California mom Sherri Papini who claimed she was kidnapped for 22 days by two Hispanic women in 2016 in a story that shocked and puzzled America, has now been arrested for making it all up six years later.
On Thursday prosecutors charged ‘supermom’ Papini, 39, for lying to federal agents about being kidnapped and defrauding the state’s victim compensation board of $30,000.
The mother-of-two was found on Thanksgiving Day in 2016 after weeks of searching in California and several nearby states 22 days after she disappeared while jogging on November 2.
She was found tied up, with a broken nose, a ‘brand’ on her right shoulder and a shaved head. Papini told authorities at the time that she had been kidnapped at gunpoint by two Hispanic women, even providing descriptions to an FBI sketch artist.
No one was ever arrested, and authorities could never determine what the ‘Hispanic women’s’ motive was.
When Papini was found on Thanksgiving Day, 2016, police collected DNA samples from her clothes. They ran them against the national criminal database but found no matches.
In 2020, however, they were alerted to a potential match. It was matched to the boyfriend’s father, whose DNA was on record with the DOJ.
They then traced that sample to the ex-boyfriend, and he admitted the entire hoax.
California mom Sherri Papini who claimed she was kidnapped for 22 days by two Hispanic women in 2016, has been arrested for faking her abduction
Papini said she was taken at the intersection of Sunrise Drive and Old Oregon Highway while on a jog. She’s described her captors as two Hispanic women who drove a dark SUV
Papini claims that two Hispanic women driving an SUV abducted her but covered their faces. These sketches were released of them almost a year after she went missing
In reality, she was with an unidentified ex-boyfriend who police say she asked to pick her up. An affidavit released by the US Attorney’s Office for Eastern California details how Papini had multiple affairs and boyfriends, and was described by exes as an ‘attention hungry’ woman who made things up for sympathy.
The ex-boyfriend is not named in the affidavit but the pair plotted their escape on pre-paid cell phones which they used to text each other before he collected her in November 2016.
She then spent the next few weeks at his apartment. The boyfriend confessed to FBI agents, as did one of his cousin’s who saw her inside the apartment.
He told how he also hired a rental car to drive her back to her family’s neighborhood on November 24, 2016.
Since then, Papini has claimed $30,000 from the Victim Compensation Board.
‘In truth, Papini had been voluntarily staying with a former boyfriend in Costa Mesa and had harmed herself to support her false statements,’ an announcement by the US Attorney’s Office in the Eastern District of California said in a release on Thursday night.
They alleged that Papini continued to lie about what happened, even after FBI agents confronted her with evidence that proved it was a hoax.
Between 2017 and 2022, Papini claimed a total of $30,000 in 35 payments the from Victim Compensation Board.
She is now being held in federal custody, awaiting her first court appearance.
A 55-page affidavit released on Wednesday night reveals how investigators were suspicious of what had happened from the beginning.
On November 2, Papini’s husband Keith reported her missing at 5.50pm after returning home from work. She was nowhere to be found and their two children were still at daycare.
Keith then used the ‘Find My iPhone’ app to locate Sherri’s phone, that was sitting on the side of the road near their home next to her earbuds, which were tangled in blonde hair.
He told authorities he thought it looked as though the phone had been ‘placed’ there and that it was positioned strangely.
Keith said the pair argued like any other married couple but had no serious marital issues. He said their last argument was the previous month and was over a messy room, and that Papini could be ‘loud’.
Police started searching her phone and quickly discovered two men’s phone numbers that were saved under women’s names, the affidavit claims.
Neither was the ex-boyfriend she spent her ‘missing’ weeks with, but authorities interviewed them and one of her old bosses.
The day before she went missing, Papini texted one of the men and discussed meeting up in Redding, California, near her home.
That man lived in Michigan and had been in California for a work trip. He told police he’d met Papini in 2011 on a work trip and that the pair ‘spent the weekend together’.
They continued to exchange flirtatious messages for years, he said, but he did not end up meeting the weekend he was in California, before she disappeared.
The second man told police that he met Papini in 2000-2001 through a a Friday Night Live youth program. He said she was a liar who liked attention and would ‘tell stories’ to get it.
He said she once told him she was the victim of abuse in her family.
‘Man 2 described Papini as an attention-hungry person who told stories to try to get people’s attention. Man 2 stated that Papini fabricated stories of being the victim of abuse from her family, father, and then Man 2 after the couple broke up,’ the affidavit reads.
