Sherri Papini concocted an elaborate kidnapping story.
But why?
Was it for fame or fortune or simply the behavior of someone suffering from severe mental health
issues?
Let's take a look at the untold truth of Sherri Papini.
Sherri Papini disappeared six years ago, only to reappear twenty-two days later.
This started a years-long investigation into the strange details of her alleged abduction.
Long after Sherri Papini returned home, detectives continued to investigate but reported no new
developments.
As the public waited for an arrest, a lull overtook the investigation.
Naturally, rumors began percolating, and people began casting doubt on Papini's story.
During this time, a series of incident reports from the Shasta County Sheriff's Office dating
back from 2000 to 2003 were discovered by the Sacramento Bee.
Notably, Papini's family made several calls to law enforcement about her.
Papini's father, Richard Graeff, claimed that she burglarized his home, and a few years
later, he alleged she made unauthorized withdrawals from his bank account.
In another report, Loretta Graeff, Sherri's mother, claimed that Papini was hurting herself
and then attributing the injuries to her.
A deputy responded to Graeff with advice on how to handle the situation.
Papini's sister, Sheila Koester, also reported her to the police.
The back door of her home had been vandalized, and Koester believed that Papini was responsible.
In a statement, Papini's family called The Sacramento Bee's reporting on Papini's troubles
"shameful" and called the article "clickbait."
Sherri Papini had a previous husband before she met Keith Papini, but it was a marriage
that started for all the wrong reasons.
According to the official criminal complaint filed against her, Papini married platoon
sergeant David Dreyfus in 2006 and used his military status to obtain health insurance.
Dreyfus told investigators that Papini made regular egg donations, which caused health
problems, and they managed to marry before he was deployed overseas.
Although Papini's mother claimed the couple traveled the world together, Dreyfus said
they only met once in Japan and never lived together.
While still married to Dreyfus, Papini reconnected with middle school crush Keith, who she had
shared her first kiss with.
In a 2009 wedding blog post, Papini wrote,
"I never imagined my middle school first kiss would turn out to be my husband!"
In her post, Papini describes living with Keith in her townhouse in 2006 to test their
compatibility before marriage.
And when Dreyfus returned from his deployment, Papini informed him that she had met someone
else.
They divorced in 2008.
Papini had once told Dreyfus that she was abused by her family growing up, but after
their separation, Dreyfus learned from mutual friends that Papini had built up a reputation
as a liar.
"She was faking a heart condition at one point.
And eventually, like not only me, but a bunch of people figured out that that was not true."
On November 2, 2016, Sherri Papini went out for a jog near her home in Shasta County,
California, and was last seen at 2 p.m.
Her husband knew something was wrong when he realized that Papini had not retrieved
their kids from daycare.
Twenty-two days later, on Thanksgiving morning, Papini was found on the side of a highway
150 miles from her home, with a bag over her head and chains tied around her wrists and
waist.
Papini's miraculous return was fodder for national headlines, and her story soon captured
attention around the globe.
Days after her return, national media outlets like "Good Morning America" and ABC's "20/20"
flanked Redding, California, to interview the Papini family and cover the story.
People were enraptured by Papini's story because of her safe return, which is rare in abduction
cases.
But there were also inconsistencies in Papini's recollection, spurring conspiracies and hoax
rumors.
On one occasion, Papini said she fought against one of her abductors, resulting in a cut on
her foot, but her hospital photos showed no evidence of that injury.
Adding to the confusion was the slow progress of both the investigation and the release
of new information.
Sherri Papini returned home with a detailed, harrowing accounting of her kidnapping.
She said her abductors were two Hispanic women who spoke mostly Spanish and forced her into
their vehicle at gunpoint.
She was then supposedly kept hostage in a closet, where she was chained to a pole.
The windows were boarded up, and her environment was very cold.
According to her interview with investigators, Papini's captors listened to "really annoying
Mexican music" and spent time watching TV.
