CRUCIAL CLUE IN THE HEARTBREAKING PLEA VIDEO — Savannah Guthrie is believed to have embedded a “coded message” in her desperate plea about her mother Nancy Guthrie — as a controversial detail emerges suggesting Nancy may have recognized her approaching assailant before disappearing.

Close sources reveal a fleeting moment captured on surveillance camera and phone data near the time of the disappearance is under intense scrutiny, pushing the search into a new tense phase and raising painful questions about what really happened.

Savannah Guthrie’s most recent video appealing for information about her missing mother Nancy marks a ‘significant strategic pivot’ appealing to the greed and guilt of her mother’s captors or killers.

Guthrie posted a video to her Instagram account Tuesday morning – marking her first public communication in nine days and the 24th day since her 84-year-old mom’s disappearance.

In it, the visibly emotional Today show host addressed whoever has taken her mother telling them: ‘We need to know where she is, we need her to come home.’

And, for the first time, she acknowledged this could now be an exercise in recovering her mother’s body rather than returning her home alive saying, ‘We need to know where she is,’ and stating that, if Nancy is dead, ‘we accept it.’

‘We also know that she may be lost. She may already be gone,’ she said.

But, according to former FBI special agent and crisis negotiator Jason Pack, the language used in this emotional video was far from accidental.

He explained: ‘Savannah’s language, ‘We believe in the essential goodness of every human being, it is never too late,’ is not just a grieving daughter reaching for comfort.

‘That is a theologically grounded appeal to conscience, and it is one of the most powerful tools in a negotiator’s kit.