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Sheriff’s office released this photo of Sherri Papini in 2016.
Provided by Shasta County Sheriff’s Office
On Thanksgiving in 2016, at 4:30 a.m., the California Highway Patrol received a 911 call from a desolate stretch of Interstate 5 in Yolo County. A trucker was on the line. He’d come upon a woman in the darkness near Woodland, in desperate need of help, or so it seemed.
She was gaunt, her face swollen. Under gray sweatpants and a gray sweatshirt, rashes and bruises covered her body. Her ankles and wrists were in cuffs, one arm fastened to a chain around her waist. Her blond hair had been cut short. Someone had crudely burned a brand into her right shoulder as if marking her as property.
It didn’t take long to identify the woman in the roadway.
Sherri Papini had been missing for 22 days, long enough for the apparent kidnapping of the 34-year-old mother of two young children — a “super mom,” by her relatives’ description — to make global headlines.
She’d vanished while jogging near her home in the community of Mountain Gate outside Redding, 150 miles up I-5 from Woodland, and then failed to pick up her kids from day care. Her distraught husband, Keith Papini, had found her abandoned phone and neatly coiled earbuds by using the Find My iPhone app.
Sherri Papini gave a horrific and extraordinary account of her captivity.
She said, according to investigators, that two “Hispanic” women had abducted her as she jogged, pulling up in a dark sport utility vehicle with tinted windows and forcing her inside by showing her a revolver and saying something like, “We don’t want to kill you.” Papini recalled the smell of sewage in the vehicle and the sensation of repeatedly falling asleep, possibly after being shocked with a Taser.
By her telling, Papini’s captors were careful, covering their faces with lace masks or bandannas at all times. They spoke of holding her for a “buyer,” who wanted her healthy. The leader of the pair was older, meaner, raspy-voiced and coffee-breathed, and would sometimes assault her younger and smaller partner, who seemed sheepish about the operation.
And then, one day, the scheme suddenly ended. The younger kidnapper — possibly after shooting the older one — put a pillowcase over Papini’s head and dropped her along the freeway in Woodland in the middle of the night. That’s where the trucker found her.
It was an incredible story. But last week, the FBI said it was all a lie.
Redding’s “super mom,” Special Agent Courtney Lantto said in a court affidavit, had spent three weeks not in chains but hanging out with an ex-boyfriend in Orange County.
现年39岁的帕皮尼上周在suspicio被捕n of making false statements to a federal officer and engaging in mail fraud. The second charge alleges she wrongfully pocketed tens of thousands of dollars from the California Victim Compensation Board, which picked up costs for therapy sessions, privacy blinds for her home and the ambulance ride to the hospital after she reappeared.
Authorities asserted that Papini’s injuries were self-inflicted, her work with a sketch artist a time-wasting sham. She faces up to 20 years in prison if convicted.
“Ultimately, the investigation revealed that there was no kidnapping and that time and resources that could have been used to investigate actual crime, protect the community and provide resources to victims were wasted based on the defendant’s conduct,” said Phillip Talbert, the U.S. attorney for California’s Eastern District, which includes Redding.
Papini, who was released Tuesday on $120,000 bail, did not comment, but her family released a statement saying, in reference to her arrest, “We love Sherri and are appalled by the way in which law enforcement ambushed her ... in a dramatic and unnecessary manner in front of her children.”
The statement continued: “Sherri and Keith have cooperated with law enforcement’s requests despite repeated attempts to unnecessarily pit them against each other, empty threats to publicly embarrass them and other conduct that was less than professional.”
The seeming abduction had spread fear through the far reaches of Northern California.
But Special Agent Lantto’s affidavit reveals that investigators became suspicious of Papini long ago, in the first days of the case.
Even as rescue teams searched wilderness areas, as cops visited local sex offenders, as a reward grew to $50,000, as her family’s GoFundMe account surged to nearly $50,000 and as Papini’s husband passed a polygraph test, investigators were learning that the missing woman had an alleged history of deceit.
