The DNA recovered from a glove found two miles from Nancy Guthrie's Tucson home has been run through the FBI's Combined DNA Index System and came back empty. No matches. Separate genetic material found inside her home was also submitted to CODIS, and returned the same result: nothing.
Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos confirmed the findings Tuesday in an interview with Fox News:
"We're hopeful that we're always getting closer, but the news now, I think, is we had heard this morning that, of course, the DNA on the glove that was found 2 miles away was submitted for CODIS. And I just heard that, CODIS had no hits."
Nancy Guthrie, the mother of "Today" show host Savannah Guthrie, was last seen on the night of January 31 at her million-dollar home in the Catalina Foothills neighborhood north of Tucson. She has not been heard from since. No suspects or persons of interest have been identified.
As the NY Post reported, the recovered black glove appeared to be the same kind as one worn by a masked man captured in surveillance footage at Nancy Guthrie's home before her disappearance. That detail made it one of the most promising physical leads investigators had.
Authorities had already confirmed that the DNA on the glove was different from the DNA found inside Nancy's home. Two separate genetic profiles, neither of which matches anyone in the federal database. CODIS contains DNA profiles from convicted offenders, arrestees, and forensic samples from across the country. A "no hit" result means whoever left that DNA has not been cataloged in the system.
That narrows certain possibilities while opening others. It means the person who wore that glove, if indeed connected to the case, has no prior record that generated a CODIS entry. It does not mean the DNA is useless. It means investigators cannot yet put a name to it.
More than a dozen gloves were collected from the area near the main highway running through the Catalina Foothills. The FBI determined that most of them had been dropped by searchers during the initial search for Nancy. Whether any of the remaining gloves still hold investigative promise remains unclear.
The scale of this case is staggering. Sheriff Nanos stated Monday that law enforcement is working through between 40,000 and 50,000 leads. Local police and the FBI are both engaged. And yet, weeks after Nancy Guthrie vanished from her home, authorities have publicly identified no suspect and no person of interest.
Surveillance footage showing a masked figure at her home before she disappeared remains the most publicly known piece of evidence tying anyone to the scene. The glove that matched the kind worn by that figure just hit a dead end in the federal database. That does not close the door on the evidence, but it does mean the quick answer investigators were hoping for did not materialize.
CODIS results typically come back within 24 hours of the FBI receiving a sample. The speed of the system is not the problem. The gap is in who the system knows about.
Cases like this often turn on the accumulation of small findings rather than a single breakthrough. Two distinct DNA profiles, tens of thousands of leads, and surveillance footage of an unidentified masked individual constitute a body of evidence that is growing, even if it has not yet converged on a name.
For the Guthrie family, every dead end extends an already agonizing wait. For investigators, the CODIS miss means the work shifts to other avenues: genealogical databases, witness identification, forensic analysis of the remaining collected evidence, and the grinding process of sorting signal from noise across 50,000 tips.
The DNA still exists. It still belongs to someone. The database just doesn't know who yet.