BOSTON (AP) — “Desperate Housewives” star Felicity Huffman and a dozen other prominent parents have agreed to plead guilty in the college admissions bribery scam that ensnared wealthy families and athletic coaches at some of the nation’s most selective universities, federal authorities said Monday.

The actress and the other parents were charged last month in the scheme, which authorities say involved rigging standardized test scores and bribing coaches at such prestigious schools as Yale and Georgetown.

Huffman, 56, was accused of paying a consultant $15,000 disguised as a charitable donation to boost her daughter’s SAT score. Authorities say the actress also discussed going through with the same plan for her younger daughter but ultimately decided not to.

She will plead guilty to a single charge of conspiracy and fraud, according to court documents. Those charges are punishable by up to 20 years in prison, but the plea agreement indicates prosecutors will seek a sentence of four to 10 months.

Experts have said they expect some parents will avoid prison time if they quickly accept responsibility. All of the defendants will have to return to Boston to enter formal guilty pleas, but no new court dates were set.

Other parents charged in the scheme include prominent figures in law, finance, fashion, the food and beverage industry and other fields.

It’s the biggest college admissions case ever prosecuted by the Justice Department. The scandal embroiled elite universities across the country and laid bare the lengths to which status-seeking parents will go to secure their children a coveted spot.

The consultant, Rick Singer, met with Huffman and her husband, 69-year-old actor William H. Macy, at their Los Angeles home and explained to them that he “controlled” a testing center and could have somebody secretly change their daughter’s answers, authorities said. Singer told investigators Huffman and her husband agreed to the plan.

Macy was not charged. Authorities have not said why.

In a statement offering her first public comments since her arrest, Huffman apologized, took responsibility for her actions and said she would accept the consequences.

“My daughter knew absolutely nothing about my actions, and in my misguided and profoundly wrong way, I have betrayed her. This transgression toward her and the public I will carry for the rest of my life. My desire to help my daughter is no excuse to break the law or engage in dishonesty,” she said.

The streaming service Netflix said Monday that the April 26 release date of a film starring Huffman, called “Otherhood,” will be moved with a new release date to be determined.

Michael Center, the former men’s tennis coach at the University of Texas at Austin, has also agreed to plead guilty, prosecutors said Monday. Center was accused of accepting nearly $100,000 to help a non-tennis playing applicant get admitted as a recruit.

California real estate developer Bruce Isackson and his wife, Davina Isackson, who are pleading guilty to participating in both the athletic recruitment and exam rigging schemes, are cooperating with prosecutors for a chance at a lighter sentence.

“We have worked cooperatively with the prosecutors and will continue to do so as we take full responsibility for our bad judgment,” they said in a statement.

Actress Lori Loughlin, who played Aunt Becky on the sitcom “Full House,” and her fashion designer husband, Mossimo Giannulli, are charged with paying $500,000 in bribes to get their two daughters admitted to the University of Southern California as rowing recruits, even though neither participated in the sport. They were not among those who agreed to plead guilty, and they have not publicly addressed the allegations.

Loughlin and Giannulli may be hoping they can get a better deal once the media attention dies down, said former prosecutor Adam Citron. They are also accused of paying much more than Huffman and some other parents, which would call for stiffer penalties under the sentencing guidelines.

Prosecutors “are likely trying to hold her out as an example, so I would assume the plea deal was not the same plea deal as the other defendants,” said Citron, an attorney at New York’s Davidoff Hutcher & Citron LLP.

Singer, the consultant, pleaded guilty to charges including racketeering conspiracy on March 12, the same day the allegations against the parents and coaches were made public in the so-called Operations Varsity Blues investigation. Singer secretly recorded his conversations with the parents, helping to build the case against them, after agreeing to work with investigators in the hopes of getting a lesser sentence.

Several coaches have also been charged, including longtime tennis coach Gordon Ernst who’s accused of getting $2.7 million in bribes to designate at least 12 applicants as recruits to Georgetown. Ernst, who was also the personal tennis coach for former first lady Michelle Obama and her daughters, and other coaches have pleaded not guilty.

Former Yale University women’s soccer coach Rudy Meredith has pleaded guilty to accepting bribes to help students get admitted and has been cooperating with authorities. Stanford’s former sailing coach John Vandemoer also pleaded guilty to accepting $270,000 in contributions to the program for agreeing to recommend two prospective students for admission.

Stanford University expelled a student who lied about her sailing credentials in her application, which was linked to the scandal. The university quietly announced it had rescinded the student’s admission in a short statement posted on its website April 2 after determining “some of the material in the student’s application is false.”

University officials previously said the student was admitted without the recommendation of Vandemoer.

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Associated Press Writer Olga R. Rodriguez in San Francisco contributed to this report.

