Savannah Guthrie and the Hard Truth About True Crime

“Well, here we go. Ready or not, let’s do the news.”

With that, Savannah Guthrie returned to her role as a co-host of Today after more than two months away from the morning show—a leave that she began just after her mother, Nancy Guthrie, was reported missing from her home in Arizona.

As Savannah summarized the day’s headlines (a potential cease-fire in Iran, surging gas prices, UCLA’s victory in the NCAA women’s-basketball championship) she wore a dress of bright yellow, its lace overlay suggestive of delicate flowers. Her co-host, Craig Melvin, wore a yellow tie, with a yellow pocket square peeking from his blazer and a yellow ribbon pinned to his lapel. The desk they shared was surrounded by yellow flowers: roses, mostly, looking like tightly packed blooms of sunshine.

Yellow, used in this way, is a color of hope—the hope, in particular, that a missing loved one will return home. On the Today set, though, it was also a color of defiance.

Guthrie’s return is a refusal to give in to the personal horror that has become a widely followed national news story. Very little has changed since the early days in the case of her mother’s disappearance: no reported new breaks, no new evidence revealed. Her decision to come back, she has suggested, is instead simply a step whose time has arrived. The television host is famous for her grin—wide, slightly crooked, proof that the poets got it right when they compared smiles to beams of light. Now, she suggested, that smile would speak for itself. “My joy will be my protest,” Guthrie told her former Today co-anchor Hoda Kotb, who had filled in for Guthrie during her absence, in an interview that aired late in March.

The protest, though, is also a concession: an acknowledgment that Nancy Guthrie’s disappearance is still a question with no answer, and a story with no conclusion.

The ransom notes the family received after Nancy’s disappearance have not been officially verified, though Guthrie has said she found two to be credible. The images captured by the Ring camera in Nancy’s entryway shortly before she disappeared—showing a figure at her door, masked and gloved and apparently armed—were leads until, it seems, they weren’t. The case grows colder. “We need answers,” Guthrie told Kotb. “We cannot be at peace without knowing, and someone can do the right thing. And it is never too late to do the right thing, and our hearts are focused on that.”

When you’re hoping for a happy ending, it may not occur to you that one day, you might find relief from any ending at all. But this is the hard truth of true crime: The crime itself rarely resolves as neatly as made-for-TV renderings might suggest. Sometimes, it simply doesn’t resolve. The dynamics involved will be familiar to anyone who regularly follows the news: Many news events are, in some way, stories without end.

In the weeks following Nancy Guthrie’s disappearance, the frantic efforts to find her received dedicated coverage on CNN and other networks. The New York Times live-blogged its developments. The case was the subject of regular updates in gossip and entertainment outlets such as People and TMZ. (TMZ’s coverage acknowledged the role that the site itself played in the story—as the recipient of a note claiming to be sent by Nancy’s alleged kidnapper.) It was a steady topic in part because it offered so few meaningful developments. Each twist, however shaky as a lead or a clue, seemed to provide a new reason to hope that she might still be found and reunited with her family.

The hope remains. But it grows fainter. The Guthries have lived through, as The New Yorker’s Vinson Cunningham put it last week, “an ordeal the likes of which most of us can contemplate only as part of the plot of an egregiously dramatic movie or television show.” A show makes a basic promise that it will come to an end. Grief makes no such guarantee.

*Photo-illustration sources: Brandon Bell / Getty; Peter Kramer / NBC / Getty; Heritage Art / Heritage Images / Getty