The 5-year saga that led to Sherri Papini’s arrest: Racist blog posts, DNA on green tea
Last week, federal prosecutors accused Sherri Papini — the subject of an alleged kidnapping in November 2016 that drew national media attention, turning the Redding “super mom” into a celebrity — of fabricating the abduction and lying to FBI agents.
In a criminal complaint, the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Sacramento charged Papini, 39, with one count each of wire fraud and lying to authorities.
She was arrested last Thursday, and was granted release at a pretrial hearing in Sacramento federal court Tuesday.
The alleged abduction hoax cost Shasta County, state and federal taxpayers, crime victims and donors more than $200,000, according to prosecutors and the sheriff whose office handled the initial investigation.
Here’s a timeline of the Sherri Papini saga, compiled using archived stories by The Sacramento Bee as well as court records including last week’s criminal complaint.
November 2016: Sherri Papini disappears
Family first reported Sherri Papini missing after she failed to return from an afternoon jog on Wednesday, Nov. 2, 2016, to their home in the Redding-area town of Mountain Gate.
She also didn’t pick up her 4-year-old daughter or 2-year-old son from daycare.
Sherri’s husband, Keith Papini, and other family members said her cellphone was found using a find-my-phone app along a rural road north of Redding.
The husband appeared in an interview airing on “Good Morning America” four days after the alleged disappearance, telling ABC News that Sherri was “definitely taken against her will.”
The family offered a $40,000 reward for her discovery, and established an online crowdfunding campaign to expand on that reward.
As various accusations began to emerge, including that Keith Papini was involved in his wife’s disappearance, family members decried the rumors as baseless.
‘Cash is ready to go’
Days before Sherri Papini re-emerged, an “anonymous donor” offered the kidnappers a ransom payment of an undisclosed amount if they returned Papini by 5 a.m. on Nov. 23, 2016.
Cameron Gamble, a self-described defense contractor, said he would facilitate the transaction, initiated by an “out-of-town man” who approached a mutual friend with the offer, The Bee reported at the time.
Gamble called the amount of money substantial, but declined to say how much.
“The cash is ready to go,” he said.
Thanksgiving 2016: Papini found safe
Tom Bosenko, then-sheriff of Shasta County, in a news conference said authorities were “ecstatic” to report Sherri Papini was found safe on Thanksgiving morning, 22 days after her disappearance and 146 miles away, and reunited with her family.
She was found, bound with restraints, around 4:30 a.m. in Yolo County. The sheriff said Papini had been released on a rural road and flagged down a driver on Interstate 5 near County Road 17, north of Woodland.
The sheriff said Papini was injured during the alleged abduction, treated at an undisclosed Sacramento-area hospital and then released.
Keith Papini said in a statement to “Good Morning America” days after Sherri was located that his wife had scabs and bruises on her body.
A brand was seared into her skin – later revealed to be on her right shoulder – and her blond hair “chopped off,” the husband wrote.
“Detectives will not rest until her captor or captors are identified and brought to justice,” vowed Bosenko, who retired as sheriff at the end of 2019.
Alleged kidnappers described
Authorities started to piece together information about the alleged abduction, and Bosenko in late November shared the first description of its perpetrators.
The sheriff said Papini had described her captors as a pair of armed Hispanic women, whom she said repeatedly beat and tortured her over the course of the three weeks.
According to last week’s court documents, Papini said the women pulled up to her during her jog in a dark-colored SUV. One of them had a “small revolver,” she said.
Papini said the women often kept their faces covered, but one of them had thin eyebrows and pierced ears; the other was older and had thick eyebrows.
Both of them spoke mostly in Spanish, according to Bosenko, who called Sherri “cooperative and courageous during the interviews.”
The criminal complaint, though, indicates that Papini refused to speak to Shasta County sheriff’s detectives while at a hospital on the day she was located.
Detectives instead gave an audio recorder to her husband, who conducted the initial interview while deputies remained in the room, court documents said.
In that interview, Sherri said her abductors had suggested that law enforcement were involved in her kidnapping.
“Papini stated, ‘She (one of the abductors) was laughing at me. No one believes you. Everyone thinks you ran away. No one believes you. Guess what? The buyer’s a cop, they’re never gonna find you,’” court documents read.
