The Sherri Papini Hoax: Abduction, Intrigue, and The Vanishing (Part 1)

In this first part of a two-episode series, we dive into the bizarre vanishing of Sherri Papini. The 34-year-old California mom disappeared during an afternoon jog in her quiet neighborhood, leaving only her phone and earbuds, tangled with strands of her blonde hair, behind. For three weeks, the entire nation watched the massive search unfold, following every possible lead. Sherri then suddenly reappeared on the side of a highway, battered, bruised, and claiming she had been abducted by two armed women. Her story immediately sparked more questions than answers. As investigators began to dig deeper, the cracks in her account only seemed to grow wider. Tune in for Part 2, available now on your feed, for the full unraveling of this unforgettable case.

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TRANSCRIPT:

[00:00:00] When 34-year-old Sherry Papini vanished during an afternoon jog in her quiet California neighborhood, the community erupted in panic. Her husband found her phone on the side of the road along with her earbuds that had strands of Sherry's blonde hair tangled in them, and within hours, a massive search was underway.

For three weeks, the entire nation watched as investigators followed every possible lead until Sheri suddenly reappeared on the side of a highway. She was battered and bruised and claimed she'd been abducted by two women. But her story sparked more questions than answers. It sounds like the plot of a hit thriller movie, but in this case, the truth was actually stranger than fiction.

Hey guys, and welcome to the Moms and Mysteries podcast, a True Crime podcast featuring myself, Mandy, and my dear friend Melissa. Hi, Melissa. Hi, Mandy. How are you? I am doing well. I am adapting very [00:01:00] well to summer life with kids at home, and by adapting, I mean. There's not much to adapt to. I know. I, I'm enjoying it thoroughly.

I'm getting a lot of, I'm bored comments, but, um, already, yeah. But like, I think boredom is an important part of life, uh, especially as a kid, and I'm like, oh. My favorite thing to do is say, okay, do you guys wanna go, uh, outside and like swim or do you wanna start your chores now and every time? Absolutely not every time.

So I'm like, I'll do the dishes. I don't care. Just everyone be quiet and go outside and play. Um, so yeah, manipulation at its finest over here. Yeah, my, uh, older son, um, he's turning 16, but not until September. So he's not quite 16 yet, but he really, really wants to get a job. He has been wanting get to get a summer job, but, um, it's really hard to find a job when you're not 16 yet.

And, uh, there are not a lot of places that will hire at certain ages. Right. And so, um, yeah, he kind of had [00:02:00] a little bummer. He had gotten an email that a place that he applied to was conducting interviews, but then they had said like, make sure you meet all this criteria. And the first one was like, you have to be 16.

So he was like all bummed out about that. So now, yeah, I'm trying to like find things that he can do and I can pay him, but of course I'm like, I can't be your boss. Like I can't, like I can't push you on payroll. You already payroll. Don't listen to me. Yeah. So, no. Yeah. I. Yeah, my daughter, same thing, but she is 16, but she's like, I'm like, let's make a list of all the places you've applied and what you haven't.

And she's like, I mean, I've applied everywhere. I'm like, okay. Oh yeah. Well then you haven't, and then you don't have a job, so not my fault. Um, so anyway, it's, it's fun. These teenagers Yes. That we have. But Mandy, I'm super excited about today, like way excited about today. Excited, way, way, way excited.

Because even though this is a case that I think a lot of our listeners may have already heard, um, it's just one of those stories that I feel. Like, it's like your old favorite movie. You, you don't get tired of hearing this story. [00:03:00] Mm-hmm. This is, you never will get tired of hearing this story. No. Because it's just that wild and crazy.

Uh, so as we said in the very beginning, today we're talking about none other than Sherry Papini and Melissa, I think we may have mentioned this. Uh, we're gonna be Sherry Papini out by the end of this week, by the way, because absolutely. Not only do we have this episode on Sherry Papini, where we're gonna give you all the details.

So many in fact, that. We are again doing this in two parts, but both parts will be available, both of them today. So we're kind of doing it similar to how we did the Rust episode, only because the length of the episode and the amount of material was just so much to cover in one episode. But you can find 'em both right here on the feed today.

So you'll get both parts, but truly a wild story. And there is a new documentary that just came out recently. It aired on Investigation Discovery. It's called Sherry Papini, I think it's called Uncovering the Y. Maybe it's, or something along those lines. There's the word lion, Sherry Papini. Yes. So it makes sense.

Yes. Uh, you can stream it on [00:04:00] Max, but we actually watched that as well this week. So this is new. We're getting to hear from Sherry herself for the first time. Mm-hmm. So, uh, we're covering that documentary on our subscription and per Patreon. So if that's something you're interested in, that will be there as well for you this week.

And by the end of that, you might be tired of hearing about Sherry Papini. Or not. I'm still fascinated by her. Same, so I, I'm, I'm totally in it. We still have to record two more episodes for, uh, Patreon, 'cause it's like a four part thing. But my goodness, if you wanna hear more. From her own words. Yes. Uh, yeah.

