The Curious Case of Sherri Papini

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Speaker 1 I'm Lester Holt. Tonight on Dateline, new details of the infamous case of California mom Sherry Peppini.
Was she the victim of a harrowing kidnapping or the mastermind of an elaborate hoax?

Speaker 2 Very, very strange circumstances. Her hands shackled and her hair had been chopped off.

Speaker 3 It appeared that she had been tortured, branded.

Speaker 1 I've never seen a victim act like she acted that day.

Speaker 1 Tonight, inside this baffling case. Can you tell me more about what state she was in? She was crying, she was screaming, a lot of injuries, bruises on top of bruises.

Speaker 1 Investigators speak out in depth for the first time. Did she tell you how she got the brand? She did.
Two female captors came into the room, held her down against a table.

Speaker 1 She described the pain, the burning, the crackling, and the smells. You don't think people are capable of stuff like this.
You see this and you go, no, this could not be true.

Speaker 2 The Sherry Papini case is taking us on a very twisty, windy, bumpy road.

Speaker 1 Here's Keith Morrison with the curious case of Sherry Papini.

Speaker 1 How in the world did she get here?

Speaker 1 Her name is Sherry Pepini.

Speaker 1 And tonight you'll hear it all. Both the story she told and the truth.
This whole case has been about calculated deception, lies, and misdirection.

Speaker 1 A mind-bending mystery that would take years to solve. And they did.

Speaker 1 Have you ever heard such a thing in your life before? Not even kind of.

Speaker 1 With details that are revealing for the first time.

Speaker 1 There's a chain around her waist and she was zip-tied to the chain. He would shoot hockey pucks off of her legs and shins.
He was willing to do anything for her.

Speaker 1 Sherry Peppini was the victim, so we heard, of a terrible crime.

Speaker 5 So I'm like totally freaking out thinking like somebody like WhatsApp grabbed her.

Speaker 1 Snatched from her home. Her family.

Speaker 6 We didn't know if there was a predator in the area. It was a really scary time.

Speaker 1 A whole city on edge as detectives hunted for a criminal. Everyone was suspect.

Speaker 1 Then, three weeks later, voila, battered and bruised, but back. We are very ecstatic to report that Sherry Papini has been located.
Lucky to be alive. Or so it seemed.

Speaker 2 And they started to let us get a trickle of her side of the story and how they chopped off her hair. And it sounded like a terrifying experience.

Speaker 1 Big news in town.

Speaker 2 Any story with the word Sherry Papini in the headline was the top story for weeks.

Speaker 1 She offered clues and the investigation got bigger. She knew what she was doing here.
All leading to this remarkable moment outside a federal courthouse.

Speaker 1 It was almost five and a half years ago when the world first heard the name Sherry Papini, her sudden disappearance, her miraculous reappearance, how terrible the suffering she endured, and how worthy of the flood of sympathy that followed.

Speaker 1 It was quite a story.

Speaker 1 But the real story?

Speaker 1 That was as twisted as they come.

Speaker 1 November 2nd, 2016, was a clear, cool day in the northern California city of Reading.

Speaker 1 Not a cloud to block the view of Mount Shasta off in the distance. A perfect day to get outside, take a walk, maybe a run.

Speaker 1 Then, at 5.51 p.m.

Speaker 1 Simon 1, what did you see? The caller was Keith Papini, father of two and Sherry Papini's husband of seven years.

Speaker 5 I just got home from work, and my wife wasn't there, which is unusual. And my kids should have been there by now from like daycare.
So I was like, oh, maybe she went on a walk.

Speaker 1 Sergeant Kyle Wallace and Captain Brian Jackson are Shasta County Sheriff's Detectives. What were the details of it as you first heard them that evening back in 2016? Keith Papini arrived home.

Speaker 1 Sherry's car was in the driveway. He walked in the house, just assuming the kids and Sherry were in the house.
He couldn't find them.

Speaker 1 He started looking around, calling their names throughout the property. He wasn't overly concerned at first.
He was going to just wait for them to come home if they were on a walk.

Speaker 1 After that time had passed, he got a little more worried.

Speaker 5 So I called the daycare to see what time she picked up the kids. The kids were never picked up, so I got freaked out.
So I hit like the find my phone app thing

Speaker 5 and it said that her, it showed her phone like at our end of our driveway.

Speaker 1 The end of the Papini's driveway is the intersection of Sunrise Drive and Old Oregon Trail. Keith drove down looking for Sherry's phone.
Got out of the car, found the phone in the bushes.

Speaker 1 Badger was some concern.

Speaker 5 I just drove down there and I saw her phone with her headphones because she started running again.

Speaker 1 The phone was playing a song on repeat, Everything by Michael Boble. It had been the Papini's wedding song.
And something was tangled up in her earbuds.

Speaker 5 It's got like hair ripped out of it, like in the headphones.

Speaker 1 It looked like Sherry's earbuds were ripped from her, her blonde hair along with them.

Speaker 1 Kelly Sam of NBC affiliate Action News Now in Chico, California, reported on Sherry Papini's disappearance from the beginning.

Speaker 8 We had a few clues.

Speaker 2 You know, we had the phone on the side of the road and those few strands of hair. Usually when you deal with these missing person reports, you don't have a clue like that.
Sure.

Speaker 2 So it was unique in that sense, and I think that's what made it so intriguing.

Speaker 1 It was exactly the kind of clue that terrifies a husband.

Speaker 5 So I'm like totally freaking out thinking like somebody like, what's her grabbed her?

Speaker 1 And that's when he called you guys, or called the police anyway.

Speaker 1 Yes. Keith's mom went to pick up the kids from daycare as detectives made their way to the scene.
The case, just then, was wide open.

Speaker 1 Well, this could be anything, right? I mean, it's also how

Speaker 1 a lot of murder cases get started. You know, somebody supposedly is missing, they find a cell phone, the husband calls in all freaked out, and then something else turns out to be the cause of it all.

Speaker 1 Did you have to look at other possibilities like that? So when we got called out, we just tried to figure out and look at it.

Speaker 1 You start broad until you can start getting some answers to some of those questions. But of course, they had no idea what was coming.
Did they?

Speaker 1 When we come back, the all-out search for Sherry. She is considered missing and at risk.
Every possibility was always on the table.

Speaker 2 They said she was a wonderful wife. This was someone who would not leave willingly.

Speaker 1 What was the state of their marriage? Everybody had an opinion on what their relationship was.

Speaker 1 They called her Supermom, Sherry Papini, devoted wife, doting mother.

