The FBI Lab May Hold Nancy Guthrie’s Answer — But Nobody Is Saying What They Found

Added: 2026-05-24

[00:00:00]A Fox News reporter stopped Sheriff Chris Nanos outside his department building on May 8th. One question.

[00:00:06]Are you closer to solving this case?

[00:00:09]Nanos looked at the camera.

[00:00:11]We are.

[00:00:12]Then he got into his Corvette and drove away.

[00:00:15]That is the most information the public has received about the Nancy Guthrie investigation in weeks.

[00:00:21]Three words.

[00:00:22]And a car door closing.

[00:00:24]Subscribe.

[00:00:26]Hit that bell.

[00:00:27]100 days. No press conference since February 5th.

[00:00:31]No named suspect. No confirmed sighting.

[00:00:35]>> [music] >> No public statement from the FBI about what their laboratory in Quantico has found. Nothing.

[00:00:42]And that nothing, according to a man who spent decades working inside the FBI, is not an accident.

[00:00:48]Former FBI agent Scott O'Gwen Baum told Cold [music] News that the silence surrounding this investigation is not a sign of failure. It is, he said, deliberate and strategic.

[00:00:59]Not [music] passive. Not bureaucratic drift. Deliberate.

[00:01:05]Strategic. A choice made by investigators who know that the moment they say what they have found, a defense attorney gets to work preparing for it.

[00:01:14]The silence is not the absence of information. The silence is the protection [music] of information.

[00:01:21]But there is a crack in that silence.

[00:01:23]And it did not come from a reporter. It did [music] not come from a leaked document or an anonymous source. It came from the director of the FBI.

[00:01:32]Kash Patel went on Sean Hannity's show and said something that no FBI director says when a case is going well between agencies.

[00:01:41]He criticized the Pima County Sheriff's Department.

[00:01:44]Publicly.

[00:01:46]By name. He was asked directly, why did Nanos send the DNA evidence to a private laboratory in Florida instead of the FBI's facility in Quantico?

[00:01:56]Patel's answer was four [music] sentences.

[00:01:59]Each one worse than the last. He said we would have analyzed it within days and maybe gotten better information or more information.

[00:02:07]Our lab's just better than any other private lab out there and we didn't get the chance to do that. So I understand everybody's frustrations.

[00:02:15]>> [music] >> We would have analyzed it within days.

[00:02:19]Our lab is better.

[00:02:21]We didn't get the chance.

[00:02:23]The director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation on national television told the world that the primary evidence in the Nancy Guthrie case sat in a private Florida laboratory for weeks before reaching the most advanced forensic facility in the country.

[00:02:37][music] Weeks that cannot be recovered.

[00:02:39]Weeks that may or may not have changed what Quantico was able to extract from the sample when it finally arrived.

[00:02:46]Nanos fired back immediately.

[00:02:49]His statement was precise and careful.

[00:02:52]While the FBI director was not on scene, coordination with the Bureau began without delay.

[00:02:58]Decisions regarding evidence processing were made on scene based on operational needs.

[00:03:03]And then, the line that investigators on the ground wanted people to hear.

[00:03:08]The laboratory utilized by the Pima County Sheriff's Department and the FBI laboratory in Quantico have worked in close partnership from the outset and continue to collaborate in the analysis of evidence. Close partnership.

[00:03:22]From the outset.

[00:03:24]Sources inside [music] the investigation told CNN that despite the public friction between Patel and Nanos, the actual working relationship on the ground between FBI agents and sheriff's detectives has [music] remained functional.

[00:03:37]That is the reality that tends to get lost when two agencies argue publicly about credit. The FBI director takes shots at the local sheriff on national television.

[00:03:47]>> [music] >> The local sheriff issues a careful statement defending his decisions. And the investigators actually running the case, the ones in the room with the evidence, the [music] ones checking in with the labs every day, keep working.

[00:03:59]CNN's chief law enforcement and intelligence analyst John Miller addressed that contradiction directly.

