This comes hours after Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos spoke to the media for the first time in over a week about the apparent abduction of Nancy Guthrie near Tucson. He says investigators are testing DNA and no one has been cleared in the case.
The sheriff’s department said Friday several gloves have been found as far as 10 miles away and as close as about 2 miles away from Guthrie’s home. The gloves are being tested.
Detectives denied reports that gloves were found inside her home or on her property.
The sheriff’s department said investigators have collected DNA that doesn’t belong to Guthrie or those close to her from the property. “Investigators are working to identify who it belongs to. We are not disclosing where that DNA was located,” the department said in a statement.
Nanos said the family members have been helpful with the investigation.
“Everybody, particularly the Guthrie family, but everybody has been very cooperative with us,” Nanos told Arizona’s Family. “We’ve done a number of interviews and investigations and taken DNA swabs from a number of different people. They’ve all cooperated with us.”
Nanos also disputed claims that he’s blocking the FBI from key evidence in the case. He told Arizona’s Family sister station in Tucson, 13 News, on Feb. 5 that he wanted all evidence to be submitted to the same lab for testing: DNA Labs International in Florida. He denied that he didn’t want something tested at the FBI’s lab.
“So their lab is a great lab. We’ve used them before. They’ve solved cases. Our lab is a good lab, too. We’ve used this lab for 40 years. So it’s not like, oh, whose lab is better? They’re both very capable labs,” Nanos told Arizona’s Family. “The FBI took the camera images and did that. When those camera images came back, what happened? FBI shares them with us. When our lab reports come back, we share them.”
He also confirmed that the rapid DNA testing was down in Tucson, so evidence was sent to the lab in Phoenix.
The FBI released Thursday new details about the suspect seen in surveillance video at Nancy Guthrie’s home and increased the reward in the case to $100,000.
Guthrie’s neighbors were also asked to check a month’s worth of their security footage.
In an alert sent to certain users of the Neighbors by Ring app, subscribers are asked to check their security video from Jan. 1 through Feb 2.
The Pima County Sheriff’s Department is specifically looking for video that includes vehicles, traffic, people/pedestrians or anything else neighbors deem out of the ordinary.
The alert went to residents who live within a two-mile radius of Guthrie’s home. The request comes directly from the Pima County Sheriff’s Department, which is verified through Ring with a blue checkmark.
“It’s a tremendous amount of work,” said Roberto Villaseñor, a former Tucson police chief.
“In a situation like this, you really cannot do what’s been done without tips and public input,” he said. “They have processed the scene. But once that’s done and exhausted, it’s hard to move forward without additional information coming in.”
The Pima County sheriff and the FBI announced phone numbers and a website to offer tips about the apparent kidnapping of Guthrie, the 84-year-old mother of NBC “Today” co-anchor Savannah Guthrie.
Several hundred detectives and agents have been assigned to the case, the sheriff’s department said.
