The Arizona sheriff leading the investigation into Nancy Guthrie’s kidnapping has denied Kash Patel’s FBI access to key evidence in the case of the missing 84-year-old.
The FBI asked Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos to provide the bureau with DNA recovered from the home of Nancy Guthrie, mother of Today host Savannah Guthrie, along with a black glove found about a mile away in order to process the material at the FBI’s national crime laboratory in Quantico, Virginia.
But Nanos instead sent the evidence to a private lab in Florida that the sheriff’s department regularly contracts with, effectively denying the FBI access to the evidence and limiting its ability to help with the investigation, an unnamed FBI source told Reuters.
“It risks further slowing a case that grows more urgent by the minute,” the source told Reuters. “It’s clear the fastest path to answers is leveraging federal resources and technology.”
The sheriff’s department has primary jurisdiction over the case but has accepted the FBI’s offer to provide assistance. The county has spent about $200,000 to send evidence to the Florida lab, the FBI official told Reuters.
The Daily Beast has contacted the FBI and the Pima County Sheriff’s Department for comment.
Investigators have struggled to identify a suspect in Guthrie’s disappearance as the investigation closes in on the two-week mark.
Chilling images recovered from Guthrie’s doorbell camera show an armed, masked individual tampering with the camera around the time she went missing, in the early-morning hours of Feb. 1
The images constituted a major breakthrough but took more than a week to recover from “residual data located in backend systems,” Patel said Wednesday.
On Thursday, the FBI’s Phoenix field office shared new details about the suspect, who is described as a man about 5 feet 9 inches to 5 feet 10 inches tall with an average build. In the video, he was wearing a black 25-liter Ozark Trail Hiker Pack backpack.
The FBI is offering up to $100,000 for information leading to Nancy Guthrie’s location and/or the arrest and conviction of anyone involved in her disappearance.
Family members say Guthrie had a sound mind but suffered from limited mobility, and that she needs daily medication to survive. DNA tests confirmed that traces of blood found on the front porch came from Guthrie.
Several purported ransom notes have surfaced since her disappearance, though they were delivered to news media outlets, not the family or law enforcement, which investigators say is unusual.
The senders have not provided any known evidence of proof of life even as the deadlines set out in the notes have lapsed.
The harrowing ordeal has seen Savannah Guthrie, 54, and her siblings Annie and Camron publish multiple videos to social media appealing to their mother’s abductor to return her.
“We beg you now to return our mother to us so that we can celebrate with her,” Savannah Guthrie said in a video posted Saturday. “This is the only way we will have peace. This is very valuable to us, and we will pay.”
A man was brought in for questioning on Tuesday, and his residence was searched, but he was released eight hours later. The man, who identified himself as a delivery driver named Carlos, told reporters he had no idea why he was brought in.
