A hair sample recovered from the Arizona home of 84-year-old Nancy Guthrie has not produced a DNA profile that could identify a suspect, Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos announced Thursday. The development comes as the investigation into Guthrie's kidnapping nears its six-month anniversary.
"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,’" Sheriff Nanos told Fox News Digital. "It came back…there’s no DNA."
Investigators sent the hair sample to a laboratory in California for examination. Nanos clarified that the absence of DNA does not necessarily mean the hair does not belong to a suspect, stating, "We won’t know that till we have the suspect’s hair."
The sheriff noted that the hair sample could still hold value for other aspects of the investigation, even without yielding DNA. "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," he said, adding that this finding was determined "just a matter of weeks ago."
The hair analysis is one component of broader DNA work being conducted. Nanos indicated that investigators are continuing to collaborate with multiple crime labs to analyze evidence from Guthrie's home and are also pursuing genetic genealogy research to develop leads from family trees. "Anything we can grasp onto with DNA is a part of this investigation," Nanos stated. "That’s really where some of my optimism is, that I just know that we’re gonna get this thing resolved."
Nancy Guthrie, mother of "Today" show co-host Savannah Guthrie, was taken from her home in the Catalina Hills neighborhood of Tucson on Feb. 1. No arrests have been made in connection with her disappearance.
On Monday, Savannah Guthrie made a public appeal on Instagram to her mother's abductors, urging them to "do the right thing." She described her family's experience as a "nightmare that will not end" and pleaded, "So I am asking you, begging you, to do the right thing now."