A hair sample retrieved from Nancy Guthrie’s Arizona home did not yield a DNA profile of a possible suspect, the sheriff leading the case revealed on Thursday.
Embattled Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos announced the latest setback as the investigation into the 84-year-old’s kidnapping nears the six-month mark.
“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,” Nanos said. “But does that mean the hair isn’t that of the suspect?
“We won’t know that till we have the suspect’s hair. You don’t just destroy it,” he added.
Local investigators, alongside the FBI, sent the recovered hair sample to a California laboratory for examination which came up empty handed.
“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,” the sheriff said, adding “that was just a matter of weeks ago.”
Nanos added that the hair sample was only one part of the broader DNA work that is underway, but did not specify how many other samples are being examined, according to Fox News Digital.
Investigators will continue working with multiple crime labs to analyze the evidence collected in the home, as well as genetic genealogy research used to generate leads from a family tree.
“Anything we can grasp onto with DNA is a part of this investigation,” Nanos said.
“That’s really where some of my optimism is, that I just know that we’re gonna get this thing resolved,” Nanos told the outlet.
On Monday, Guthrie’s daughter, “Today” show co-host Savannah Guthrie, made a heartbreaking fresh appeal to her mother’s kidnappers to “do the right thing” — as she described how her family is living in a “nightmare that will not end.”
“The world can be a cruel and unforgiving place, and I know that you have tried to do things the right way,” Savannah said on her Instagram, appearing to address her mother’s abductors directly.
“So I am asking you, begging you, to do the right thing now.”
No arrests have been made since Guthrie was snatched from her home in the upscale Tucson suburb of Catalina Hills on Feb. 1.
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