On the morning of the 2nd of November 2016, Sherri Papini said goodbye to her husband Keith as he left for work. Soon afterwards, she dropped her two young children off at daycare and returned to her home in Redding, Northern California. At 10.37am she texted Keith to see if he’d be coming home for lunch. He didn’t see the message until later, but wasn’t able to leave work anyway.
At around 11am, neighbours saw Sherri out on a jog, dressed in a pink top with her long, blonde hair in a neat ponytail. Hours later, a frantic Keith found her cellphone and earbuds by the side of the road about a mile away from their house, but there was no other trace of the woman her family referred to as a “super mom”. So began the strange and twisted tale of the disappearance of Sherri Papini.
Disappearance
Sherri Papini was 34 at the time of her disappearance and, according to the missing posters that went up, she was blonde-haired, blue-eyed, weighed 105 pounds, or 47 kilos and was 5 feet 3 inches or a petite 160 cm tall. When Keith Papini returned home from work, he wasn’t initially too worried that she wasn’t home, but when he found out she’d failed to pick their kids up from their daycare, he knew something was wrong as this was totally out of character. He used the Find my Phone app for Sherri’s phone and drove out to the location it pinged.
There he found her phone and wired earbuds, along with a few strands of blonde hair. The authorities were alerted, and a huge search began with the police, search and rescue crews, dog units and volunteers combing the semi-rural area. Surveillance cameras from local businesses and homes were checked but no more clues were found as to the whereabouts of the young mother.
When interviewed by ABC News a few days into the search, Keith Papini stated his belief that his wife had been abducted. He said: “Everybody who knows my wife knows that there’s no reason for her to leave … She was definitely taken against her will.”
At the same time, authorities hadn’t found enough evidence for them to confirm it had been an abduction, but they weren’t ruling anything in or out. Sherri had no known medical issues that could have caused her to become confused. An animal attack was possible but there was no evidence that it had happened.
If Sherri had just left, why had her phone been found on the road and where would she have gone? The area Sherri was jogging in was near to the Interstate 5 highway, a well-known route for human trafficking and smuggling due to the major cities it connects between Mexico and Canada. Papini also looked younger than her 34 years which might have made her an accidental target.
Women’s safety when out jogging had also been in the headlines shortly before Papini went missing, as three female joggers in different states had been killed over a nine day period, all of them during the day.
Keith Papini was, naturally, a person of interest in the disappearance, but there was proof that he had been at work all day and hadn’t left early. He also did a polygraph to prove he was not involved, which he passed. With no witnesses and no other evidence found, things were starting to get desperate for the Papini family.
A reward of $10,000 for information was initially put out, but this increased to $50,000 as private donations came in. As the days went by with no sign of the woman described by friends as a “devoted young mother”, however, it did seem increasingly likely that foul play was involved. Keith Papini said he was “scared for my wife” and “getting very angry and frustrated.” Then, just over three weeks later on Thanksgiving Day, Sherri Papini made a dramatic reappearance.
Reappearance
On Thursday the 24th of November 2016 at about 4.30 am, a 911 operator answered a call about a blonde woman trying to flag down a car on an off-ramp of the I-5 highway. The driver had not stopped at the time, but had pulled over shortly afterwards to inform the police, mainly because they were worried that the woman was so close to the road and might get hit by another vehicle. The driver, Alison Sutton, later said: “I saw a blonde woman, frantically waving, what looked to be a shirt, up and down trying to get somebody’s attention(…) I have a memory of a flash, of a face, with a panic look on it. I remember thinking she must be cold because it didn’t look like she had clothes on that were warm enough.”
Despite the extensive coverage the story had received, Sutton didn’t recognize the woman on the side of the road as the missing Sherri Papini but was notified later in the day. She added: “It gives more meaning for Thanksgiving for me, knowing about her and the fact that she got rescued on Thanksgiving.” The location where Papini was eventually found was about 150 miles or 240 km south of her home.
When authorities reached her, Sherri was found to have a chain around her waist and arm, was emaciated, had had some of her hair chopped off and was covered in bruises, burns and other injuries, including having a broken nose. She was taken to a hospital where she was reunited with Keith. Overall, she had been missing for 22 days and everyone was eager to get her story.
Initial Claims
Immediately after she was found, Papini told police that she had been abducted by two women driving a dark-coloured SUV. They had a handgun and were described as Hispanic. Papini claimed they told her to drop her phone and forced her into the SUV at gunpoint. They subdued her in some way, although Papini wasn’t sure if she was drugged with something or maybe tazed.
She couldn’t give an estimate of how far they’d driven and said: “I’m missing time…The car smelled really bad…Like sewage… She stuck me with something. I kept falling asleep.”
She woke up in a room which she tried to escape from and ended up in a closet, chained to the metal pole used to hang clothes on. There was a bucket with cat litter in it as a makeshift toilet. She was given leftover scraps to eat. Papini couldn’t get any clues about where she was as the women played a stereo loudly outside her door.
She was also wearing different clothes to the jogging stuff she’d been kidnapped in, although her underwear was the same. Papini said when she was allowed to shower she washed her underwear as well. She also mentioned that she’d been put in an adult diaper. Once, when she tried to escape, the kidnappers tied her to a table and branded her right shoulder.
Her captors eventually started arguing, with the younger of the two seemingly more sympathetic to Papini. On the day she was released, Papini heard a gunshot and was then left alone for several hours in the closet. The younger woman eventually came in, hit her, and put something over her head. Papini was put back in a car but again, had trouble staying awake on the drive.
She was eventually told by the younger woman to get out. Papini remembers that the woman “clipped something” and Papini could move her arms again.
While police waited to interview her again, Keith Papini made a statement on Good Morning America. He started off by extensively thanking everyone who had helped in the search for his wife or who had supported the family in some way. He then went on to address the way the case had become so public, and that the publicity was itself “a double edged sword.”
He clarified by stating: “Rumors, assumptions, lies, and hate have been both exhausting and disgusting. Those people should be ashamed of their malicious, sub human behavior. We are not going to allow those people to take away our spirit, love, or rejoice in our girl found alive and home where she belongs.
I understand people want the story, pictures, proof that this was not some sort of hoax, plan to gain money, or some fabricated race war. I do not see a purpose in addressing each preposterous lie. Instead, may I give you a glimpse of the mixture of horror and elation that was my experience of reuniting with the love of my life and mother of our children.”
He then went into a bit more detail about the shock he had when he was reunited with Sherri in the hospital room: “Her now emaciated body of 87 pounds was covered in multi-colored bruises, severe burns, red rashes, and chain markings. Her signature long, blonde hair had been chopped off. She has been branded and I could feel the rise of her scabs under my fingers. She was thrown from a vehicle with a chain around her waist, attached to her wrists and a bag over her head.
The same bag she used to flag someone down once she was able to free one of her hands. Sherri was taken from us for 22 days, and suffered incredibly through both intense physical agony and severe mental torture.”
He then went on to ask for privacy while Sherri recuperated.
When interviewed again, Sherri couldn’t provide many more details to investigators. She had been approached by the women in the SUV and had left her phone and earbuds on the ground as they requested. She also pulled out a few strands of hair so she could be definitively identified.