[00:04:06]He said Patel's public criticism was not helpful to the case. Not because the criticism was necessarily wrong, but because the working relationship between the FBI and local law enforcement depends on trust that public attacks erode.

[00:04:19]He said the FBI director cannot tout the FBI's dedicated support for local law enforcement on his social media feeds every day and then throw a partner agency under the bus the first time a high-profile case gets hard.

[00:04:33]The partner agency fired back. The FBI director kept talking. And in the middle of that public argument, the sample sat in Quantico being processed.

[00:04:43]The science inside that laboratory is not simple.

[00:04:46]The evidence collected from Nancy Guthrie's home is not a simple profile.

[00:04:51]It is a mixture.

[00:04:52]Multiple contributors.

[00:04:54]Genetic material from Nancy herself, from family members, from anyone who had been inside that home in recent weeks.

[00:05:02]Cleaning staff.

[00:05:04]Visitors. And potentially, [music] whoever spent 40 minutes inside that house on the night of February 1st.

[00:05:12]Separating [music] one profile from that mixture is not like running a swab through a machine and waiting for a number.

[00:05:19]It is computational.

[00:05:21]Mathematical.

[00:05:22]It requires software that can model the statistical probability of which genetic markers belong to which contributor. A process that [music] gets exponentially harder as the number of contributors increases.

[00:05:35]Former FBI supervisory special agent Lance Leising told CBS News exactly what location determines the priority of the sample.

[00:05:44]He said, "An item containing DNA, such as a strand of hair found somewhere in a house is one thing.

[00:05:50]But a strand of hair near the victim's last known location [music] such as in her bed would be a high priority for the FBI.

[00:05:58]Her bed.

[00:05:59]Where Nancy Guthrie was sleeping when whoever came for her arrived. If what is sitting in Quantico right now came from that location, from the most intimate space in that house, the space where she was most vulnerable, it is not a background sample.

[00:06:14]It is the sample.

[00:06:16]CeCe Moore, the forensic genealogist whose work has helped solve cases [music] that had been cold for decades, has been specific about where she believes this evidence is headed.

[00:06:26]She told NewsNation that the FBI would likely bring in Astrea Forensics, not just any lab.

[00:06:33]Astrea Forensics is the San Francisco-based laboratory that developed a DNA profile in the Gilgo Beach serial killer case, the case that identified Rex Heuermann after more than a decade.

[00:06:44]Moore said she has personally been involved in six cases where Astrea produced results from rootless hair evidence.

[00:06:50]>> [music] >> Six cases.

[00:06:52]With rootless hair.

[00:06:54]The hardest kind. She called it by far the safest option.

[00:06:58]And she described the hair in Nancy's case, the sample that went from Florida to Quantico, as kind of a Hail Mary. Not because the technology does not work.

[00:07:08]But because rootless hair is difficult.

[00:07:11]Because mixtures are difficult.

[00:07:13]Because the standard for federal prosecution is not probably him.

[00:07:18]It is beyond reasonable doubt.

[00:07:21]And getting [music] from a partial profile extracted from a complex mixture all the way to beyond reasonable doubt, that is not days of work. That is months.

[00:07:31]Jim Clemente looked at the blood, not the DNA, not the footage, the blood.

[00:07:38]He told NewsNation that the blood, Nancy's blood confirmed by DNA on the exterior of the home suggests there was likely only one suspect [music] involved in the abduction.

[00:07:48]His reasoning is specific. If two people had been inside that house, one person controlling Nancy while the other handled the camera and the entry point, she would not have reached the front steps. She would have been managed, controlled, kept inside. The fact that blood from a blow to her face or head ended up outside the front door suggests a single person managing [music] a struggle while also trying to execute a plan that was not going perfectly.

[00:08:17]One person struggling, improvising. That profile, one suspect operating alone encountering more resistance than planned, is the most specific [music] forensic portrait of whoever took Nancy Guthrie that any expert has publicly offered.