Tomorrow, starting tomorrow Wednesday. Um, those will be available. And if you're looking for something else to listen to us talk about nonsense and not Sheri Papini. Not Sheri Papini. If you're tired of Sheri Papini after this, um, we were, uh, just on the doing it all podcast, uh, with Maya and Sarah. They're.

Amazing. They're two moms as well and they're interviewing different people about doing it all, which neither Mandy or I are really doing it all, but we're sure trying and [00:05:00] it was just a great conversation. They were amazing and so much fun to talk to and um, had a great time on that interview. So if you wanna check that out, we'll have that in our show notes as well.

Awesome. All right. So as I said before, we have a ton to get into and we are going to jump right into Sherry Papini story, but if we wanna understand how things kind of unraveled in the dramatic way that they did, we need to start long before the headlines began and go all the way back to the beginning, which was really the childhood of a girl who was just always running from something.

Sherry was born on June 11th, 1982 to Loretta and Richard gr. She was raised in Northern California with her sister Sheila, who was almost two years older than her. The family seemed very ordinary from the outside, but according to Sheila, they were anything but ordinary. Sheila described their childhood as being traumatic and said there was drug and alcohol abuse in the home.

Throughout their upbringing, Sheila was forced to grow up fast and began taking on adult responsibilities when she was still just a kid, [00:06:00] including taking care of Sheri, who really looked at Sheila as more of a mother figure than a sister. One of she's friends remembered that she would come over a lot just to escape the chaos at her home.

This friend also said there was constant yelling and she once saw Sheri's mom drag her down the hall by her hair. It was clear that from a young age, Sheri desperately desired peace, and for someone to just take care of her as a teen, Sherry didn't exactly thrive at 16, she dropped out of high school and ran away to LA where she eventually made her way to the Bay Area.

Her father described her as a couch hopper who just bounced between friends', homes and disappeared for stretches at a time. Sherry didn't return home until she was in her early twenties. She married her first husband, David Dreyfus in 2006. He was in the military, and Sherry later said she only married him because she had a heart murmur and she needed access to health insurance.

David's version though was a little [00:07:00] bit different. He said he and Sherry never lived together and they only actually met once while he was deployed in Japan. And then by the time he returned to the US, Sherry told him she'd found someone else and that someone else was Keith Papini. Keith and Sherry met while she was technically still married to David, but Sherry explained that the marriage was just for insurance and a divorce was already in the works.

Keith was head over heels and Sherry's family thought that he was a breath of fresh air. They usually didn't like Sherri's partners, but Keith was kind and grounded and he was just different from the others. Before him. Keith and Sherry's relationship quickly took off. She called him her knight and shining armor, and they got married in 2009 and had a son and a daughter, and they built a quiet life in Redding.

She embraced motherhood and her family said that she was a super mom. She was the kind of mom who was always doing crafts, throwing big birthday parties, and just making every moment feel like a celebration. [00:08:00] But not everyone saw Sheri in the same positive light. Childhood friends said that Sheri actually had a long history of lying, especially about being abused.

Some who knew her said she was manipulative and even dangerous. And this wasn't just gossip, there were hints that something was amiss all along. Sherry's parents had made several 9 1 1 calls over the years accusing their daughter of theft, self-harm and deception. Her dad said Sheri had stolen from him, and her mom once reported that Sheri hurt herself and blamed it on her mom.

Sheri's sister reported a break in at her home and said she suspected that Sheri was behind it and behind closed doors. The Papini marriage had its cracks too. Keith had found messages that Sherri sent to another man where she called him cute and suggested that they meet up. Keith was really devastated by this, but he was determined to work things out and stay together.

He actually asked her to sign a postnuptial agreement that ensured if Sherri ever left, she'd get [00:09:00] nothing. Not even the car. From then on, the couple's finances remained separate. At one point, Sherry found a little stability when she got a job as an account executive for at and t, but that really didn't last for long.

She was let go in 2015 and never returned to the workforce. That same year, her life began to shift into a new direction. After Sheri lost her job, she stayed home with the kids and used her severance pay to cover things like electricity and daycare. Though Keith really didn't understand why she was paying for daycare since she wasn't working, it was around the same time that Sheri decided to get breast implants, which Keith thought was unnecessary and a stupid investment, but he told her he'd support her choice if that made her feel good.

Sherry's friend Jennifer said that Sherry often portrayed Keith as being a controlling person who just wouldn't let Sherry have free will. She claimed that he wanted her to be the perfect 1950s housewife, but also he wanted her to work. [00:10:00] Sherry's journals also had entries about Keith, where she described him as being a simple man, which I don't think any man really wants to be called, uh, who won very simple things.

He was very protective of Sheri and didn't want other men looking at her, nor did he like that. Sheri had a lot of previous boyfriends. November 2nd, 2016 started off like any other Wednesday in the Papini household. Sheri went about her usual routine of dropping the kids off at daycare, taking care of some things around the house, and even wrapping an early Christmas present for Keith.

