TUCSON, Ariz. (AP) — Authorities believe the 84-year-old mother of “Today” show host Savannah Guthrie was kidnapped, abducted or otherwise taken against her will, and the sheriff said Monday it’s imperative she’s found soon because she could die without her medication.
Nancy Guthrie was last seen around 9:30 p.m. Saturday at her home in the Tucson area, where she lived alone. Her family reported her missing around noon Sunday. The Pima County Sheriff's Department is investigating the possibility she was taken overnight, spokesperson Angelica Carrillo said.
Guthrie had limited mobility, and officials don't believe she left on her own. Sheriff Chris Nanos said Guthrie was of sound mind.
“This is not dementia-related. She’s as sharp as a tack," Nanos said at a news conference earlier in the day. “The family wants everyone to know that this isn’t someone who just wandered off.”
Nanos said a family member received a call from someone at church saying Guthrie wasn’t there, leading family to search for her at her home and then calling 911. Nanos said Guthrie needs her daily medication, and the sheriff urged whoever has her to free her.
“If she’s alive right now her meds are vital. I can’t stress that enough. It’s been better than 24 hours, and the family tells us if she doesn’t have those meds, it can become fatal,” Nanos said.
Searchers were using drones and search dogs to look for her, Nanos said. Search and rescue teams were supported by volunteers and Border Patrol, and the homicide team was also involved, he said. It is not standard for the homicide team to get involved in such cases, Nanos said. The FBI has offered to help, Carrillo said.
“This one stood out because of what was described to us at the scene and what we located just looking at the scene,” Nanos said Sunday. He was not ruling out foul play.
On Monday morning, Nanos said search crews worked hard but have since been pulled back.
“We don’t see this as a search mission so much as it is a crime scene,” the sheriff said.
Even so, a sheriff’s helicopter flew over the desert Monday afternoon near Guthrie’s home in the affluent Catalina Foothills area on the northern edge of Tucson. Her brick home has a gravel driveway and a yard covered in Prickly Pear and Saguaro cactus.
Savannah Guthrie issued a statement Monday, NBC's “Today” show reported.
“On behalf of our family, I want to thank everyone for the thoughts, prayers and messages of support,” she said. “Right now, our focus remains on the safe return of our dear Nancy."
“Today” opened Monday’s show with the disappearance of the co-anchor’s mother, but Savannah Guthrie was not at the anchor’s desk. Nanos said during the Monday news conference that Savannah Guthrie is in Arizona. Savannah Guthrie grew up in Tucson, graduated from the University of Arizona and previously worked as a reporter and anchor at KVOA-TV in Tucson.
Nancy Guthrie appeared in a November 2025 story her daughter did about her hometown. Over a meal, Savannah Guthrie asked her mother what made the family want to plant roots in Tucson in the 1970s.
“It’s so wonderful. Just the air, the quality of life,” Nancy Guthrie said. “It’s laid back and gentle.”
She said she likes to see the javelinas, pig-like desert mammals, eat her plants.
Billeaud reported from Phoenix.
Law enforcement officers are present outside the home of Nancy Guthrie, the mother of "Today" host Savannah Guthrie, near Tucson, Ariz., Monday, Feb. 2, 2026. (AP Photo/Sejal Govindarao)
This image provided by the Pima County Sheriff’s Department, on Monday, Feb. 2, 2026, shows a missing person alert for Nancy Guthrie. (Pima County Sheriff’s Department via AP)
FILE - Savannah Guthrie attends the third annual World Mental Health Day Gala, hosted by Project Healthy Minds, at Spring Studios on Thursday, Oct. 9, 2025, in New York. (Photo by Evan Agostini/Invision/AP, file)
RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — Hold on to those Thanksgiving turkeys! WKRP is coming to Cincinnati — for real this time.
“I cannot, by contract, tell you when. I cannot tell you who. But I can tell you, direct to the camera, WKRP, after 48 years, is coming to Cincinnati,” D.P. McIntire, who runs the media nonprofit that is auctioning the famous call letters, told The Associated Press. “Book it! It’s done!”
The call sign was made famous by “WKRP in Cincinnati,” a CBS television sitcom that ran from 1978 to 1982. It made stars of actors like Loni Anderson and Richard Sanders, whose bumbling newsman Les Nessman reported on a Thanksgiving promotion gone bad when live but flightless turkeys were dropped from a helicopter.
McIntire remembers watching the show’s first episode — featuring disc jockeys Dr. Johnny Fever (Howard Hesseman) and Venus Flytrap (Tim Reid) — in the living room with his parents and older sister.