She kept falling asleep or passing out in the car and woke up in a room with zip ties on her hands which she managed to break by chewing through them, cutting her lip in the process. She tried to escape by pulling some boards off a boarded-up window but just broke one of her nails. The noise caused the two kidnappers to come in, and she might have been tased as she passed out and woke up in a lot of pain.
She was then chained to the rod inside the closet, but could move about in the room a little as the chain was quite long. She could reach a bed but not the door or window. She tried to remove the rod from the closet but just ended up damaging her fingers and nails more.
It seemed that whenever the chain Sherri was attached to made too much noise, one or both of the kidnappers would come in and punish her in some way. They would frequently beat her and both carried guns. At one point, one of the abductors grabbed Papini and cut a chunk of her hair off, holding it up saying “I’m gonna send it to your mother.”
While she had seen the two women, they always wore masks or covered her head and demanded that she didn’t look at them whenever they entered the room. They mainly spoke in Spanish around her, which Papini didn’t understand. When they did speak to her, they talked of getting money from the kidnapping and also that they had a buyer for her.
They also mentioned that law enforcement officers were some of the people behind the crime, with one woman telling her: “Your buyer is a cop.” Sherri was living in a state of terror of being sold into a human trafficking ring, but when the kidnappers found out she was older than they thought, they ended up letting her go. Because of the trauma of the kidnapping and beatings she received, Sherri had trouble recalling much about her ordeal.
She did state, however, that she had not been sexually assaulted. It took a long time for her to recover enough to give useful details to the FBI, so it wasn’t until October 2017, almost a year later, that they released sketches of the two women Sherri said had kidnapped her. According to an article on People.com: “The younger woman in the sketch is described as being 5 feet 5 inches, with a medium build with coarse, curly dark hair, thin eyebrows and pierced ears.
The second suspect is approximately 5 feet 7 inches, and has straight black hair with some gray in it and thick eyebrows.”
The FBI also offered $10,000 for information leading to the identification of the women. The sheriff’s office said they had received over 600 tips about the case and that two DNA profiles had been found on the clothes Sherri was wearing when she had been released. One of these profiles belonged to Sherri. The other was male DNA but not that of her husband, Keith.
The case went quieter as time went on. There was fear and suspicion in the areas surrounding the kidnapping, especially inside and around the Hispanic community, as people were on the look-out for anyone they deemed to be a suspicious looking woman.
Thanks to recurring therapy sessions, Sherri did start to remember more small details over time. Her husband Keith made sketches of the details of the room that came back to her, including an orange shaggy carpet, and more information about the closet, chain and panelling on the walls. He sent photos of the sketches to the FBI.
Sherri also recalled the bathroom in the place where she was held as having a high-pressure shower with no curtain, and that the tiles were light coloured with speckles and one of the tiles had a crack in it.
Once, when in a sporting goods store, Sherri went into a panic upon seeing a black Ruger revolver and confirmed that one of the captors had a similar one.
Nine months after her ordeal, she remembered details about a black coffee table she had been forced down onto while one of her kidnappers branded her on the shoulder. The brand appeared to be a Bible reference as the word “Exodus” is visible, but the numbers underneath are not clear enough to definitely say which chapter or verse it relates to. Sherri also remembered being in pain from having to lie on her front as she’d recently had breast enlargement surgery. Keith sent a picture of a similar looking coffee table to the FBI.
In 2018, Keith once again contacted the FBI with a new tidbit that Sherri had remembered after her latest therapy session: One of the kidnappers had tried pouring a sticky substance down her throat which Sherri had wiped off using her underwear, leaving a stain.
Despite being shown multiple photo lineups, Sherri could never positively identify her abductors. Progress stalled and it seemed as though Papini’s kidnappers would never be found.
In March 2022, four and half years after Sherri Papini was kidnapped, police suddenly did make an arrest in relation to the case. Sherri Papini was arrested for making false statements and for mail fraud.
The Story Unravels
From the get-go this was an odd story, with police and the general public feeling as though something was just not sitting right. Living in California when this was happening, I was aware of the disappearance, yet online chatter and just the whole vibe of the case meant that when Papini reappeared and started giving her story, peoples’ skepticism levels got cranked to the max. When she was arrested in 2022, I posted: “If anyone was following the Sherri Papini story, you may be unsurprised to hear that she’s just admitted to making it all up.” So, kudos to me for smelling a rat and boy, is this rat enormous and juicy.
Really, the main question for people seems to be: why did it take law enforcement so long to charge her? I can’t really answer that definitively, but we do know that at some point their case took a turn from investigating her kidnapping to investigating her lies. Let’s go back to the beginning. By the way, any time we talk about her abduction or kidnapping from now on, just imagine it in giant inverted commas every time.
For true crime aficionados, the Sherri Papini story was a cliché from the start. Pretty, petite, white, blonde haired, blue eyed woman goes missing, the classic ingredients that get the most media attention. Sure, she was in her mid-30s and a stay at home mother, but physically she was a bingo for the profile.
The first weird thing happened before the so-called crime even took place. Sherri texted Keith to see if he was going to come home for lunch. That’s a fairly normal occurrence between couples. What Sherri had actually texted Keith, however, was did he want to come home and have sex with her.
Keith didn’t see the message until much later and subsequently was pretty embarrassed that this was the last message his wife had sent him before disappearing, but while being interviewed, Sherri brought the contents up specifically and joked about them with police. I’m sure the police already knew what the message said, so Sherri didn’t have to explicitly relay the contents. As we’ll see later, she may have used this message as bait to see if Keith would be likely to make an appearance or not.
The second weird thing was what Keith found when he started looking for his wife. Using the “find my phone” app, he tracked her phone to the corner of Sunrise Drive and Old Oregon Trail. Sherri later said that when the women approached her in the car and pointed a gun at her, they told her to leave her phone behind.
This was supposedly why it was placed by the side of the road with the ear buds quite neatly coiled on top, along with a few strands of Sherri’s hair. The hair thing has never really made sense. If you were physically and violently abducted from the side of the road, maybe you would lose some hair in the process.
If you were being told to get into a car while the people pointing the gun were still inside it, why bother leaving some hair behind? She doesn’t need to identify herself - we already know the phone is hers. Presumably she did it to make it look like a struggle had taken place rather than her just dropping the phone by accident.
The way it was all placed, however, would negate that idea anyway. Keith said himself that his initial impression upon finding the phone and earbuds was that the placement looked staged and told police it was “weird”. If that wasn’t odd enough, Michael Bublé’s song “Everything” was set up to play on repeat.
This had been a song at the Papini’s wedding. Sherri later said that she was using it to jog to, as it was “a good pace keeper.” I just tried jogging to it and it is not a particularly good pace keeper but Sherri’s shorter than me so maybe it did fit her stride better.
When you find out more about Sherri’s modus operandi, however, it seems more likely that leaving the song from their wedding playing was a direct message to Keith. What kind of message exactly, I’m not sure, but possibly something to focus his mind onto the task of finding her by bringing up a core memory from presumably one of the happiest days of their lives.
I suppose the next strange thing in the case was the reappearance itself. It’s rare that a person kidnapped to be trafficked would just be let go after a three week period. By Papini’s own admission, while she had been chained up and beaten on multiple occasions, she had not been sexually assaulted, had stayed in one place and had been fed and allowed to shower.