Just before lunch, Sherry sent Keith a playful and flirtatious text message, and Lightheartedly asked him to come home and be intimate with her for lunch. Instead of taking a lunch break, Keith responded that he couldn't leave work and this ended up being the last message that he ever received from his wife.

A little while later, Sherry laced up her running shoes and headed out the door for a run. She had been training for a local 5K, and the route was one that she knew very well. [00:11:00] It was just a few miles along Sunrise Drive, which is in a very quiet area of Redding. Sherry brought her phone along, as she always did.

She used it to track her pace and listen to her favorite music. She liked to run to the song by Michael Buble called Everything which was partly sentimental and partly practical because the Steady Rhythm helped her keep time. I love that song, but I have to say, do you listen to it over and over or is that just a song that you hear and you're like, oh, I like this song, and yeah, and if it comes on like at the grocery store, you're like, oh, I like this, but not run.

But you never think like repeat? No, definitely not. By five o'clock that evening. Keith was home from work, but Sheri wasn't there and neither were their two young kids. Keith called the daycare and assumed that Sheri may have just been running late, but they told Keith that the kids had actually never been picked up that day.

So at that point, panic really began to set in. Keith used the find my feature on his iPhone to [00:12:00] locate Sherry's phone and saw that it pinged at a location about a mile from their house near the corner of Sunrise Drive and Old Oregon Trail. So Keith drove to this location, but he still didn't see Sherry anywhere.

He ended up finding her phone just sitting in the grass right off the side of the road. Her earbuds were still attached and there were strands of blonde hair tangled in the wires. Keith thought that Sherri's phone kind of looked like it had just been placed there, not dropped or thrown on the ground, and to him it looked as though someone had just intentionally set it down there.

He actually snapped a photo of her phone before he touched it, and then he dialed 9 1 1. Very smart to do that. Yes. It was 5:50 PM when Keith reported Sherry missing. The last known sighting of her was during her run that day. Investigators believed that Sheri disappeared sometime between 10:00 AM and noon that day because every single message that was sent to her phone after 1:00 PM went unanswered.

Sheri was [00:13:00] last seen wearing black leggings, a hoodie with thumb holes and black and white checkered under Armour shoes. Within hours of the 9 1 1 calls, Shasta County deputies were on the scene. They walked the trail near where Keith had found Sherry's phone, then moved on to the Papini home. They checked the mailbox, which was still full and combed through the house looking for anything out of place that night.

The search continued After the sun went down, officers and volunteers continued to look for Sherry. While a larger, more organized search was planned for the next morning, the search would stretch across a half mile radius from where Sherry's phone was found. Sheri's sister Sheila, who was pregnant at the time, drove through the neighborhood with Keith's sister, shouting Sheri's name.

Sheila even joined in the ground, surges in the woods despite being pregnant and exhausted. She was just desperate to find her sister. Hundreds of volunteers turned out to help, but the landscape around Redding is very rugged and consists of dense woods, uneven terrain, and even wild [00:14:00] animals like bears and hogs.

Within days, Sherri's disappearance had gone viral. The story was spreading far beyond Redding. The entire nation was talking about Sherry and social media was flooded with the hashtag bring Sherry home. Some local men who were concerned about Sherry got swept up and carried away in their efforts when they reportedly would show up at stranger's homes and started aggressively questioning people.

Okay. And they said they were desperate to save Sherry's life. Sergeant Kyle Wallace with the Shasta County Sheriff's Office was assigned as the lead investigator and within days the FBI was brought in. The search expanded to include other states. As tips began to pour in, authorities did their best to track each tip, but with over 900 of them, it quickly became overwhelming.

Some of the tips were heartfelt while the others were borderline bizarre. Most of the tips were just completely unhelpful with a lot of them coming from people who simply thought something looked off in their grocery store, or maybe they [00:15:00] had a weird feeling about their neighbor, and the worst were those who falsely claimed to know where Sheri's body was.

And there were actually a lot of those. As the search intensified detectives turn their attention to the place that often holds the most answers in a missing person's case, and that was the Papini home. They went back through the house room by room, but nothing seemed out of place. All of Sheri's personal belongings were still there, including her purse, her jewelry, and even her wedding rings.

Her wallet was sitting right where she left it stuffed with hundreds of dollars of cash. Investigators did think it was strange that Sheri had left her belongings, but it was especially strange that she wouldn't have taken the cash with her. People who wanna disappear on purpose, Ty typically will take cash with them because it's untraceable and it can keep them moving.

There were no signs of forced entry to the house, no sign of a struggle, and no obvious clues to suggest what had happened. Even Sherry's phone that they had found a mile away didn't show any unusual activity before it went silent. [00:16:00] Keith told the detectives that his marriage was normal. He said they had their disagreements like any couple, but nothing that would be alarming.

