FBI Is Now Analyzing DNA From Nancy Guthrie's Home
Two and a half months after 84-year-old Nancy Guthrie was taken from her Arizona home in the middle of the night, investigators are escalating the forensic effort to find whoever did this.
DNA evidence recovered from her home — including hair, a bedsheet clipping, and other key samples — has been shipped to the FBI's elite laboratory in Quantico, Virginia for high-tech genetic testing. NewsNation's Brian Entin broke the news on April 16, revealing that a Florida lab hired by the Pima County Sheriff's Office sent the evidence to the bureau's facility after completing its own analysis.
The move has been a long time coming. According to reports, the FBI had been pushing to handle the evidence from the beginning while local authorities stuck with their contracted private lab. That behind-the-scenes tension has apparently now resolved in the FBI's favor.
The complication driving the urgency is that the DNA samples were determined to be "mixed" — meaning they contain genetic material from more than one person. That kind of sample requires more sophisticated analysis to separate and identify individual contributors, which is exactly what the Quantico lab specializes in.
What Set Off the Speculation
The day before the DNA bombshell dropped, something happened on live television that sent the internet into a spiral.
Savannah Guthrie — Nancy's daughter and Today show anchor — was mid-interview with Anne Hathaway on April 15 when the show cut to commercial. When it came back, Hoda Kotb had taken over the interview without any explanation. Savannah later reappeared for a cooking segment but her absence was never addressed on air.
Viewers immediately started speculating that something had happened in her mother's case.
It had previously been reported that NBC has a system in place specifically for this scenario — a coded phrase to pull Savannah off set and brief her privately if significant news comes in about her mother while she's on air. The plan, according to insiders, is to tell her she's "needed off set," take her to an office, and break the news to her at the same time another anchor reports it as breaking news on air.
Whether that protocol was triggered on April 15 has not been confirmed.
What We Know About the Case
Nancy Guthrie, 84, was abducted from her Tucson, Arizona home on February 1. She has not been found.
The only significant visual evidence to emerge came on February 10 when Google recovered a brief Nest doorbell camera clip showing a masked and gloved man with a gun holstered at his waist disabling or removing the camera from Nancy's front porch. The footage captured his movements, clothing, and a partial view of his eyes and what appeared to be a mustache — but yielded no confirmed leads despite more than 5,000 tips flooding into the Pima County Sheriff's Office.
No definitive motive has been publicly announced, though Savannah has shared that her brother Camron — a retired fighter pilot — concluded very early that this was likely a targeted kidnapping for ransom connected to his sister's fame as a prominent television anchor.
Savannah herself has spoken about blaming herself, a painfully human response to a situation that is completely outside anyone's control.
The FBI's involvement with the DNA evidence is the most significant investigative development in weeks. Whether Quantico's analysis can separate the mixed samples and point toward a suspect is now the central question in a case that has stretched on for two and a half months with an 84-year-old woman still missing.
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