While it seems she had been given sedatives of some sort, she was never given any other type of drug. Her dramatic reappearance also occurred on Thanksgiving Day, possibly the most auspicious day in the American calendar for something like this to happen apart from Christmas of course.
She was taken to a hospital and Keith eventually arrived. In an interview for “To Have and to Hoax” by ABC 20/20, Keith is asked what his initial reaction was when seeing her there. He replies: “When I pulled back the curtain and I saw her, and I saw the look in her eyes, I felt in that moment that she was lying.” It was a fleeting emotion, however, as when he saw how covered in injuries she was, he immediately banished all thoughts that she could have made it up and felt “horrible” for having even imagined it.
To hammer yet another suspicious nail into the coffin of Sherri’s story, she didn’t even stay overnight in hospital and was discharged the same day. This seems very fast for someone who had so many injuries and was apparently “emaciated”, not to mention the psychological toll the whole ordeal would have taken.
There must have been a nagging doubt lingering in Keith’s mind, though, as when asked if he had ever noticed something was off in the 20-20 interview, he said: “Of course I felt that way. There was always something that wasn’t right.” Maybe he was covering his tracks in the years following the story or trying to come across as less of a dope, because he definitely presented himself as Sherri’s number one fan at the start of the case. Keith had a solid alibi for the time Sherri disappeared, but as time went on, some people thought he must know more than he was letting on, which leads us to the next suspicious aspect: the first interview and the media statement.
You would have thought that if you’d just endured over three weeks of beatings and were then set free, that you’d be desperate to tell the police everything you could remember, or at least give them the basic details of what you’d just experienced. Sherri absolutely refused to talk to police, demanding only to speak with her husband. In the end, while the detectives were present in the room, it was Keith who had the audio recorder and who asked the questions in the first interview.
Investigators did not interview Sherri themselves until a couple of days later, after Keith had made his media statement. Keith was also present in every subsequent interview, for months after.
I did a lot of message-board reading during my research for this story and some people said they started getting suspicious when, during his statement to the media, Keith Papini used the sentence: “Her signature long, blonde hair had been chopped off.” Online eyebrows were being raised. Who would use the phrase “signature long, blonde hair” about anyone who isn’t a celebrity? While I’m sure there are probably exceptions, it’s even less likely that a husband would use that phrase to describe his wife’s hair.
How much input had Sherri had in the statement? As has become quite the norm with this story, that wasn’t the only odd thing about the speech.
While the word had gone out about two Hispanic women having abducted Sherri, Keith pushed the envelope a bit further. His statement included the lines: “I understand people want the story, pictures, proof that this was not some sort of hoax, plan to gain money, or some fabricated race war.” Fabricated race war?
Slow down a second, Keith, you’re putting the cart a bit before the horse there. Sure, Sherri said she was kidnapped by two Hispanic women, but the Hispanic part could just be viewed as a descriptor to narrow down the search. The general public is not assuming you’re trying to incite racial violence by mentioning that the women could have been Mexican.
The fact that he’s already aware of people calling it a hoax by day 2 of Sherri being found should also tell us that something’s smelling fishy in Redding, California. Bringing up the phrase “fabricated race war” virtually unprompted just serves to highlight the angle rather than play it down. Would someone really try to blame their disappearance on a couple of Spanish-speaking women to cover up for the real reason they went missing?
Why yes, yes they would, and it seems that Sherri might really have had a grudge against the Hispanic community that served as a convenient lie for this whole debacle. We’ll dive into that a bit more later but for now, let’s find out what Sherri Papini was really doing for three weeks in November 2016.
The Fake Abduction
When Sherri was found, she was wearing some sweatpants, different to the clothes she had been abducted in. She was, however, wearing her original underwear. Investigators tested the clothing for DNA and recovered the profiles of Sherri and an unknown male on her sweatpants and “multiple cuttings taken from Papini’s underwear”.
It has been widely reported that it was sperm, however, the criminal complaint against Papini states: “A different analysis also identified some sperm or partial sperm in the clothing. However, the male contributor DNA material analyzed may have come from sperm or another source.” Hmm, not sure what other source male DNA on a ladies’ undies would be likely to come from, but there you go, just saying it possibly might not have been sperm.
Maybe he had a really runny nose one laundry day. I think Sherri was trying to get in front of this when she mentioned wiping away a sticky substance with her underwear. Maybe she hoped the cops wouldn’t test it if she pretended it was just some liquid she’d been forced to drink.
Anyway, there were no hits in the CSI database for this male contributor but - and I suppose this is why it took so long to crack the case - in March 2020 a familial match was found. These can sometimes take ages to unpick based on how big a family tree is, but in this case it was pretty easy. When analysts found the potential relative of the DNA contributor, they discovered that this person had two biological sons, one of whom used to be engaged to one Sherri Papini. He was later named as James Reyes.
The FBI got to work investigating Reyes and quickly found past links with Sherri, including joint financial transactions and an association with Sherri’s parents’ address. In June 2020 they obtained Reyes’ DNA from trash outside his home - that old classic - and it was confirmed that he was the contributor of the male DNA on Sherri’s clothes.
In July 2020, they perused his social media posts and saw a photo that included a coffee table that matched the description of the one Sherri said she had been held down on and subsequently branded. Things seemed to be coming together. Eventually, in August 2020, Reyes was interviewed and told investigators his story, blowing this case wide open.
Reyes and Sherri Papini had known each other since they were teenagers and had been in a relationship. At one point they had even been engaged but it hadn’t worked out and they fell out of touch and moved on with their lives. Reyes said that in 2015 he had found an old box of photos and various personal belongings of Sherri’s. He’d sent them to her parents and not long after that, Sherri started calling him.
She told him that Keith was abusive and she wanted to run away but didn’t know how. She had filed police reports but nothing had happened and she wanted Reyes to help her escape. For the record, there’s a footnote in the criminal complaint against Sherri stating that the Shasta County Sheriff’s Office “did not have any domestic violence reports filed by Papini against Husband.”
Poor old James didn’t realise this, of course, he thought his ex-fiancee was in dire need of assistance so tried to help her as best he could. Sherri and Reyes started using prepaid phones to talk to each other, and eventually Sherri came up with the idea that Reyes could come and pick her up and help her “run away” from her abusive marriage. Reyes confirmed he was the only other person involved and when shown the sketches of the two abductors that Sherri had done with the FBI, he said: “I don’t know any Mexican girls.”
Eventually, Reyes asked another friend to rent a car for him and, on the morning of the 2nd of November 2016, he drove up from Costa Mesa in Southern California to Redding, a distance of almost 600 miles or 965 km. He then hung around awaiting further instructions. Sherri texted him her pick-up spot and he drove to meet her. She got in the car, lay down on the back seat and they then drove all the way back to Reyes’ home in Southern California.
Reyes said Sherri did start worrying about her children but that otherwise she didn’t talk much and was asleep for most of the drive.
Once they arrived at his place, it seems that the plan had already run out of steam. Sherri stayed inside for the entire period, with Reyes going to work as usual and making a couple of trips out to buy clothes for her. While you might be thinking they rekindled some sexy times, especially because his DNA was found on her undies, both parties said they did not have sex.