[00:08:34]And it means that Deena in Quantico does not need to match a conspiracy. It needs to match one person, >> [music] >> one set of markers, one name, one more thing. And it sits inside leaked emails that most people dismissed as irrelevant. [music] Leaked internal emails revealed that the Pima County Sheriff's Department worked extensively with producers of a reality television show called Desert Law from July to December 2025.

[00:09:01]Six months. The department granted behind-the-scenes access, [music] body camera footage, operational cooperation.

[00:09:10]That is the six months before Nancy Guthrie disappeared.

[00:09:14]The emails show no direct overlap with the case.

[00:09:18]The investigation into her disappearance began in February 2026 after [music] the TV production period ended.

[00:09:25]But critics have not let it go.

[00:09:28]Because what those emails reveal is a department that for six months was operating with the awareness of cameras and production timelines alongside its law enforcement responsibilities.

[00:09:39]Whether that culture, the culture of a department comfortable with public performance, shaped any decision made in the first hours of the Nancy Guthrie crime scene, is [music] not something the department has addressed.

[00:09:51]The silence on that question is a different kind of silence from the strategic silence around the lab results.

[00:09:56]>> [music] >> It is the silence of an institution that does not want to answer.

[00:10:01]FBI Assistant Director for Public Affairs Ben Williamson made a statement on X that clarified the agency's version of the evidence timeline. He said the FBI had asked to test the DNA two months before the sample was transferred. Two months. Before the Florida lab, before the weeks of standard analysis, before the transfer to Quantico. Two months earlier the FBI asked, and the evidence went to Florida instead.

[00:10:27]The question of why, of what operational decision on the day of the crime scene processing, [music] led to a private contractor receiving evidence that the FBI had already asked to test, [music] has not been answered publicly by anyone. That silence, unlike the strategic silence around the lab results, is [music] a different kind of quiet.

[00:10:46]On Monday, May 12th, the Pima County Board of Supervisors is voting.

[00:10:51]Not on the investigation.

[00:10:53]On Sheriff Nanos.

[00:10:55]Supervisor Matt Heinz told Arizona Luminaria that Nanos' written response to the board's questions did not meet statutory requirements, and that there [music] were significant deficiencies that put Nanos at risk for removal.

[00:11:09]Removal. The man who drove away from a reporter in his Corvette with three words about one of the most consequential missing person cases in America may not be the Sheriff of Pima County much longer.

[00:11:21]Whether that changes anything for the investigation, or whether the FBI's parallel operation is already functioning independently of whatever happens in Pima County politics, is not something anyone has answered. Jason Pack, a former law enforcement official who has consulted on major investigations, told CBS News something that reframes the entire public perception of this case.

[00:11:44]He said, "A hundred days feels like forever to a family. In investigative terms, it can still be early."

[00:11:53]Early.

[00:11:54]Because behind the scenes, [music] in a laboratory in Quantico, in a pipeline that may reach Astrid of Forensics in San Francisco, in the work of re-interviewing witnesses and running down tips that did not connect [music] the first time, this investigation has not stopped. "The cameras may move on," Pack said. "The investigators usually do not."

[00:12:14]The cameras have mostly moved on, the investigators have not.

[00:12:19]And whatever they found in that lab, whatever the silence is protecting, is not gone.

[00:12:25]It is in Quantico.

[00:12:27]It has been there since the Florida lab finished what it could, and when it is [music] ready, when the profile is clean enough, the match is strong enough, the case is tight enough for a federal prosecutor [music] to walk into a courtroom, the silence ends. If you have any information about Nancy Guthrie, call 1-800-CALL-FBI right now.

[00:12:47]Anonymous cash reward of 1.2 million dollars. No ID required.

[00:12:53]523-514-900 or tips.fbi.gov.

[00:12:58]Subscribe. Hit that bell. The lab has what it has.

[00:13:03]And somewhere in Quantico, the answer is waiting for the science to catch up.