Police in Scottsdale, Ariz., have identified the body of a woman recovered from a canal over the weekend as Passion Schurz, a 28-year-old who was reported missing from the Salt River-Pima Maricopa Indian Community on March 22.

“The initial identification was made based on specific tattoos, her physical characteristics, and clothing description,” the police department said in a post on X. “We can confirm that there were no injuries related to fractures, stab wounds, or gunshot wounds. The medical examiner is still determining the official cause of death.”

Officials said there is “no apparent connection” to the Nancy Guthrie case.

Scottsdale, Ariz., police confirmed Saturday that a woman’s body recovered from a canal near Indian Bend and Hayden Roads on Saturday has no connection to the disappearance of Nancy Guthrie. The body has not been identified; a death investigation is underway.

Former FBI special agent Harry Trombitas told Yahoo that the timing of Savannah Guthrie’s interview is probably not coincidental. Because there are no major breakthroughs, no suspects identified and no motive publicly released in the case, Trombitas said about the interview, “I really believe that that’s most likely coordinated between the sheriff’s office, the FBI and the Guthrie family.”

He said that, speaking as a former FBI agent, some of the interview’s goals were likely to humanize Nancy Guthrie as a person, persuade the suspects to do the right thing and keep the case in the public eye.

Trombitas said there are still people out there who likely have no idea that Nancy Guthrie is missing. “We’ve got to keep getting that information out there because it may finally come across the right person, and all of a sudden they realize that what they saw or the information that they have may be significant to the case.”

Read more from Yahoo: An ex-FBI agent analyzes what we learned from Savannah Guthrie’s ‘Today’ show interview amid the search for her mother, Nancy

Savannah Guthrie will talk more about her mother’s disappearance in a Dateline special this evening on NBC, airing at 9 p.m. ET. The true-crime show typically features in-depth investigations, interviews and mystery documentaries.

Savannah Guthrie told Hoda Kotb that another reason she wants to come back to the Today show is that it brings her joy.

“I want to smile. And when I do, it will be real. My joy will be my protest,” she said. “My joy will be my answer. Being there is joyful, and when it’s not, I’ll say so. And I’ve been so grateful to have this family — I consider this my family, my greater family. When times are hard, you want to be with your family, and I want to be with my family.”

Hoda Kotb asked Savannah Guthrie what it was like to return to Studio 1A, from where the Today show is broadcast, in New York City, earlier this month amid the ongoing search for her missing mother.

“I really wanted to come and see everybody,” Guthrie said. “I just love this beautiful place that we call home, where we get to come and be every day. And I know how much people have prayed for me and loved me, all the people that you see on TV and then all the people that you don’t. All the notes and messages that I have received are just so beautiful. I just wanted to be with my family — they’re my family too.”

Kotb said she remembered Guthrie saying to her colleagues, “I don’t know how to come back, and I don’t know how not to come back.”

“Yeah, that’s how I feel when I look at the Today show. It’s just the answer to all my dreams, actually better than my dreams. “

Last weekend, the Guthrie family issued a statement thanking the Tucson, Ariz., community for their support in the search for Nancy Guthrie — but also asking neighbors and locals to think back for any information that could help the investigation. “Especially around the key timelines of January 31 and the early morning hours of February 1, as well as the late evening of January 11,” as it’s possible someone might have seen or noticed something odd amid Nancy’s disappearance.

“How can someone vanish without a trace? How?” Savannah Guthrie questioned in the Today interview. “Someone knows something. Even if that something is, ‘Someone’s been acting strange for the last seven-eight weeks,’ even if it’s just that. Someone knows. And maybe somebody’s afraid. And I understand that. But our hearts are in agony. We can’t breathe, we can’t live. We can’t go on, we can’t be at peace, we can’t go forward. We have to know what happened to her.”

Savannah Guthrie speaks openly about how she’s deeply rooted in her Christian faith. When asked by Hoda Kotb if she’s “wrestled” with that faith amid her mother’s disappearance, Guthrie acknowledged: “Yes.”

“And I’m not done. But God doesn’t tell us not to wrestle with him. This isn’t some cheap faith — and my mom taught me that,” she said, adding that: “Faith is how I stay connected to my mom. God is how I’m holding hands with my mom. And I won’t let sadness win.”