He said their last argument was over a messy room. Keith did say that Sherry could be loud when she was mad and she knew how to push his buttons, and he admitted that the couple had gotten physical a couple of times during their fights. When investigators started digging deeper though, the story of the Papini marriage got a little bit more complicated.

S said they heard shouting coming from the home sometimes, and one woman said Keith gave her the creeps, another claim that she overheard Keith threatening to kill Sherry during an argument once, and Sherry's friends had similar stories. Her friend Jennifer told police that Keith told her he'd kill her if she ever left.

He allegedly said he would chop her up and bury her in the backyard. This was about a month before Sherry disappeared. Jennifer admitted that she had never personally seen that side of Keith, and also admitted that Sheri was known to be a bit dramatic [00:17:00] at times, but she still thought this was very unsettling.

Is that saying that Jennifer told police that Sheri told her that Keith said he would do that? Correct. Okay. Okay. Correct. Yes. So this is just. Sherry's story, right? We don't, and we know what we know of Sherry, which is that she might not always tell the honest truth. Another one of Sherry's friends named Nicole said that Sherry once claimed Keith hit her and left her with a black eye.

Again, this is just Sherry's claims. Keith did not deny that Sherry had this injury when police asked him about it, but he did say the story had been twisted into something. It wasn't. He explained that a few years earlier, the couple was at a friend's house playing a game on the Wii called Fruit Ninja, which I totally.

No fruit. I love Ninja. Yeah. Yeah. And while he was swinging his arm, he accidentally elbowed sherry in the face, which did leave a black eye. When friends would ask what happened, Keith would make like stupid jokes and say things like, oh, she didn't put the dishes away, or [00:18:00] whatever. However, the woman who hosted the game night.

Did back up Keith's story that it was a complete accident and said that all of them, Sherry included, were all kind of laughing about it at the time, like it was just a mistake, an accident. If you've ever played Fruit Ninja, I feel like it is, uh, plausible that it was an accident. If you play, we it's possible.

Yes, it's an accident. Your hands are just going around, you know, whatever. Yes, it's a very active, absolutely. Game. Um, yeah, so you can absolutely see how that could happen. In a later interview for the documentary Perfect Wife, which is the documentary that was on Hulu, Keith talked about a fight that happened before he and Sherry got married.

He said that in this incident, Sherry threw a picture frame at him so hard that it cut open his knee. Sherry claimed though that she had done this in self-defense. Jennifer believed that Keith was probably confronting Sherri about talking to other men. She said she didn't think he had ever put his hands on her in a violent way.

From the beginning though, Keith cooperated with the investigators. [00:19:00] When they first sat him down for an interview, they got straight to the point. They told him that they had to look into him because statistically, in cases like this, the husband is the first suspect. And Keith didn't argue with this. He said he understood and he mentioned that Sherry watched a lot of true crime shows.

So he knew that in a lot of cases it actually was the husband, but he reiterated that in this case it wasn't. But Keith's demeanor during his TV interviews was picked apart online. Lots of armchair experts out there pointing out what they call red flags. I cannot stand this. I hate whenever we're in the early days of like someone missing or anything like that, and people are dissecting every single thing they see because.

Those have very long-term consequences for people. And so I, I'm always cringing whenever I see somebody talking about, oh, but did you see how he did this? And then like two days later, it's not this person, it's a whole other person. Right. Like it just feels very irresponsible to me. I don't know. It makes me crazy.

No, I totally agree [00:20:00] with you. And the other thing is some people's personalities may just be perceived as a little bit odd, right? Totally. And so I feel like the more you get to know someone, the more you start to realize like, oh. This isn't a sign that they're being dishonest. This is actually just their personality is a little strange.

And I kind of feel that way about Keith Papini. Like I don't think there's anything wrong with him as a person. Mm-hmm. Like he seems fine to me, but I would describe his personality as being strange and odd, which I guess if you've never seen or interacted with this person and you're only in first interaction or first time seeing them as on the news, talking about his wife's disappearance, I can see how some people might draw conclusions.

But that's again why it's not. Not right to draw those conclusions early on before you really even know anything about the story or about the person or anything like that. Yeah, it, I mean, in this case was full of that. Just everyone from people saying, I, I know where she's buried, all that stuff. People, everyone had an opinion.

Um, so some said that his tears seemed fake and that he was over the top and dramatic. His wife is missing. I don't, I don't know that you can be over the top in that. In [00:21:00] that case, but some of Sherry's family also expressed concerns about Keith and wondered if he knew more than he was letting on Keith's own relatives tried to defend him, but public opinion was divided.

Five days after Sherry vanished, Keith took a polygraph test. Voluntarily, he was given the questions ahead of time and detectives did everything they could to make him feel at ease. But in the footage for the exam, Keith appears nervous and can be seen, fidgeting, stretching, patting the back of his head, and in general, just looking very anxious.

Which of course, like if you're sitting down for a polygraph test and you know that they're gonna look into these results. It would be terrifying. But meanwhile, you also don't know what's going on and where your wife is. So like Right. Of course you're gonna be having, like, there's a lot going on in your head in that moment.