She also said in the interview that the two women kept her in a closet and forced her to use a bucket with kitty litter as a toilet. Papini said the kitty litter was her own suggestion.
She described her alleged abductors as playing “that really annoying Mexican music,” according to the criminal complaint. She also said they had played “mariachi music” during the vehicle ride from the scene of her abduction to the residence where she was purportedly held.
The motive for the abduction remained unclear, Bosenko said.
By Keith Papini’s account, the captors threw Sherri out of a vehicle in Yolo County with a bag over her head and chains on her wrists and waist.
Meanwhile, Gamble – the facilitator for the alleged anonymous benefactor offering a ransom – said the donor would use his wealth to assist the Papini family.
In an interview with The Bee at the time, Gamble called Sherri a “hero.”
‘Rumors, assumptions, lies’
The high-profile incident began to spark numerous rumors – chief among them, that the abduction was a hoax.
“Rumors, assumptions, lies, and hate have been both exhausting and disgusting,” Keith Papini said in his statement to “Good Morning America” following his wife’s discovery.
“Those people should be ashamed of their malicious, sub human behavior.”
Bosenko also dismissed rumors.
“All the information that we have right now we have no reason to believe that she is making this up,” the sheriff told The Bee in a November 2016 interview.
Missy McArthur, then mayor of Redding, said a few days later at a celebration at the Redding Civic Auditorium marking Papini’s safe return home that any suggestion the abduction did not occur was simply the work of internet “trolls.”
Abduction case goes cold; doubt swells
In the months following Papini’s alleged kidnapping and release, law enforcement officials shared little new information about the investigation. No arrests were made, and no motive determined.
Papini herself never gave a public firsthand account of what her husband and sheriff’s officials said had happened.
Then, in early 2017, The Bee via California’s Public Records Act obtained a December 2003 incident report from the Shasta County Sheriff’s Office.
The two-sentence report stated that Papini’s mother, Loretta Graeff, alleged that then-21-year-old Papini had been harming herself and blaming it on Graeff.
Criminologists and law enforcement experts who spoke to The Bee at the time noted some of the abnormalities about the incident.
For one, it is very rare for women to be abducted by other women, they said. James Alan Fox, a Northeastern University criminology professor, called the 2003 police report by Papini’s mother “suspicious,” though not proof of a hoax in and of itself.
Around the same time, internet sleuths dug up a racist essay signed by “Sherri Graeff” – Papini’s maiden name – posted to a now-defunct website called Skinheadz.com.
The post’s author wrote that she got into fights during her youth with Latinos who she claimed targeted her because she was “drug-free, white and proud” of her “blood and heritage.”
Papini told sheriff’s detectives that she believed someone else wrote the post using her name, and that she’d hired an attorney to try to have the post removed, according to last week’s criminal complaint.
Papini’s family and friends have also said the post was written by someone else.
October 2017: DNA evidence emerges
Just before the one-year anniversary of Papini’s disappearance, investigators announced what would turn out to be the pivotal discovery: Sherri Papini, who claimed her two abductors were women, had male DNA on her clothes when she was found in Yolo County.
Detectives found DNA from a woman on Papini’s body and DNA from a man on her clothes, authorities said in October 2017. The DNA did not match her husband, Keith.
The DNA sample was uploaded into a criminal database, where it didn’t ping a match. At least not right away.
Sgt. Brain Jackson, a spokesman for the Shasta County Sheriff’s Office, said at the time that investigators had found other inconsistencies with Papini’s story.
The “super mom,” as tabloid magazines would call her, told detectives she cut her foot while trying to fight back against her captors. But investigators found no evidence of the cut.
Papini also told investigators that after her release along I-5, she heard her captors having an argument, followed by a gunshot, Jackson said.
According to Jackson, authorities could not corroborate any reports of missing persons or unresolved homicides in Yolo or nearby counties.
Investigators also revealed that Papini’s phone — the one found in rural Shasta County — had been found screen-up, undamaged and with earbuds neatly coiled on top of it.
Meanwhile, sheriff’s officials said Keith Papini had passed a polygraph test about the incident and offered to take another.
After the DNA revelation, no significant updates were made public in the Papini case for more than four years.
