Nancy Guthrie Update: FBI Drops Bombshell News About ‘Suspect’

As the Nancy Guthrie investigation enters its fifth month, a new report claims the ransom notes sent by the alleged abductors were fake.

According to Reuters, an anonymous FBI official claimed that at least three letters related to the kidnapping are not authentic. The source said the FBI assessed the authenticity of two ransom notes reported to have been sent in early February, and a third note recently sent to TMZ that claimed to know the identities of Nancy’s kidnappers.

Nancy, the 84-year-old mother of Today‘s Savannah Guthrie, went missing on February 1, when police believe she was abducted from her home in Tucson, Arizona. Investigators have released doorbell camera footage of a masked suspect and sent DNA for testing at the FBI lab in Quantico, but no suspects have been named publicly.

The first ransom note was sent to TMZ and other media outlets in early February, demanding around $4 million in Bitcoin in exchange for Nancy’s return. A second letter, sent to a local Arizona TV station a few days later, implied that Nancy had died, noting that she was “buried with nature.”

“None of the ransom notes are believed to be genuine,” the FBI source told Reuters.

The official said that the FBI tested the legitimacy of the first ransom letter by depositing a small amount of cryptocurrency into the provided wallet address. The deposit was never touched, and this, in addition to other unspecified methods, led the FBI to rule the ransom note as a fake sent by someone not connected to Nancy’s disappearance.

The letter sent to TMZ last week, which claimed to have information about Nancy’s abductors on a phone, was also determined to be fake, though the source did not specify how that decision was made.

Back in March, Savannah revealed in her sit-down interview with Hoda Kotb that she believed two of the notes were real. “There are a lot of different notes, I think, that came, and I think most of them — it’s my understanding — are not real, and I didn’t see them,” she stated. “But I believe the two notes that we received, that we responded to, I tend to believe those are real.”