A hair sample collected from Nancy Guthrie’s home in Arizona has failed to produce a DNA profile that could point investigators to a potential suspect, the sheriff overseeing the case said Thursday.
Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos, who has faced scrutiny amid the high-profile investigation, disclosed the development as the search for answers in the 84-year-old woman’s kidnapping approaches the six-month mark.
“Yes, there was a hair. We had it and thought, ‘OK, well, we’ll do the DNA first,’ right? You’re going to do DNA before something else,” Nanos told Fox News Digital.
“It came back…there’s no DNA,” Nanos said. “But does that mean the hair isn’t that of the suspect?
“We won’t know that till we have the suspect’s hair. You don’t just destroy it,” he added.
Investigators with local law enforcement, working in coordination with the FBI, submitted the hair to a California lab for testing, but the analysis did not return the evidence they had hoped for.
“There’s other things that hair may prove valuable for, but right now it was just about, ‘Is there any DNA there?’ And the answer was no,” the sheriff said, noting that the result came back “just a matter of weeks ago.”
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Nanos said the hair sample represents only one piece of the wider DNA testing effort in the Nancy Guthrie kidnapping investigation, though he did not say how many other samples are currently under review, according to Fox News Digital.
Investigators will continue working with multiple crime labs to analyze the evidence collected in the home, as well as genetic genealogy research used to generate leads from a family tree.
“Anything we can grasp onto with DNA is a part of this investigation,” Nanos said.
“That’s really where some of my optimism is, that I just know that we’re gonna get this thing resolved,” Nanos told the outlet.
On Monday, Guthrie’s daughter, “Today” show co-host Savannah Guthrie, made a heartbreaking fresh appeal to her mother’s kidnappers to “do the right thing” — as she described how her family is living in a “nightmare that will not end.”
“The world can be a cruel and unforgiving place, and I know that you have tried to do things the right way,” Savannah said on her Instagram, appearing to address her mother’s abductors directly.
“So I am asking you, begging you, to do the right thing now.”
No arrests have been made since Guthrie was snatched from her home in the upscale Tucson suburb of Catalina Hills on Feb. 1.