Reyes might have initially thought some throwback romance was on the cards, but it became clear quite quickly that Sherri wasn’t interested and he confirmed in his interview that “it was not a sexual thing.” As we said before, it could not be confirmed that his DNA came from sperm cells, so maybe we should give him the benefit of the doubt, especially as he turned out to be a well-meaning but maybe not the smartest pawn in Sherri’s game.
Instead of being chained in a closet and beaten by two masked women, Sherri just hung around the house trying not to be seen. Reyes boarded up some windows by her request and it seems that she basically sat around in the dark for three weeks. Reyes told the FBI Sherri “had a lot of private time,” and “just wanted to be in the room with the door shut.”
How did she come by all those injuries, then? For the most part, they appear to have been self-inflicted. When her voluntary life-hiatus was almost done, Reyes confirmed Sherri started hitting herself to create bruises and had burned her own arm.
While he said he did not and would not hurt her directly, he did agree to do things such as hit a hockey puck off her leg. He said he found the whole situation confusing but I guess he thought Sherri knew what she was doing and that she had a plan in mind. Sherri lost weight because she didn’t eat very much while staying with him.
People who knew her when she was younger also said that she had had an eating disorder, so being underweight was not as drastic for her as it would be for others. She also cleaned the house a couple of times and had a skin reaction to some of the cleaning supplies so Reyes bought a selection of rash and skin creams for her.
He was directly involved in the infamous brand on Sherri’s shoulder, though. Reyes confirmed he bought a wood burning kit at Hobby Lobby at Sherri’s instruction. They plugged it in back at his house and he went into detail as to how Sherri wanted a specific phrase burned onto her.
As this interview was several years later, he couldn’t remember the phrase but did say that it seemed to hold relevance to Sherri. While he was burning the letters into her skin, he was worried about hurting her and bought some more healing creams for her, but Sherri appeared not to be that bothered and didn’t complain about any pain afterwards. He told investigators he wanted to keep the tool to use for actually working on wood, but Sherri told him to throw it away.
He also said that one of the first things Sherri had done after arriving was cut her hair off. He couldn’t remember what she had done with it.
As to why he let Papini hang around his house while a highly publicised search was going on for her, Reyes said he didn’t have a television in his house and, to begin with, just hadn’t known about it. He also believed he was saving her from a bad situation so was doing what he could to help. There were other people around who knew Sherri was there, too.
Reyes had told his cousin and their spouse that he was going to pick her up before she disappeared and his mother also knew Papini was staying with him. His mum called to tell him the case was getting a lot of media attention but as Sherri was fine just staying in his house all day, Reyes didn’t think there was much point doing anything about it and didn’t want to out her, as she would have to return to what he thought was an abusive situation. His cousin lived opposite and they would usually spend a lot of time together, but when Papini was at his house, the cousin barely saw Reyes at all.
While the cousin knew she was there, he only caught two glimpses of her and told investigators that Reyes had told him Sherri had wanted Reyes to punch her in the face, but that he had refused. He also said Reyes told him Sherri had hit her head on the bathtub and bathroom floor to purposefully injure herself. The cousin also believed Reyes was protecting Sherri from a domestic abuser who was not being investigated by police.
Eventually, Sherri told Reyes she missed her children and was ready to go, so he asked his friend to rent another car and they drove back north. Sherri had a bag of stuff with her, including a chain and other things she put around her own wrists and ankles. She threw a burner phone out of the car as they drove and after about seven hours or so, Reyes dropped her on a barren road near an orchard and drove back to his own life where he made it to his aunt’s house in time for Thanksgiving lunch.
James Reyes’s story checked out with investigators as, as well as all the details he knew that hadn’t been made public, they found phone records between the two and time off work taken by Reyes that matched when he drove to pick Sherri up. Car rental receipts matched Reyes’ friend’s details, and the mileage on the rental cars matched the round trips taken by Reyes. As to why he’d never come forward before, Reyes said that he had been “rattled” by the experience, especially after the story started getting even more coverage when Papini reappeared with her “kidnapped by two Hispanic women” story.
He assumed that the police would come knocking on his door at some point, and if they did, he had no problem telling his story but until that happened, he hadn’t done anything and no actual crime had been committed against Sherri, so he figured: “it’s like I’m turning myself in for nothing.” He was right in that regard, as Reyes has never been charged with anything in relation to the Sherri Papini case. He also confirmed that he hadn’t spoken to Papini since dropping her off several years before.
Three days after the interview with James Reyes, FBI and Shasta County sheriff’s office detectives sat down once again with Sherri and Keith Papini. With Sherri’s story shot to pieces, they wanted to catch her in as many lies as possible. According to the Criminal Complaint against Sherri, it says: “At the beginning of the interview, investigators stated, ‘All we want is truthful statements because it’s a crime to lie to federal officers. Understood?’
PAPINI nodded her head in agreement. PAPINI nevertheless continued to make false statements regarding her supposed abduction.”
Oh, Sherri, what are you like? Rather hilariously, the investigators then showed Sherri photos from Reyes’ house that matched the descriptions she’d given previously about the place where she’d been held captive. There was the coffee table, there was a closet with a pole and a hole in the wall, there was the bathroom with the speckled tiles and one with a crack in it.
Sherri didn’t confirm that any of the pictures looked exactly right and kept saying things like: “I feel like this wood paneling is too thick(…) I remember it going all the way up to the window, is what I’m having trouble remembering,” and: “I mean this doesn’t look like the bathroom to me but the order is, yes, this is the type of order, but this is not what it looked like to me.” The criminal complaint then lays it all out in an extremely satisfying way: “Investigators then explained that they were showing PAPINI the photographs of the house they had discovered she had been staying at, and they had spoken to the family who knew that she was there. PAPINI responded, ‘Oh my God.’”
If you thought she’d finally stop lying though, you’d be wrong. Despite being told on numerous occasions that lying to federal agents is a crime, Papini manages to pivot, her brain ticking over for all it’s worth, and seemingly comes to the realisation that what the FBI is telling her is that James Reyes was the mastermind behind it all along. She repeatedly says things like: “there is no way it’s [James].
There’s no way. There’s no way.” When asked why she thought he wasn’t involved, she said: “Because he loves me.
We were friends. There’s no way.” She said the last time she had spoken to him was “forever ago”.
When investigators mention the phone calls and the fact that they found his DNA on her clothes, Sherri obviously felt the net tightening as did Keith and he eventually left the room in a huff. Here’s another choice excerpt from the criminal complaint, which is actually a pretty fun read overall: “While Husband was still in the interview room, PAPINI continued to deny that she ran away with Ex-Boyfriend. Once Husband left the room, PAPINI admitted that she and Ex-Boyfriend, ‘did talk a little bit before’ and said, ‘When I went out of town for work.
I talked with other guys (…) I made a mistake and I talked to other men and I shouldn’t have.’” Not Sherri owning up to more than was put to her! It turned out that there were two other men listed under women’s names in her phone that she was also communicating with in a not-just-friends way, so yeah, it became clear that Sherri was perhaps getting a little bored at home.
When investigators circled back to the whole “Hispanic women pointing a gun at you” aspect of her story, they asked: “Did a woman point a gun at you and put you in the car? Yes or no?” Sherri, that great dissembler, replied: “I don’t remember.”
