The black glove found on the roadside near Nancy Guthrie’s Arizona home could hold crucial DNA evidence key to finally unmasking the missing 84-year-old’s kidnapper, according to a former FBI agent.
The glove — discovered on Wednesday, roughly one and a half miles from the Catalina Foothills home of “Today” show host Savannah Guthrie’s mother, as exclusively reported by The Post — would “be significant” if confirmed to be related to the investigation, Michael Harrigan, who oversaw the FBI National Academy, said.
“The question would be whether that glove was like a nitrile glove that was placed over another glove or whether it went against the skin,” Harrigan said of the discarded glove, which resembles the ones worn by the masked kidnapper caught on Nancy’s home security camera.
“Whether it’s against the skin or over another glove would determine the likelihood of DNA being transferred to it from the suspect,” he told The Post.
“They’ll be looking all over for skin cell DNA that could have been transferred to the glove, so I would expect they’ll be sending that to the laboratory and having that analysis done.”
If Nancy’s DNA isn’t found on the glove, it becomes possible it was “just another glove discarded by a worker or somebody else,” Harrigan said.
Authorities will likely still race to investigate the DNA of any individual found on the glove, on the chance they could be related to the investigation.
“They would like to go out and interview the person. They would do some investigation. They would run his background, do up a good analysis on the person, and then just go talk to him … do normal investigative work to pull pictures,” he said.
Though Harrigan cautioned that a connection is a “very low probability thing with a glove that far away” from the scene, nothing becomes insignificant 11 days out in a kidnapping investigation, the former agent argued.
“The fact that you would have investigators walking along a roadway one and a half miles away looking for items that likely could have been thrown out of a car or a vehicle, discarded, tells you that they are absolutely doing a lot of detail work in this case behind the scenes,” Harrigan said.
“In this instance, with it being a kidnapping, there is no limit really to a perimeter [of the search],” he added.
Authorities have still not identified any suspects behind Nancy’s kidnapping.
In the first breakthrough in the case, the FBI released footage on Tuesday of a man with black gloves, a ski mask, and a holstered gun trying to obscure a security camera on her front stoop.
Investigators briefly detained a person of interest for questioning Tuesday evening, but the man, a delivery driver named Carlos Palazuelos, was released several hours later.
Palazuelos, from Rio Rico — some 60 miles south of Tucson, insisted he did not know who Nancy Guthrie was or had anything to do with the woman’s abduction, according to WDBJ.
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