LOS ANGELES \u2014 A Los Angeles-area man pleaded guilty to felony harassment charges in federal court on Thursday for sending fake ransom \u200bnotes posing as a kidnapper of “Today” show co-host Savannah Guthrie’s missing elderly mother.<\/p>\n
Derrick Callella, 42, pleaded guilty to two counts of harassment by telecommunications device, marking the only criminal conviction to date stemming from \u200cthe disappearance of 84-year-old Nancy Guthrie from her home in Tucson, Arizona, five months ago.<\/p>\n
The charges carry a maximum penalty of two years in \u2060prison and a $250,000 fine. But the plea agreement with \u200bprosecutors calls for Callella, a resident of Hawthorne, California, \u2060to serve five years on probation, according to a U.S. Attorney’s Office spokesperson. Formal sentencing was set for Sept. \u200c10.<\/p>\n
The plea deal, entered in \u200cU.S. District Court in Tucson, leaves Guthrie’s fate unknown and the underlying kidnapping case as yet \u2060unsolved.<\/p>\n
Guthrie, in frail health with limited mobility, was last seen alive on \u2060Jan. 31 at her home. A friend contacted family members the next day, when she did not show up to church as expected, and relatives entering her home found her gone.<\/p>\n
A search of Guthrie’s residence showed she had left behind essential items such as her wallet, cellphone, hearing aid and medication. Blood found on Guthrie’s front porch was hers, DNA tests confirmed later.<\/p>\n
Callella was arrested on Feb. 5, four days after \u200cGuthrie was reported missing. By then, according to court records and FBI public \u200bstatements, local media had received a ransom note on Feb. 2 demanding payment in bitcoin and setting deadlines for payment.<\/p>\n
In entering his guilty plea, Callella admitted that he called and sent text messages to Guthrie’s family on Feb. 4 inquiring about a bitcoin transfer, and “he acknowledged that he knew an earlier ransom demand had been made,” the U.S. Attorney statement said.<\/p>\n
“Callella also admitted that his actions were meant to harass the family by seeking information about the investigation into the missing person’s disappearance,” the statement said.<\/p>\n
The guilty plea came a \u200bday after the FBI field office in Phoenix said on X that investigators have received “several” ransom notes in the course of the \u200cinvestigation, some deemed \u200cto be “extortion attempts without \u2060legitimacy,” others being treated as potentially genuine.<\/p>\n
The FBI said Guthrie’s disappearance continues to be investigated as a kidnapping-for-ransom case.<\/p>\n
Last week, celebrity news site TMZ.com reported receiving an email from someone claiming to know the identities of the abductors and to have video of the “main guy” involved in her kidnapping, as well as of Guthrie on the day she died.<\/p>\n
An \u200cFBI official, speaking on condition of \u200banonymity to discuss an active probe, told Reuters on Tuesday \u200cthat the latest TMZ letter and \u2060two ransom notes reported \u200bby media in February have since been deemed by investigators to not be credible.<\/p>\n
\n The Key Takeaways for this article were generated with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article, itself, is solely human-written.\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"LOS ANGELES \u2014 A Los Angeles-area man pleaded guilty to felony harassment charges in federal court on Thursday…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":384453,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[7,9,8,6996,10286,6995,723,6813,1286,721,972,100,4201,6997,127,4509,821,4591,19],"class_list":["post-384452","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-california","tag-california","tag-california-headlines","tag-california-news","tag-cars","tag-celebrity","tag-classifieds","tag-crime","tag-homes","tag-jobs","tag-law","tag-local","tag-news","tag-radio","tag-salt-lake","tag-sports","tag-television","tag-traffic","tag-utah","tag-weather"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/384452","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=384452"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/384452\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/384453"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=384452"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=384452"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=384452"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}