During the whole interview, Sherri never admitted she had been staying with Reyes and never took back the story of the gun-pointing, face-masked women in an SUV.
On March 3rd 2022, after dropping the kids off for a piano lesson, Sherri was formally arrested, and on the 12th of April she was charged with 34 counts of mail fraud and one count of making false statements. She could have been facing up to 25 years in jail but after a little negotiating, she amazingly pleaded guilty on the 18th of April and the mail fraud charges were reduced to a single count. In September 2022 she was sentenced to 18 months in prison followed by 3 years of supervised release.
According to the United States Attorney’s Office: “Papini was ordered to pay $309,902 in restitution for losses incurred by the California Victim Compensation Board, the Social Security Administration, the Shasta County Sheriff’s Office, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.” While she admitted her guilt, a statement Papini gave after her sentencing rang very hollow. She said: “I am so sorry to the many people who have suffered because of me - the people who sacrificed for the broken woman I was, the people who gave willingly to help me in a time that I so desperately needed help (…) I am choosing to humbly accept all responsibility.”
Sorry, but this comes across as the opposite of humble. Anyway, this is a handy segue into some interesting back story about the kind of person Sherri Papini really is.
The Real Sherri Papini?
According to select friends and family at the time of her disappearance, Sherri was a “supermom”, an “incredible human being” etc. etc. When investigators started digging a little deeper, however, some less savory sides to her personality began to come to light. Many people who knew her as a child and teenager confirmed that she would lie a lot and had accused her family of abusing her.
We can’t say if this was true or not but no charges have ever been brought against anyone in Papini’s family. One friend said that if Sherri was ever finding something difficult, she’d just run away. I only found passing references to this, but apparently a younger Sherri had also staged a kidnapping in 2006, although if true, it obviously didn’t garner any media attention.
As well as her ex-fiance James Reyes, Sherri was also in touch with other men and had made plans to meet a completely different guy before that plan fell through. Former Shasta County Sheriff’s Deputy Captain Pat Kropholler told ABC News: “There were some infidelity issues in her background that even Keith had told us about.” So basically, past acquaintances were painting her as a cheat and a liar, prone to accusing people of abuse and who would run away from a situation. Seems about right.
There’s also another negative angle to this story, and that’s the rampant racism displayed by Papini when trying to pin her three week staycation on two Hispanic women. When investigating Sherri’s social media history, investigators found an interesting post on MySpace published in 2007 under the name “Sherri Graeff”, Sherri’s maiden name. Some of the post reads: “I used to come home in tears, because I was getting suspended from school all the time for defending myself against the Latinos.
The chief problem was that I was drug-free, white and proud of my blood and heritage. This really irked a group of Latino girls, which would constantly rag and attack me.” Sherri gets in a fight and manages to break another girl’s nose and suffers a shin injury herself.
The post ends: “Being white is more than just being aware of my skin, but of standing behind Skinheads – who are always around, in spirit, as well – and having pride for my country.” Yeah, this post has aged…poorly. When confronted with it, of course Sherri “couldn’t remember” if she had a MySpace account or not and at least had the good sense to call the post “awful”.
She also said that someone else had posted it using her name and that she had already been trying to have it removed from the internet and had even hired a lawyer. I have no clue if that bit was true but it’s a bad look either way. If she did write it, yikes.
If she didn’t, there’s probably a pretty good reason why someone else did.
Speaking of social media, those Pinterest boards are always going to get you. According to The Irish Sun: “posts have been made on Pinterest under her name that can be described as ‘anti-Muslim’ and ‘pro-white’, under a group euphemistically called ‘Cultural Differences’”.
In other Pinterest news, remember James Reyes’ outing to Hobby Lobby to get the gift of branding? Well, investigators found a secret Pinterest board under Sherri’s name titled “gift ideas” and some of the pins were photos of woodburning tools. The white supremacy allegations extended to Keith Papini too, as in his media statement shortly after Sherri returned, he said that the people wanting “gory details”: “should be ashamed of their malicious, sub human behavior.”
The phrase “sub human” is not one generally thrown around in everyday parlance and is actually strongly linked with the language of the Nazis. We don’t know how much input Sherri had into the statement, but it’s just another little pointer that we might not be dealing with the world’s nicest people here.
Let’s get back to the real victims in this case, the Hispanic community. According to the criminal complaint filed against Sherri Papini: “For several months, and even years, Redding and the nearby community were on the lookout for two Hispanic women. Multiple tips were given to law enforcement by the community about suspicious-looking Hispanic women.” Talk about traumatising an entire group.
Remember Keith Papini’s other comment in his media statement? He said they had been accused of starting “some fabricated race war”. I think his accusers had a point.
Let’s talk about how Sherri described her fake abductors to investigators. We get that she wanted people to believe she had been taken by two women of Hispanic origin, possibly Mexicans. This could be tied in to her past problematic interactions or maybe it was to add credence to her story of not knowing much because she didn’t speak Spanish.
Fair enough, however, for someone who claims not to be able to speak Spanish, Sherri somehow managed to pick out the word for “gambling” as well as other discussions involving medicine, dates and traffic cameras. When asked if she had understood anything her captors said while she was being driven away, Sherri responded: “It’s not English. It’s Spanish.
I don’t speak Spanish.” I might be reading too deeply into it, but starting your answer with “It’s not English”, seems condescending, as if she’s saying “of course I couldn’t understand them. I’m a white person.
I speak English. They weren’t speaking English, the one and only acceptable language of the United States.” What I’m trying to say is that there are many ways of saying that you couldn’t understand what someone else was saying but that probably wasn’t the best one.
Sherri’s interviews with investigators are absolutely littered with casual racism. We know for a fact that no women abducted her, so every single detail she gave out about what they were like and what they did was made up. Here are some examples of the things she said, possibly while referencing a stereotype handbook: “PAPINI described her abductors: the ‘smaller one’ had ‘dark,’ ‘curly hair that’s kind of short,’ so curly that ‘if she didn’t put product in there it would probably be really frizzy,’ and was wearing ‘brown shoes’ that looked like ‘Guess knock offs’ and blue jeans, had pierced ears and wore ‘those big hoop earrings,’ and had thin, ‘almost drawn in’ eyebrows. The ‘bigger’ abductor had ‘dark eyes, really thick eyebrows, and dark hair with strands of grey.’”
As well as wearing masks, Papini mentioned that the women sometimes covered their faces with bandanas. The sketch of the older woman was what tipped off some observers to the possible hoax aspect of the story, as she bore more than a passing resemblance to a certain well-known and famously scary-looking Hispanic actor. R.V.
Scheide who wrote a piece called “Sherri Papini’s Big Adventure” for A News Cafe.com stated: “I personally kept an open mind about the case until Papini fingered Danny Trejo as a suspect in 2017. Clearly, when she described the larger of her two Mexican female abductors to the sketch artist, she must have channeled pop culture seeking the meanest Mexican visage she could muster and grafted Trejo’s scarred countenance onto her imaginary big, fat, mean and masked Mexican lady kidnapper.” Poor Danny Trejo, I think he’s actually very nice in real life.
Stephanie L. Canizales, an assistant professor of sociology also pointed out to CNN that: “Papini’s description of the alleged abductors aligned with tropes of Mexican women in which hoop earrings and bandanas are linked to the cholo/chola subculture and proximity to gang culture.”