You know, I would expect that someone would be fidgeting and anxious and like even to get like some way of getting all that energy like out of your body. Like you can't just sit there and sit still and stare at the wall and that situation. And I feel like, I mean, that would to me be more strange, you know?

Totally. I was [00:22:00] surprised they gave questions ahead of time. I don't know if they always do that, but that was kind of an interesting thing to me. Um, but Keith did pass, pass the polygraph test that day not long after. Investigators publicly stated that they did not believe that Keith had anything to do with Sherry's disappearance, but they were still left with very few answers.

At this point, the investigation turned to Sherry herself. Investigators read through her journals looking for clues about her mental state, her fears, or any signs that she may have run away on purpose. But the more they read, the harder it was to really pin down exactly who Sherry was. She was a puzzle, and the pieces really just didn't seem to fit.

Meanwhile, members of the community were still rallying to bring Sherry home. And on November 4th, a friend of Keith's launched a GoFundMe called Help Find Sherri Papini. The page explained the urgency of the situation and promise that the funds raised would go directly to the Papini family to use in whatever way was necessary to bring Sherry home.

In total, the [00:23:00] GoFundMe raised over $49,000. For many in Redding, Sherri's disappearance triggered memories of another case that haunted the local area. In 1998, a young woman named Tara Smith had vanished while jogging just a few miles from where the Papini lived. Tara was also a petite blonde in her twenties, and she disappeared under eerily similar circumstances.

The comparison was just impossible to ignore, and authorities even reexamined the person of interest. In Tara's case. He ended up having an alibi and he wasn't even in California at the time. Sherry disappeared though. As the days passed, the energy on the ground started to fade, and after nine days of exhaustive searches, investigators officially suspended the physical search efforts.

They had scoured the woods and checked into every lead, but none of them had led to Sherry. The investigation changed course and authorities started looking into Sheri's digital footprint. Keith had been ruled out and he was no longer being treated as a suspect. [00:24:00] Now there were two working theories.

Either Sheri had been abducted by a stranger or she left on her own accord, and that second theory was actually gaining traction. 10 days into the case, detectives told Keith that it was more plausible now that Sherry may have walked away on purpose. Then a new lead was uncovered in Sherry's phone. In her contacts, they found something they thought was a little strange.

There were two phone numbers that were saved under women's names, but these phone numbers actually belonged to men in official documents. These men are referred to as Man one and Man two. Man one was a man named Donovan. He had met Sherri back in 2011 during a work trip she took to Lansing, Michigan.

They spent that weekend together and stayed in touch through texting afterwards, and every now and then the flirting between them would pick back up again. In the months leading up to her disappearance, Sherri and Donovan had been texting back and forth pretty regularly on November 1st, the day before she went missing.

They had a conversation [00:25:00] about possibly meeting up in Redding. Donovan had flown from Michigan to San Francisco on October 26th and flew home on November 2nd, which is the same day that Sherri disappeared. Investigators flew to Michigan to speak with Donovan. Sherry wasn't with him, and he said he hadn't seen her when he went on this trip, but he did have something else to tell them.

Donovan said that back when they were first talking, Sherry told him that her husband was abusive. She said Keith locked her in the house and that he was violent and controlling. Donovan admitted that there had always been chemistry between him and Sherry, but he knew that she was married at one point.

They actually discussed a possible future together, but the texting eventually died down until April, 2016 when it picked back up again. Just before Sherry disappeared, Donovan sent her a message that said, destiny keeps putting roadblocks in our way. Sherry responded with, I agree. It's very annoying. A solution may be in the works, although I'm [00:26:00] afraid once it happens I might be too late again, and investigators thought this sounded more than just small talk.

It sounded like a plan was already in motion, but still authorities didn't jump to any conclusions. And then there was Man two. This was an ex-boyfriend of Sherry's from her teenage years. They had met in 2000 or 2001 through a youth program called Friday Night Live, and the two had dated for several years.

He painted a very different picture of Sherry and said she always craved attention and would say almost anything to get it. He said she lied about being abused by her family, and later told people that he had abused her too. None of this was true. The director of the program actually backed him up and told investigators they actually never wanted Sherri in this program because of a reputation for spinning alternate versions of reality or lying.

She showed people what she wanted them to see in order to get the reaction she wanted. Back in Redding, Sherry's family was hanging on by a [00:27:00] thread. Her sister Sheila, was emotionally and physically drained. She was pregnant, exhausted, and trying to support Keith as he crumbled under the pressure of everything going on.

Sheila had started trying to prepare Keith for the worst. She told him he may be raising their kids alone. It seemed like all anyone could do was accept the fact that Sherry might not ever be coming back. But then everything changed and we still have so much to get into after a quick break to hear a word from this week's sponsors.

