Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos is pushing back on a claim that he withheld essential physical evidence from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in the disappearance of Nancy Guthrie and suggested the news media was sowing “division” among investigators.
The controversy erupted this week when a federal source inside the investigation told Reuters the sheriff blocked the FBI from accessing a glove and DNA found inside Guthrie’s Tucson, Arizona home and sent it for testing to a private lab in Florida instead of the bureau’s state-of-the art lab in Quantico, Virginia.
“Not even close to the truth,” Nanos told NBC Tucson affiliate KVOA on Thursday.
The elected sheriff, a second-term Democrat, insisted he has been cooperating with the bureau and cited a recent discussion about the Florida lab with FBI agents.
“Actually, the FBI just wanted to send the one or two they found by the crime scene, closest to it — mile, mile and a half … I said ‘No, why do that? Let’s just send them all to where all the DNA exist, all the profiles and the markers exist.’ They agreed, makes sense,” Nanos told the Tucson outlet.
The sheriff also told a reporter from KOLD that an FBI official told him during a Thursday meeting that “we do not want the media to divide us.”
Nanos also said gloves found by FBI on the side of the road this week may not be as important to the case as “quite a number of them” were also picked up in the area near the Catalina Foothills home of Today show co-host Savannah Guthrie’s mother.
“We don’t even know the true value of these gloves,” he said.
The gloves discovered just off the berm of the road resembled those that a masked individual was wearing while being captured on video outside Nancy Guthrie’s home the night she disappeared on Feb. 1.
Because no apparent federal crime has occurred, the sheriff maintains jurisdiction in the case but can request assistance from federal investigators.
Turf conflict between local police and the FBI is nothing new in law enforcement, with the federal agency sometimes accused of “big footing” an investigation and local detectives pushing back on the bureau appearing as an overused mainstay in TV cop shows.
However, some analysts on cable outlets like CNN and Fox News have been criticizing the sheriff as the investigation has dragged on now for nearly 13 days.
Criticism ranges from Nanos’s mixed messaging in early news conferences, to releasing the Guthrie home as a crime scene after only one day of evidence gathering, to not accessing the formidable crime-busting tools of the FBI earlier in the probe.
Nanos also took heat for attending a University of Arizona men’s basketball game last weekend while the search for the 84-year-old Guthrie was in full swing.
“When this is all done with, offer your critiques all you want, but right now we have work to do,” Nanos told KVOA.
The Today show host’s mother was last seen at her Tucson home on Jan. 31, when she was reportedly dropped off by a “family member,” Nanos said, after she had dinner with her daughter Annie and her husband Tommaso Cioni at their Tucson home.
As the disappearance has played out in the media, it’s not even clear what investigators are dealing with in the apparent abduction case. Speculation has ranged from a home invasion gone bad to a kidnapping based on purported ransom demands sent to local TV stations and the gossip outlet TMZ.
The ransom notes may be nothing more than criminal opportunists trying to cash in on the disappearance as there has been no direct communication or negotiation with the family or authorities by the purported kidnappers.
In the most recent new developments, on Thursday the FBI released the bureau’s analysis of the individual seen on the security video outside Guthrie’s home, featuring it on its Most Wanted page with the doorbell camera footage.
The bureau stated the suspect is believed to be between 5 feet 9 inches and 5 feet 10 inches tall with an average build. The suspect was also wearing a black, 25-liter Ozark Trail Hiker Pack backpack in the doorbell video.
“The FBI seeks information that will lead to the identity of this individual,” the FBI page states, adding tips can be made by calling 1-800-CALL-FBI.
“We hope this updated description will help concentrate the public tips we are receiving,” the FBI said after receiving over 13,000 tips, according to a New York Post report.
The bureau also increased the award from $50,000 to $100,000 for information leading to the discovery of Nancy Guthrie or an arrest of those responsible for her disappearance.
Contributor Lowell Cauffiel is the author of the New York Times true crime best seller House of Secrets and nine other crime novels and nonfiction titles. See lowellcauffiel.com for more.
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