As the search for Savannah Guthrie’s 84-year-old mother enters its third week, attention has turned to an unexpected and deeply ironic detail from the “Today” anchor’s 2024 memoir. In Mostly What God Does, Guthrie recounts a childhood summer ritual she and her sister once called a “kidnapping.”
The passage, first highlighted earlier this month and now circulating widely online, describes an annual game orchestrated by Guthrie’s older cousin, Teri. About once each summer, when the cousins visited Guthrie’s family home in Tucson, Teri would stage a mock abduction in the early morning hours on the day she was set to leave.
According to the excerpt, Teri would wake Savannah and her sister Annie before dawn, urging them to be quiet as they slipped out of the house in the pre-sunrise darkness. The girls would climb into Teri’s aging station wagon and drive north through the Arizona desert as the sky turned shades of orange and pink.
Somewhere between Tucson and Phoenix, they would stop at a pay phone. From there, the girls would call home with the rehearsed line: “Mom, cousin Teri kidnapped us to take us to her house!” Their mother would play along, feigning shock and dramatic distress before promising to come retrieve them in a few days.
The game, as Guthrie described it, was playful and fully known to the adults involved. It ended not in danger but in a family visit. Yet the word choice — “kidnapping” — and the vivid staging have struck many observers as unsettling in light of current events.
In her memoir, Guthrie tied one of these mock abductions to a formative spiritual moment. During one drive, her cousin shared Psalm 23, including the line: “Even though I walk through the darkest valley, I will fear no evil.” Guthrie wrote that the scripture became a kind of private code between her and God, one she returns to in moments of anxiety.
The coincidence between that childhood game and her mother’s present disappearance has fueled debate. Some dismiss it as an unfortunate but meaningless parallel. Others describe the resurfaced passage as eerie timing.
At its core, the story details an unusual family tradition: a carefully staged dawn escape, a desert road trip, and a scripted phone call home — a game built around make-believe danger that, decades later, reads very differently.