It was the type of Saturday evening that Nancy Guthrie treasured: dinner and game night at the home of her eldest daughter and son-in-law.
They lived near each other, in the unincorporated desert communities north of Tucson, Ariz., and Ms. Guthrie arrived by Uber just after 5:30 p.m. on Jan. 31. The family spent about four hours together before Ms. Guthrie was driven home by her son-in-law, who watched to ensure she made it safely inside, the police said later.
At 9:48 p.m., her garage door opened, according to a timeline from the authorities. Two minutes later, it closed. That glimpse of Ms. Guthrie heading inside was the last time anyone in her family saw or heard from her.
What unfolded in the following hours is still mostly a mystery, but one flecked with several ominous details. It has been more than a week since Ms. Guthrie, the 84-year-old mother of “Today” show anchor Savannah Guthrie, disappeared. The case has captivated the nation. But, so far, it has confounded the authorities.
Investigators have not identified a possible perpetrator, and they have spent days analyzing notes from people claiming to be the kidnappers, including one that demanded millions of dollars in Bitcoin. The authorities have closed and reopened the crime scene at the house multiple times. And they have acknowledged that they do not know where she might be or whether she is still alive.
“These are facts you usually only find all together in a movie, and now you’re seeing them play out in real life,” said Lance Leising, a retired F.B.I. agent in Phoenix. “And it’s heart-wrenching for the family.”
The search has become a sensation, fueled by Savannah Guthrie’s fame and the many questions that remain. The F.B.I. is involved, and its director, Kash Patel, is receiving regular updates. President Trump has checked in with the family and discussed the case aboard Air Force One. On Friday, Mr. Trump said, “We could have some answers coming up fairly soon.” He did not elaborate.
The next day, Savannah Guthrie spoke directly to her mother’s abductors in a video shared on social media, imploring for her return: “This is very valuable to us,” she said, “and we will pay.”
The First 10 Hours
It was after she returned home, according to a police account, that Nancy Guthrie’s ordeal began.
At 1:47 a.m., the authorities said, the camera at her front door was disconnected from her home’s security system. Some 25 minutes later, a camera somewhere on the property detected motion, but recorded no video, because she did not have a subscription to the device’s service provider.
At 2:28 a.m., about 15 minutes after the camera was set off, Ms. Guthrie’s pacemaker lost contact with her cellphone, which officers later found inside the house, suggesting that this may have been about the time she was taken.
Ms. Guthrie, who friends have described as a devoted Christian, was expected at church that Sunday morning. But when someone at St. Andrew’s Presbyterian did not see her in the pews, they called her family to check in.
Alerted, Ms. Guthrie’s family rushed to her home, the authorities said. They found her phone, wallet, hearing aid, daily medication and car. But they did not find her. They called 911.
More than nine hours had passed before anyone realized something was terribly wrong.
From Search and Rescue to Crime Scene
Initially, deputies from the Pima County Sheriff’s Department figured the Guthrie case would be another routine search and rescue operation. They do those every day, helping out hikers who have strayed from the trail in nearby mountains or tracking down people with dementia who have wandered from home.
But the officers quickly realized this was no typical case. Ms. Guthrie could not walk far without assistance, and she is mentally sharp, so they ruled out the possibility that she had ambled off on her own and become lost.
And her home looked like a crime scene.
At the front stoop, they found an empty mount where a doorbell camera had once hung, and on the tile below they saw spatters of blood, which DNA analysis later confirmed to be Ms. Guthrie’s.
But elsewhere, they noted even more worrying signs of violence, Sheriff Chris Nanos said in an interview with The New York Times earlier in the week.
“You’re elderly; you could be on blood thinners,” Sheriff Nanos said, explaining why the blood on the stoop was not the most troubling aspect of the scene. “That wasn’t it. The piece to me was, there were things at that home that were of concern. That scene, there were things that I thought, this doesn’t sit well.”
He declined to describe the scene further, but investigators spent the week combing through the home, its garage and the surrounding scrubland.
The police searched for Ms. Guthrie on foot — with rescue teams and trained canine units — and by air, circling her home with drones, helicopters and a plane. Neighbors from Ms. Guthrie’s secluded foothill community pitched in, too, scouring their backyards for any sign of her.
But because of what Sheriff Nanos saw at the house, he also called in homicide detectives from the department’s criminal investigations division.
“We’re pretty much throwing everything at this that we can,” Sheriff Nanos told reporters outside Ms. Guthrie’s house on Sunday night, as helicopters hovered above him, their rotors beating the air.
Officers did not find footprints or tire tracks that yielded any clues around the home, he said.
At a news briefing the next morning, he issued a grim assessment: “Right now, we don’t see this as a search mission as much as we do a crime scene,” the sheriff said.