AURORA, Ill. (AP) — Eight years after an Illinois boy disappeared, his family began to think that their nightmare might be over at last.

A young man found wandering the streets of a Kentucky town claimed he had just escaped from two men in the Cincinnati area who held him captive for seven years. And he told police his name was Timmothy Pitzen. It didn’t seem possible that someone so far away could make up such a story. So for a day and a half, relatives waited and hoped for a breakthrough.

Then on Thursday came devastating word from the FBI: DNA tests showed that the person was not Timmothy, a boy from Aurora who vanished at age 6 in 2011, around the time of his mother’s suicide.

“It’s like reliving that day all over again, and Timmothy’s father is devastated once again, as are we,” said the boy’s aunt Kara Jacobs, her voice choked with emotion.

Authorities said the person claiming to be 14-year-old Timmothy was actually a 23-year-old ex-convict who was recently released from an Ohio prison after serving time for burglary and vandalism.

Neither Jacobs nor the boy’s grandmother Alana Anderson tried to hide their disappointment as they struggled for composure during a brief news conference outside Anderson’s home in Antioch, about 60 miles north of Aurora.

Anderson said her prayer has always been that when Timmothy was old enough, “he would find us if we couldn’t find him.” She held out hope that if he’s “in a place where he has communication with the media or a computer, that he’ll remember us enough to look for us, and I think he will. He’s a very smart guy.”

The rest of Aurora seemed to share in the family’s disappointment.

“I know the community won’t give up that he is out there,” said Nick Baughman, former principal at the school where Amy Fry-Pitzen took her 6-year-old son out of his kindergarten class on May 11, 2011, saying something about a family emergency.

Wearing his backpack, Timmothy waved to his classmates, saying “See you tomorrow,” teacher Cheryl Broach recalled.

The two climbed into Fry-Pitzen’s SUV and went on an adventure that included a visit to the Brookfield Zoo outside Chicago, a suburban Chicago resort and another resort in the Wisconsin Dells, a region that calls itself the “Waterpark Capital of the World.”

The next day, according to video footage released later by police, the boy and his mother were seen leaving the Kalahari Resorts in the Dells. That was the last time the two were seen together. When Fry-Pitzen checked into a motel in Rockford, Illinois, about 120 miles away, on May 13, she was alone, according to police.

The next afternoon, her body turned up but with no sign of her son. A note she left said the boy was being cared for by someone who loved him in a place where he would never be found.

In the first days of the search, police said they found a significant amount of blood in the SUV’s back seat, and tests confirmed it was the boy’s. That news initially terrified Anderson, but the boy’s father explained that his son had a history of nosebleeds and had suffered a serious one just days before he disappeared.

At Greenman Elementary, classmates, teachers and parents tried to help by tying hundreds of yellow ribbons around trees and signs. A garden was planted in Timmothy’s memory.

“There were a lot of prayers, I recall,” Baughman said Thursday. “It was just one of those moments where you want to maintain hope and be supportive.”

Police tried to piece together the route Fry-Pitzen might have taken in her SUV, but in the years that followed, authorities never offered a public explanation for her actions. Reported sightings of the boy went nowhere. Investigators became frustrated by what they called hoaxes.

Family members knew that Fry-Pitzen had been troubled. A woman who was close to the family and whose children played with Timmothy said she noticed something amiss the morning he was taken out of school.

“I got to see him that morning before everything happened,” Linda Ramirez remembered. “She seemed very sad. I was in a hurry and I didn’t stop. I just went to work. I thought I can come over later and talk to her.”

“I would love to see him again and hold him, and say that I’m sorry that I didn’t stop,” Ramirez added. “Believe it or not, his mother loved him very, very much.”

When Fry-Pitzen died, she was on her fourth marriage, Anderson said. Her daughter had battled depression for years and was taking medication.

“She and her husband were having problems,” Anderson said. “We were very concerned and told her we would help her any way we could.”

In 2003, according to an account James Pitzen gave to CNN, his wife “had taken some pills, I guess, and (had been) sitting on the edge of a cliff and supposedly passed out and fell off a cliff.”

James Pitzen, who could not be reached for comment Thursday, ultimately moved back to Iowa, Anderson said. After a while, the flood of calls between him and his wife’s family slowed to a trickle before stopping altogether.

“He went on with his life,” Anderson said. “I think seeing us was upsetting to him.”

If there were troubles at home, they weren’t obvious in the behavior of young Timmothy. He often played with her children and enjoyed their backyard trampoline. He loved to learn and talked about learning Spanish.

“He was a very happy boy with a lot of energy,” Ramirez said. “It was hard to keep up with him.”

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Babwin reported from Chicago. Associated Press writer Corey Williams in Detroit also contributed to this report.