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Guthrie spoke about how she saw her mom’s world “shatter” when her husband died: “I saw her faith. She taught me — she taught all of us. And I may not do it as well as her but I will do it. I will do it for my kids. I will not fall apart.”

“I will not let whoever did this take my children’s mother from them. I will not let them take my joy,” she said. “They will not take our love. They will not take our faith.”

“But our anguish is real. We need help. We need someone to tell the truth. I have no anger in my heart. I have hope in my heart,” Guthrie continued. “This family needs peace.”

In the third part of her interview with NBC, which aired on Friday, Savannah Guthrie said she plans to return to Today on April 6.

She believes it’s “part of my purpose right now.”

“I can’t come back and try to be something that I’m not. But I can’t not come back because it’s my family,” Guthrie told Hoda Kotb in the interview. “I don’t know if I can do it. I don’t know if I’ll belong anymore, but I would like to try. I would like to try.”

“I’m not gonna be the same. But maybe it’s like that old poem, ‘More beautiful in the broken places,'” she said.

In the Today show interview that aired on Thursday, Hoda Kotb asked Savannah Guthrie to tell viewers about her mother.

“She is present tense to me,” Savannah said. “My mom is so incredible. She’s resolute and strong, quiet strength, quiet faith, but hard fought. She’s funny and a little mischievous, I would say, in her humor. She’s a noble creature, she does what’s right.”

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Savannah also talked about her childhood home, describing it as her mother’s “safe haven.”

“It’s the house where all of our memories are. Good and bad, so it’s hallowed ground. My mom loved and treasured that house.”

“It’s really hard to see that violated, and the terror that she must have felt is unbearable,” Savannah said tearfully.

Nancy Guthrie was last seen when she was dropped off at her home on the night of Jan. 31 by a family member, according to a timeline from the Pima County Sheriff’s Department. In the immediate aftermath of her disappearance, intense online speculation grew that Savannah Guthrie’s family members had something to do with Nancy Guthrie’s disappearance.

When asked by Hoda Kotb how the family has dealt with those rumors, Savannah Guthrie said “it’s unbearable.”

“It piles pain upon pain. There are no words. I don’t understand,” she said. “I’ll never understand, and no one took better care of my mom than my sister and brother-in-law, and no one protected my mom more than my brother.

“And we love her, and she is our shining light,” she continued tearfully. “She is our matriarch, and she’s all we have.”

Savannah and her siblings are particularly close to their mother, as their father, Charles Guthrie, died when Savannah was 16 years old.

In the days after Nancy Guthrie was reported missing on Feb. 1, authorities said that multiple ransom notes were sent to various media outlets and the Guthrie family.

The Pima County Sheriff’s Department and the FBI said in February that they were investigating the validity of the ransom notes, but have not said publicly whether those notes were believed to have been from any person who may have abducted Guthrie.

During her first interview since her mother’s disappearance, Savannah Guthrie weighed in on whether she thinks they were real.

“There are a lot of different notes, I think, that came,” Savannah Guthrie told Hoda Kotb. “And I think most of them, it’s my understanding, are not real. And I didn’t see them, but a person that would send a fake ransom note really has to look deeply at themselves — to a family in pain. But I believe the two notes that we received, that we responded to, I tend to believe those are real.”

Savannah Guthrie said that her brother Camron, who spent his career in the military and worked in intelligence, immediately knew that their mother was taken.

“He saw very clearly right away what this was, and even on the phone when I called him, he knew. He said, ‘I think she’s been kidnapped for ransom,’ and I said, ‘What?’” she recalled through tears.

“I just said, ‘Do you think because of me?’ and he said, ’Sorry sweetie, but yeah, maybe,’” Savannah said, adding that, deep down, she already knew that.

“I mean, we still don’t know, honestly, we don’t know anything. I don’t know that it’s because she’s my mom, and somebody thought, ‘That lady has money, we can make a quick buck,’ I mean, that would make sense, but we don’t know,” she said.

Savannah said it’s “too much to bear to think that I brought this to her bedside. That it’s because of me … And I just want to say I’m so sorry, mommy, I’m so sorry.”

Within hours of learning of her mother’s disappearance, Savannah Guthrie rushed home to Tucson, Ariz., to be with her family.

When she first saw her sister, Annie, and her brother, Camron, she said they were all in “disbelief and hugging each other” while they were also on the phone with the Pima County sheriff.