A Ransom Note Arrives
At 6:40 p.m. on Feb. 2, roughly 24 hours after the sheriff’s department first posted a missing person bulletin for Ms. Guthrie, a Tucson television station, KOLD, received a note claiming to be from her kidnapper. The station forwarded it to the authorities.
The celebrity gossip site TMZ, which received a copy the next morning, reported that the letter demanded millions of dollars in Bitcoin for the release of Ms. Guthrie. Harvey Levin, the outlet’s founder, described the letter on a broadcast as “very well constructed.”
In an interview with CNN, Mr. Levin said the note detailed “precisely” what the senders wanted done and what the consequences would be if they didn’t get what they asked. There would be “no negotiation and no communication,” Mr. Levin said, describing the letter’s contents.
The ransom note did not come with proof that Ms. Guthrie was alive, Levin added, but it did begin by saying she was “safe but scared.”
Officials with the sheriff’s department and the F.B.I. said they were taking the letter seriously and were working to validate its authenticity, but they could not be certain it came from the actual culprit.
On Wednesday, after news of the note ricocheted across the country, Ms. Guthrie’s eldest daughter, Annie Guthrie, and son-in-law, Tommaso Cioni, received text messages from someone claiming to be the elder Ms. Guthrie’s captor.
“Did you get the Bitcoin,” the sender asked. F.B.I. agents traced the messages to a Southern California man, who they determined had nothing to do with the kidnapping. They arrested and charged him, accusing him of trying to profit from the Guthrie family’s pain.
That day, Ms. Guthrie’s children recorded their first emotional address to their mother’s kidnapper. The situation is growing more dire every day, they said. Ms. Guthrie could die without her medication.
“We are ready to talk,” Savannah Guthrie said, trying to hold back tears as she sat between her older siblings, Annie and Camron Guthrie. “However, we live in a world where voices and images are easily manipulated. We need to know, without a doubt, that she is alive, and that you have her.”
Thursday morning the F.B.I. announced a $50,000 reward for information leading to Nancy Guthrie’s recovery.
“To anyone that may be involved: Do the right thing,” Heith Janke, the special agent in charge of the F.B.I.’s Phoenix office, said at a briefing. “This is an 84-year-old grandma that needs vital medication for her well-being. You still have the time to do the right thing before this becomes a much worse scenario for you. Please return Nancy home.”
The ransom note listed two deadlines, Mr. Janke said, and the first was just a few hours away — 5 p.m. on Thursday night.
As that time approached, Mr. Guthrie recorded another short statement, and his sister Savannah posted it to her 1.5 million Instagram followers. Mr. Guthrie pleaded with his mother’s kidnapper to get in touch with the family. “We need you to reach out and we need a way to communicate with you so we can move forward,” he said.
Another Note, Another Video
At about 11:30 a.m. on Friday, KOLD received another message from the supposed kidnappers. The message, which the station forwarded to the police and did not describe publicly, came from a different IP address than the ransom note, but the senders appeared to have used the same methods to mask their location and identity, the station said.
The F.B.I. said it was assessing the message’s authenticity.
Later that day, the authorities once again returned to Nancy Guthrie’s home, at least the third time they had cordoned it off with crime scene tape, and on this occasion restricted access to most of her street.
Reporters nearby watched as the police towed away a car and officers climbed onto Ms. Guthrie’s roof and appeared to remove a camera.
That evening, Mr. Trump told journalists aboard Air Force One that the investigation was going “very well.”
“We have some clues, I think, that are very strong,” Mr. Trump said, adding that the new information “could be definitive.”
The next day, the Guthrie siblings released another video. It was 20 seconds long and cryptic. Savannah Guthrie, speaking without a visible script, said into the camera: “We received your message, and we understand. We beg you now to return our mother to us so that we can celebrate with her. This is the only way we will have peace.”
Experts in hostage negotiation said they could detect resignation in the statement, as if the family feared the elder Ms. Guthrie dead. But Mr. Leising, the retired F.B.I. agent, said the wording of the message was purposefully vague, a sign that investigators were not convinced the ransom note was legitimate.
“The possibility that it’s fraudulent, and these people don’t have Nancy, is still high,” Mr. Leising said.
A spokeswoman for the sheriff’s department declined to comment on the video and said officials had no new information to share.
As the search for Ms. Guthrie turned one week old, the supposed ransom note’s second deadline, sometime on Monday, loomed. It was not clear what would happen if it passed — if the note was even real, that was. Like so many other aspects of the case, the details were murky.
Georgia Gee and Susan C. Beachy contributed research.
Reis Thebault is a Phoenix-based reporter for The Times, covering the American Southwest.
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