Speaker 10 In every story that we heard, she's a great mom. She's physically fit.

Speaker 1 She likes to jog. She lived practically her whole life in Reading from birth through high school to the day she disappeared.
Sherry knew Keith Papini since childhood. They even kissed in junior high.

Speaker 1 In a blog leading up to their wedding, Sherry gushed about her fiancé. Keith, she wrote, continues to surprise me.

Speaker 1 He continues to do little things that light me up and make me grow more and more in love with him. They married in 2009.
Photo after romantic photo.

Speaker 2 There were those beautiful family photos. Sherry Papini, I think, looked to a lot of folks like the girl next door.
She was very relatable. People thought that could be my sister.

Speaker 1 So when Sherry vanished, her family reached out to local newsrooms and sent those enchanting photos.

Speaker 2 Family or friends that emailed our newsroom with a picture, a couple pictures saying Sherry Papini, age, height, weight,

Speaker 2 went missing on an afternoon jog. And this is not like her.

Speaker 8 You don't realize that it could happen to your family?

Speaker 1 Sherry's sister, Sheila, made a public plea for help.

Speaker 11 I hope to bring her home. I would just love her to come home to her family.

Speaker 1 And overnight, carried by those lovely photos, it all went viral. Elizabeth Parker has lived in the area on and off for 25 years.
And she said talk of Sherry's disappearance was everywhere.

Speaker 6 I heard about it from social media that Sherry Papini was missing and

Speaker 6 then the local news stations. And then shortly thereafter, it was national news.
It was

Speaker 6 all everybody could talk about.

Speaker 1 Far, far beyond Reading.

Speaker 6 The desperate search for a missing Shasta County mother continues tonight.

Speaker 1 Sherry's girl next door image helped generate intense interest in her disappearance. A GoFundMe page was set up to help Keith.
It was flooded with money, $49,000 all told.

Speaker 1 Neighbors and strangers came out to search, including Trudy Nickens of the Nor-Cal Alliance for the Missing.

Speaker 10 I have five daughters that live in this county and to hear somebody was taken off the side of the road, it's, you know, just

Speaker 10 concerning. We just set up a table and pulled out some maps and started assigning people different areas to search in.

Speaker 1 Meanwhile, detectives sifted through the scant evidence they had. Every possibility was always on the table.
We've checked out every avenue we could.

Speaker 1 For example, they went through the contacts on Sherry's phone and found out that two of them, listed under women's names, were really men, ex-boyfriends. There was also an ex-husband.

Speaker 1 All the men in Cherry's life had to be checked out. Including the husband, I'm assuming.
Absolutely. We talked to Keith at length for several days following November 2nd.

Speaker 1 What was the state of their marriage? Were you able to determine that? Everybody had an opinion on what their relationship was. There was never really any evidence to show that it was a bad marriage.

Speaker 1 Trudy Nickens talked to Keith when she first arrived.

Speaker 10 He just seemed kind of in shock, just like,

Speaker 10 you know, not a lot of emotion, just like couldn't believe it was happening and

Speaker 10 trying to deal with it the best he could.

Speaker 1 Did he take a polygraph? He did.

Speaker 1 Willingly sort of said, yeah, I'll take a polygraph, no problem. He was cooperative.
Everybody was coming out to him saying, you know, the husband's responsible.

Speaker 1 We didn't have to explain to him the circumstances. It allowed him to really just, I want to get my name cleared.
Keith Pepini passed that polygraph, and he had an alibi.

Speaker 1 The ex-husband had an alibi, too. And investigators tracked down ex-boyfriends, went all the way to Michigan to speak to one of them.
because he'd just visited California.

Speaker 1 But neither he nor the others were anywhere near Reading when Sherry Sherry vanished on November 2nd. There was another theory.

Speaker 1 Maybe Sherry just walked away from her life. But the sheriff's office quashed that theory then and there.

Speaker 1 She is considered missing and at risk.

Speaker 2 They said she was a wonderful wife, that she and her husband got along well. And that was pretty consistent from law enforcement.

Speaker 2 They were saying from their conversations with family and friends, this was someone who would not leave willingly.

Speaker 12 Keith Papini was in crisis.

Speaker 1 Cody Salfin is a private investigator Keith hired to help sort through incoming tips, and there were a lot of them. Did you try to track them all down, or was it pretty obvious a lot of them were just

Speaker 1 a lot of them were bogus.

Speaker 12 A lot of people come out of the woodworks.

Speaker 9 There were psychics.

Speaker 12 There were people that said they had dreams about Sherry Papini.

Speaker 1 The mystery of Sherry Papini's disappearance seemed to grow with each passing day, as did local unease, even fear.

Speaker 1 Things were different now in Reading.

Speaker 6 Everybody was on edge. You didn't know if it was someone within the community, if it was an outsider.
We didn't know if it was our neighbor.

Speaker 6 It was probably one of the scariest things for a lot of not only women, but everyone, because it could be your sister, it could be your daughter. We were all just terrified.

Speaker 1 And as the theories multiplied, one chilling coincidence came to the surface.

Speaker 14 The last time anybody saw Tara Smith, it was right here on this remote gravel road.

Speaker 1 Years before, another woman had vanished from Reading.

Speaker 1 A woman who'd gone to the same high school as Sherry.

Speaker 1 And she was not found.

Speaker 1 Not ever.

Speaker 1 What did that portend?

Speaker 1 Coming up.

Speaker 1 Did you consider any possible link between this case and the Tara Smith case? Yeah, it was something that we looked at.

Speaker 15 Outwardly, it seems like there's some similarities. Personally, I thought she was probably gone for good.

Speaker 1 When dateline continues.

Speaker 1 As the citizens of Reading searched for Sherry Papini, Terry and Marilyn Smith saw the news and their hearts were torn open once again. What is it? About their Tara.

Speaker 16 Tara was our oldest.

Speaker 1 She was our firstborn.

Speaker 15 She just loved life. She had a lot of passions and interests.
Her freshman year of high school, she was homecoming queen and arm wrestling champ.

Speaker 1 It's a combination you don't often hear.

Speaker 1 It's amazing.

Speaker 16 Especially at a young age of 16.

Speaker 16 She was also a prolific writer. We have volumes and volumes of her journals.

Speaker 16 She was an interesting soul.

Speaker 1 She loved horses and basketball. Even took up taekwondo.

Speaker 1 Tara was a student at Central Valley High School back then. The same school Sherry Papini attended around the same time.

