A glove discovered in a field roughly two miles from the Tucson home of 84-year-old Nancy Guthrie — mother of "Today" show host Savannah Guthrie — has yielded DNA, and the FBI says it appears to match gloves worn by the masked figure recorded on surveillance video outside Guthrie's front door the night she vanished.
Breitbart reported that the FBI announced the development on Sunday, as the search for Nancy Guthrie ground into its third week.
She was last seen at her Arizona home on Jan. 31 and reported missing the following day. She has not been found. Two ransom deadlines have passed. Her blood was found on the front porch.
The preliminary DNA results arrived on Saturday. Official confirmation is still pending.
The glove surfaced after law enforcement sealed off a road approximately two miles from Guthrie's home late Friday night. Forensics vehicles were spotted passing through the roadblock.
That same night, investigators tagged and towed a Range Rover SUV from a nearby restaurant parking lot — a move the sheriff's department confirmed was part of the Guthrie investigation. No arrests were made.
The glove find is significant because of what preceded it. Days before Sunday's announcement, the FBI released surveillance footage showing a masked person outside Guthrie's front door on the night she disappeared. By Thursday, the bureau had upgraded its language: that person was now a suspect, described as approximately 5 feet, 9 inches tall with a medium build and carrying a 25-liter "Ozark Trail Hiker Pack" backpack.
Roughly 16 gloves were recovered from various locations near the house. Most turned out to belong to searchers and were discarded during the effort. One, apparently, did not.
The glove and the Range Rover aren't the only threads investigators are pulling. On Tuesday — before the suspect designation — sheriff's deputies detained a person during a traffic stop south of Tucson. The man was questioned and released. That same day, deputies and FBI agents carried out a court-authorized search in Rio Rico, about an hour's drive south of Tucson.
No public details have emerged about what the search targeted or produced.
Authorities had also previously collected DNA from Nancy Guthrie's property that does not belong to her or anyone in close contact with her. Investigators were working to identify who it belongs to. Whether that unidentified DNA matches the glove evidence remains unclear — the FBI has not drawn that connection publicly.
Purported ransom notes were sent to news outlets at some point during the ordeal. The FBI has not confirmed their authenticity or disclosed their specific demands beyond payment.
What makes this case especially urgent is not just its mystery but its stakes. Nancy Guthrie is 84 years old. She relies on vital daily medicine. She has a pacemaker and a history of high blood pressure and heart issues. Every day without resolution is a day her survival odds narrow — and everyone following this case knows it.
Three weeks is a long time for an elderly woman with serious medical needs to be missing under circumstances that include blood on a porch, a masked suspect, and ransom demands. The facts do not paint a picture of someone who wandered off.
The investigation is clearly accelerating. A suspect description, surveillance footage, a sealed-off road, a towed vehicle, a court-authorized search an hour south, a detention-and-release, and now a DNA-bearing glove — each data point narrows the field. But critical gaps persist:
The FBI is playing this close, which is what you'd expect when a case is active and a victim may still be alive. But the public pieces are beginning to form a recognizable shape. Someone came to Nancy Guthrie's door that night with a plan. They left traces. And the forensic net is closing.
Somewhere in the Arizona desert, an 84-year-old woman is either waiting for rescue or beyond it. The DNA on that glove may be the thread that determines which.
