A distraught Savannah Guthrie said it is unbearable to think her mother, Nancy Guthrie, may have been kidnapped from her Arizona home because of the “Today” anchor’s high-profile name — sobbing, “I’m so sorry, Mommy. I’m so sorry.”
The NBC star gave a gut-wrenching first interview since her 84-year-old mom vanished nearly two months ago, in which she shared her overwhelming guilt related to her mom’s case.
“It’s too much to bear, to think that I brought this to her bedside… and it’s because of me,” an emotional Guthrie told her former morning show co-host, Hoda Kotb, in the sit-down that aired Thursday.
“I’m so sorry, Mommy. I’m so sorry. … to my sister and my brother and my kids and my nephew and my brother-in-law. I’m so sorry if it is me.”
The full tell-all, airing in two parts on Thursday and Friday, is the first time Guthrie has been interviewed since her mom was reported missing back on Feb. 1.
Based on eerie surveillance footage from Nancy’s doorbell camera, authorities believe she was taken against her will after a masked man was caught loitering on her doorstep the evening she vanished.
Guthrie opened up on the moment she receiving the chilling phone call from her sister, Annie Guthrie, to say their mother hadn’t shown up for church — initially fearing the grandmother had suffered a medical episode.
“My sister called me and I said ‘Is everything OK?’ And she said ‘no, she said ‘mom’s missing,’” Guthrie said.
Despite a $1 million reward and countless heartbreaking pleas from the Guthrie family, there has been little movement in the chilling case that quickly captivated the nation.
As the search inched closer to the two-month mark, investigators still hadn’t narrowed down any suspects.
The Pima County Sheriff’s Department and FBI insisted Wednesday that investigators were still examining leads and hadn’t given up.
A tearful Guthrie, for her part, begged anyone with information to come forward.
“Someone needs to do the right thing,” she said on Thursday.
“She needs to come home, now.”
The interview aired just as embattled Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos, who has been the face of the investigation, was facing calls to resign over his handling of the probe so far.
He has been criticized, in part, for releasing Nancy’s home as a crime scene too quickly in the early days of her disappearance, using a private DNA analysis company instead of working more closely with the FBI, and not deploying critical resources like a search plane or cadaver-sniffing dogs.