She was fed only once a day.
Her meals consisted of rice, tortillas, and apples.
Papini managed to fight back at one point when she was allowed to leave her closet to
take a shower, slamming the head of one of her captors onto the toilet.
Her captivity ended after Papini heard her captors arguing, followed by a gunshot.
The younger captor took Papini and dropped her off on a highway.
Papini came back home with a swollen nose and bruises, rashes, and ligature marks all
over her body.
She was also branded on her right shoulder with unintelligible markings, which detectives
struggled to decipher.
She also weighed 13 pounds lighter and had her long, blonde hair chopped off.
It was only a matter of time before Sherri Papini's deception unraveled.
In the spring of 2017, investigators found male DNA on the clothing and underwear she
wore when she was discovered, but it wasn't until 2019 that the DNA was decoded.
The following year, the DNA led them to Papini's ex-boyfriend, who was living in an apartment
in Costa Mesa, California.
The ex-boyfriend told investigators that Papini's story had been a lie.
He helped her leave her home and drove her to his apartment.
Papini told him that her husband, Keith, was abusive, and she needed to escape.
Papini's entire abduction was deliberately plotted.
She and her ex-boyfriend contacted each other over pre-paid phones to solidify their plans
ahead of time.
According to the criminal complaint filed against Papini, she and her ex-boyfriend started
talking as early as December 2015.
Once she arrived at her ex-boyfriend's home, she lived a comfortable life and never left
the apartment.
The ex-boyfriend bought her clothes at TJ Maxx, Target, and Ross, and she slept in a
bedroom while the ex-boyfriend slept on a couch.
As Thanksgiving neared, Papini said she missed her children and requested to be returned
home.
While staying at her ex-boyfriend's apartment, Sherri Papini began to create her story.
She cut off her hair and gave herself injuries by bruising and burning her body.
At times, she requested her ex-boyfriend's help.
Although he refused to physically harm her, he agreed to brand her arm with a wood-burning
tool he bought at Hobby Lobby.
The ex-boyfriend told investigators that she would minimize how much food she ate, such
as eating half a banana instead of a whole one in order to lose weight.
He told his cousin that Papini asked him to punch her in the face, but he refused.
So she threw her body on the bathroom floor and against the bathtub to injure herself.
According to the criminal complaint, the entire experience left the ex-boyfriend "rattled."
In an interview with law enforcement, Papini described a table she was tied to as she was
being branded by her abductors.
That description fits a table found at the ex-boyfriend's apartment.
Further, the closet in the bedroom she stayed in had the same "lag bolt" that she described
in her hostage narrative.
Sherri Papini's supposed abduction eerily mirrored the disappearance of a former classmate
of hers back in 1998.
Sixteen-year-old Tera Smith was the homecoming queen at Central Valley High School and only
a year apart from Papini.
She had gone out jogging on Old Oregon Trail, the same road Papini disappeared from, in
the early evening of August 22, 1998.
Eighteen years later, when Papini disappeared, her grieving family reached out to Smith's
father, Terry, for advice.
Their daughters were now both victims of a similar crime.
When she returned home, Papini spoke to the family and dined with them.
Papini's arrest and the disclosure of her fabrication were disconcerting for Tera's
mother Sierra, who said Papini had to be "sick" and "not well" to make up such a lie.
She called Papini's situation "upsetting," which made it difficult for her to sympathize.
On August 13, 2020, suspecting that Sherri Papini had invented everything, law enforcement
warned her of the consequences of lying to federal agents.
According to the District Attorney's press release of her arrest, a Shasta County detective
and a federal agent presented Papini with evidence that she hadn't been abducted.
But Papini refused to recant her carefully constructed narrative.
In the interview with her husband Keith present, Papini recounted descriptions of her supposed
abductors.
The investigators presented her with a lineup of Hispanic women, but Papini recognized none
of them.
They then presented her with several pictures of her ex-boyfriend's apartment, with several
rooms and objects that matched her prior descriptions.
