SHERRI Papini went for her usual morning jog after dropping the kids at school, but when her husband came home from work to find that she still wasn’t home, panic set in.
Keith Papini quickly took measures to find the 34-year-old mum of two, tracing her phone to her last location and driving straight there, but his panic soon turned to horror when he found her phone lying on the side of the road.
It was November 2nd, 2016, in California, and Keith, who was the prime suspect in her disappearance at the time for police, was doing the media rounds begging for his wife’s return to him and their two children.
“If she is listening, I want to say, ‘We are trying. We are trying the best we can, and I am sorry I’m not there,” he said in a tearful interview.
“I’m doing everything I can, and I love you.”
News of the disappearance dominated the news across the world, as hundreds of local residents took time out of their lives to find the mum and bring her home.
Three weeks later, on Thanksgiving, Sherri was miraculously discovered 150 miles away from her home running across a church car park with a chain around her waist.
Her hands were zip-tied together, her body was bruised and burned, her nose was broken, and she had been branded with a hot iron.
Sherri spent weeks with police going over the details of her kidnapping, claiming two Hispanic women had taken her and put her in a small dark room, beating her and starving her until the abductors had an argument and one decided to release Sherri.
Her memory was foggy, and the trauma she endured seemed severe, as she recounted the incident to police, her husband stood by her every step of the way.
Sherri claimed to have overheard a conversation about a “buyer’, implying the two women intended to sell her into sex trafficking.
It seemed like a miracle that Sherri was let go, considering the extent of the abuse she endured, and law enforcement was quick to hunt for the perpetrators as they feared it was part of a larger pattern of human trafficking.
Web of lies
But after years of dead ends, the two women were never caught, in fact, they never even existed.
Now, 42, Sherri has been dubbed the real life ‘Gone Girl’ after faking her own kidnapping to run away with her ex-partner.
In 2020 police found DNA on her clothes that matched with her ex James Reyes.
She knew what she was doing in that moment. And to this day, I remember that time, and it hurts. I’ll forever remember that.
Keith Papini
When they tracked him down, he was quick to reveal that Sherri had asked him to pick her up at a staged abduction site, then to take her back to his home in Costa Mesa, hundreds of miles down the coast.
She’d even asked him to help her injure herself to bolster her kidnapping claims by branding her and holding a hockey stick up so she could run into it and break her nose.
Sherri's 'Gone Girl' Timeline
- 2 November 2016: Sherri Papini was reported missing after failing to return from a jog near her home in Mountain Gate, California. She also missed picking up her children from daycare.
- 24 November 2016 (Thanksgiving Day): Papini was found around 146 miles away in Yolo County, near Woodland, California. She was discovered with injuries and restraints, claiming she had been abducted by two Hispanic women.
- August 2020: Papini was interviewed by a federal agent and a Shasta County Sheriff’s detective, where she continued to maintain her story of being kidnapped by two Hispanic women.
- 3 March 2022: Sherri Papini was arrested on charges of making false statements to federal law enforcement and mail fraud. Authorities revealed she had been staying with a former boyfriend in Costa Mesa, California, and had inflicted injuries on herself.
- April 2022: Papini signed a plea agreement.
- 19 September 2022: Sherri Papini was sentenced to 18 months in prison, followed by 36 months of supervised release. She was also ordered to pay $309,902 in restitution.
- 8 November 2022: Papini reported to federal prison at the Victorville Federal Correctional Complex in Adelanto, California, to begin serving her 18-month sentence.
James was never tried for a connection to the crime and three weeks after he ‘kidnapped’ Sherri, she wanted to return home as she missed her kids.
Before dropping her off, Sherri asked him to brand her with the word ‘EXODUS’ using a wood burning tool.
Looking back, Keith reveals the heartbreak he felt when his wife Sherri came home, telling him, “I have to live with the fact that you never found me.”
“I remember I was pleading with her,” Keith says now. “Like, ‘I did everything I could, I’m so sorry you had to go through that.’”
“She knew what she was doing in that moment. And to this day, I remember that time, and it hurts. I’ll forever remember that.”
Sherri was ultimately charged with 34 counts of mail fraud and one count of making false statements in 2022, and spent ten months in jail.
Her husband, Keith, divorced her soon after she was sentenced and has custody of the children.
Bold new claims
Now, Sherri has claimed all is not as it seems in a new Investigation Discovery’s docuseries, Sherri Papini: Caught in the Lie.
“Haven’t you ever lied? And then, has the lie been blown up?” Sherri said in the trailer.
“I went missing in 2016, was gone for 22 days. I was tortured; I was branded; I was chained to a wall. All that is true. I did keep some secrets from you, though.”
Now, the mum-of-two claims she was in fact kidnapped by her lover James Reyes but made up the two Hispanic women as she was terrified about what her husband would do if he found out about the affair.
“I was concealing an affair from my husband, who (was) threatening to take everything from me if he found out that I was having any involvement with another man,” she said.
Now she claims she went to meet James to break things off, but alleges he soon turned violent.
“I remember waking up briefly in the back of the vehicle and not being able to even keep my eyes open,” she said.
She claims the next thing she knew it was dark and she was being carried out of the car into a house.
“I just remember thinking, ‘This is not where I’m supposed to be. I’m supposed to be picking my kids up from day care. I am not supposed to be here,'” she adds.
“The injuries that occurred… the bites on my thigh, the footprint on my back, the brand, the melting of my skin — I am telling you there was no consent.”
Sherri alleges that James then had her chained up to a pole inside his home so she could not escape.
“I wanted to leave,” Sherri claimed. “So I tried to pull one of the boards off the window and James came in and hit me in the face. And that’s the first bruise that I got … And after being knocked out and waking up, that’s when the chain was around my waist, secured with a padlock attached to a cable that was attached to a pole in the closet.”
Every injury, every incident, the description of the room down to every last bit of fragment, was not a lie.
Sherri Papini
Just before she ‘escaped,’ Sherri says she had a conversation with James, who agreed to let her go on the condition she lied about what really happened and blamed two Hispanic women for the abduction.
Her claims continued: “James had let me off the chain.
“I said, my husband’s going to find me. He’s never going to stop looking for you … You need to let me go. He was like, ‘Well, there’s too much has happened.’
“So it all came down to me. It all came down to my cover-up, and that’s [when] I agreed to … make up that someone else did it.”
“I lied about James’ identity. I lied about the man who abducted me to keep him a secret,” she said in the docuseries. James denies these claims.
“It wasn’t the right choice and I know that… I wish I would’ve told the truth from the day I was in the hospital — that it was James,” she continued.
“I wasn’t thinking about my neighbor that was searching for me. I wasn’t thinking about the churches that were lighting candlelit vigils,” she continued. “I was thinking about myself.”
“Every injury, every incident, the description of the room down to every last bit of fragment, was not a lie,” she adds.
Mother knows best?
Keith, who has full custody of the children they share, was accused by Sherri throughout the show of being abusive; he heavily denies these claims.
And it seems even Sherri’s own mum doesn’t believe her new story.
Speaking to the filmmakers, Loretta Graeff said: “No, it wasn’t a kidnapping.”
“My daughter was very, very unhappy in her marriage. She wanted some kind of happiness.
“When he showed up and Sherri went with him, it wasn’t a kidnapping, it was more ‘I want to have a little bit of happiness in my life because it’s been very, very hard.'”
“She needed to get away from him and she didn’t abandon her children,” Graeff told People.
Where is Sherri now?
Sherri was released from prison in August 2023 and transferred to a residential reentry facility in Sacramento County, California.
She left the home that October — eight months early — and will remain on supervised release until late 2026.