Speaker 16 They went to the same school, but they were not friends or associated.

Speaker 1 And yet, two attractive women from the same school? were these related disappearances or not?

Speaker 1 It happened to Tara on an August evening in 1998 when she was just 16.

Speaker 15 Tara was grounded that day.

Speaker 1 Do you remember why?

Speaker 1 Why she was grounded?

Speaker 15 I think she had snuck out.

Speaker 15 She wasn't always...

Speaker 15 She wasn't the perfect child by any means. She was kind of impulsive sometimes, didn't always think things through.

Speaker 1 Tara was supposed to head to work at the Smiths Mini Golf business, but she didn't show up.

Speaker 15 So I called home

Speaker 15 and

Speaker 15 her little sister Sierra was here and said that she'd gone jogging.

Speaker 1 Jogging.

Speaker 1 Marilyn drove around looking for Tara. She and Terry called Tara's friends.
Nobody had seen her.

Speaker 15 But later that night, a friend called back and said,

Speaker 15 I think she was having an inappropriate relationship with Troy Zink.

Speaker 1 Troy Zinc, Tara's 29-year-old Taekwondo instructor. Tara had talked to her dad about Troy before.

Speaker 16 She started telling me all these wonderful things that her master Zinc had shared with her.

Speaker 16 And I remember feeling almost a tinge of jealousy, like, wait, there's another adult man in my young daughter's life.

Speaker 16 And I also remember feeling like, maybe there's not, this isn't right.

Speaker 1 After Tara disappeared, Troy Zinc was questioned extensively. He told the police Tara called him at work asking to see him.

Speaker 1 He said when he showed up, she asked him for $2,000.

Speaker 1 He said he told Tara he might lend her the money if he knew what it was for, and she got angry.

Speaker 1 He said he ended up dropping her off an old Oregon Trail, the same road where Sherry Papini's phone was found. And she went jogging.

Speaker 16 He gave us the same story that he dropped her off about a mile and a half half from our house, two miles, three miles from our house, and then had gone up to a hill nearby called Hanglider Hill.

Speaker 16 He says he went up to Hanglider Hill and was praying for the last five hours and had just gotten home. Praying?

Speaker 1 Praying.

Speaker 16 Which...

Speaker 1 For five hours. Right.

Speaker 1 Then, a couple of days after Tara disappeared.

Speaker 16 We were going through her things up in her bedroom and found the letter.

Speaker 1 A letter Tara had written to Troy, telling him she wanted to end their relationship. And you believe that she was going to deliver a version of that letter to him?

Speaker 16 I think originally she had written it all out thinking she would, yeah, either mail it or give it to him in person, and then

Speaker 16 decided she would just tell him in person.

Speaker 1 The Smiths thought Zink must have something to do with Tara's disappearance. And they only became more certain of it when they learned that he had a criminal record.
He had served time for rape.

Speaker 1 Police searched Zinc's martial arts studio and found weapons, a violation of his parole. He was sentenced to four years in prison for that.

Speaker 1 But police never found evidence to prove Zink harmed Tara, and he was never charged. He denies any involvement.
Redding rallied around the Smiths after Tara went missing.

Speaker 1 Vigils and searches went on for months. $20,000 reward, media appearances.
All All of it led nowhere.

Speaker 15 It was a very gradual

Speaker 15 process, realizing she was gone. From the time we lost Tara till about four years, I don't have specific memories.

Speaker 15 It's almost like it was just such an overwhelming part of our consciousness all the time that I didn't have room for any other memories. I felt like I lost

Speaker 15 those years in some ways with our other kids.

Speaker 1 And then

Speaker 1 18 years after Tara vanished. Keith Papini reported his wife, Sherry,

Speaker 1 as a missing person with suspicious circumstances.

Speaker 16 It was major news in our small community. We watched it like everybody else.

Speaker 1 What were the odds? Did you consider any possible link between

Speaker 1 this case and the Tara Smith case? Yeah, it was. something that we looked at.
The detectives checked to see if Troy Zink had an alibi. We were in contact with Troy Zink,

Speaker 1 and he provided us information where he was, which was corroborated, and we moved on from that. What did you think about

Speaker 1 the fact that the comparisons were made?

Speaker 15 Outwardly, it seems like there's some similarities outwardly.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 15 But

Speaker 15 we'd never made a correlation that maybe the same thing that happened to Sherry had happened to Tara.

Speaker 1 But if anyone could understand what the Papini family was going through, it was certainly the Smiths. Keith Papini went to Tara's dad, in fact, looking for support.
And the Smiths were keen to help.

Speaker 1 But they weren't optimistic about Sherry.

Speaker 15 Personally, I thought she was probably gone for good.

Speaker 15 That had been our experience, you know.

Speaker 1 So, you can imagine their surprise. Everyone's surprise at what happened next.

Speaker 1 Coming up.

Speaker 17 We saw this woman frantically and desperately trying to get someone's attention.

Speaker 1 A woman along the highway at an urgent call to 911.

Speaker 1 Could this be Sherry Papini? Sheer terror in her eyes.

Speaker 1 It was early morning, Thanksgiving morning. Dark,

Speaker 1 hours before dawn. Allison Sutton was driving with her daughter along a rural stretch of Interstate 5, 150 miles south of Reading.

Speaker 1 Suddenly, in her headlights, well, let her tell it.

Speaker 7 We saw this woman who was

Speaker 17 almost out in 70 mile an hour traffic. She was so frantically and desperately trying to get someone's attention.

Speaker 1 A woman on foot darting in in and out of freeway traffic.

Speaker 7 If I'd swerved just a little bit,

Speaker 17 I would have hit her with my car.

Speaker 7 I felt like we like locked eyes. It's like I caught her gaze for this, and there's just like sheer terror in her eyes.

Speaker 17 Those eyes just like haunted me for a very long time.

Speaker 1 Allison pulled over, called 911.

Speaker 17 If I just said, you know, there's this woman on the side of Interstate 5 and she obviously needs help.

Speaker 1 Allison didn't know it then, but the terrified woman on the highway was the same one who had been making national headlines, Sherry Papini.

Speaker 1 In this security cam video from a church parking lot, you can see Sherry just moments before she was spotted by Allison running across the blacktop, all alone.

Speaker 1 Back in Reading, Shasta County Sheriff's investigators had been searching for Sherry for 22 days straight. This was their first day off.
Kyle Wallace was asleep when his phone rang.

Speaker 1 It was Sherry's husband, Keith Papini.