On Papini’s abandoned cell phone, the FBI said, two phone numbers stored under women’s names actually belonged to men — one of whom had discussed meeting up with Papini in a text conversation the day before she vanished. Contacted by investigators, the man said he didn’t ultimately connect with Papini that day.
The second man whose number was in the phone told investigators he was an ex-boyfriend and that Papini was “an attention-hungry person who told stories to try to get people’s attention” — including stories of being abused, Lantto wrote. The man said Papini was “good at creating different realities.”
When investigators tracked down a third man — Papini’s ex-husband — he said they had tied the knot in 2006, prior to his military deployment overseas, “because Papini needed health insurance due to complications related to regular egg donations.” The man said that when he returned, she was with someone else. So they divorced.
Investigators, records show, also reviewed a blog post from 2007 titled “Keep Walking” that was attributed to Sherri Graeff — Papini’s maiden name. The blogger said that after a group of “Latinos” picked on her at her Shasta County high school, she responded by fighting the girls and breaking one of their noses.
“I used to come home in tears, because I was getting suspended from school all the time for defending myself against the Latinos,” the blogger wrote. “The chief problem was that I was drug-free, white and proud of my blood and heritage. … 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.”
Papini told investigators the post was “awful” and that she did not write it.
Many mysteries are solved with DNA evidence these days, and the Papini case was no different, the FBI said. But this was a slow burn.
On that miracle Thanksgiving Day in 2016, as Papini was treated at Woodland Memorial Hospital, police collected her sweatshirt, sweatpants, socks and underwear. A lab soon detected an unknown man’s DNA. But when the profile was checked against government databases, no hits emerged.
Over the next few years, investigators sought matches over and over again. Nothing.
Then, in 2020, Lantto wrote in her affidavit, the same DNA profile was checked for “familial matches.” Investigators got a hit. The profile matched a man whose son had once shared an AOL account with Papini. The son was an ex-boyfriend.
When FBI agents scoured social media accounts linked to this ex-boyfriend, they reported spotting a familiar piece of furniture; the table was similar, they said, to one that Papini said she was strapped to while being branded.
On Aug. 10, 2020, investigators said the ex-boyfriend — whose name they withheld — admitted that Papini had been at his Costa Mesa home during the time she said she was in the cold bedroom with the boarded-up windows. He said Papini, his ex-fiancee, had claimed she needed to escape her husband’s abuse.
整个事件,他告诉调查人员,began in 2015, when he was cleaning his house and came across old photos and other items that belonged to Papini. After he sent the mementos to her parents, she reached out and told him she was planning to run away with him.
The man said he and Papini soon agreed to communicate on burner phones — which they used to arrange the fateful pickup from Redding.
In Southern California, the man said, Papini retreated to a bedroom, where she often spent time alone, and asked him to board up the windows. The two did not have sex, he said. She ate little, he said, cut her hair short and — late in her stay — began to bruise and burn herself.
The man “said he helped her create some of the injuries, although he never laid his hands directly on her,” Lantto wrote. “For example, she told him, ‘Bank a puck off my leg,’ so (he) shot a puck off her leg, lightly.”
Asked about the branding, the FBI said, the man responded that Papini asked him to buy a small wood-burning tool from Hobby Lobby, and then to burn a phrase that was important to her onto her skin. All these years later, he couldn’t recall the words.
The man said he “wasn’t sure of Papini’s intentions during her stay with him, but he believed they might end up in a romantic relationship again.” Yet shortly before Thanksgiving, he said, she told him she missed her children.
“I’m ready to go,” she said.
He rented a car through a friend, dropped her along I-5, and, by his account, never spoke to her again.
The FBI said it had a mountain of evidence corroborating the ex-boyfriend’s account — receipts, cell phone records, witness statements. Agents confronted her on Aug. 13, 2020, telling her they knew she had been with her ex-boyfriend.
Lantto said Papini insisted she was kidnapped.
“The younger one is the one that let me go and was the nicer of the two,” she told investigators. “The older one was really abusive and really mean and is the one that did all the really terrible things.”
Demian Bulwa (he/him) is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email:demian.bulwa@sfchronicle.comTwitter:@demianbulwa
