The sheriff overseeing the investigation into the suspected abduction of Nancy Guthrie blamed lab work, scientific protocols and the judicial process for delays in the investigation, which entered its fourth month Monday, in an interview with local media this week.
“It’s just not a detective goes out there, talks to somebody, and we can make an arrest,” Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos told the Tucson-based KOLD-TV. “This is a very sensitive case, but what really makes it prolonged is we do rely on labs.”
Detectives have relied on lab work for DNA and digital testing in particular, he said.
Although the interview was published Monday, a spokesperson for Nanos’ office told Fox News Digital he sat down for it “several weeks ago.”
“This is an active and ongoing investigation,” the spokesperson said. “Forensic analysis of DNA and video evidence remains underway. If and when there is a significant development in this case, it will be shared publicly.”
In a controversial move that stemmed from a public rift with the FBI, 11 weeks after he sent hair samples from Guthrie’s home in the Catalina Foothills to a private genetics lab in Florida, they were forwarded to the bureau’s Quantico lab for more advanced testing. There were also early reports of mixed DNA samples, which are difficult to isolate, and ongoing digital forensic analysis.
“When you’re looking at those labs and the work they do, you have a science there, and science has rules that it has to go by,” Nanos said in his local news interview. “Even though it’s not — DNA they’ll tell you isn’t an exact science — it’s 99% plus. So it’s pretty close, but you still have to follow rules.”
In addition to scientific protocols, there are also rules for the judicial system, he said.
“If I were to say there’s a positive to this, it is that people are working, doing their best to stay within those rules so that they have that understanding that, look, nobody wants to arrest the wrong person,” he said. “We wanna make sure that DNA doesn’t just identify a suspect. It also exonerates those who are innocent.”
Although his office declined to answer questions about who outside the family may have been ruled out or remains a person of interest, Nanos told Fox News Digital last month that detectives were making progress in the case. However, no suspects have been publicly identified, no arrests have been made, and Guthrie’s whereabouts remain unknown.
“The sheriff needs to give us concrete answers on what is going on and what he is doing, not vague plaтιтudes about the scientific process,” said RJ Dreiling, a California criminal defense attorney who is following the case.
“The Guthrie kidnapping has captivated the country — not just because of how well known Ms. Guthrie’s daughter is, but because if this loved and respected woman can be ripped out of her home, and we can’t find the person who did it,” Dreiling told Fox News Digital. “It makes us all wonder how safe are we all really?”
While Nanos pointed to forensic testing as a reason for the slow pace of the investigation, federal sources familiar with the probe told Fox News Digital over the weekend that the FBI is discussing deploying new technological tools in the case.
Morgan Wright, the CEO and founder of the National Center for Open and Unsolved Cases, said he believes the new tools are likely focused on one of three areas, all of them digital.
“The solution to this case is going to be, I think, something technical, something that they come up with — new ways of analyzing data,” he told Fox News Digital. “I’m looking at the video, the video forensics, signals analysis, blockchain kind of stuff.”
The investigative genetic genealogy process remains ongoing, and could also crack the case, he said.
Guthrie is the 84-year-old mother of “Today” co-host Savannah Guthrie.
There is a combined reward of over $1.2 million for information that cracks the case, which remains unclaimed.
The family is asking anyone with information to dial 1-800-CALL-FBI. Anonymous tips can be called into Tucson’s 88-Crime H๏τline at 1-520-882-7463.
💔 STELLA PARTON BREAKS HER SILENCE — What She Said About Dolly’s Health Has Fans Looking Back
Dolly Parton’s Sister Breaks Silence What Really Happened - GMT - G1
Stella Parton was born May 4, 1949, the sixth of twelve children raised by Robert Lee and Avie Lee Parton in Sevierville, Tennessee — a household defined by noise, limited money, and almost no privacy, the kind of environment that produced strong, determined personalities.
Stella was one of them.
By seven, she was appearing alongside her older sister Dolly on a Knoxville television program; by her teens, she was writing her own songs, though marriage and motherhood pulled music to the margins of her life for a stretch.
The dream never fully disappeared.
In 1967, she recorded a gospel album with her mother and sisters, and later worked clubs in Washington, D.C., before founding her own record label in 1975 and releasing “I Want to Hold You in My Dreams Tonight,” which climbed to number nine on the country charts.
Long before any of that commercial success, Stella had already shown a willingness to take positions others avoided.
At 26, amid backlash against Australian singer Olivia Newton-John for winning recognition in country music, Stella recorded “Ode to Olivia” in her defense — a stand that offered her no career benefit and real risk of criticism, but one she took anyway simply because she believed staying silent was the wrong choice.
That instinct defined the rest of her career: hits like “The Danger of a Stranger” and “Steady as the Rain” (written by Dolly) built a genuine, independent following, including in the U.K., while Stella also worked in New York theater and spoke openly, often controversially, about poverty, domestic violence, and the treatment of women in the music industry.
She was named the Christian Country Music Association’s Female Vocalist of the Year in 2004.
Through all of it, she remained defined publicly, more often than not, as simply “Dolly’s little sister” — a label she spent five decades quietly proving didn’t tell the full story.
That same directness is why her comments in the fall of 2025 carried real weight.
Stella had never positioned herself as the family’s image manager or spokesperson; she was, by reputation, someone who believed difficult truths shouldn’t stay hidden indefinitely.
What she described wasn’t dramatic or accusatory — it was a portrait of a woman who had spent years prioritizing everyone else’s needs over her own.
The context mattered.
Carl Dean, Dolly’s husband of nearly sixty years, died in March 2025 at 82, after a long illness during which Dolly had devoted herself almost entirely to his care.
She later acknowledged that in the process, she’d neglected her own health significantly.
The loss reverberated through the whole extended family — the Partons had lost three brothers in the years surrounding this period, compounding grief that, for a family that had once crowded twelve children into a single small home, meant losing pieces of a shared childhood one after another.
Stella herself went seven years without releasing new music during this stretch, later describing the period simply as one shaped by sorrow, while still speaking about the importance of finding moments of laughter within it.
Looking back, one moment reads very differently in hindsight than it did at the time: in late September 2025, Dolly postponed her planned Las Vegas residency, citing health challenges — a rare cancellation for a performer whose six-decade career had included very few of them.
At the time, most fans treated it as a minor, temporary setback.
Stella’s later reflections suggested the signs had actually been building for some time, visible to family in ways the public smile made easy to miss.
That concern crystallized publicly not long after, when Dolly’s younger sister Frieda posted a simple request on Facebook asking fans to pray for Dolly.
What looked at first like an ordinary, well-meaning gesture spread rapidly, sparking widespread speculation about how serious Dolly’s condition actually was.
Dolly herself responded directly within days, appearing in a video from a Grand Ole Opry commercial shoot, insisting with her familiar humor that she wasn’t finished yet — the now widely remembered “I ain’t dead yet” moment that briefly quieted public concern.
In the months that followed, the pattern repeated: reassuring updates about kidney stones, dehydration, and treatment, paired with continued work on new projects, right up until Dolly Parton’s death on August 25, 2026, at 80.
Looking back across that full timeline — the postponed residency, the family’s public worry, Stella’s own account of a sister who consistently deprioritized her own wellbeing — it becomes easier to see what the people closest to Dolly understood well before the rest of the world did: that the warmth and resilience the public saw every time she appeared on camera came at a real, largely invisible cost.
