Federal prosecutors have charged a California man with sending a fake ransom note to extort Savannah Guthrie and her siblings, while their 84-year-old mother remains missing after what local investigators believe was a forced abduction from her home near Tucson.
Derek Callella is accused of demanding a ransom across state lines and utilizing anonymous telecommunications to abuse, threaten, or harass the Guthrie family.
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“Did you get the bitcoin were [sic] waiting on our end for the transaction,” Callella allegedly wrote to Annie Guthrie and her husband, Tommaso Cioni.
Nancy Guthrie is a mother of three, including NBC’s “Today Show” co-anchor Savannah Guthrie, who canceled plans to cover the Olympics to return home after her mother went missing.
Investigators determined that the text came from a voice over IP service capable of spoofing phone numbers.
According to court documents, they tracked the account to Callella’s Google email account.
After being read his Miranda rights, Callella allegedly admitted to sending two texts, claiming he got the family’s contact information online and had been following news coverage of the case.
According to the FBI, he also allegedly called his family later.
Earlier Thursday, the FBI Phoenix Special Agent in Charge Heith Janke told reporters about the arrest but said that the FBI was looking into another ransom demand that could have come from the true abductor.
Nancy Guthrie has been missing since early Sunday morning, Feb. 1, in what Pima County Sheriff Christopher Nanos believes to be a forcible abduction from her house in the Catalina Foothills neighborhood, a low-crime suburb north of Tucson.
Her last sighting occurred the previous evening, following her dinner with her daughter and son-in-law, approximately 4.5 miles away from her own residence.
Her family dropped her off at home. Her doorbell camera was removed just before 2 a.m. A few minutes later, home security software detected motion, and her pacemaker device lost connection with her phone, indicating that she may have been forced to leave her home.
Despite the presence of many cameras, police were unable to obtain videos from her home security system, Nanos said on Thursday.
Police discovered a blood trail from her front door to the edge of her driveway.
She has not been seen since.
Authorities said the senders have not supplied evidence of life or a way to contact them. They did, however, set a deadline of 5 p.m. Thursday for their ransom demand.
