Mum faked own kidnapping by burning herself until ex’s tip off caught her out

WHEN Keith Papini found his wife Sherri’s phone lying by the side of the road, it was playing Michael Bublé’s Everything on repeat. It had been the couple’s wedding song. 

His desperate call to the emergency services was recorded and captures his sheer panic after the discovery.

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“I found her phone, and it’s got, like, hair ripped out of it, like, in the headphones, so I’m like totally freaking out thinking, like, somebody grabbed her,” he gasped.

Keith’s wife Sherri was a 34-year-old mum of two, who’d gone out for a run on the afternoon of November 2, 2016 and never returned home.

After Keith discovered her phone – using the Find My iPhone app – a mile from their home in Redding, California, her disappearance sparked a huge search that made national headlines.

Keith pleaded for news of his wife’s whereabouts on prime-time news shows in the US and TV cameras descended on the couple’s hometown to report on the missing “supermom”. 

However, while her husband, family, community and the authorities searched for Sherri and feared the worst, she was actually hundreds of miles away, secretly staying with an ex-boyfriend, after staging her own kidnapping.

“Sherri was a very capable, stay-at-home mum with a four-year-old son and two-year-old daughter,” reveals a source who was close to the family.

“She was blonde with blue eyes and very pretty, which is probably why so many TV stations picked up her story when she went missing. Looking back, I really don’t think she was expecting so much media attention and so her lie just grew and grew.” 

Sherri’s deception, its exposure and the fallout has been revealed recently in a Hulu docuseries called Perfect Wife: The Mysterious Disappearance Of Sherri Papini. 

Over the course of filming, director Michael Beach Nichols got to know Sherri’s husband Keith well.

Speaking this year about the jaw-dropping case, the filmmaker said: “Keith would make self-deprecating jokes about being the ‘idiot husband’ to the crew.

“And we were just like: ‘What are you talking about? Who would think that their partner would lie about all of this?’”

Michael continued: “She fooled him, which is a lot more understandable because it’s his partner. But she also fooled law enforcement – high levels of law enforcement.”

I don’t think she was expecting so much media attention, so her lie just grew and grew

Ssource who was close to the family

A week after Sherri went missing, on November 9, 2016, the FBI joined the hunt. There were news conferences, family statements, community rallies and rewards offered, but the weeks came and went with no sign of her. 

On November 24 – which was Thanksgiving in the US – there was a yellow balloon release planned by Keith and the residents of Redding to act as a symbolic gesture that they hadn’t lost hope of finding Sherri.

However, at around 4.30am that day, California Highway Patrol responded to a number of 911 calls reporting a woman standing in the middle of the interstate, 146 miles south of Redding. It was Sherri Papini. 

Her long, blonde hair had been cut short, one of her arms was bound to a chain around her waist and she had been branded on her right shoulder.

Her nose was swollen, and there were bruises, rashes, burns and ligature marks all over her body. She was emaciated, weighing just over 6st – almost 2st less than the weight listed on her missing posters.    

‘Made me sick’

When she was reunited with Keith, in the presence of FBI agents, she told them she’d been taken at gunpoint by two Hispanic women who intended to sell her to a corrupt policeman connected to Mexican drug cartels.

However, after being held for three weeks in captivity, she was allowed to escape when one of the women took pity on her.

As the media interest in Sherri’s ordeal intensified, it was Keith who put himself front and centre to shield his traumatised wife from the glare of the media. This included a high-profile appearance on ABC’s 20/20 news programme, where he described what the family had been through. 

“It made me sick that there are people out there that could do something like this,” he said.

“She literally lived through hell. The things she told me that she did… like tonight she was tucking in our kids and she told me one time she took some piece of cloth and rolled it up like it was [her daughter] Violet and she would rock it. She’s so strong.” 

Keith went on to explain that his wife was struggling to get over her abduction.

“When the lights are off, when the doors are shut, and when she hears certain sounds, it’s something that I don’t know how to deal with and we’ll need somebody that can help her through that from a professional standpoint. 

“It’s not just a long road. It’s something that we’re never going to forget.” 

Sherri applied to the California Victim Compensation Board for financial support based on the trauma of her kidnapping and collected payments totalling more than £23,000.

She also began claiming social security disability benefits for post-traumatic stress. 

The family moved out of their Redding home into an FBI safe house in case there was a repeated kidnapping attempt. Sherri was rarely seen, but her lies were beginning to have a divisive effect on the community she left behind. 

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There was a surge in tips to local police about Hispanic women, after FBI posters featuring artist impressions of Sherri’s “kidnappers” began replacing her original “missing” flyers.  

She fooled her partner – but she also fooled high levels of law enforcement

Michael Beach Nichols

Meanwhile, investigators continued to try to find the phantom kidnappers based on Sherri’s account, concentrating their efforts on mountainous areas because she’d told them that where she’d been held was cold. 

