The New Yorker:

The search for the “Today” show host’s mother, nearing its second week, has transfixed the public in Arizona and beyond.

By Paige Williams

The grim news out of Tucson is that, thirteen days into the search for Nancy Guthrie, the odds of finding her alive have been dropping by the hour. She is the eighty-four-year-old mother of Savannah Guthrie, the longtime co-anchor of the “Today” show. Not long after midnight on February 1st, she vanished from her home in an affluent neighborhood in the Catalina Foothills, on the north end of town. The investigation seemed to inch along until Tuesday, when the Pima County Sheriff’s Department and the F.B.I., working jointly on the case, got a break: footage from Guthrie’s doorbell camera, which showed what the veteran journalist and former F.B.I. official John Miller described, on CNN, as “the bogeyman we’ve all feared since we were kids.” An armed intruder stood on Guthrie’s doorstep in the dead of night, wearing a balaclava, a bulky backpack, and what appeared to be black neoprene gloves.

Within twenty-four hours, more than five thousand leads poured in. By Thursday, investigators were looking for a man who’s about five feet nine or five feet ten, of average build. He was said to have been carrying a twenty-five-litre backpack made by Ozark Trail, a brand sold primarily at Walmart. There was talk of a white, unmarked van. Investigators erected a tent around Guthrie’s front door to create a blackout environment that may have allowed them to see how certain materials compared to what showed up in the video; they put out a call for neighbors’ security-camera footage from as far back as January 1st.

Demands for bitcoin had been made to TMZ and other media outlets, but their authenticity remains in question. On Thursday, TMZ’s founder, Harvey Levin, said that he’d received another note from someone who purports to know who abducted Guthrie. According to Levin, the tipster reported needing one bitcoin (worth, this week, at least sixty-five thousand dollars) to say more. The veracity of the note was again unclear, but Levin suggested that it painted “a very bleak picture.”

Go to link