Sherri said the women played music outside her door so she couldn’t hear anything from outside. What kind of music? Sherri described it variously as: “That really annoying Mexican music” and “Mariachi music”. What was she given to eat over the course of her 22 day ordeal?
The criminal complaint details that once she was given: “two apples, a ‘weird’ cracker, scraps, like ‘the fat off of (…) a piece of meat or something,’ a piece of bread, and mostly tortillas and ‘homemade’ ‘gritty’ Spanish rice.” She also described the food as “crap” and “leftover crap”. If you recall, she was making all this up. She could have been given anything in the world to eat but went with the old rice and tortillas.
Thomas Saenz, President of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund stated to CNN: “She fell into stereotypes about the Latino community that are far too prevalent in the population at large but clearly, she was also counting on law enforcement relying upon stereotypes.” Canizales was also of the opinion that Sherri used the Hispanic women as a convenient story as she was confident: “that no one would question her because the public has accepted that this is what a criminal looks like.” This is depressing but unfortunately very believable. Thankfully in this case, nobody was wrongfully arrested and the police and FBI investigations followed the DNA trail.
It wasn’t only the blame on a minority that Sherri was using for her cover story, though. The whole set up of her disappearing while out on a run had extremely painful echoes for another local family. In August 1998, blonde-haired Tera Smith, a 16 year old high school student dressed in jogging gear, went missing from Old Oregon Trail in Redding, California and has never been seen since.
This is the same road that Sherri left her phone and earbuds next to, 18 years later. Not only that, in 1998, Sherri was also 16 and went to the same high school as Tera who had been homecoming queen, so was well-known and popular. When Sherri staged her disappearance, the Smith family were reminded of their own nightmare and when Sherri was found, Tera’s father commented: “I can’t tell you how thrilled we were.
It’s bittersweet. We didn’t have that kind of outcome.” It’s highly unlikely that Sherri was unaware of Tera’s disappearance at the time, and the fact that she staged something so similar in such a similar location must have been deliberate, which, if it was, is gross.
The Smith family are just another victim of Sherri’s bizarre stunt.
And while we’re on this track, let’s get back to Sherri’s husband Keith and an extremely strange sidebar.
Sherri and Keith
When Sherri was arrested in 2022, Keith finally filed for divorce although, according to him in later interviews, things had been weird since the whole thing started. Of course he’d say that now to avoid looking like a hapless cuck or to throw off suspicions that he was involved in any way, but let’s start from the standpoint that he was not involved. It’s clear that Sherri was firmly committed to the bit. While there were changes in details and hazy parts - it’s noted that after the initial mention she never referenced the adult diaper again, for example - she stuck to her overall story of being kidnapped and imprisoned by two Hispanic women for nearly 6 years.
Keith himself reiterates the level of commitment in the 20-20 To Have and to Hoax interview. When asked what viewers could take away from the program, he says: “I think the level of dedication Sherri put into tricking everyone. The hoax didn’t just last the 22 days she had disappeared, it lasted for years, six years. And that’s what people don’t realize.
It was every single day.” The big question is why she did this in the first place. From what we know about Sherri’s background, the event really does seem like par for the course. The only difference to any of her past antics is that this time it became a huge news story and also, she had children she basically abandoned.
When Keith was asked why she has done it, he says: “I think she wanted me to be her knight in shining armour and run to her. She wanted to plan a fake kidnapping, but in her version I was supposed to find her.” It seems that Keith was tethered to Sherri by a rope of horrible emotional blackmail.
His take on the whole debacle was that Sherri was giving him a chance to save her. She wanted him to come to her rescue and when he didn’t (because how could he?) she just got bored and decided to come home on her own.
She left the phone and hair for him to find. Why the hair? He can’t do anything with that.
She got picked up and driven nearly 600 miles away by a man she’d been communicating with secretly. How’s the average guy supposed to know where to begin to look? The fact that she’d set their wedding song on repeat does seem a little pointed but there’s no way Keith personally would have been able to do anything to help her.
Authorities were called, posters were made, news outlets spread the word, he did everything anyone would expect of him.
Whenever he got a bit tetchy with Sherri over the following years, she always had an ace up her sleeve. Once, they were doing what he called “light yard work” and Sherri was huffing and puffing in an exaggerated manner and when he asked why she was making such a big deal out of it, she launched into a well-trodden spiel about how he didn’t know what her 22 days in captivity had been like. This was more than five years later and Keith said: “I just wanted a day where we don’t talk about it. And that is when she just looked right at me - looked in my soul - and was like ‘I have to live with the fact that you never found me.’
And it did. It crushed me.” Keith also confirmed that Sherri has never apologised to him or their children.
Now let’s take the approach that maybe Keith was more involved than he’s admitted as we go off to the strange little sidebar. We mentioned a small detail earlier that I only added in because it struck me as odd, but all of a sudden it clicked with a slightly larger, although still pretty murky, picture. Sherri repeatedly said she didn’t understand what her kidnappers were talking about as they were speaking Spanish, but she did mention that she did pick out a few things here and there.
The criminal complaint states: “PAPINI never heard her buyer’s name because the abductors spoke mostly Spanish and PAPINI did not understand more than a few Spanish words. These included discussions about medicine, traffic cameras, a delivery date, and a ‘gamble,’ as well as Spanish insults directed at PAPINI.” Sherri is also quoted as saying: “I listened so carefully, but it was all Spanish…I heard [the word] gambling.”
If you know only the most basic of Spanish words, “gambling” or “gamble” would not be one of them. I did Spanish GCSE and never learned that word. It’s not similar to the English word at all so there’s no way you could work out what it meant just by hearing it.
By the same token, the kidnappers were unlikely to have said it in English. Also, I just momentarily forgot that these conversations never happened anyway because Sherri made the whole thing up.
It did seem like a weird word to insert, but then I found some information about shenanigans that started during Sherri’s disappearance and they were fronted by a man called - guess what? Cameron GAMBLE. Coincidence?
So here’s the sidebar. While the Papinis were doing everything they were supposed to, a stranger entered the mix offering $50,000 in return for Sherri’s release. All negotiations were to be done through this anonymous person’s hired intermediary - Cameron Gamble.
While offering money as a reward for information leading to the discovery of the abducted person is totally normal, this offer, like so much about this story, came at it from a strange angle. There was a now-defunct website set up at SherriPapini.com, and instead of advertising something like a $50k reward for her safe return, the text on the site called it a “cash ransom payment” and a “ransom reward.” Bear in mind that no ransom was ever sent to the Papinis or the Sheriff’s office.
The whole set up is odd, with the website basically being a letter from this unknown person to the kidnappers. It starts: “I am willing to confidentially pay you cash immediately for her release. I am a visitor in Redding who heard of Sheri’s disappearance and want to see her returned to her family.”
It also says: “I will only be in Redding for the next few days before I leave on my next business trip. I have the cash ready to give to my negotiator 24/7 as soon as you reach out to him using the contact information below.( …) Once I leave town this offer is off the table.
So, if you want to be paid a cash ransom reward contact us immediately.” It also includes a note to the police: “Please don’t threaten me. I have received legal counsel and what l am doing is within my rights.”