Speaker 1 Keith called me about four o'clock in the morning. He was frantic,

Speaker 1 was yelling, saying that Sherry had been found.

Speaker 1 Very, very excited.

Speaker 1 And at that point, I didn't know if he was being tricked. A reasonable suspicion.
The massive search for Sherry had come up empty. What were the odds she would just turn up?

Speaker 1 YOLO on Northbound 95. But by then, Highway Patrol was on the scene and it appeared this was no trick.

Speaker 1 She is heavily battered. When Detectives Jackson and Wallace arrived, they finally laid eyes on Sherry Papini.
She was

Speaker 1 very emotional, upset, crying. Gone was the woman from those beautiful photos.
Sherry's long blonde hair was chopped short. She looked frail and bruised and battered.
And more.

Speaker 1 When she was initially found on the side of I-5, she had been chained. There was a chain around her waist and she was zip-tied to the chain.

Speaker 1 How badly was she bruised? Extreme. The bruises were, you know, different stages of healing, you know, the different colors that occurred during the bruise.

Speaker 1 As if this has happened over the whole period of time. Legs, arms, back.
So it was

Speaker 1 pretty significant. And that wasn't all.
She had a brand.

Speaker 1 A brand burned into the skin of her right shoulder.

Speaker 1 In what shape? It was still in the process of healing.

Speaker 1 So it was still scabbed. It was still healing.
It was obvious Sherry had suffered horribly, but she was alive.

Speaker 6 We all woke up on Thanksgiving morning to the news that Sherry's been found and she's alive and a little worse for the wear, but she was safe and returning home to Shasta County.

Speaker 1 The citizens of Reading, the hundreds who had contributed and searched and prayed for Sherry Papini's safe return, were ecstatic.

Speaker 10 I got on to the phone with my team and we're just like, yeah, you know, praise God, all right, she's been found

Speaker 10 and she's alive, and this is great. And,

Speaker 10 you know, everybody celebrated for Thanksgiving, and it was just, wow, such a blessed day.

Speaker 1 A Thanksgiving Day miracle.

Speaker 1 Bittersweet for Tara Smith's parents.

Speaker 15 It was extreme happiness one second and then extreme just like crashing

Speaker 15 because we didn't.

Speaker 15 It sounds so selfish, but we didn't get our happy ending. It just seemed like, oh, some people get that happy ending and we didn't.

Speaker 1 Sherry's sister Sheila spoke to the press after Sherry's return.

Speaker 4 Keith and Sherry only have one statement at this time.

Speaker 4 We are overwhelmed with joy of how supportive everyone has been to help bring us together as a family again.

Speaker 1 Sheriff Basenko vowed that his investigators would find the people responsible. They are still devoted to the case and will not rest until her captor or captors is identified and brought to justice.

Speaker 1 Of course, the investigators wanted answers and urgently. But as they soon found out, answers would not be so easy to find.

Speaker 1 Coming up, beatings and branding. She described the pain of the burning, the crackling, and the smells.
Heart-wrenching new details, but a hesitation to reveal them.

Speaker 1 She said that law enforcement was involved in her abduction. How did that strike you? Struck us as odd.
When dateline continues.

Speaker 1 When Sherry Papini turned up on the side of the road as suddenly as she had disappeared three weeks earlier, detectives knew time was of the essence.

Speaker 1 It seemed clear she had been assaulted, which meant they were looking for violent criminals. They needed Sherry to tell them who hurt her, but Sherry did not want to talk to the police.

Speaker 1 She She was hesitant at first, like a mistrust of law enforcement. At first, it wasn't clear why.
We couldn't get anything out of her at that point.

Speaker 1 We needed to calm down the situation the best we could. So Keith came into the room because at that point we weren't able to interview her based on her emotional state.

Speaker 1 With investigators present, Keith Papini interviewed his wife about what happened the day she went out for a jog on old Oregon Trail and didn't come back.

Speaker 1 Sherry Sherry told a harrowing story. She said that she was on a run in her neighborhood initially when an unknown type SUV drove in front of her, turned around,

Speaker 1 came back and she was confronted by two Hispanic females, one of which had a handgun, ordered her into the vehicle.

Speaker 1 Sherry said she complied,

Speaker 1 got into the car, and

Speaker 1 they drove her to an unknown destination.

Speaker 1 Terrified the whole time, I'm assuming, right?

Speaker 1 Correct.

Speaker 1 In subsequent interviews, Sherry opened up more, much more.

Speaker 1 This document filed in federal court summarizes her account, which detectives Wallace and Jackson are talking about in detail for the first time. Some parts of Sherry's story were crystal clear.

Speaker 1 For example, about that eye-catching clue Sherry's hair wrapped up with her earbuds. She later told us she was told by the captors to

Speaker 1 throw her phone. So she intentionally grabbed the hair and plucked the hairs out as she took the earbuds out because she said that would leave a message to Keith that something happened to her.

Speaker 1 But Sherry said she couldn't tell them much about the car ride with her kidnappers. Sherry said that a mask was put over her head or a bag of some sort.

Speaker 1 put over the back of her head and then she was placed in the back seat of the vehicle. You know, it was a sunny day.

Speaker 1 She recalled seeing what she believed was the passing of trees because of the changes of the color and light. As far as providing us a real good depiction of the vehicle, she did a poor job at that.

Speaker 1 What could she tell you about where she was taken? So she described the location of a rural location and cold.

Speaker 1 She almost described it as mountainous.

Speaker 1 She said they came off of a paved road onto a dirt driveway behind a gate.

Speaker 1 She described having to walk upstairs to get into the main residence and then being placed in a room that she described as a raised foundational house, almost like a modular home type.

Speaker 1 The details she offered painted a picture of a room that looked something like this. Sherry said her kidnappers put her in different clothes, but kept her in her own underwear.

Speaker 1 A point that would matter a lot later.

Speaker 1 Then these women, one of them particularly cruel, she said, cut off most of her long blonde hair and told Sherry she was going to send it to her mother.

Speaker 1 They let her shower, but only fed her once a day, she said. Rice or tortillas, sometimes apples.
She looked emanciated, yes.

Speaker 1 A lot of her bones were sticking out on her, like collarbones sticking out, shoulders really defined.

Speaker 1 Looked like she was starving. Yes.
Yes.

Speaker 1 Sherry said she tried to escape by ripping a a board off a window.

Speaker 1 And for that, she said her abductors punished her by keeping her in a closet, chained by her waist to a metal pole, a bucket filled with kitty litter for a toilet.

