“They told me I was being detained for kidnapping, and I asked them, “Kidnapping of who?””
Hear from a man who says he was detained yesterday by deputies for “kidnapping” Nancy Guthrie and has since been released.

Person detained in Guthrie case, search underway at Rio Rico location

Deputies detained a person for questioning in the Nancy Guthrie case after a traffic stop in Rio Rico, south of Tucson, the Pima County Sheriff’s Department said Tuesday night.

“The subject is currently being questioning in connection to the Nancy Guthrie investigation,” the department said.

The Sheriff’s Department and the FBI were also carrying out a “court-authorized search of a location in Rio Rico” that was expected to take several hours, the department said at about 9:15 p.m.

Rio Rico is about an hour’s drive south of Tucson.

This image provided by the Pima County Sheriff’s Department earlier this month shows a missing person alert for Nancy Guthrie.

Pima County Sheriff’s Department via AP

CNN interviewed a woman in Rio Rico Tuesday night who said law enforcement officers were searching her home on Camino Agosto there. She said they put her son-in-law, whom she identified as Carlos Palazuelos, in cuffs and took him out of the house.

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“He has nothing to do with it, either,” she said in the on-air interview. “I have nothing to hide. There’s nobody in the house.”

She said her daughter and son-in-law, Palazuelos, are living with her until they get their tax refunds because they were evicted from their home. He is a delivery driver in Tucson, she said.

“Somebody gave a tip that the lady was in the house,” she said, as she then asked a person standing next to her to remind her of the missing Tucson woman’s name. “I don’t know anything about her,” the mother-in-law said. “We’re not hiding anything.”

She said investigators showed her the video that was released earlier Tuesday, which showed an armed, masked person at Guthrie’s door the morning she went missing. “He doesn’t have anything” like that, the mother-in-law said, gesturing at her own clothing, apparently to refer to what the person was wearing in that video.

The Nogales International also reported speaking to the mother-in-law, identifying her as Josefina Maddox, saying she spoke to a media swarm at the scene in Rio Rico. She said Palazuelos is a good man, a good father, has no criminal record and wouldn’t do anything like that, the paper reported.

Investigators believe Guthrie, the 84-year-old mother of NBC “Today” show host Savannah Guthrie, was abducted from her home the early morning hours of Feb. 1.

ABC News was first to report Tuesday night that a person had been detained for questioning the in case, citing a law enforcement source who had been briefed on the situation.

“However, there is no indication that the person who was detained is the figure seen in the newly released video footage” from Guthrie’s front door camera, ABC said.

Meanwhile, TMZ reported late Tuesday that “there has been activity in the Bitcoin account listed in the first ransom note in relation to the Nancy Guthrie case.”

On Tuesday images and video were released by the FBI and Sheriff’s Department that showed a person wearing a backpack and a ski mask. The person can be seen in one of the videos tilting their head down and away from a door camera of Guthrie’s Catalina Foothills home on the morning she disappeared, Feb. 1.

FBI Director Kash Patel told Fox News late Tuesday that FBI agents are looking at more than one individual as a “person of interest” in Guthrie’s disappearance.

An investigator looks inside a Culvert Tuesday in the Tucson neighborhood where Annie Guthrie, whose mother Nancy Guthrie has been missing for more than a week, lives.

lives.

Ty ONeil, Associated Press

“We are looking at people who, as we say, are persons of interest,” Patel said.

Patel did not elaborate on who might be under suspicion, but said authorities were undergoing a process to eliminate anyone who may not be involved.

Patel said the FBI’s outreach to the private sector has shown “there might be persons of interest in and around the area related to this event.”

The video footage released earlier Tuesday shows a person at Guthrie’s door holding a flashlight in their mouth and trying to cover the camera with a gloved hand and part of a plant ripped from her yard.

The videos — less than a combined minute in length — gave investigators and the public their first glimpse of who was outside Guthrie’s home, but the images did not show what happened to her or help determine whether she is still alive.

By Tuesday afternoon, authorities were back near Guthrie’s neighborhood, using vehicles to block her driveway. A few miles away, law enforcement was going door-to-door in the area where daughter Annie Guthrie lives, talking with neighbors as well as walking through a drainage area and examining the inside of a culvert with a flashlight.