Nancy Grace is shutting down one of the loudest rumors swirling around the disappearance of Nancy Guthrie — and she says it comes down to one thing.
Speaking Friday, March 13, during Variety’s True Crime Summit at SXSW in Texas, the longtime legal analyst said she doesn’t believe the Guthrie family had anything to do with the 84-year-old’s vanishing.
And her reasoning? It all centers on Nancy’s youngest daughter — Today co-anchor Savannah Guthrie.
Grace told the crowd she’s convinced Savannah is exactly who viewers see on television.
“For one reason, and one reason only, I do not believe the Guthrie family is responsible,” Grace said, explaining that she’s known Savannah for years and believes her on-camera personality is the real deal.
Grace went even further, calling Savannah “super-smart” and pointing to her legal background. In Grace’s view, that makes it hard to imagine Savannah publicly standing close to a family member if she even suspected they were involved.
Yes, investigators often “look at the family first,” Grace acknowledged — but she said this case doesn’t fit that script.
Nancy was last seen January 31 after spending the evening with her daughter Annie and son-in-law Tommaso Cioni. Later that night, Cioni reportedly drove her back to her home in Catalina Foothills and dropped her off just before 10 p.m.
Alarm bells went off the next day when Nancy didn’t arrive at a friend’s house to watch a livestreamed church service — a routine they’d reportedly kept for years.
When family checked on her, her keys and wallet were still inside. But Nancy was gone.
Then came the most chilling detail: authorities later released video said to show a masked person wearing thick black gloves and carrying a stuffed backpack outside her home, captured on her Nest doorbell camera. That footage only intensified talk that this wasn’t a walk-off — it was an abduction.
Online sleuths quickly locked onto Annie and her husband, largely because they were the last people known to have seen Nancy.
The speculation exploded after reports that Ashleigh Banfield cited a law enforcement source describing Cioni as a major person of interest. Megyn Kelly also weighed in, saying it would be wrong not to scrutinize the timeline involving the brother-in-law — even if an outside abductor entered later that night.
In other words: if you’re trying to map out what happened, you start with the final confirmed hours.
But local authorities have pushed back hard on the rumor mill.
Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos said last month that the Guthrie family had been cleared as suspects and had cooperated fully with investigators.
According to Nanos, detectives collected phones and computers, processed vehicles, and searched homes.
“They’re victims,” he said.
As the search continues, the case now appears to hinge on what investigators can confirm from surveillance footage, digital evidence, and any leads tied to the masked figure seen near Nancy’s home — while the public debate over “who to suspect first” keeps raging online.
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