For weeks, Sherri Papini’s face was everywhere. Photos of the petite blond woman with big blue eyes and a wide smile ran on every newscast and were ubiquitous on social media. Missing posters dotted the streets of Redding, California. It felt like a miracle when, on Thanksgiving Day 2016, Papini resurfaced, battered but alive.
What came next was a story so improbable that FBI agents now say the entire thing was an elaborate fabrication — one that has landed Papini in jail.
On Nov. 2, 2016, Keith Papini returned from work to find his Mountain Gate home empty. No kids, no wife. A quick check revealed his two children just hadn’t been picked up from day care. But running the “find my iPhone” app for his wife’s phone showed it was somewhere near Sunrise Drive, where Sherri had gone for a run earlier that day.
He drove to the spot, and there, about 2 feet off the road, he found her phone and earbuds neatly left in the dirt. The phone was playing their wedding song — Michael Buble’s “Everything” — on repeat. He “thought the cellphone had been placed,” an unsealed FBI affidavit wrote, “which he described as weird.”
This was only the beginning of the weirdness, according to investigators.
As they dug into the 34-year-old’s personal life, investigators discovered a string of oddities. The affidavit says two men were found among her phone contacts, but Sherri Papini had listed them under women’s names. One man allegedly traveled to meet up with Papini in 2011, and the pair had “continued to exchange flirtatious text messages throughout the years.” The second man told investigators he met Papini at a Friday Night Live youth program around 2000, and the pair dated for some time after. He claimed Papini was “attention-hungry” and “fabricated stories of being the victim of abuse from her family, father, and then [him] after the couple broke up.”
Rumors of attention-seeking behavior dogged Papini in interview after interview. When the director of the Friday Night Live program spoke with detectives, they allegedly said Papini “was good at creating different realities for people so that they would see what she wanted them to see, which got her really good attention.” Even friends admitted Papini “would make up lies, particularly about being the victim of abuse, especially as a youth,” the affidavit claims.
Three weeks after her disappearance, on Thanksgiving Day 2016, Papini suddenly reappeared. California Highway Patrol officers responded to Interstate 5 near Woodland after multiple 911 calls about a woman wandering onto the highway. It was Sherri Papini. Her hair had been hacked off in chunks, a chain was around her waist, she’d lost weight from her already slim frame and she was covered in bruises, burns, rashes and a strange brand on her right shoulder.
The affidavit recounts multiple interviews with Papini. The details change in each one, but her general story was this:
On the day of her disappearance, she’d gone for a jog. She noticed a dark-colored SUV with two “Hispanic” women inside. One woman beckoned her over, appearing to need help with something. When Papini got closer, she said one woman pulled a gun on her, and Papini left behind her phone as evidence before getting into the vehicle. Despite the terror of the abduction, Papini told FBI agents that she slept most of the drive and couldn’t figure out where she was taken. She allegedly told investigators she “did not remember getting out of the vehicle; the first thing she remembered was waking up in a room. She had zip ties around her wrists, and was no longer in the clothes she had been jogging in.” Papini did not allege she was drugged, although at one point she asked if being tazed would affect her memory; investigators told her this was unlikely.
During her captivity, Papini said the two women mostly spoke Spanish and played constant loud music from a speaker placed outside of her locked room. Despite this, she also claimed that “any time she made noise, her captors would come running into her room.” Papini said one woman told her they were going to “sell” her to “a cop.”
For reasons unknown, Papini said, after three weeks, the younger of the two abductors ordered Papini back into the SUV and drove her to Woodland, where she was found by good Samaritans.
While Papini recovered in the hospital, Shasta County Sheriff’s Office deputies sent her clothing to the lab for DNA testing. In September 2019, the DNA profile of an unknown male discovered on her clothing was submitted for familial testing, a process that searches databases for near-matches that are likely from family members. One such match was found, leading detectives to an ex-boyfriend of Papini’s.
On Aug. 10, 2020, the ex-boyfriend agreed to a police interview. He admitted immediately he had helped Papini run away, the FBI affidavit says. According to the affidavit, the ex-boyfriend, who had known Papini since they were teenagers, said she contacted him “out of the blue” and claimed “her husband was beating and raping her, and she was trying to escape.” The ex-boyfriend allegedly told investigators he drove from his residence in Southern California to Redding on Nov. 2, 2016, to pick up Papini, who met him after her morning jog. He claimed she slept most of the drive south, lying across the back seat of the Dodge Challenger.
In the weeks that followed, the ex-boyfriend told investigators that Papini stayed in his apartment, eating very little, cutting her own hair and, toward the end of the stay, asking him to brand her with a crafting implement purchased at Hobby Lobby, the affidavit says. Eventually, the ex-boyfriend claimed he drove Papini back toward Redding, dropping her off when she instructed him to. The affidavit alleges cell phone records from both Papini and her ex-boyfriend corroborated his retelling of events, and the pair used prepaid phones throughout to communicate.
According to the affidavit, investigators then returned to Papini’s home to question her again. She was repeatedly told that lying to federal agents is a crime and, according to the FBI, she repeated her earlier story of being abducted by two Hispanic women and denied meeting up with her ex. On Thursday, Papini, now 39, was arrested and charged with mail fraud and lying to a federal agent.
The affidavit also claims a GoFundMe for the family raised $49,070, which allegedly went toward paying the Papinis’ credit card bills and “personal expenses.” FBI investigators also allege Papini fraudulently applied for and received more than $30,000 from the California Victim Compensation Board to pay for blinds for her home, an ambulance ride and therapy sessions.
Papini’s family has vehemently denied the allegations and issued a statement Friday through a publicist.
“We love Sherri and are appalled by the way in which law enforcement ambushed her (Thursday) afternoon in a dramatic and unnecessary manner in front of her children,” the family said.
Papini is currently in custody at the Sacramento County Main Jail awaiting her next court date.