Before the break, we were discussing the strange disappearance of Sherry Papini. She was a young mom from Red California who seemingly vanished during an afternoon jog. Her phone was found on the side of the road with her headphones still attached, and strands of her blonde hair tangled in them. And at first, of course, suspicions turned to her husband Keith, but he was ultimately ruled out as a suspect.

The investigation ended up uncovering accusations of abuse and control in the Papini home. Though no one knew for sure exactly what happened to Sherry. [00:28:00] By this point, the search had already stalled. Her family was exhausted, and the leads were running dry. Then 22 days after she disappeared, Sherri Papini came back.

Gasp. Yeah. In the early hours of Thanksgiving morning, a string of 9 1 1 calls came into the California Highway Patrol. As drivers on Interstate five were reporting, seeing a woman either standing or running down the middle of the highway. When officers arrived, they found Sherry, who was dirty, bruised, and hardly recognizable.

The location was 146 miles south of where she had vanished. Just over three weeks earlier, one truck driver stopped and stayed with Sherry until the police arrived. In the 9 1 1 call, Sheri can be heard in the background sobbing and panic as she explains that she is Sheri Papini the missing woman.

Something I thought like gave me like a little giggle in this wild story was that the man mistook her last name for panini and told the [00:29:00] 9 1 1 operator that. Her name was Sherry Panini, and she was like, no, Papini. And I was like, I wonder, I bet you that actually probably happens all the time. A lot, yeah.

If, if your last name is Papini. Mm-hmm. Sheri then asked the operator to call her husband, and she made comments that suggested she had been taken by a woman. Sheri claimed to have been abducted in Reding, but said she'd been chained up and she never actually saw her captor's face. She was taken to Woodland Hospital where she was found to have extensive injuries.

She had a metal chain around her waist with one arm bound to it. Her other wrist and both ankles also had signs of additional bindings as well. Her nose was swollen and her face was very bruised. Sheri also had burns on her left arm, rashes on her inner thigh, and ligature marks around her wrists and ankles.

She had lost a significant amount of weight and her hair had been chopped short. Most shockingly of all, Sheri had been branded on the back of her left shoulder. As investigators began to [00:30:00] process Sheri's clothes, it was noted that everything she was wearing, including her sweatpants, sweatshirt, and socks were different from what she had on when she disappeared.

Except for her underwear, which Sherry claimed was the same pair. The clothing was sent off for DNA testing and they collected DNA from both her underwear and her sweatpants, and the results ended up showing a mix of DNA. One sample belonged to Sherry, and there was also DNA from an unknown male contributor.

The profile was entered into CODIS, where it would end up sitting for years. Keith later said that the first time he saw Sherry after she resurfaced, the way she looked at him made him feel like something just was off. He didn't think something about it was right. He didn't know if maybe she wasn't telling the full story, but he knew that whatever happened must have been very traumatic based on the number of injuries she had and the way she looked.

So he still was treading lightly and trying to be as supportive as possible. Once Sherry was able to speak with investigators, she started to share her [00:31:00] story of what happened. She alleged that she had been abducted by two women who were both Latina. Sherry said one of them was older and the other was younger, and they mostly spoke Spanish, but they always wore masks or colorful bandanas.

Other times she said they wore lace. That's a weird one for sure. How many kidnappers have you ever seen that have like pretty lace costumes? Is that what it would be? A cost know, make a share. It doesn't make any sense. Even lace over your face. Okay, I can, I can see you. That doesn't make sense. So Sherry claimed that anytime the women touched her, they wore these black leather gloves.

According to Sherry, one of the women had dropped her off along Interstate five, but she had no explanation as why they suddenly let her go. In fact, a lot of the details were vague and inconsistent. Sherry told investigators that she wasn't sure if she saw the women's full faces, and she said she was really scared and never looked up at them, but she did have some vague descriptions.[00:32:00] 

She said the older woman was taller and heavier with thick eyebrows, dark eyes, and dark hair with streaks of gray, and the younger woman allegedly had long, curly brown hair with thin, drawn on eyebrows, big hoopy earrings and knockoff guest shoes. Sherry painted a picture of two different personalities.

The older woman was described as being more cruel while the younger woman was more hesitant. It's almost like they're the exact opposite. These two women. Yeah, just like if you describe one, one way, just go the opposite and you've got the other wild. So Sheri said she never saw the older woman hit the younger one, but she heard it.

Sheri said she felt like the little one was protective and tried to help her. Sherry insisted she had no idea why she'd been taken or what these women wanted. She told the investigators that her abduction happened while she was out on her usual jog. A dark colored SUV passed by then suddenly backed up and inside.

There were these two women who she would later describe to the police. [00:33:00] Sheri said one of the women rolled down a window and asked for help. So Sheri took out her earbud and stepped toward the vehicle, and that's when she said the car door opened and she saw that a woman inside was holding a gun. Sheri claimed the woman said something along the lines of, we don't wanna kill you, and they instructed her to put her phone down.

