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TUCSON, Ariz. — Law enforcement agents have been gathering more potential evidence as the search for Today show host Savannah Guthrie‘s mother heads into its third week.

Nancy Guthrie, 84, was last seen at her Arizona home on Jan. 31 and was reported missing the following day. Authorities say her blood was found on the front porch. Purported ransom notes were sent to news outlets, but two deadlines for paying have passed.

Authorities have expressed concern about Nancy Guthrie’s health because she needs vital daily medicine. She is said to have a pacemaker and have dealt with high blood pressure and heart issues, according to sheriff’s dispatcher audio on broadcastify.com.

Here’s what to know about her disappearance and the intense search to find her:

Video of masked man

The Federal Bureau of Investigation released surveillance videos of a masked person wearing a handgun holster outside Guthrie’s front door in Tucson the night she vanished. A porch camera recorded video of a person with a backpack who was wearing a ski mask, long pants, jacket, and gloves.

On Thursday, the FBI called the person a suspect. It described him as a man about 5 feet, 9 inches tall with a medium build. The agency said he was carrying a 25-liter “Ozark Trail Hiker Pack” backpack.

Investigators initially said there was no surveillance video available since Guthrie didn’t have an active subscription to the doorbell camera company. But digital forensics experts kept working to find images in back-end software that might have been lost, corrupted, or inaccessible.

Studying DNA

Investigators collected DNA from Guthrie’s property which doesn’t belong to Guthrie or those in close contact with her, the Pima County Sheriff’s Department said. Investigators are working to identify who it belongs to.

Evidence requiring forensic analysis is being sent to the same out-of-state lab that has been used since the beginning of the case, the department said.

Investigators found several gloves, the nearest about 2 miles from Guthrie’s home, and submitted them for lab analysis, the sheriff’s department said. It did not specify what type of gloves.

The sheriff stressed his department is working closely with the FBI.

Sorting through tips

The Pima County sheriff and the FBI announced phone numbers and a website to offer tips. Several hundred detectives and agents have been assigned to the case, the sheriff’s department said.

The FBI said it has collected more than 13,000 tips since Feb. 1, the day Guthrie was reported missing. The sheriff’s department, meanwhile, said it has taken at least 18,000 calls.

The sheriff’s department has not said whether any tips have advanced the investigation.

Intensive searches

Late Friday night, law enforcement sealed off a road about 2 miles from Guthrie’s home as part of their investigation. A parade of sheriff’s and FBI vehicles, including forensics vehicles, passed through the roadblock.

The two agencies also tagged and towed a Range Rover SUV from a Culver’s restaurant parking lot. The restaurant is just over 2 miles from Nancy Guthrie’s home. This activity took place at the same time the sheriff’s office closed a road just north of the Guthrie home.

The Pima County Sheriff’s Department confirmed Saturday that a federal court-ordered search warrant was executed at the home Friday in connection with the Guthrie case. The warrant was based on a lead the agency had received. No arrests were made.

A traffic stop was also conducted, and while someone was questioned, no arrests were made, the sheriff’s office said.

No additional information was released Saturday.

On Tuesday, sheriff deputies detained a person for questioning during a traffic stop south of Tucson. Authorities didn’t say what led them to stop the man but confirmed he was released.

The same day, deputies and FBI agents conducted a court-authorized search in Rio Rico, about an hour’s drive south of the city.

Family pleas

Savannah Guthrie, her sister, and her brother have shared on social media multiple video messages to their mother’s purported captor.

The family’s Instagram videos have shifted in tone from impassioned pleas to whoever may have their mom, saying they want to talk and are even willing to pay a ransom, to bleaker and more desperate requests for the public’s help.

The latest video on Thursday was simply a home video of their mother and a promise to “never give up on her.”

A quiet neighborhood

Nancy Guthrie lived alone in the upscale Catalina Foothills neighborhood, where houses are spaced far apart and set back from the street by long driveways, gates, and dense desert vegetation.

Savannah Guthrie grew up in Tucson, graduated from the University of Arizona, and once worked at a television station in the city, where her parents settled in the 1970s. She joined Today in 2011.

In a video, she described her mother as a “loving woman of goodness and light.”

LONDON — Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny was poisoned by the Kremlin with a rare and lethal toxin found in the skin of poison dart frogs, five European countries said Saturday.

The foreign ministries of the U.K., France, Germany, Sweden, and the Netherlands said analysis in European labs of samples taken from Navalny’s body “conclusively confirmed the presence of epibatidine.” It is a neurotoxin secreted by dart frogs in South America that is not found naturally in Russia, they said.

A joint statement said: “Russia had the means, motive and opportunity to administer this poison.”

The five countries said they were reporting Russia to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons for a breach of the Chemical Weapons Convention. There was no immediate comment from the organization.

Navalny, who crusaded against official corruption and staged massive anti-Kremlin protests as President Vladimir Putin’s fiercest foe, died in an Arctic penal colony on Feb. 16, 2024, while serving a 19-year sentence that he believed to be politically motivated.

“Russia saw Navalny as a threat,” British Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper said. ”By using this form of poison the Russian state demonstrated the despicable tools it has at its disposal and the overwhelming fear it has of political opposition.”

French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot wrote on X that the poisoning of Navalny shows “that Vladimir Putin is prepared to use biological weapons against his own people in order to remain in power.”

Navalny’s widow says results confirmed her accusations

The European nations’ assessment came as Navalny’s widow, Yulia Navalnaya, attended the Munich Security Conference in Germany, and just before the second anniversary of Navalny’s death.

She said last year that two independent labs had found that her husband was poisoned shortly before he died. She has repeatedly blamed Putin for her husband’s death. Russian officials have vehemently denied the accusation.

Navalnaya said Saturday that she had been “certain from the first day” that her husband had been poisoned, “but now there is proof.”

“Putin killed Alexei with chemical weapon,” she wrote. She said Putin was “a murderer” who “must be held accountable.”

Russian authorities said that the politician became ill after a walk and died from natural causes.

U.K. has accused Russia of previous attacks

Epibatidine is found naturally in dart frogs in the wild, and can also be manufactured in a lab, which European scientists suspect was the case with the substance used on Navalny. It works on the body in a similar way to nerve agents, causing shortness of breath, convulsions, seizures, a slowed heart rate, and ultimately death.

Navalny was the target of an earlier poisoning in 2020, with a nerve agent in an attack he blamed on the Kremlin, which always denied involvement. His family and allies fought to have him flown to Germany for treatment and recovery. Five months later, he returned to Russia, where he was immediately arrested and imprisoned for the last three years of his life.

The U.K. has accused Russia of repeatedly flouting international bans on chemical and biological weapons. It accuses the Kremlin of carrying out a 2018 attack in the English city of Salisbury that targeted a former Russian intelligence officer, Sergei Skripal, with the nerve agent Novichok. Skripal and his daughter became seriously ill, and a British woman, Dawn Sturgess, died after she came across a discarded bottle with traces of the nerve agent.

A British inquiry concluded that the attack “must have been authorized at the highest level, by President Putin.”

The Kremlin has denied involvement. Russia also denied poisoning Alexander Litvinenko, a former Russian agent turned Kremlin critic who died in London in 2006, after ingesting the radioactive isotope polonium-210. A British inquiry concluded that two Russian agents killed Litvinenko, and Putin had “probably approved” the operation.