“And at the end of the 30-minute episode,” he said, “I got up and I proclaimed, `I’m going to be in radio. And if I ever have the opportunity, I’m going to run a station called WKRP.’”
McIntire said he got his first on-air job at 13 as a news anchor at WNQQ “Wink FM” in Blairsville, Pennsylvania.
Fast forward to 2014, when his North Carolina-based nonprofit acquired the call sign from the Federal Communications Commission. Stations in Dallas, Georgia, and Alexandria, Tennessee, previously bore the letters.
McIntire laughs as he recalls his chat with a woman in the agency’s audio division.
He had two sets of call letters in mind. She told him he needed a third.
“Being the jokester that I am, I said, `Well, if you need three, and if it’s available, we’ll take WKRP,’” he said. “And 90 seconds later, she came back and she said, `Mr. McIntire. Congratulations. You’re the general manager of WKRP in Raleigh, North Carolina.’”
WKRP-LP — 101.9 on the FM dial — went live Nov. 30, 2015. The LP stands for “low power,” a class of station created to serve more local audiences that didn’t want mass-market content.
“Our format is what radio used to be 35 years ago in small-town America,” he said. “There is Greats of the 80s, Sounds of the 70s, 90s Rewind.”
LPFM is restricted to nonprofit organizations like his Oak City Media, and it’s definitely local.
“Your broadcast capacity is limited to 100 watts,” McIntire said. “So, your average range is between, depending on your terrain and circumstances, 4 and 12 miles (6 and 19 kilometers) in any direction. Enough to cover a small town.”
And, by necessity, it’s a low-budget affair.
The transmitter is in a corner of McIntire’s garage, between a recycling bin and the cleaning supplies. The broadcast antenna sits atop a 25-foot (7.62-meter) metal flagpole in the backyard. The studio — microphones and a mixing board hooked up to a computer — is in McIntire’s basement.
Like the WKRP of television, McIntire and his partners set out to be “irreverent.” One of their offerings is a two-hour show called “Weird Al and Friends,” focusing on the satirical works of Weird Al Yankovic.
They even had an annual Thanksgiving turkey giveaway. But don’t call the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals — they hand out gift certificates to a local grocery store.
“We don’t toss them out of helicopters,” he said with a laugh.
After more than a decade on the air, the 56-year-old McIntire decided it was time to pass the reins.
“We’re in a position where the older members like me who started the station are turning the leadership over to younger members,” he said. “They’re not interested in radio.”
They put out a call for bids to use the call letters on FM and AM radio, as well as television and digital television.
They intend to use the proceeds for a new nonprofit venture called Independent Broadcast Consultants. He said IBC will be “geared specifically toward helping these new broadcasters get up and running, get the consulting that they need in order to be, hopefully, more successful than we have been.”
Oak City Media was all set to hand off the television-related suffixes — WKRPTV and WKRPDT — when another group defaulted on the agreement, McIntire said. But he said the Cincinnati deal is in the bag, he just can’t legally discuss it.
“It will be radio,” he said. “But that’s all I can tell you at this time.”
Robert Thompson, who uses a season 2 episode of “WKRP” in his TV history class at Syracuse University, said it’s telling that people see real value in a fictional station whose call letters invoke the word “crap.”
“The value comes from the love of the characters for each other,” he said. “And now by buying this thing, the value comes from our love of the characters themselves.”
Whatever they do with the call sign, McIntire hopes they will be true to the show that inspired it.
“It has a special place in the hearts of an awful lot of people,” he said. “And we have been very, very, very proud to have been a steward of that legacy.”
D.P. McIntire leans against a deck beneath the WKRP radio antenna in the backyard of his home in Raleigh, N.C., on Thursday, April 2, 2026. (AP Photo/Allen G. Breed)
D.P. McIntire points to the transmitter for WKRP radio in a corner of his garage in Raleigh, N.C., on Thursday, April 2, 2026. (AP Photo/Allen G. Breed)
The WKRP radio antenna sits atop a 25-foot flagpole behind D.P. McIntire's home in Raleigh, N.C., on Thursday, April 2, 2026. (AP Photo/Allen G. Breed)
A photo of the cast members of the sitcom "WKRP in Cincinnati" sits in a window at the home of D.P. McIntire in Raleigh, N.C., on Thursday, April 2, 2026. (AP Photo/Allen G. Breed)
D.P. McIntire stands beneath a WKRP banner in the backyard of his home in Raleigh, N.C., on Thursday, April 2, 2026. (AP Photo/Allen G. Breed)
