A year after "Today" co-host Savannah Guthrie highlighted her hometown roots and introduced viewers to her mother and favorite haunts, the broadcast is drawing new scrutiny over whether it could have helped make Nancy Guthrie a target in her still-unsolved kidnapping.
According to several experts who have been following the case, the same segment could have provided information that influenced the kidnapping — or allowed someone to fake inside knowledge afterward.
"There's nothing about the house, but you could easily infer that she would still be wearing that watch two months later," said Morgan Wright, the CEO and founder of the National Center for Open and Unsolved Cases and an expert on digital forensics. "And again, it's not an unreasonable assumption to think that elderly people would take their watch off at night."
As Fox News Digital has reported previously, investigators were divided over whether the two early ransom notes were authentic and have not publicly identified their sender.
But Savannah Guthrie's prominence, combined with the personal details included in the segment, could also have caught the attention of someone with malicious intent, according to experts.
"I think the segment is worth considering as a very possible spark for someone’s interest in Nancy," said Lisa Miller, a retired detective and law enforcement executive at the Colorado Attorney General's Office who has been following the case. "Whether this involved a kidnapping for ransom, someone fixated on Savannah, or another motive, that broadcast could have introduced a potential offender to Nancy and planted the seed of an opportunity."
She called the segment's influence on her abductor or abductors "a strong possibility to investigate" while noting the motive remains unclear.
"I want to be very clear — none of that places responsibility on Savannah," Miller said. "She shared her love and pride in a strong woman who raised a family, spent part of those years parenting alone and built a successful career."
Jim Clemente, a retired FBI supervisory special agent and profiler, separately told the "Crime & Justice with Donna Rotunno" podcast that Savannah Guthrie's fame may have caught the perpetrator's attention.
"Whether it actually caused I can't say that, but certainly Savannah's popularity and the fact that Nancy was on her shows and the relationship between them could have caused some sort of, some type of jealousy or some type of feeling that they belonged to this person, and they wanted to get back at her for not feeling the same way," he said. "It's not logical. It's not something you can anticipate. But it could be possible."
"Until that story, I didn’t even know she was from Tucson," said Bob Krygier, a retired SWAT commander with the Pima County Sheriff's Department, which is headquartered in the city. "I’ve always had a bit of a feeling that there was some connection."
It also shows Nancy Guthrie wearing a white Apple Watch.
The watch detail could have been used by whoever wrote the notes, said Wright, the expert on digital forensics — even if they had no connection to the abduction.
One of the notes included references to the crime scene that may not have been public at the time they were sent — including details about the location of Guthrie's Apple Watch and the smashed floodlight in her backyard. Fox News Digital first learned about the watch on the morning of Tuesday, Feb. 3. According to authorities, the note had been sent the day before, on Monday, Feb. 2, indicating the sender knew about it before the information began to seep out into the public sphere.
But it could also have been a lucky guess, Wright said.
"So I believe none of the ransom notes are credible, and that, that information could have been easily obtained from just watching a video," he said.
Krygier said public figures should be cautious about what they share online in today's environment.
"You need to be careful, but I also don’t think they need to go into a complete shell," he said. "It’s a balance, but being careful is incredibly important."
Visit Tucson, a local nonprofit created to attract tourists and business to the city, sponsored the segment, which remains renewed her public plea for help on Nov. 1, nine months after her mother's abduction.
"I think it's important for Savannah and her siblings to really look at every communication that they've had from whatever source, whether it's social media, email, telephone, in-person contacts, because somewhere in that mix, this person has likely interacted with one or more of them, including Nancy," Clemente said.
Anyone with information is asked to dial 1-800-CALL-FBI or 520-88-CRIME.
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