As regards that negotiator, the unknown donor states: “my hired negotiator has negotiated ransom releases for people all over the world, so he will determine immediately if you are lying.”
While the negotiator is not named in the letter, a man called Cameron Gamble started appearing in the media about two weeks into Sherri’s disappearance. He was variously referred to as a “ransom consultant” and “captivity survival expert”, saying he had been retained by an anonymous donor to bring Sherri safely home. We won’t go into this too much, but a background check by The Daily Beast found many holes in Gamble’s CV and past experience.
While he purported to be an expert in kidnap-prevention training due to his military training, The Daily Beast article by Kelly Weill and Katoe Zavadski calls his skills “vague at best.” He was discharged from the Air Force after less than three years and received disability benefits, allegedly for an eye condition. This meant he never flew planes and was working as a vehicle operations apprentice.
His stated military training is just a course all aircrew members have to complete, and courses he has run have been accredited by agencies that don’t actually exist. I think you can see where we’re going here.
If we zoom out a bit, does this seem like a pre-planned scam? It’s possible. Maybe Sherri mentioning Gamble in her interview was a hint to him that she wanted to carry on with the plan. While she was staying with James Reyes, he confirmed that she would check the news on her phone, so she could easily have seen that Cameron Gamble had inserted himself into the story and could have been communicating with him.
Allegedly it was Keith who agreed to bring him into the case, so was the whole thing just a ruse to get donations, then pretend to swap the money for Sherri’s life? With no real kidnappers, the money would just have been split between them. Really, it’s just another strange little twist to the tale as in the end, no ransom money was paid by anyone to anyone, so if it was a scam, it failed.
That’s not to say that Sherri didn’t benefit hugely from the made-up ordeal she went through, and at a high cost to other people. The search that took place for her used up valuable time and resources that could have been spent on real cases. We all know that victims from racial backgrounds other than Papini’s generally receive less attention in the media, so not only was she stealing their chances, she was wasting it on a fake case. Shasta County Sheriff Michael Johnson estimated that $150,000 was spent on the Papini case by his office alone and told CNN: “in a time where there is serious human trafficking cases with legitimate victims, Sherri Papini used this tragic societal phenomenon to gain notoriety and financial gain.”
A go fund me called “Help Find Sherri Papini” was set up with Keith as the beneficiary and did, in fact, almost reach $50,000. After Sherri’s return, financial records show that Keith withdrew over $30,000 from the fund to his personal account. About $12,000 was used to pay off the couples’ credit card bills, while the rest was said to have been spent on “personal expenses.”
Sherri also lied well enough to qualify for financial assistance from the California Victim Compensation Board, and between 2017 and 2021, she received over $30,000 which was mainly used for therapy appointments although she did also spend a grand on blinds. It was the mailing of the checks to her therapist that gave her the mail fraud charge as the funds had been fraudulently obtained and had been sent using the US Mail service. She was originally charged with 34 counts of mail fraud, I guess one for each payment, but this was reduced to one count under her plea deal.
Was Keith involved in any way? Some people are convinced he was, others not so much. He benefited financially from the Go Fund Me donations but it seems very unlikely that he would have approved the idea of Sherri staying at an ex-fiance’s house until she got bored. Sherri kept him with her in every interview, crying that she needed him there and often refusing to speak with police unless he was the conduit.
While James Reyes thought her reasons for the whole hoax were to get out of a bad and abusive situation, Keith was under the impression that she was trying to get him to ride to her rescue. The fact that Sherri never filed any official complaints against Keith, plus her many instances of lying in the past on similar issues have ultimately reduced her credibility to less than zero. Let’s finish this sorry tale with a little “where are they now” section.
Where Are They Now?
As previously mentioned, Keith filed for divorce as soon as Sherri pleaded guilty to having made the whole kidnapping thing up. He’s since made a few media appearances to talk about the case, including a 2024 Hulu documentary titled “The Perfect Wife”. He says he’s now just focussed on providing a safe and stable childhood for his two children, of whom he has full custody.
Sherri was released from prison in August 2023, only about 11 months into her 18 month sentence. She stayed in a halfway house for two months before being let out under supervised release which is due to expire later in 2026. Unbelievably, or maybe very believably, Sherri rejigged her story again in 2025 in a four-part docuseries called “Sherri Papini: Caught in the Lie.” Personally, I would have demanded a different title but maybe it refers to her old lies as opposed to the new story that she came out with.
Her original story was that she had been kidnapped at gunpoint by two Hispanic women. The story that she pleaded guilty to was that she had called her ex-boyfriend to pick her up and had stayed with him and faked injuries so she could use the pretend kidnap story as an excuse. She now alleges an amalgamation of these stories in the docuseries and also in a book she self-published in June 2025 called “Sherri Papini Doesn’t Exist: The Lie That Defined Me, The Media that Destroyed Me, And the Truth That No One Heard.”
I think we can agree that Sherri had ample opportunities to tell the truth, and everybody was listening with open ears, but she never chose to do so. Anyway, her latest excuse is that while she did ask James Reyes to come and pick her up, he actually then drugged and kidnapped her and chained her in that closet. Apparently he only let her go because she convinced him she would blame two women instead. Reyes was never charged with anything in relation to Sherri’s disappearance and I don’t believe he’s under any new investigations because of these claims.
In an interview with Juju Chang on ABC News in June 2025, Sherri said she was scared to tell the truth because she had been scared of Keith, then also became scared of James. She stated: “Prison was far safer than the consequences that I would suffer if my ex-husband found out I was having an emotional affair. I’d prefer prison over telling Keith Papini that I was having an emotional affair.” It just sounds like she’s playing off whichever angle suits her better in any given situation.
In more unsurprising news, the timing of these two projects coincided with the fact that Sherri still owes most of the $309,000 she defrauded from various bodies. An article on krcrtv.com states that: “her plea deal specifies that 75% of any payments from media appearances or book deals will be directed to the federal government for distribution among the owed parties.” Apparently she wasn’t paid for the docuseries though, so she’ll need to sell a hell of a lot of books to bridge that gap.
In the “about the author” blurb on amazon, it states: “From the terrifying moments around her staged abduction to the relentless trauma at the hands of her captor, Sherri confronts not only the horrors of her captivity but the toxic control wielded by her husband, Keith, whose emotional cruelty imprisoned her long before her kidnapping made national news.” Yikes. If I were James Reyes or Keith Papini, I’m thinking a defamation lawsuit might be on the cards, but then if Sherri has no money, maybe it’s not worth the bother.
She did stick a disclaimer in the front, though, some of which says that the book: “reflects my personal memories, experiences, perceptions and emotions surrounding real events in my life. While I have made every effort to be truthful to the essences of what I experienced, memory is imperfect, especially under trauma.”
Like all consummate liars, Sherri has a quick mind and an answer for everything, even if the answer is bizarre. Interviewing Sherri about her new claims for an article in Us Weekly, writer Carla Sosenko asked why there was a gap in her memory about being kidnapped, when, according to her book, she had very vivid recollections about other traumatic experiences, such as giving birth. Sherri says: “I wish I knew. I’ve tried hypnotism, I’ve tried EMDR, I’ve tried guided meditation.
I’ve tried everything to reach that memory. It’s infuriating for me…not having that answer.” She then posits that she must have been drugged which is a handy way of glossing over it. Here’s a radical idea - maybe she can’t reach that memory…because it doesn’t exist.