She claimed she recognized none of it.
When given a picture of his bathroom, she denied it was the same one, saying there was
a crack in the tile where she was held captive.
The investigators then presented her with a photo of the tile crack in the ex-boyfriend's
bathroom, but Papini still denied everything.
It wasn’t until her husband left the room that Papini admitted she had been in contact
with her ex-boyfriend, but she still maintained that she was abducted by two Hispanic women.
Sherri Papini's claims that Hispanic women were behind her kidnapping emboldened doubters.
An old blog post written in 2007 on the now-inoperative website "Skinheadz" began circulating online
since it was authored by someone named Sherri Graeff, Papini's maiden name.
In the post, Graeff describes being attacked by a group of Latinos who called her father
a "Nazi."
Graeff then described herself heroically fighting the group, whose main gripe against Graeff
was that she was,
"drug-free, white, and proud of my blood and heritage."
According to the criminal complaint, the post originally appeared on a MySpace page.
The Shasta County detectives confronted Papini about the post, and she told them she had
previously hired an attorney to try to get it removed.
She called the post "awful" and believed someone else had written it under her name.
Sherry Papini's faked kidnapping cost the California Victim's Compensation Board over
$30,000 in assistance money, which went toward her therapy sessions, "blinds," and her ambulance
trip to the hospital.
Papini applied for the money on November 28, 2016, a few days after she returned home.
She answered the program's questionnaire and detailed her kidnapping under penalty of perjury.
She was awarded 35 payments from January 2017 to March 2021.
To make matters worse, Papini used her family's crowdsourced funds from their GoFundMe campaign
to pay off her credit card debt.
On November 4, 2016, two days after she disappeared, a family friend created the campaign "Help
Find Sherri Papini."
The campaign's page promised that all funds would be used for search efforts to bring
her home safely by "any means necessary."
They managed to raise $49,070.
On December 6, 2016, several days after Papini returned, her husband transferred $31,818
to his and Papini's personal bank accounts, which were then used for credit card debt
and personal expenses.
"So many people, so many resources, so much financial burden, was put out to find this
young lady."
After a long investigation, it was time to bring Papini in.
Law enforcement and officials followed Papini from her home to her children's music lesson.
To separate Papini physically from her children and protect them in case her arrest resulted
in gunfire, Papini was told there was an accident involving her car so she would come out alone.
Once she was outside, an FBI agent told her she was under arrest, to which Papini yelled
"no," ran away, and threw her phone 20 feet away.
Papini didn't manage to escape and was brought into custody.
As a defense for resisting arrest, Papini's attorney said she was merely caught by surprise
and was instinctively trying to protect her children, who were nearby watching.
Shortly after, Papini was released on a $120,000 bond on the conditions of surrendering her
passport, refraining from alcohol, and providing a DNA sample.
She also had to seek psychiatric treatment.
On Monday, April 18, 2022, Sherri Papini pleaded guilty to charges of mail fraud and making
false statements to a federal agent.
She claimed that she was "ashamed" of her behavior and promised to embark on a lifelong
mission to compensate for it.
In her court appearance, Papini revealed that she had been in treatment for anxiety, depression,
and post-traumatic stress disorder since 2016.
She faced a maximum sentence of 25 years in prison and up to $500,000 in fines.
In addition to fines, Papini would have to pay restitution to the various establishments
that helped solve her fake kidnapping.
Once convicted.
she owed $127,000 to the U.S.
Social Security Administration, $148,866 to the Shasta County Sheriff's Office, and $2,558
to the FBI.
"It's just a complete farce for law enforcement and for the nation."
According to former federal prosecutor Neama Rahmani, Papini is likely to receive a sentence
of eight months in federal prison and no significant fines.
If you or someone you know is dealing with domestic abuse, you can call the National
Domestic Violence Hotline at 1−800−799−7233.
You can also find more information, resources, and support at their website.