By Erica Stapleton and Jana Winter
TUCSON, Arizona, Feb 10 (Reuters) – Authorities on Tuesday released video of an armed man in a ski mask tampering with the doorbell camera at the Arizona home of U.S. television journalist Savannah Guthrie’s elderly mother shortly before she was abducted nine days earlier in a presumed kidnapping for ransom.
Retrieval of the images came hours before another major break in the search for 84-year-old Nancy Guthrie – the first known arrest in a case making national headlines following days in which investigators reported making little progress.
The Pima County Sheriff’s Department said in an online statement Tuesday night that its deputies had “detained a subject during a traffic stop” south of Tucson and that the person was “being questioned in connection to the Nancy Guthrie investigation.”
The sheriff’s office declined to provide further details. A U.S. law enforcement official separately told Reuters late on Tuesday that a “suspect” in the investigation had been taken into custody in Arizona but did not elaborate.
Later still, the sheriff’s department reported that its deputies and an FBI forensic team conducted a court-authorized search of a “location” in Rio Rico, Arizona, about 60 miles south of Tucson near the Mexico border.
A woman identifying herself as the mother-in-law of the man who was detained told CNN late on Tuesday that authorities searched her Rico Rio home after telling her they were acting on a “tip that the lady was in my house.”
She told CNN her son-in-law, who works as a delivery man, had nothing to do with Guthrie’s disappearance, that “there’s nobody in my house,” and that she had “nothing to hide.”
FOOTAGE RETRIEVED FROM DISCARDED VIDEO DATA
The victim was last seen on the night of January 31, when family dropped her off at her home after she had dinner with them. Relatives reported her missing the following day, according to the sheriff’s department, after she failed to show up for Sunday church services.
Hours before the suspect was detained, the FBI and sheriff’s office released video footage captured outside Nancy Guthrie’s front door by a Google Nest camera and recovered from discarded data found in a “back-end” digital repository.
The images, videos and still photos, show a man wearing a woolen ski mask, gloves, a backpack and a gun in a holster. He approaches Nancy Guthrie’s front door in the early hours of February 1, about the time she was abducted.
At one point in the video, the masked figure is seen trying to obscure the camera with foliage gathered from nearby, then appears to damage the camera. The individual’s head is down as he approaches the door, suggesting an awareness of the camera’s location, according to a law enforcement source.
Facial hair is visible through the ski mask cut-out around the man’s mouth.
Sheriff Chris Nanos has said the camera was disabled shortly before 2 a.m. local time on February 1, that Guthrie’s pacemaker became disconnected from her phone about a half-hour later, and that she was presumably taken from the house by force.
MAJOR BREAK IN INVESTIGATION
Traces of blood found on the front porch was confirmed by DNA tests to have come from Guthrie, officials said last week. Law enforcement and family members have described her as being of limited mobility, in frail health and in need of daily medication to survive.
Release of the video and an arrest of someone for questioning marked the biggest turning points yet in an investigation that had seemed to have stalled in recent days.
The sheriff’s department and FBI said on Monday night that they had yet to identify suspects or “persons of interest” in the connection with the investigation.
FBI Director Kash Patel posted what he called the “previously inaccessible” images from the door camera on social media early on Tuesday.
FBI agents were later seen going door to door canvassing the neighborhood around the home of Nancy Guthrie’s older daughter, Annie, with whom the mother was widely reported to have spent the evening before the presumed kidnapping.
At least two purported ransom notes have surfaced since Nancy Guthrie vanished, both of them delivered initially to news media outlets. But no proof of life is known to have surfaced following her abduction.
The elder Guthrie’s disappearance has attracted wide attention. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt began her press briefing on Tuesday by saying she and President Donald Trump had just reviewed the newly released images in the case.
“The president encourages any American across the country with any knowledge of the suspect to please call the FBI, who continue to assist state and local authorities who are leading this investigation on the ground,” Leavitt said.
Savannah Guthrie, 54, and her brother and sister have posted several video messages on social media pleading for the public to help with tips and for the kidnappers to return their mother or communicate with them directly. The family has said that they would pay a ransom.
Savannah Guthrie, a longtime co-anchor of the NBC morning news program “Today,” shared the new images on Instagram on Tuesday with the caption: “We believe she is still alive. Bring her home.”
(Reporting by Erica Stapleton in Tucson and Jana Winter in Washington; Writing by Helen Coster and Steve Gorman; Editing by Donna Bryson, Cynthia Osterman, Rod Nickel, Christopher Cushing and Neil Fullick)
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