Speaker 1 She said those women hit her in the back and tied her to a table and branded her. She described the pain, the burning, the crackling, the smells.

Speaker 1 And the reason she was afraid to reveal all this to the cops. She said that law enforcement was involved in her abduction.
Sherry said the kidnappers told her your buyer is a cop. The idea that she

Speaker 1 didn't want to talk to you because some cops were behind her abduction or wanted to buy her or something. I mean, how did that strike you? Struck us as odd.

Speaker 1 Anything is possible in this world, unfortunately.

Speaker 1 So it's something that you have to investigate, look into to see if there's any validity to it. And then one day, Sherry said she heard the women arguing in Spanish.
She heard a gunshot.

Speaker 1 And after a long time, one of her kidnappers came to get her and threw a pillowcase over her head, put her back in the SUV,

Speaker 1 and dumped her on the side of Interstate 5. Branded, bruised, battered, but not sexually assaulted, said Sherry.

Speaker 1 She's always claimed that there was no sexual misconduct. She was never a victim of any sexual assault or sexual activity during her time away.

Speaker 1 They sent Sherry's clothes to the crime lab to test for DNA.

Speaker 1 And later, Cherry spoke with a forensic interviewer from the FBI.

Speaker 1 And whenever something spurred a memory, she would reach out to myself or the FBI

Speaker 1 and bring up information that if she recalled something specific.

Speaker 1 Like that table she said she was branded on. So she described the table as like a coffee coffee table, so short legs one or two feet high off the ground.

Speaker 1 She said the tile was a fake, which provided like a specific description of the table that she said that she was placed on.

Speaker 1 Many months later, Keith Papini found a picture of a table that Sherry said was similar to the one she was branded on and sent it to investigators.

Speaker 1 I think Keith was trying to be as helpful as he could. But none of those leads went anywhere.

Speaker 1 As the weeks, the months slipped by, local and federal investigators seemed no closer to finding Sherry's kidnapped person. How did she seem to be adjusting post-return? I think it was pretty a slow,

Speaker 1 she wasn't going out in the public much, she was staying inside the house. Not long after Sherry turned up, the Smiths invited the Papinis over for dinner.

Speaker 1 This is the first time they're telling the story publicly.

Speaker 16 It seemed very obvious that she had been through some traumatic stuff.

Speaker 15 She was very emotional. Keith was very emotional.

Speaker 15 She was almost like shaky, a little unsteady talking about it or just very uncomfortable even being,

Speaker 15 just even existing.

Speaker 16 She needed to use the restroom at one point

Speaker 16 and she

Speaker 16 from claustrophobia that was linked to her being held against her will in a room apparently. She had her husband accompany her into the restroom.
and kind of, you know, just standing guard.

Speaker 1 And while Sherry was recounting the horrific details of her kidnapping a ring came off of her finger and fell on the floor she recovered the ring and essentially said that she had lost so much weight that her her rings won't stay on her hand anymore you must have had some empathy for her then as she uh was at your house for dinner talking about what they were going through absolutely a few days after she was found on the highway Sherry applied for and received victims assistance.

Speaker 1 In In her application, she said she was kidnapped at gunpoint, and she further declared, under penalty of perjury, that all the information I have provided is true, correct, and complete.

Speaker 1 The state paid for therapy for the next five years and paid for blinds to be installed at Sherry's home, presumably to keep prying eyes out.

Speaker 1 But nothing could stop the questions that were starting to swirl around Sherry Papini.

Speaker 1 Coming up, doubts creep in.

Speaker 3 So they couldn't take her to the bathroom, but they could take her to shower?

Speaker 1 Was Sherry's story adding up?

Speaker 1 After Sherry Peppini's miraculous return home to Reading, the community breathed a sigh of relief, followed almost immediately by questions from people like local resident Elizabeth Parker.

Speaker 6 Personally, I was skeptical of this story. Just to happen to appear on the side of the road out of nowhere on Thanksgiving of all days, it just seemed like it was written for television, honestly.

Speaker 1 And TV reporter Kelly Sam.

Speaker 2 It was very, very strange circumstances of why would someone leave her along the interstate if you'd kept her for three weeks? Why that morning?

Speaker 2 And why in those circumstances would you suddenly decide to release her?

Speaker 2 So there were more questions than really answers at that point, because now we want to hear from Sherry herself of what happened.

Speaker 1 Did she speak?

Speaker 2 No, she did not.

Speaker 1 Of course, Sherry had every reason to lock herself in her home given what she'd been through.

Speaker 1 The police weren't talking either. But from the earliest days of the investigation, detectives had

Speaker 1 heard things.

Speaker 1 Every person had a different opinion of Sherry that we talked to. All of her close friends, all of her acquaintances, every person had a different

Speaker 1 view of Sherry or Sherry portrayed herself different to each one of those friends. Did anyone say that she had been habitually a liar?

Speaker 1 I wouldn't say that like habitual. I think there were some stories that came out of like tall tales, some misrepresentations of truths.

Speaker 1 Small-town gossip? Maybe.

Speaker 1 But there were also the incident reports Sherry's family filed with the Shasta County Sheriff's Office in the early 2000s. The reports are very brief.

Speaker 1 No charges were filed, but family members told police Sherry vandalized property. broke into her sister's home, took money from her father's checking account without his permission.

Speaker 1 And there was this.

Speaker 1 An incident report from 2003 filed by Sherry's mother said a then 21-year-old Sherry had been harming herself and blaming it on her mother.

Speaker 1 It does cause you to

Speaker 1 have a little bit of doubt, but you always make those little mental notes about, well, that information was a little weird. Liz Thompson is a former homicide unit supervisor in Albuquerque.

Speaker 1 She didn't work on the Papini case, but she got hooked on it anyway because of her lifelong obsession with human psychology.

Speaker 1 When Thompson reviewed the court documents related to the case, her 20 years as an investigator told her that some parts of Sherry's story just didn't make sense.

Speaker 1 Like that clue Sherry said she left by the side of the road.

Speaker 3 You're going through the steps of pulling out your own hair, placing it on the earbuds, and then placing the phone down. That seems like a lot to be going on while you're being held at gunpoint.

Speaker 1 And while she was in the back of the car, Sherry told investigators, her hands were zip-tied behind her back.

Speaker 3 But then she talked about chewing through the zip ties.

Speaker 1 With them behind her back.

Speaker 3 She could not explain how she got her hands to the front to then chew through zip ties.

Speaker 1 Didn't add up.