Savannah said that from very early on in the investigation, Annie and Annie’s husband, Tommaso Cioni, told investigators that it wasn’t just a case of someone wandering off.

“My mom, she was in tremendous pain, her back was very bad,” Savannah told colleague Hoda Kotb. “On a good day she could walk down to the mailbox and get the mail, but most days not. So there was no ‘wander off.’ And the doors were propped open and there was blood on the front doorstep and the Ring camera had been yanked off,” she recalled. “Something is very wrong here.”

In the first of a three-part interview with NBC’s Hoda Kotb, which aired on the Today show on Thursday, Savannah Guthrie remembers the “chaos and disbelief” when she learned her mother had disappeared from her home.

Savannah recalled that her husband, Mike Feldman, had been out of town for a tennis trip, and she had taken their two kids over to colleague Carson Daly’s house. She said they all returned home at the same time when she got a call from her sister, Annie.

“My sister called me, and I said, ‘Is everything OK?’ and she said, ‘No.’ She said, ‘Mom’s missing,’ and I said, ‘What? What are you talking about?’ She said, ‘She’s gone,’” Savannah said through tears.

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“She was in a panic. I was in a panic,” she said, adding that her sister had already called 911.

“We thought that she must have had some kind of medical episode in the night and that somehow the paramedics had come because the back doors were propped open,” Savannah recalled. “That didn’t make any sense, we thought maybe they came and there was a stretcher and they took her out the back, but her phone was there, and her purse was there, and all her things, and it just didn’t make any sense.”

She said her sister, Annie, and her brother-in-law, Tommaso Cioni, called local hospitals, and Savannah decided to start calling hospitals too. She said the police were at their mother’s house talking to Annie at the same time she was talking to Savannah and “it was just chaos and disbelief.”

Speaking to NBC’s Hoda Kotb for her first interview since her mother, Nancy, disappeared 53 days ago, Savannah Guthrie detailed the “agony” her family has been going through.

“Someone needs to do the right thing,” Guthrie said through tears. “We are in agony. We are in agony. It is unbearable.”

“And to think of what she went through.”

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Guthrie said that she wakes up “every night, in the middle of the night, every night. And in the darkness, I imagine her terror — and it is unthinkable.”

“But those thoughts demand to be thought. And I will not hide my face,” Guthrie added. “But she needs to come home. Now.”

NBC said the interview released on Wednesday was a snippet of a longer sit-down, and that more will be released Thursday and Friday of this week.

Savannah Guthrie shared her family’s statement on Instagram Sunday morning, amplifying their appeal to the Tucson, Ariz., community.

“Someone knows how to find our mom and bring her home,” she wrote. She also posted an image of a religious painting with the words “I believe, I believe.”

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Nancy Guthrie’s family issued a new public appeal Saturday, asking Tucson, Ariz., residents to search their memories and home security footage for anything that might help investigators.

“It’s possible a member of this community has information that they do not even realize is significant,” the family said in a statement to KVOA in Tucson. “We hope people search their memories, especially around the key timelines of January 31 and the early morning hours of February 1, as well as the late evening of January 11.”

The family asked residents to review “camera footage, journal notes, text messages, observations or conversations that in retrospect may hold significance.” They added: “No detail is too small. It may be the key.”

Federal investigators have secured video from an Uber ride Nancy Guthrie took on the evening of Jan. 31, hours before she disappeared from her Tucson, Ariz., home, NewsNation reported.

The driver handed over all footage from inside the car to the FBI. Investigative reporter Dave Mack said on Crime Stories with Nancy Grace that authorities found nothing notable. “They found nothing of substance of anything of Nancy Guthrie in the vehicle, anything she said, her demeanor, nothing was mentioned,” Mack said.

Investigators are looking closely at the security gate on Nancy Guthrie’s front door, which is nearly impossible to break through from the outside, NewsNation reported on Thursday. That’s why some law enforcement officials believe there was a second person already inside Nancy Guthrie’s home when a masked person was seen in the doorbell camera surveillance video shared by the FBI.

Investigators are looking into a theory that the masked person was waiting on the outside to help an accomplice get Guthrie out the front door.

NewsNation’s Brian Entin reports that the FBI has returned to the neighborhood to ask residents about some former neighbors who moved out shortly before Guthrie’s disappearance.

Entin spoke to a resident of the area who said a friend of hers has a house under construction, and FBI agents asked them to give the names of construction workers and contractors who have been working on the home.