The whole world learned Nancy Guthrie’s name because of a crime. But the people who actually know her — the ones who packed a church to pray for her, the colleagues who looked forward to her meetings, the pastor who noticed the second she wasn’t in her pew — they know a completely different woman. And that woman deserves to be heard.
Nancy Guthrie was a Kentucky girl from Fort Wright who wrote for her college newspaper, saw a man walk up to her sorority door on a blind date, and told everyone within earshot that she was going to marry him. She did. She followed him around the world — from Kentucky to Melbourne, Australia, to Tucson, Arizona — raised three children, and built a family in a burnt-adobe house in the Catalina Foothills that she would call home for more than fifty years.
Then her husband died suddenly at forty-nine, and Nancy was left alone at forty-six with three kids, an aging mother, and a brother with Down syndrome who needed her care. She had no career. No professional network. No safety net. And she didn’t collapse. She told her children to get up and decide and do. Then she went out and did exactly that — taking a job at the University of Arizona so her daughters could attend tuition-free, building a career in public relations, creating a program that brought live music into a hospital for patients and staff, and eventually becoming president of the Southern Arizona chapter of the Public Relations Society of America.
Her kids became a fighter pilot, a published poet and jeweler, and one of the most recognized journalists in America. Savannah Guthrie has said publicly that her mother is the reason any of them grew up to do anything. And that her selflessness, her grit, and her unshakable faith held them all together through the worst of it.
This episode is about the Nancy the general public never got to meet. The woman behind the missing poster. The grandmother who was spunky and mischievous. The churchgoer whose thirty-year attendance record was so reliable that one missed Sunday was enough to sound the alarm. The woman who was still laughing about javelinas eating her garden plants just weeks before she was taken from the home she loved.
This is who we’re fighting to bring home. And her story is worth knowing. (Continued In Video 👆)
This publication contains commentary and opinion based on publicly available information. All individuals are presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Nothing published here should be taken as a statement of fact, health or legal advice.
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