Speaker 1 Neither did this.

Speaker 1 Sherry said the kidnappers allowed her to take showers,

Speaker 1 but made her use kitty litter for a toilet.

Speaker 3 So they couldn't take her to the bathroom, but they could take her to shower?

Speaker 1 And then there was the branding.

Speaker 1 At one point, Sherry said it was punishment for trying to escape. But another, it was punishment for making too much noise.

Speaker 1 And she gave a third reason.

Speaker 3 The buyer,

Speaker 3 the person who was purchasing her, liked that and wanted that.

Speaker 1 And while Sherry said she couldn't see what they used to brand her, she also said she thought it might have been a crafting tool. It wasn't a drastic change of story.

Speaker 1 It was maybe a new detail here or there. But there was never anything that made us jump up and down and say it is or it wasn't true.

Speaker 1 Later, in an interview with the FBI, Sherry asked what investigators thought the brand said, even though she already seemed to know it was a word, Exodus.

Speaker 3 She thought that it was from the Bible, but it was confusing.

Speaker 3 And I find it interesting that Exodus is about

Speaker 3 the rescue or the liberation of the Israelites from slavery.

Speaker 1 One thing Sherry was confident about. Her description of her captors, two Hispanic women.
But that, that tweaked someone's memory. And from there came a huge flood of controversy.

Speaker 1 Coming up, new sketches of the alleged captors. We received quite a few tips.
People saw two females that looked similar to the sketches. And a surprise from the DNA lab.
The results?

Speaker 1 Not at all what investigators expected. When Dateline continues.

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Speaker 1 Throughout their investigation, Detectives Jackson and Wallace struggled to get information out of Sherry Sherry Papini. She seemed frightened, traumatized.

Speaker 1 The tales were hazy, but she was always clear about the description of her kidnappers. Hispanic females, one younger, one older.

Speaker 1 She stated the younger Hispanic female came out with a handgun, put her at gunpoint, and forced her into the vehicle. Hispanic females.
The description went far and wide.

Speaker 1 And just days after Sherry reappeared, it also became a flashpoint when someone on social media discovered this.

Speaker 1 Did you read this blog post called Keep Walking? Yes, we did.

Speaker 1 It was reportedly written in 2003, designed by a Sherry Graff.

Speaker 1 Graff was Sherry's maiden name. It told the story of a white woman bullied by Hispanic women because of her race.

Speaker 1 The chief problem was that I was drug-free, white, and proud of my blood and heritage. This really irked a group of Latino girls which would constantly rag and attack me.
She concluded, writing,

Speaker 1 Being white is more than just being aware of my skin, but of standing behind skinheads and having pride for my country.

Speaker 1 There was never anything we could say that she actually wrote when we talked to her. We couldn't confirm that that's the Sherry Graf or that's the one in the same person.

Speaker 2 She denied those things and said someone had posed under her name and that she had hired an attorney to get those posts taken down off social media.

Speaker 1 Nevertheless, when the blog post hit the news, it raised uncomfortable questions.

Speaker 26 When our country is so divided racially, it's a problem.

Speaker 1 Nima Romani is a former federal prosecutor. And he said the story told in the blog post is uncomfortably similar to the one Sherry told about her abduction.

Speaker 27 This young, attractive white woman that really captured the country's attention, she She is blaming members of a minority group for kidnapping and torturing her.

Speaker 1 Which only added more pressure to solve the case. What the detectives needed desperately was some hard evidence.
And then suddenly, in early 2017, there it was.

Speaker 1 Working on that case for so long and just hitting roadblocks, and then we get the DNA

Speaker 1 was huge for us. The crime lab had found foreign DNA on Sherry's body and her clothing.
There wasn't much of it and they weren't sure how it got there. It was a transfer type of DNA.

Speaker 1 It wasn't just something that you could swab. And that's another oddity of this case.
Nothing was easy. The DNA was from two individuals who were not Sherry Paffini.
One sample was seriously degraded.

Speaker 1 That DNA was a partial profile, and so we were only limited to run that locally in the state database, and there was no connection. But the other DNA sample was strong.

Speaker 1 Criminalists had to compile it and put it together to show that complete DNA structure. Complete enough to give these detectives some hope.
It was a piece of information that was tangible.

Speaker 1 You know, we could put it in the combined DNA index system, or CODIS, and hopefully get... the person identified, which would then push us to the next stage.

Speaker 1 CODIS is a huge database of DNA profiles maintained by law enforcement. If Sherry's kidnappers had been convicted or even arrested before, they could well be in it.
It was an exciting time for us.

Speaker 1 I remember talking with Kyle and waiting for us to get a hit on that DNA. It took a few days to get the results back.

Speaker 1 No match. That's frustrating.
Immediate high in the beginning, and then about a week or so later, we have a low. CODIS is constantly updated, so their search would be rerun once a week.

Speaker 1 But for now, the DNA was a dead end, at least when it came to identifying a suspect. But there was something else very significant about the DNA.

Speaker 1 That degraded sample, the one they couldn't match, came from a woman. The other sample found on her underwear came from a man, and it did not match her husband.

Speaker 1 Male DNA in somebody's underwear does tend to be somewhat suggestive, but... It could definitely cause a person to have pause about it.
I will agree with you.

Speaker 1 Especially when she was abducted, she said, by two women. Welcome to our investigation.
Remember, Sherry told investigators that two women took her. No man was involved at any point.

Speaker 1 And she was not sexually assaulted. So how to explain that male DNA? Detectives Wallace and Jackson had to navigate the investigation carefully.

Speaker 1 The last thing we want to do is to shut her down and confront her if we don't have everything in order because then she's never going to talk with us again.

Speaker 1 There was a lot of things that weren't right. We just didn't quite know what it was at the time, and we were going to get to the bottom of it.
There was another good reason to tread lightly.

Speaker 1 In 2015, a few hours south of Reading in Vallejo, California, a woman named Denise Huskins told police she was kidnapped and later returned. And investigators declared that a hoax almost immediately.

Speaker 1 Police say she lied about her own kidnapping. They were wrong.

Speaker 1 Denise Huskins' abduction had been all too real.

Speaker 1 It was a case that made for world headlines and widespread condemnation of the Vallejo Police Department. That was a black eye.
Yeah, black eye for everybody.

Speaker 1 Here's the current sheriff of Shasta County, Michael Johnson.