So she did. And then Sherry just got into the vehicle. However, that version of the story would later change. In a 2017 interview with the FBI, Sheri said she couldn't remember how she got into the car at all, and in another version she said that she ducked down when she saw the gun and intentionally ripped out a clump of her own hair to leave behind as evidence before laying her phone on the ground.

Which is also different than just dropping your phone on the ground in a frenzy. Yeah. So each time Sherry told the story, these details change slightly. Sheri claimed the SUV that she got into had tinted windows and described the interior as having either no seats or having only one seat on the far side with a raised [00:34:00] hump in the back.

So investigators went on this wild goose chase trying to find a vehicle that matched that setup, but nothing they found matched the description that Sheri gave. Sherry said that once she was inside the SUV, which she also made sure to say smelled like sewage, the women then wrapped something over her face so that she couldn't see where they were going.

She said her legs were bound together and she kept falling asleep during the ride, which was confusing to me because how could anyone fall asleep? While all this was going on. Need a little nap? Yeah, go nap. P. So Sherry told her husband Keith that she couldn't remember very much and that she was missing chunks of time.

So I guess she said she had been stuck with something insinuating that they drugged her in some way. Oh yeah. Maybe that's why she was dozing, you know, nodding off and couldn't remember everything that happened. In a follow-up interview, Sherry said she felt cold and nauseated while in the SUV and she could tell the road was winding, but she was laying on her side in the backseat.

According to Sherry's [00:35:00] account, after she was abducted, she woke up in a room She didn't recognize lying on a mattress on the floor under a boarded up window. She said her wrists were zip tied in front of her. Her legs were no longer bound, and she had no memory of how she got there. In one interview, she said she was wearing a plain T-shirt, and in others she described.

Different outfits. The woman holding her captive would allegedly change her clothes occasionally. She thought her pants were only changed once, but the tops were changed more often. There was also a bucket in the room that became this makeshift toilet and Sherry. Told the FBI that she suggested, they just put cat litter in this bucket just to make things easier.

'cause when I'm being kidnapped, the first thing I wanna do is like clean. Clean this up and make it easy. Girls, let's just make it easy. So Sherry said the room had a metal pole in it that went from the ceiling down through two shelves in a closet and stopped just above the ground. She was chained to the pole by her wrist with [00:36:00] just enough slack to reach the mattress, but not enough to reach the door.

And Sheri also said that she wasn't chained up at first. It wasn't until after she tried to escape that the woman started chaining her up. She alleged that during one of the early days, she managed to break free from the zip ties around her wrist by chewing through them. Sure. I don't have those kind of teeth.

Like my, my teeth are basically soft at this point. I'm, I'm barely holding on. So once she was free, she tried the door, but found that it was locked from the outside with a second deadbolt. So she stood on the mattress and reached up to the window to try and pry off one of the boards. Sherry said she broke a nail trying to do this, but it was all in vain anyway, because there ended up being another set of boards this time on the outside of the window.

Of course there were of course, so she never made it out before. The women burst into the room and beat her with something she said she blacked out from the pain, and when she woke up, she was chained to the pole in the room, and from that moment on, [00:37:00] Sherry said everything got worse. Sherry told stories of the days and nights spent in captivity and described how she was treated.

She said that she tried to outsmart her captors and manipulate them for information. She offered to cook and clean, hoping the women might let their guard down or at least be nice enough to tell her why she had been taken. But she said that anytime she stepped out of line, the women would just lock her in the closet.

One day while she was in the closet, she found a screw and used it to chip away at the drywall in yet another attempt to escape. Sherry said it was always cold, and sometimes the women would come and take her blankets away, and other times they would just come in and beat her. She said she never believed that she was ever truly alone in the house.

She could always sense movement and she could hear music playing loudly right outside the room she was in. Sherry claimed that was the radio that actually really bothered her the most because as she put it, she didn't like the Mexican music. But when the TV was on, she said she felt [00:38:00] more at ease.

Sherry's story was quite detailed and elaborate. She said she was fed once a day with meager meals that included things like rice tortillas and maybe an apple. Sometimes they would feed her cream of wheat or just the fat off of a piece of meat with a small piece of bread. The food was always placed on a paper plate and was slid into the room and the door was shut behind it.

She was never given silverware, so she would have to fold the plate and tilt it into her mouth to get the food into her mouth. Sheri said she had no idea what happened to the clothes that she was wearing the day she was taken, and she had already been changed into a different outfit. When she woke up after the car ride, she said all she had left of her own belongings were her underwear.

When Sheri was allowed to shower, one or both of her captors would guard her and keep her chained up, but she said she was only even allowed to shower twice while she was under their control. Sheri said that her first shower stung due to all the burns and open wounds on her body. She described the [00:39:00] bathroom as being cheap with no shower curtain and a chrome shower head.

Sheri said the body wash smelled like coconut, but she wasn't given any shampoo. She also wasn't given a towel. She claimed that she washed her underwear during her first shower, but later she then said she actually never took her underwear off. Sherry further claimed that during one of the showers, she tried to fight back and she grabbed something, although she wasn't sure what it was, and tried to hit the younger woman.

