A Fake Ransom Text.
A Guilty Plea.
And a Deal That Ends in Probation.
Nancy Guthrie, the 84-year-old mother of NBC “Today” co-host Savannah Guthrie, had been missing for three days. Her family had just gone on camera to beg for proof that she was alive. Within hours, one of their phones lit up with a text about a bitcoin transfer.
It was not the kidnapper. It was a 42-year-old man in Hawthorne, California, who had found the family online and decided to insert himself into a national tragedy. On July 2, 2026, in federal court in Tucson, Derrick Anthony Callella pleaded guilty to two counts of using a telecommunications device to harass.
Prosecutors dropped the most serious charge against him. The plea agreement recommends five years of probation and drug treatment — and no time in prison. Nancy Guthrie is still missing.
- 2countsof telecom harassment Callella admitted — U.S. Attorney's Office, D. Ariz.
- 5yearsprobation the plea recommends; the interstate-ransom count was dropped — plea agreement
- 9secondsthe VOIP call he placed to the family demanding bitcoin — court documents / NBC News
- Feb 1dateNancy Guthrie, 84, vanished from Tucson; she remains missing — Pima County Sheriff / CNN
On July 2, 2026, in U.S. District Court for the District of Arizona in Tucson, Derrick Anthony Callella, 42, of Hawthorne, California, pleaded guilty to two counts of using a telecommunications device to harass. The case was brought by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Arizona, according to a spokesperson quoted by ABC7 Los Angeles and Courthouse News Service.
In exchange for the plea, prosecutors dropped the more serious charge Callella had originally faced: transmitting a ransom demand across state lines. Magistrate Judge Jacqueline Rateau accepted the plea and ordered Callella to report to a residential treatment facility. Sentencing is set for September 10, 2026, before U.S. District Judge John C. Hinderaker, per the Arizona Daily Star and NBC News.
During the hearing, Callella told the court he had used methamphetamine four days earlier but said he was no longer under the influence, the Arizona Daily Star reported. He is not accused of any role in Nancy Guthrie’s abduction — a distinction that matters, and one this story returns to below.
The timing was the cruelty. On February 4, 2026 — three days after Nancy Guthrie vanished — Savannah Guthrie posted a video to Instagram directly addressing whoever had taken her mother, pleading for proof that she was alive. After that video went up, according to court documents cited by NBC Los Angeles, two family members received text messages and a phone call about a bitcoin payment.
One text, reproduced in court filings, read: “Did you get the bitcoin were [sic] waiting on our end for the transaction.” Callella also placed a nine-second call using a VOIP line, prosecutors said. After investigators read him his Miranda rights, court documents state, he admitted sending the messages and said he had found the family’s contact information online while following the coverage.
“Did you get the bitcoin were [sic] waiting on our end for the transaction.”
Text message attributed to Derrick Callella · court documents, as reported by NBC Los Angeles
The FBI moved quickly. Agents flagged the messages as a hoax within days and arrested Callella. He was indicted on online-harassment charges — and, crucially, the FBI kept his case separate from the still-open investigation into the ransom demand it considered a live investigative lead.
Here is where the accountability question sits. Each of the two counts Callella pleaded to carries a statutory maximum of two years in prison and a fine of up to $250,000. Stacked, that is a theoretical ceiling of four years behind bars. The plea agreement, negotiated with prosecutors, recommends none of it: two concurrent five-year probation terms and drug treatment — but no prison.
The government also gave up its strongest count. The dropped charge — transmitting a ransom demand across state lines — is the kind of felony that carries real prison exposure. What remained were the two harassment counts, the lesser of the offenses on the table. A judge is not bound by a plea agreement’s recommendation, and Judge Hinderaker will make the final call in September. But the deal the parties struck asks for probation for a man who, by his own admission, tried to extract cryptocurrency from a family whose mother had just been taken.
Derrick Callella of Hawthorne has pleaded guilty in Tucson federal court to two counts of telecommunications harassment for sending the Guthrie family a hoax bitcoin-ransom demand; prosecutors dropped the more serious interstate-ransom charge, and the plea calls for probation.
Charged: transmitting a ransom demand across state lines (dropped) plus two counts of telecommunications harassment.
Pleaded to: the two harassment counts only.
Statutory ceiling on those counts: up to two years and $250,000 each.
Recommended: five years’ probation (concurrent) and drug treatment — and zero prison. Sentencing is September 10, 2026, before Judge John C. Hinderaker, who is not bound by the recommendation.
It has to be said plainly, because the headlines blur it: Callella did not take Nancy Guthrie. He is a hoaxer who exploited her disappearance, not the person responsible for it. When then-FBI Phoenix Special Agent in Charge Heith Janke announced the February arrest, he told reporters the bureau was separately investigating a different ransom demand that may have come from the actual abductor.
That is part of what makes this brand of opportunism corrosive. Every fake note and phantom bitcoin demand is a lead investigators must chase down and rule out — time and manpower pulled off the search for an 84-year-old woman while the clock runs. The FBI has since discounted several ransom notes as extortion attempts while continuing to evaluate others, including one, reported publicly in late June, that claimed Nancy had died shortly after her abduction. Investigators asked that it be kept private to avoid interfering with the case.
Nancy Guthrie was last seen on the night of January 31, 2026, dropped at her home in Catalina Foothills, an affluent suburb of Tucson, after dinner at a relative’s house. By late the next morning, family members who came to check on her found her gone and called 911. Evidence at the home indicated she had been taken against her will, and Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos (D) said publicly that he believed she had been abducted.
The FBI later released still images and short video from a doorbell camera showing a masked, armed figure with a backpack tampering with the device on Nancy’s property before she vanished. In late February 2026, the family offered a $1,000,000 reward for information leading to her recovery. Savannah Guthrie stepped back from her NBC duties — including a planned role at the 2026 Winter Olympics opening ceremony — to help lead the search.
Investigators are treating the disappearance of Nancy Guthrie as a kidnapping-for-ransom case; the FBI released doorbell-camera images of a masked, armed figure on her property, and the family has offered a $1 million reward for her recovery.
The FBI has discounted some ransom notes in the Nancy Guthrie case as extortion attempts while continuing to investigate others; the Hawthorne man behind one hoax bitcoin demand, Derrick Callella, later agreed to plead guilty.
Five months on, her condition and whereabouts remain unknown. The Callella plea closes one grim chapter — the con artist who saw a grieving family and reached for a keyboard — but it does nothing to answer the only question that matters to the Guthries: where is Nancy?
Callella returns to court on September 10, 2026, for sentencing before Judge John C. Hinderaker, who can accept, reject, or vary from the probation recommendation. Whether a federal judge signs off on no prison for exploiting an active abduction investigation is the open question — and the reason a hoax that lasted a few minutes is still worth watching months later.
“Every phantom ransom note is time and manpower pulled off the search for a missing woman while the clock runs.”
The cost of the hoax · Civic Intelligence
The bottom line: a man admitted to preying on one of the most closely watched missing-persons cases in the country, and the deal on the table asks a judge for probation. The person who actually took Nancy Guthrie has never been identified. Both facts belong in the same paragraph — and both should sit uneasily with anyone who has ever waited by a phone for news of someone they love.