Speaker 1 Every case like that contributes to why we're so thorough and careful and make sure that we do it right because one, that's not fair to a true victim. And two,

Speaker 1 part of professionalism law enforcement and integrity rests upon the fact that we should be vetting out all those things in october 2017 nearly a year after sherry disappeared the shasta county sheriff's office finally put out a press release about the dna results while at the same time saying they had no reason to doubt sherry's story They also released these sketches made by the FBI based on Sherry's description of her captors, the notorious Hispanic females.

Speaker 1 The sketches that Sherry provided, what came of those things? Were there tips out of them? We received quite a few tips.

Speaker 1 People would report that they saw two females that looked similar to the sketches at a Walmart in whatever city. They seemed quote-unquote weird to the reporting party.

Speaker 1 And then there was nothing ever really concrete.

Speaker 1 After that, nothing.

Speaker 1 No press releases, no statements, silence.

Speaker 10 When something like that public

Speaker 10 happens

Speaker 10 and then you just kind of shut the story down with no conclusion, of course everybody's going to start going, whoa, what happened? Why aren't we getting answers?

Speaker 1 After organizing the search when Sherry was missing, Judy Nickens was starting to have doubts about Sherry's story.

Speaker 10 Personally,

Speaker 10 You know, when I just sitting down and discussing the story with people, a couple of colleagues felt almost shunned. Like, how dare I question the story?

Speaker 10 How dare I think that there might have been a different scenario happening? The majority of the public, I believe, believe that she was taken off the side of the road.

Speaker 1 Shasta County detectives and the FBI had nothing to say publicly about the Sherry Papini case. But behind closed doors was a very different story.

Speaker 1 Coming up, a solid lead at last from that male DNA. Sherry Papini's mystery man is about to get a knock on the door.
He wasn't ready for us. It'll be the easiest way to put it.

Speaker 1 He was scared and shocked that we were there.

Speaker 1 Veteran detectives Brian Jackson and Kyle Wallace were determined to crack the Sherry Papini case. We had a goal, and the goal was to find the abductors and to get this case solved.

Speaker 1 They had the kind of evidence that often solves cases. The male DNA found on Sherry's underwear, but without a hit in CODIS, there wasn't much they could do with it.
That is,

Speaker 1 until April 24th, 2018.

Speaker 1 The mystery surrounding an infamous killing spree that shook California and confounded investigators for decades may have just ended.

Speaker 1 The notorious Golden State serial killer was one of the first major cases to be cracked using forensic genealogy, so-called familiar DNA, that taps DNA profiles stored in massive publicly available databases.

Speaker 1 How did the Golden State killer case affect law enforcement around the country?

Speaker 3 So dramatically, just a game changer.

Speaker 1 Detectives Wallace and Jackson figured maybe we should try this familial DNA thing. I know that some people were saying, well, why didn't you do that sooner?

Speaker 1 You know, there's benchmarks in an investigation that you have to reach. Eventually, they got the California Department of Justice to approve a familial DNA search.

Speaker 1 It was a slow process.

Speaker 1 But then, on March 19th, 2020, Three years and four months after Sherry Papini weirdly appeared along Interstate 5, there was a hit on a family member of the man whose DNA they recovered from Sherry's underwear.

Speaker 1 Which led us to several possibilities of people it may or may not be.

Speaker 1 One of those possibilities was an amateur hockey goalie who lived in Costa Mesa, California and managed the skate store at an ice rink.

Speaker 1 His name was James Reyes.

Speaker 1 Tell me about this guy. I think the easiest way to describe him is just like a burnout, burnout, essentially.

Speaker 1 He played hockey every day or majority of his days off, single guy, just living that glory days life, I think is the easiest way to describe it. Friends described Reyes as the nicest guy in the world.

Speaker 1 Could he really be involved in Sherry Papini's disappearance? The detectives had to be sure, so they traveled to Costa Mesa and they staked out, of all things, his trash can.

Speaker 3 So detectives will follow people, they'll see that they've discarded some trash.

Speaker 1 And is that what happened?

Speaker 3 Yeah. They were able to identify a green tea bottle that he had drank from.
So they were able to get his DNA from the bottle.

Speaker 1 What do you know? The DNA on the bottle was a perfect match to the DNA on Sherry's underwear.

Speaker 1 Somehow, James Reyes was involved, after all.

Speaker 1 As the detectives dug deeper into Reyes' life, they would discover he was connected to Sherry by more than DNA. The two had history.

Speaker 3 They had known each other since they were in their early teens.

Speaker 3 They had been boyfriend and girlfriend. He said that they had actually been engaged to each other.

Speaker 1 They called it quits in 2006.

Speaker 1 So why had Reyes suddenly appeared in Sherry's life nine years after they split up?

Speaker 1 I I was getting a little more excited to try to figure out how he was involved now that I knew that they had a previous relationship. Wallace and an FBI agent went to Reyes' duplex to find out.

Speaker 1 Myself, the LA field office of FBI, and then a local agent just contacted him at his residence on a cold knock. What did the boyfriend look like when

Speaker 1 A couple of cops arrived at the door? He was shocked. He wasn't ready for us.
It would be the easiest way to put it. He was scared and shocked that we were there.
At first, he wasn't exactly chatty.

Speaker 1 He wanted to limit what he was saying, which is common for these types of investigations. So initially, it was a lot of just the try to break him.

Speaker 1 But eventually, James Reyes began to talk. It started in December 2015.
said James, when he was cleaning his home and stumbled on some of Sherry's things. He packed them up and sent them off.

Speaker 1 He mailed some stuff to her parents' place or something, and then she contacted him. Yes, which started the conversations, text messages, phone calls.

Speaker 1 Sherry called first, said James. He was at work at the skate store.
He told detectives Sherry said she was in trouble. What was his explanation for why he helped her in the first place?

Speaker 1 He was a friend. Yeah, he was a friend.
She called him in need.

Speaker 1 It was her marriage. She described that she was in an abusive relationship with Keith,

Speaker 1 that she needed to get away. She needed his help.
If he was going to help her, he said, she told him, they'd need to talk in secret. Sherry was the person who told him to go get

Speaker 1 a minute-by-minute phone.

Speaker 1 A burner phone. Sherry got one too, he said.
Sherry eventually used the mail to send him the plan. So he got a care package with the instructions on how she wanted him to get there.

Speaker 1 The plan was for James to drive 600 miles from his home in Costa Mesa to Reading to rescue Sherry. James had to find a friend to rent him a car for him so the rental car wasn't in his name.

Speaker 1 After driving all the way to Reading James got breakfast at a Trader Joe's and then waited outside a Starbucks for a text message from Sherry on his prepaid phone.

