The authorities in Arizona have said they are investigating the disappearance of Nancy Guthrie, the mother of the “Today” show anchor Savannah Guthrie, as a possible kidnapping and are examining purported ransom notes sent to several media outlets.
If she were abducted by a stranger, at age 84, that would make her case extremely unusual. Most kidnappings in the United States involve family or custody disputes, and a vast majority of the victims are children, experts say.
Investigators in Ms. Guthrie’s case have said they have not identified any suspects since she was last seen at her home outside Tucson, Ariz., on Saturday night. Savannah Guthrie and her siblings have released emotional videos in which they say that they are ready to talk to anyone who may have taken her, but that they first need proof she is alive.
In general, kidnappings targeting older people are extremely rare and often involve a scam or financial motive, said Carrie Landau, a retired F.B.I. agent who focused on crimes against children and human trafficking investigations during her 21-year career. She recalled two cases she worked on in which adult victims were abducted and driven to A.T.M.s to withdraw money. One of the victims was also sexually assaulted, she said.
Dr. Mark S. Lachs, a geriatrician at Weill Cornell Medicine, who studies elder abuse, said he was not aware of any studies about the prevalence of adult kidnappings in the United States. In general, reported abductions of older people usually turn out to be cases in which a family member or another person close to the victim has taken them and isolated them as part of some sort of dispute, he said.
“A stranger abduction is unusual in my experience,” Dr. Lachs said.
Most kidnappers also have some connection to the victim in cases of child abduction.
Elizabeth Smart, for instance, was 14 when she was taken from her bedroom in Utah at knife point in 2002 and held captive for nine months. She was rescued after her sister realized that the voice she heard during the kidnapping belonged to a handyman who had worked at the Smarts’ home.
“For the most part, there is a knowledge of the family; there is an awareness” among kidnappers, said John E. Bischoff III, vice president of the missing children division at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
Cases in which a stranger grabs a victim on the street or takes someone from their home are “exceedingly rare,” and particularly challenging to investigate, Mr. Bischoff said. “For example, there is no built-in suspect pool,” he said. “Where is the starting point if it is a true nonfamily abduction?”
Ms. Guthrie’s disappearance is the latest case of its kind to capture the nation’s attention, reviving fears that have been stoked by the abductions of Charles A. Lindbergh’s baby, Charles Augustus Jr.; Patty Hearst; J. Paul Getty III; Etan Patz; Adam Walsh; and Polly Klaas, to name a few.
By the mid-1980s, such cases, combined with misleading claims that as many as 50,000 children were being abducted by strangers every year, had stoked a panic that left “a residue of anxiety about stranger abductions that lasted quite a while,” said David Finkelhor, director of the Crimes against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire.
The Denver Post won a Pulitzer Prize in 1986 for a series that examined the myth that most missing children had been abducted by strangers, and found that a majority were runaways or involved in custody disputes.
Since then, Dr. Finkelhor said, the number of kidnappings has decreased, partly because the crime has become much more difficult to carry out in an era of surveillance cameras, license plate readers and cellphone tracking data.
Research has shown that a few dozen to 100 children in the United States are kidnapped by strangers every year, compared to hundreds of thousands who are taken by family members, Dr. Finkelhor said.
The National Crime Information Center logged the circumstances of 263,079 missing-person cases in 2022 and found that 95 percent had been coded as runaways, 0.9 percent as kidnapped by a noncustodial parent and 0.1 percent as kidnappings by a stranger.
Mr. Bischoff said he was among those who grew up with the stereotypical image of a kidnapper being a stranger with aviator sunglasses and a van. “I can’t say those cases never happen because they do,” he said. “But they’re much rarer than the fear we were raised with.”
Michael Levenson covers breaking news for The Times from New York.
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