TUCSON – The armed personnel arrived at Carlos Palazuelos’s house in Rio Rico on a February morning and held him for the next seven or eight hours. He is a delivery driver. He was never charged. The Pima County Sheriff’s Office declined to comment on that morning when reached this week. Palazuelos’s attorneys, however, have now done the commenting for him, in a notice of claim filed against the sheriff seeking $2.5 million.
That filing landed the same week the sheriff’s office took what it described as a significant investigative step: publicly releasing the ransom notes that arrived after Nancy Guthrie disappeared from her home near Tucson on February 1. Six months into a case that has produced no suspects, no arrests, and no confirmed account of what happened to the 84-year-old mother of NBC’s Today co-host Savannah Guthrie, investigators are simultaneously going to the public for help and fielding legal claims from people caught in the early dragnet.
The notes themselves read as the work of someone familiar with the Guthrie home. The first, which arrived at a local television station’s tip line on February 2 and was addressed to Savannah Guthrie directly, demanded $4 million in Bitcoin by February 5. It mentioned a white Apple Watch at the foot of Nancy Guthrie’s bed and a backyard floodlight that had been destroyed. The deadline escalated: if payment was not made in time, the demand would rise to $6 million.
The second note arrived four days later. It told the family that Nancy Guthrie “perished shortly after she was taken” from what the writer described as heart-related causes. “She is buried in nature now,” the note read. “Nothing you could have done could have changed the outcome.” Investigators confirmed that both notes originated from the same IP address, according to NBC News.
Releasing them publicly, Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos said, was a bid to identify the author through what he described as “distinctive patterns of word choice, syntax, and phraseology.” A friend, family member, or coworker might recognize the phrasing, Nanos said, appealing for anyone with information to call 1-800-CALL-FBI.
What Nanos did not address publicly was the complication embedded in the notes’ history. The FBI previously determined the ransom notes connected to the case were fabricated by individuals with no connection to Nancy Guthrie’s actual disappearance, as Eastern Herald reported in July. Whether the decision to release the notes now reflects a reassessment of that finding, or simply an acknowledgment that identifying the fake-note authors might still yield useful leads, was not explained.
The reward standing in the case totals more than $1.1 million: $1 million from the Guthrie family, up to $100,000 from the FBI. A retired FBI negotiator who analyzed the case explained to Eastern Herald why the unclaimed reward signals something specific: the people who know what happened are bound by something money cannot dissolve.
Palazuelos’s experience on February 10 illustrates how aggressive the early investigation was. According to the notice of claim, he was detained at gunpoint during the execution of a search warrant. His home was searched and, the filing alleges, ransacked. The sheriff’s office subsequently posted on social media in ways that connected his name to the case, generating what the filing describes as reputational harm. He is seeking $2.5 million from the county.
Daniel Maddox was held the same morning. He was at the home of his mother, Josefina Maddox, when armed personnel in what he described as military gear ordered him to the ground in the hallway and held him under guard in a van for several hours. No charges were ever filed against either man. Josefina Maddox is also named on the claim over property damage. The three claimants are seeking $3.25 million combined, according to NBC News.
The sheriff’s office said it would not comment on pending litigation. Sheriff Nanos maintained separately that “no one has been cleared in this case.”
Nancy Guthrie disappeared from her home in the Catalina Foothills area of Tucson on the night of January 31 into the morning of February 1. She is 84. Her daughter Savannah Guthrie, a co-host on the Today show since 2012, made public pleas for her mother’s return in the weeks following the disappearance and has remained a visible presence in coverage of the case. Six months later, no body has been found, no suspect named, and the investigation’s most recent public action is to ask whether someone’s friend or coworker might recognize a turn of phrase in notes the FBI already said came from the wrong people.
The ransom notes, if they help narrow the search, may eventually close one of the many gaps in this case. What they have opened, at minimum, is a new question: whoever wrote convincingly about a white Apple Watch and a destroyed floodlight in the Guthrie home either had access to that home, or had access to someone who did. The sheriff wants to know who that is. So does everyone else.