Sosenko later states: “Papini either couldn’t or wouldn’t give me a clear answer. That doesn’t mean she’s lying. And it doesn’t mean she’s not.”
Unfortunately for Sherri, she cried wolf way too loudly the first time, and when her past form as a liar who was prone to running away came out, it would be a trusting person indeed who believes anything she says.
Key Takeaways
- Sherri Papini faked her 2016 kidnapping, spending 22 days with ex-fiancé James Reyes while claiming two Hispanic women abducted her.
- Male DNA on Papini’s clothing led investigators to Reyes, who confessed and was never charged.
- Papini inflicted many injuries on herself and had Reyes brand her shoulder with a wood-burning tool.
- She pleaded guilty to mail fraud and false statements in 2022, receiving 18 months in prison and $309,902 restitution.
- Papini has continued changing her story post-release, now claiming Reyes drugged and kidnapped her in a 2025 docuseries and book.
Dana Ortiz covers prosecutorial mechanics, evidentiary procedure, and how investigations unwind decades after the original case file went cold.
Frequently Asked Questions
When did Sherri Papini disappear and what were the circumstances?
Sherri Papini disappeared on November 2, 2016. After dropping her two young children at daycare and returning home, she texted her husband Keith at 10:37am about lunch. Around 11am, neighbors saw her jogging in a pink top with her blonde hair in a ponytail. Hours later, Keith found her cellphone and earbuds by the side of the road about a mile from their house, with a few strands of blonde hair nearby. She failed to pick up her children from daycare, which was completely out of character.
How was Sherri Papini found and what condition was she in?
On Thanksgiving Day, November 24, 2016, at about 4:30am, a driver named Alison Sutton called 911 about a blonde woman frantically trying to flag down cars on an I-5 off-ramp about 150 miles south of her home. When authorities reached Sherri, she had a chain around her waist and arm, was emaciated at 87 pounds, had some of her hair chopped off, and was covered in bruises, burns, rashes, chain markings, and had a broken nose. She had been missing for 22 days.
What was Sherri Papini’s initial story about her abduction?
Papini claimed she was abducted by two Hispanic women driving a dark-colored SUV who had a handgun. She said they forced her to drop her phone, subdued her with something (possibly drugs or a taser), and she woke up chained to a closet rod in a room with a bucket of cat litter as a toilet. She claimed she was given scraps to eat, branded on her shoulder when she tried to escape, and eventually released after hearing a gunshot and the captors arguing. She described the younger woman as about 5’5” with curly dark hair and the older as about 5’7” with straight black hair with some gray.
What DNA evidence was found on Sherri Papini’s clothing?
Investigators found two DNA profiles on the clothes Sherri was wearing when released. One belonged to Sherri herself. The other was male DNA that did not match her husband Keith. In March 2020, a familial match was found, leading to James Reyes, who used to be engaged to Sherri. His DNA was confirmed in June 2020 from trash outside his home. The criminal complaint noted that while some sperm or partial sperm was identified, the male DNA ‘may have come from sperm or another source.‘
What was James Reyes’ account of what really happened during Sherri Papini’s disappearance?
James Reyes, Sherri’s ex-fiancé, said Sherri contacted him in 2015 claiming Keith was abusive and she wanted to escape. On November 2, 2016, he drove nearly 600 miles from Costa Mesa to Redding, picked Sherri up, and she lay in the back seat sleeping most of the return trip. She stayed at his house for three weeks, mostly in a room with the door shut. She self-inflicted injuries including hitting herself, burning her arm, and having Reyes hit a hockey puck off her leg.
She cut her own hair, lost weight by not eating much, and had Reyes brand her shoulder with a wood-burning tool from Hobby Lobby with a phrase she chose. Reyes was never charged with any crime.
What charges was Sherri Papini arrested for and what was her sentence?
Sherri Papini was arrested in March 2022 for making false statements and mail fraud. She was charged with 34 counts of mail fraud and one count of making false statements. She pleaded guilty on April 18, 2022, and the mail fraud charges were reduced to a single count. In September 2022, she was sentenced to 18 months in prison followed by 3 years of supervised release, and ordered to pay $309,902 in restitution to the California Victim Compensation Board, Social Security Administration, Shasta County Sheriff’s Office, and FBI.
She was released from prison in August 2023 after about 11 months.
How did Sherri Papini financially benefit from her fabricated kidnapping?
Sherri benefited financially in multiple ways. A GoFundMe called ‘Help Find Sherri Papini’ raised nearly $50,000, with Keith withdrawing over $30,000 to his personal account—about $12,000 for credit card bills and the rest for ‘personal expenses.’ More significantly, between 2017 and 2021, she received over $30,000 from the California Victim Compensation Board, mainly for therapy appointments though she also spent $1,000 on blinds. The mail fraud charges stemmed from these checks being mailed to her therapist using the US Postal Service.
What racist elements were present in Sherri Papini’s fabricated story and past?
Sherri’s story relied heavily on Hispanic stereotypes. She described her fake captors with features matching chola/chola subculture tropes (hoop earrings, bandanas, thick eyebrows), said they played ‘annoying Mexican music’ and ‘Mariachi music,’ and claimed they fed her ‘tortillas and homemade gritty Spanish rice’ which she called ‘crap.’ A 2007 MySpace post under her maiden name ‘Sherri Graeff’ stated she was ‘drug-free, white and proud of my blood and heritage,’ mentioned standing behind Skinheads, and described fights with ‘Latino girls.’
Pinterest posts under her name were described as ‘anti-Muslim’ and ‘pro-white.’ Her false accusations led to the Hispanic community being on high alert for suspicious-looking Hispanic women for years.
What was Keith Papini’s reaction when he first saw Sherri after her return?
In a 20/20 interview for ‘To Have and to Hoax,’ Keith stated that when he first pulled back the curtain and saw Sherri in the hospital, ‘I felt in that moment that she was lying.’ However, this was a fleeting emotion, and when he saw how covered in injuries she was, he immediately banished those thoughts and felt ‘horrible’ for having imagined it. He later admitted there was ‘always something that wasn’t right,’ and that Sherri used emotional manipulation, including telling him ‘I have to live with the fact that you never found me’ more than five years later, which ‘crushed’ him. He filed for divorce when she pleaded guilty and has full custody of their children.
What new claims did Sherri Papini make in 2025?
In 2025, Sherri released a four-part docuseries ‘Sherri Papini: Caught in the Lie’ and self-published a book ‘Sherri Papini Doesn’t Exist: The Lie That Defined Me, The Media that Destroyed Me, And the Truth That No One Heard.’ In these, she claimed a new amalgamation: while she did ask James Reyes to pick her up, she alleged he then drugged and kidnapped her, chained her in a closet, and only released her because she convinced him she would blame two women instead. She told ABC News she was scared to tell the truth due to fear of both Keith and James, stating ‘Prison was far safer than the consequences that I would suffer if my ex-husband found out I was having an emotional affair.’ James Reyes was never charged and is not under new investigation.
Sources
- Original Casual Criminalist video: Sherri Papini: The Woman Who (Allegedly) Faked Her Kidnapping
- Hero image source by IAEA Imagebank / openverse, by.