After that, the bathroom was then stripped bare. The mirror and the towel rack were removed, and it was just. Nothing. In another version of the same story, Sheri described a more intense and violent struggle. She said the older woman lowered her gun and Sheri jumped on her and shoved her face into the toilet.

And during the scuffle, she slipped and cut her foot on the bathroom cabinet, and then the woman dragged Sheri back to the room and shoved a bitter liquid down her throat and left her in there alone. Sherry said she woke up and there were clothes on the bed, which she put on, and [00:40:00] she noticed that her underwear had been laid out to dry.

Sherry said that one of her escape attempts led to being punished by having a brand burned into her shoulder. She said that after she tried to pry the boards off one of the windows, the woman brought in a table for her to lay on while they branded her. She wasn't held down, but she said she couldn't move freely because the chains around her prevented her from moving.

At first, Sherry's account of being branded was one of the key details that made investigators and the public believe that something truly sinister had happened to Sherry. But over time, that part of the story would fall apart too. I will say when this was like what was released, that she had been branded, but nobody knew what the branding said it was.

I mean, it was fascinating because you do then think like, oh my gosh, to brand somebody that's so terrible, and then knowing they kept that, it almost felt like we would never know, right. What it actually said. And at one point, Sheri said the woman told her that she was being sold and that the [00:41:00] buyer wanted the brand on her shoulder.

Sheri said she didn't know who the buyer was, but the women had told her they weren't supposed to hurt her. They were just supposed to deliver her, and Sherry overheard them talking about getting paid. For a while, authorities thought that they may be looking at a human trafficking operation. The brand, the Injuries and Sherry's claims about being sold made it seem like a disturbing but plausible theory.

But Sherry's story continued to change over and over again. Sherry said to keep her mind busy. She would exercise every day. She had to pull the chain around her waist tight and tuck it in between her legs, so it and rattle. She lost track of time and started sleeping a lot, and she said her appearance began to change.

Her captors had cut her hair in the beginning, allegedly another punishment for making too much noise. By this point, Sherry's story was already pretty muddy. The injuries she had were definitely real, but they really didn't match these events that she was describing. But [00:42:00] still, nobody had proof that she was lying.

After spending three weeks under these horrible conditions, Sheri said that something just changed. On the final day of her captivity, she overheard the two women arguing in Spanish, and she believed the younger one said something about Sherry needing medicine. Sherry said she heard a gunshot followed by silence, and she believed the younger woman had been shot or possibly had fled either way.

She was left alone in the house for a long time. She said she screamed until she was hoarse and then she passed out. Later. The younger woman who apparently was not gone after all returned and slid some food into the room for Sherry. Sherry said she dozed back off to sleep, and when she woke up, the younger woman was there and immediately hit her in the face.

Next, Sherry said that she changed into clothes that were on the bed before a pillowcase was pulled over her head. She was then guided into a vehicle and bound at the wrists and ankles again, and told to lay on the floor of the car. Sherry said she kept [00:43:00] falling in and outta sleep on the ride. Eventually the car stopped and one of the women cut the restraints from her limbs and told her to get out.

The women then drove away leaving Sherry alone on the side of a highway in Yolo County, more than 140 miles away from her home. Sherry said she pulled the pillowcase off her head and ran toward the first place she could find, which was a church, but there was no answer when she banged on the doors. So she then ran to the interstate hoping that someone would stop and help her.

A passing truck pulled over and dialed 9 1 1. To the outside world, it seemed like an absolute miracle that Sheri had been found alive after 22 days. But behind the scenes, the police were already connecting the dots and noticing holes in the entire story. After Sherri was rescued from the side of the highway, investigators expected that she would be ready to talk, but she wasn't on the ride to the hospital.

She actually refused to speak to the police. The only person she would talk to at all was her husband, Keith. [00:44:00] She said she didn't trust the police because her abductors had warned her not to trust the authorities because law enforcement was in on the whole scheme. Oh yeah. In fact, Melissa, her buyer, was allegedly a police officer.

Yeah. So I need what happens. Hi. Yeah. So the detectives decided, you know what? Let's take a step back here. Let's let her have what she wants. They're gonna let her talk to Keith in her hospital room. But the detectives were gonna stay there and record the conversation just to kind of observe. So in this recording, you can hear that Sheri sounds very emotional and overwhelmed.

Sherry also begged to see her sister, Sheila, and asked over and over again if Sheila was okay. When they were finally reunited, Sheila said that Sheri looked like she'd been tortured and beaten from the bruises, the weight loss, the haircut, you know, the brand that was burned into her skin. All of these things were physically real, and it just reinforced the idea that, you know, the family had and believed about what Sheri had endured.

But as investigators dug [00:45:00] deeper, the cracks in Sherry's story only seemed to grow wider and soon a shocking truth would come to light. And we're gonna unravel all of that in part two, which you can find right now if you go back to your feed and click on Cherry Papini Art two.