I have no choice until something shows me, a piece of physical evidence shows me that that’s different.’
Complicating matters further are the multiple ransom notes that have come in to news outlets since Nancy went missing from her home on the night of Saturday, January 31.
Tucson television station KOLD News 13 received the first letter at approximately 5pm on Monday, February 2.
KOLD news anchor Mary Coleman appeared Wednesday on CNN and said the note contained ‘information that only someone who is holding her for ransom would know’.
She also said the letter included a ‘dollar amount’ and a ‘deadline’. That letter was sent to the Pima County Sheriff’s Office.
TMZ appeared to receive this same letter on Tuesday and revealed that the alleged kidnappers wanted millions of dollars in bitcoin sent to a specific crypto wallet address. This address was verified as authentic by investigators.
The note TMZ received specified two deadlines. One was at 5pm on Thursday, which has already passed and another was on Monday, February 9.
The message warned that if the first deadline was missed, the demands would change and that there would be ‘a more serious consequence’ if the second deadline was missed, according to TMZ.
On Friday, staff at KOLD were left ‘alarmed’ by a second message from Nancy’s alleged captors.
Coleman told CNN that both messages were sent straight to law enforcement.
The Pima County Sheriff’s Department said that the IP address from the email did not match the first one sent to the station earlier this week.
If the ransom notes are legitimate, private investigator Clarke said that that whoever sent them to news outlets instead of the family made a ‘rookie’ mistake.
The Guthrie family has noted that no one who claims to have Nancy has contacted them directly, despite their multiple heartbroken pleas on social media.
Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos believes Nancy is still alive and investigators are operating under that assumption
‘No one in 40 years have I seen anybody do a kidnapping, send a ransom note, and then not contact [the family]. The people have no communication with them. That tells me that something went wrong,’ Clarke said.
He speculated that the supposed kidnappers may not have a viable plan to prove Nancy is alive without getting caught. He also suggested authorities may be inferring with whoever has Nancy to buy time.
Clarke said if there ever ends up being an exchange of money, that is when the perpetrators will likely get caught.
‘They’re smart and they’re stupid,’ Clarke said. ‘They knew the Guthrie family. They know who they are. They know where they live. They knew enough about them to pull this thing off.’
Clarke said he believes Nancy is being held nearby because of her poor health. Transporting a woman with a pacemaker and limited mobility almost certainly makes things harder for the kidnappers.
Clarke also shared his opinion on the kidnappers demanding to be paid with Bitcoin, calling it ‘stupid’.
The FBI has tools to trace funds going to crypto wallets, but criminals do have methods to obscure transactions.
They often use mixers or tumblers, services that pool funds from many different sources to hide specific transactions.
Another option is to have funds sent to an exchange in a country with lax anti-money laundering laws. It is unclear where the crypto wallet address included in the ransom notes originates.