They showed her photos of suspects matching the profiles she had given them, but every potential lead turned out to be a dead end, and the women Sherri claimed had kidnapped and brutalised her were – obviously – never found.

In March 2020, detectives finally made a breakthrough when a familial match was found on DNA that had been taken from Sherri’s clothes on the day she returned. That led the FBI to a man called James Reyes, one of Sherri’s ex-boyfriends.  

On August 10, 2020, he was interviewed by agents and admitted that he’d helped Sherri “run away”. 

The two of them had reconnected in the summer of 2016 when Sherri called, according to James’ interview statement, “out of the blue”. They’d known each other since they were teenagers and had been briefly engaged, before Sherri’s relationship with Keith.

Sherri told him she needed to escape her husband because he was beating and raping her, an accusation that has never been proven as investigators found no domestic violence reports filed by Sherri against her husband.

Days later, a package from Sherri arrived at James’ apartment and inside was a piece of paper detailing where and when she wanted him to pick her up.

‘Abducted’

The extent to which Sherri had calculated her fake kidnapping was revealed in the interview, as James told investigators he was instructed to buy a prepaid phone, rent a car and meet her at the specified intersection.  

When he picked her up, she immediately got in the back seat and lay down, sleeping for most of the seven-hour trip to his two-bedroom apartment in Costa Mesa, Southern California.

For the next three weeks, Sherri didn’t leave that apartment, eating small portions to lose weight, cutting her own hair and burning herself with cigarettes. 

Not all of the injuries were self-inflicted. James created some by hitting a hockey puck off her leg and used a wood-burning tool bought from a hobby store to brand her shoulder. 

However, as Thanksgiving approached, Sherri told James that she missed her children and wanted to be with them for the upcoming family holiday, telling him: “I’m ready to go.” 

Once again, Sherri lay on the back seat of his car for the whole of the trip, taking with her a bag that contained the chain and bindings she would use to complete her kidnapping ruse. 

Three days after James had told investigators everything, on August 13, 2020, Sherri and Keith were asked to attend an interview in an interrogation room.  

What Keith was about to hear, which was captured on CCTV, would turn his world upside down, as Sherri was confronted with James’ confession. 

“All we want is truthful statements because it’s a crime to lie to federal officers. Understood?” the detectives repeatedly told her, before showing her a series of photographs from James’ apartment that matched descriptions she had given them of her location when she was “abducted”. 

Sherri dismissed each picture and denied she’d been there for those three weeks in November 2016 or that she’d ever been in contact with James.  

I understand why someone would want to believe their partner and fight for their relationship

Michael Beach Nichols

With no confession, the authorities had no choice but to build a case against Sherri, while the couple’s life returned to an uneasy normality, with Sherri reinforcing the line to her husband that the FBI were trying to drive a wedge between them.

“His whole sense of identity was tied into having this relationship with his wife, the mother of his children,” revealed Michael. “If he doesn’t believe in that, then all of that just crumbles. 

“I completely understand why someone would want to fight for that, and would want to fight for the relationship and would want to believe their partner.”

On March 3, 2022 Sherri was arrested as she took her children to a music lesson. The charges were making false statements to federal agents about the fake kidnapping and defrauding the California Victim Compensation Board. 

When Sherri returned to the family home and told Keith that she was going to accept a plea bargain, he’d had enough. The couple separated, Keith started divorce proceedings, and was granted temporary complete custody of the children. 

I am guilty of lying… What was done cannot be undone

Sherri

Sherri moved out and went to live with a family member while she awaited sentencing. In a statement before her sentence was handed down, she wrote: “I am guilty of lying. I am guilty of dishonour… What was done cannot be undone… I am choosing to humbly accept all responsibility.” 

On September 19, 2022, Sherri was sentenced to 18 months in prison to be followed by 36 months of supervised release and ordered to pay a restitution fee of $309, 902 (around £240,000). 

However, there was still no reasonable explanation as to why she’d faked her own abduction.  

According to the original FBI indictment against her, the motivation was purely financial.

It concluded that: “In the 11 months leading up to her disappearance, Papini was devising a plan to obtain funds under false and fraudulent pretences.”

However, Sherri’s defence attorney wrote in a court filing that his client’s “chameleonic personalities drove her to simultaneously crave family security and the freedom of youth.”

And that once her kidnapping became front-page news, “each lie demanded another lie.”   

Sherri was released from prison in August 2023, after serving around half of her sentence, and has maintained her silence since then.

Of course, the real victims are Sherri’s two children, Tyler, now 11, and Violet, nine, and her husband, who has no contact with her other than via the court.

He has said that the children speak to Sherri once a week on the phone, and see her once a month in a professionally supervised meeting.

Keith appears to be resigned to living without the answers he must desperately crave about why his wife blew up their seemingly perfect life with her deception, saying recently: “I’ve accepted that I will never know the truth. No one ever will.” 

Sherri Papini: Lies, Lies and More Lies is available to stream on Hayu.

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