Anonymous Tip Sends Searchers to Mexican Grave Site for Nancy Guthrie

A group of volunteers in Mexico spent this week digging through dry creek beds near the Arizona border, chasing a phone call from a stranger who claimed he knew exactly where Nancy Guthrie was buried. The 84-year-old mother of Today co-anchor Savannah Guthrie vanished from her Tucson home back in February, and four months later the case still has no named suspect. Then came the call.

The search came up empty. But the fact that a tipster pointed straight to a specific spot, by name, has pulled the investigation in a new direction and across an international border. Here is what actually happened, and where things stand now.

The phone call that started it all

On Saturday, May 10, a volunteer search group in Mexico called Buscando Corazones Nogales got an anonymous tip. The group's name translates to "Looking for Hearts," and they spend their days hunting for missing people and hidden graves in the rough country south of Arizona.

Ramona Guadalupe Ayala Ortiz, who leads the collective, said a caller she believes was a man told them Nancy's body was in an area called Mariposa, northwest of Nogales, Sonora. "We received an anonymous call telling us that the woman's remains were in the Mariposa area, in a grave over a stream," she told a Mexican newspaper. The tipster pointed to one of the dry creek beds that cut through the area.

What made this one stand out is that it was the first time anybody had called the group and mentioned Nancy Guthrie by name. That detail alone was enough to get volunteers moving fast.

What the search turned up

The group scrambled crews out to the area, which sits about 70 miles from Nancy's home. This is not gentle terrain. It is rugged desert with uneven slopes and stream beds where bodies have stayed hidden for long stretches of time. Because of the dangers in the region, armed guards were deployed alongside the volunteers during the operation.

The Sonora State Commission for the Search of Missing Persons pitched in too. Teams focused on the ground near the stream the caller described, then pushed into nearby sections that had not been fully checked before.

This is an area the group knows well. In past searches they have found more than 25 unmarked graves there. In the latest sweep, crews reported finding more burial sites and signs of old digging. None of it was linked to Nancy. There was no trace of her at all. Still, the group said it is not giving up.

What the sheriff said

Once the news spread, the Pima County Sheriff's Department put out a short statement on June 11 to address the reports. The big takeaway: nobody on the Mexican side had reached out to them.

"We are aware of reports regarding an anonymous tip related to the Nancy Guthrie investigation that was provided to a group in Mexico," the department posted. "At this time, we have not been contacted by Mexican authorities. This investigation remains active and ongoing, and we will continue to follow up on any credible information."

The volunteer group also said no U.S. law enforcement joined them on the searches. Local Nogales police sometimes ride along, but they are not part of any formal investigation. So the dig was happening on one side of the border while the people running the case sat on the other side, waiting on word that never came.

How Nancy disappeared

Nancy Guthrie was last seen the evening of January 31, when family dropped her off at her home in Catalina Foothills, a suburb of Tucson, after a dinner and a game night. The next day she was supposed to show up at a friend's place to watch a virtual church service. She never arrived. By late midday on February 1, she was reported missing.

What investigators found at her house pointed to something far worse than a woman wandering off. Evidence at the scene showed she had been taken against her will. Bloodstains found outside the home were confirmed to be hers. A masked person was caught on a camera near the property, and in some reports that figure was armed.

There was one strange dead end early on. Gloves that appeared to match the ones the suspect wore were recovered, but the DNA on them traced back to a local restaurant worker who had nothing to do with the case. Nancy had lived in the Tucson area for more than five decades. Authorities have described her as a vulnerable adult because of her age, her mobility limits, and her need for daily medication.

The ransom and the fake abductor

This case got messy fast. Multiple ransom notes turned up, and their real origin was never nailed down. The demand was reported at $6 million, to be paid in cryptocurrency, with two deadlines that came and went by February 9. On February 24, the family offered $1 million of their own for information that helps bring her home.

On top of all that, a California man was arrested on February 5 for posing as an abductor and trying to squeeze money out of the Guthrie family. That scheme was not connected to the actual ransom notes. There was also a separate report claiming Savannah Guthrie paid around $500,000 to private investigators to find her mother, a claim that was later disputed.

Why the case has dragged on

Part of the holdup comes down to lab work. As of June 11, investigators were still waiting on DNA results from samples taken inside Nancy's home. Experts say that DNA likely came from several different people, which makes it slow and tricky to pull apart. It could take months just to extract usable profiles and run them against databases.

And even then there is no promise of a hit. If the suspect has never been arrested or had their DNA logged in any system, a clean match could turn up nothing. Sheriff Chris Nanos said back in May that he felt they were "getting closer," with DNA labs working with investigators daily. But despite thousands of hours of work and tens of thousands of tips, no suspect has been named.

The fight over who handled it

The investigation has also turned into a finger-pointing match between local and federal officials. FBI Director Kash Patel has claimed that authorities in Arizona delayed the FBI's involvement in the early days, alleging the sheriff's office sidelined the bureau for several days at the start.

The case got attention at the very top, too. President Donald Trump called Savannah Guthrie on February 4 to offer additional federal resources. By now the case has pulled in the Pima County Sheriff's Department, the FBI, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, and search-and-rescue teams, with the kind of national spotlight that comes when a network anchor's family is involved.

Where the lead stands now

For now, the Mexico tip is exactly that: a tip. It has not been verified, the searches found nothing tied to Nancy, and the agencies running the investigation say they had not even been contacted by their counterparts across the border. But it does raise a possibility that had not been front and center before, that Nancy may have been moved out of the United States.

The Mariposa area sits just south of Arizona and has built a grim reputation among search groups for hidden burial sites. That is why volunteers there did not brush off the call. The terrain hides things well, and the group has a track record of finding what others miss. They said they plan to keep going because the tipster gave such a specific spot, even if covering all that ground is slow and risky.

If you know anything about the Guthrie case, investigators want to hear from you. You can call 1-800-CALL-FBI, the Pima County Sheriff's Department at 520-351-4900, or 88-CRIME. The family's $1 million reward still stands for information that leads to Nancy's recovery. Four months in, a stranger's phone call is the freshest lead anyone has, and that tells you a lot about how cold the trail had gone.