March 2022: Papini arrested, charged
Federal prosecutors last Thursday, March 3, 2022, unveiled the charges against Papini: local law enforcement and the FBI determined that instead of being kidnapped and tortured, she had actually been staying with a former boyfriend in Costa Mesa.
“She was presented with evidence that showed she had not been abducted,” U.S. Attorney Phil Talbert’s office said in a statement. “Instead of retracting her kidnapping story, Papini continued to make false statements about her purported abductors.”
The DNA entered into the state database returned a hit in March 2020 that led investigators to the ex-boyfriend, according to court documents, which do not identify the man. Investigators determined the ex was briefly associated with an address owned by Papini’s parents.
FBI agents went to the ex-boyfriend’s home on June 9, 2020, and collected items from his trash, including an “Honest Honey Green Tea” bottle that was analyzed and found to have DNA that matched that collected from Papini’s clothing, court documents say. A very similar process was used in 2018 to collect DNA confirming Joseph James DeAngelo Jr. as the Golden State Killer.
Investigators tracked down the ex in August 2020 and he admitted that he “helped Papini ‘run away,’” court documents say. The two had known each other since they were teenagers and had once been engaged.
Sometime in 2015, the ex found personal items that reminded him of Papini and sent them to her parents, he told investigators.
Papini later called him, telling him she’d been saving money because she “had a plan to run away with him,” court documents say.
“Papini told him that her husband was beating and raping her and she was trying to escape,” the documents say. “Papini told ex-boyfriend that she had filed police reports, but the police were not doing anything to stop her husband’s abuse.”
Shasta sheriff’s officials have no reports of Papini filing those reports against her husband, according to the court documents.
Sherri and Keith Papini were interviewed by the FBI and Shasta County sheriff’s officials on Aug. 13, 2020.
“While husband was still in the interview room, Papini continued to deny that she ran away with ex-boyfriend,” court papers read. “Once husband left the room, Papini admitted that she and ex-boyfriend ‘did talk a little bit before’” her disappearance.
The court documents say Papini “did not at any point throughout the interview disavow her repeated statements that two Hispanic women kidnapped her,” nor did she “ever admit that Ex-Boyfriend had picked her up.”
The ex-boyfriend told investigators Papini cut her hair and hit and burned herself to cause injuries while she was with him, the court papers say. She also asked him to brand him, which he said he did.
Papini “harmed herself to support her false statements” about the abduction, the criminal complaint alleges.
Eventually, according to court documents, Papini told the ex-boyfriend that she missed her children and asked to be taken back to Redding.
The ex said he made the seven-hour drive in a rental car and dropped Papini off on a country road along I-5, and that she brought “stuff in a bag,” which she used to bind her own wrists and ankles. She also tossed a prepaid phone out the window during the drive, according to court documents.
Prosecutors said Papini applied for and received more than $30,000 from the California Victims Compensation Board, resulting in the mail fraud charge.
Papini and her husband also collected more than $49,000 from a GoFundMe page, which they used in part to pay off Sherri’s credit cards.
In interviews with the FBI and with The Sacramento Bee, numerous people from Papini’s past described her as a serial liar.
Shauhin Davari, one of Papini’s ex-boyfriends from the early 2000s, told The Bee last week that she would routinely make up bizarre claims, sometimes for no apparent reason.
“She lied about surfing and, like, just all kinds of crazy lies,” he said.
Family reacts, ‘appalled’ by arrest
Papini’s family released a statement late Thursday through a Salt Lake City-based public relations firm, which said family members were “confused by several aspects of the charges and hope to get clarification in the coming days.”
The statement said the family was “appalled” by Sherri’s arrest that day, particularly that she was “ambushed ... in a dramatic and unnecessary manner in front of her children,” they allege.
FBI agents surveilling Papini followed her last Thursday from her home to a location where her children receive music lessons, both sides’ attorneys said during Tuesday’s pretrial hearing.
When an FBI agent identified himself and told her she was under arrest, Papini screamed and ran away from him.
The prosecution argued in the hearing that this constituted resisting arrest, while Papini’s attorney argued she was simply taken by surprise and attempting to protect her children.
Papini was granted release on $120,000 bond, and is due to appear in federal court for a preliminary hearing on March 25.
This story was originally published March 8, 2022 at 2:14 PM.