Papini and her husband Keith are pictured for Halloween with their two children
Picture of Keith and Sherri Papini on their wedding day in August 2012
On the day Papini went missing, her husband Keith said he had first become concerned about her whereabouts when she stopped answering her phone
Prosecutors charged Sherri Papini, 39, (pictured) for lying to federal agents about being kidnapped and defrauding the state’s victim compensation board of $30,000
Investigators also spoke with Papini’s boss at the Friday Night Live youth program, and he said he worried about having her in the program because she ‘was good at creating different realities for people so that they would see what she wanted them to see, which got her really good attention.’
Papini was married once before she met Keith.
Her first husband was in the military. Keith told police that their entire marriage was a sham designed to get herq onto his medical insurance so that she could receive treatment for a persistent heart murmur.
When police spoke to the first husband, he said she told him she needed the insurance due to ‘complications from regular egg donations’.
Papini’s mother said she’d told her she ‘traveled the world’ with her first husband when in reality, they had only traveled together once.
The ex-husband told police that after they divorced, he was told by mutual friends that she had a history of lying.
She faces a mail fraud charge related to the reimbursement requests that carries a penalty of up to 20 years in prison, while lying to a federal officer has a maximum five-year sentence.
‘Everyone involved in this investigation had one common goal: to find the truth about what happened on Nov. 2, 2016, with Sherri Papini and who was responsible,’ said Shasta County Sheriff Michael Johnson.
That 22-day search and five-year investigation not only cost money and time, he said, ‘but caused the general public to be fearful of their own safety, a fear that they should not have had to endure.’
The mother-of-two, dubbed a ‘supermom’ by her sister Sheila Koester, 36, disappeared while out jogging on November 2, 2016.
On the day she went missing, her husband Keith said he had first become concerned about her whereabouts when she stopped answering her phone.
Neighbors told DailyMail.com that Papini had been living as ‘a recluse’ but has begun to make more frequent appearances in 2017
After spending the past year living as a recluse, the mother-of-two seemed to be getting back to normal when she went for pizza with her husband Keith in Redding, California in 2017
Neighbors told DailyMail.com that shortly after returning home Papini had been living as ‘a recluse’ but had begun to make more frequent appearances in 2017
A video shows Papini (in red circle) running around on the morning she was found after vanishing for two weeks in November 2016
The area where Sherri Papini was found near the I-5 freeway outside of Yolo, California
When he discovered she hadn’t picked the kids up from daycare, he flew into full blown panic.
‘I couldn’t find her, so I called the day care to see what time she picked up the kids. The kids were never picked up so I got freaked out, I hit the Find My iPhone app thing,’ he said. ‘I found her phone; it’s got like hair ripped out of it, like, in the headphones.’
Her phone was discovered a mile away at the intersection of Sunrise Drive and Old Oregon Highway – neatly placed on the ground and with the headphones tidily wrapped around it.
Keith, who said at the time that his wife would never leave him or their children voluntarily, also launched an appeal – a GoFundMe account raising cash to pay for the search which eventually raised close to $50,000.
After being found three weeks later, with her hair hacked off and branded with a threatening message, Papini claimed she had been kidnapped by two Hispanic women who could not be identified because they constantly covered their faces.
Papini said the women had been driving a dark-colored SUV with ‘a large rear side window’ at the time of the kidnapping but has so far been unable to give details of the make and model.
However, police also revealed that male DNA that did not belong to husband Keith was found on her clothing and said she had been texting another man before her disappearance.
Cops investigating the kidnapping had discovered Papini’s texts and tracked down the man in Detroit, Michigan on November 9 – a week after she disappeared.
Following her return, Papini was said to be living a quiet existence at her family home which occupies a shady plot of land on the outskirts of Shasta Lake; a small town of 10,000 people in Northern California.
Neighbors told DailyMail.com that she had been living as ‘a recluse’ but had begun to make more frequent appearances in 2017.
That year she was spotted doing the school run and relaxing in her yard with a book.
Further skepticism about why she disappeared emerged after it was revealed she had previously run away as a teenager.
And according to the Sacramento Bee, uncovered documents from 13 years ago outlined how Papini’s mother, Loretta Graeff, called police asking for help after her daughter was allegedly self-harming and trying to blame the wounds on her.
The incident report, filed in December 2003, is just two lines long and reads: ‘RP states her 21y/o daughter that was living with her was harming herself and blaming it on the RP.
‘RP states female is coming back to live with them and she wants advice.’
The newspaper also found two other incidents involving Papini, where her father and sister both claimed she damaged their property.
In 2000, Richard Graeff said his daughter ‘burglarized his residence,’ before Sheila Koester, ‘alleged her back door had been kicked in and she believed Papini was the suspect’, the Bee reported.
In retrospect, ‘we are relieved that the community is not endangered by unknown, violent kidnappers,’ said Sean Ragan, special agent in charge of the FBI’s Sacramento Field Office.