Speaker 1 It was November 2nd, 2016.

Speaker 1 When James told the story to detectives, he couldn't quite remember the name of the road where Sherry told him to pick her up. Old something, he said.
Old Oregon Trail.

Speaker 1 Then, driving down the dusty road, he spotted a sweaty Sherry in running clothes. And then he picked her up beside the road.
They left the cell phone by the road, and that's how the whole thing began.

Speaker 1 That's how it kicked off.

Speaker 1 After Sherry ditched her cell phone and earbuds, she lay flat on the back seat, barely saying a word, as Reyes drove all the way back to Costa Mesa and settled her at his apartment.

Speaker 1 When they got back to his place, did he say what he thought would happen or what did happen?

Speaker 1 He didn't know what was going to happen on the relationship, and he didn't know what was going to happen the next day. He didn't know what was going to happen the next hour.

Speaker 1 But what did happen?

Speaker 1 Remember when we said twisted

Speaker 1 coming up. That bizarre branding.
Did it come at Sherry's request? She wanted him to go specifically to like a hobby lobby and to get a like a wood burning kit or a wood carving kit.

Speaker 1 He said she just laid there, tightened her back, and he

Speaker 1 conducted the brand. When dateline continues.

Speaker 1 To hear James Reyes tell it, he was rescuing Sherry Papini.

Speaker 1 His story was that after a clandestine meeting arranged on burner phones, he drove nearly 10 hours to bring her to his home in Southern California. Everything was normal when they first got there.

Speaker 1 She asked to be in a specific room, so he had to move all of the furniture out of the room that she wanted. He said, Well, Sherry hid out in her chosen room, he tried to go about business as usual.

Speaker 1 He continued to go to work, went to all of his hockey games.

Speaker 1 He came home to discover Sherry had transformed his apartment.

Speaker 1 He said with the first couple of days, she did a deep cleaning of his apartment, went from a bachelor lifestyle house to a house that was very clean. Wow.

Speaker 1 Did he tell you that he was waiting for the romance to begin? If the relationship took back off, I think he was absolutely willing to continue that romantic relationship.

Speaker 1 But according to James, that didn't happen. He said she slept in his bed.
He slept on the couch. We were able to confirm that there was no sexual activity.

Speaker 1 If his DNA was on Sherry's clothing, it must have gotten there some other way.

Speaker 1 She could have handed him a pile of clothes and he'd take them off to the washing machine and then hand them back to her after and he left his DNA on her underwear. Is that possibly how it got there?

Speaker 1 That is probably one of the higher probabilities of what that DNA had been originated from. She was able to get the transfer from being in his house,

Speaker 1 sleeping in his bed. Action News Now reporter Avisha Scarborough visited those volunteers today and also spoke with the missing woman's family.

Speaker 1 As the storm of news about Sherry's disappearance raged across the country, James said he told family and friends to keep their distance, while Sherry followed news about their frantic search for her on her own burner phone.

Speaker 1 She stayed inside the apartment the entire time. She would ask him to go get certain stuff throughout her stay there.

Speaker 1 Inside James's home, things were getting stranger. He was day to day with Sherry, waiting for what was going to happen next.

Speaker 1 Within a week, he told police, Sherry had cut off her own hair. And while he provided plenty of good food, he said, she put herself on prison-type rations.

Speaker 1 losing weight to the point she looked emaciated. He claimed she banged her head on the bathtub and bathroom floor.
Severe bruises from that.

Speaker 1 And here's the first time the detectives are sharing the details of what James said Sherry told him to do next. She demanded he beat her.
What was that like for him?

Speaker 1 He refused to put his own hands on her to hurt her.

Speaker 1 So he would shoot hockey pucks off of her legs and shins. And that wasn't all.

Speaker 1 On one occasion, Sherry wanted him to hit her in the face with the hockey stick. He described Sherry then running into the hockey stick while he just held it out.

Speaker 1 And that's how she caused the injury to her nose. Have you ever heard such a thing in your life before? No, I have never heard of anything like this.
Not even kind of.

Speaker 1 If that sounded improbable, consider his story about the branding. James claimed Sherry gave him instructions.

Speaker 1 Wanted him to go specifically to like a hobby lobby and to get a like a wood burning kit or a wood carving kit. He said she just laid there, tightened her back.
He doesn't know what he branded in her.

Speaker 1 He was just handed the letters and he

Speaker 1 conducted the brand. So you put the letter

Speaker 1 on the end of the crafting tool and you just stamp it on her back, basically. Yep, once it heats up.
And then you put another one on and stamp the next letter on.

Speaker 1 Yep, sounds like it took at least an hour or two.

Speaker 1 After three weeks, said James, Sherry told him she missed her kids and wanted to go home.

Speaker 1 It was just another day. He doesn't know if it was because it was Thanksgiving or if there was any of that idea behind it.
He had no idea.

Speaker 1 They set out on the eve of Thanksgiving, said James. Drove back up Highway 5 to Northern California.
On the way back, did she get rid of anything? Yes, she threw away different items, cell phone.

Speaker 1 She discarded lots of the different items that would would have tied her to where her location was. Chucked them out the window on the way up the highway.
Yep.

Speaker 1 According to James, her final piece of stagecraft was to bind her own wrists and ankles using a chain and zip ties and hose clamps he had bought for her.

Speaker 1 She started securing herself in the chains while she was in the back seat of the car. When she was done, she told him to pull over.
He did.

Speaker 1 Followed her directions on where to go. She jumped out of the car.

Speaker 1 Then Allison Sutton saw her, and the world soon learned of Sherry's miraculous return, not having a clue about James Reyes, whose story ended as improbably as it began.

Speaker 1 And he drove back home and went to Thanksgiving dinner with his family. There was no communication after that.

Speaker 1 James Reyes contradicted just about every last strange detail of Sherry Peppini's story.

Speaker 1 There'd been no kidnapping by Latina women, no gun, no torture, no kitty litter, and no plot to sell her to a cop. According to James Reyes, it was just Sherry and himself.

Speaker 1 Now the question was:

Speaker 1 which one of them was really in charge?

Speaker 1 Coming up, Sherry Peppini back in the interview room. When she was confronted, she just went into a shutdown mode, we're

Speaker 1 looking down, non-responsive. Would she change her story now?

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Speaker 1 James Reyes told investigators a long and detailed and deeply strange story about how he came to be involved in what he now knew was Sherry Pepini's fake kidnapping.

Speaker 1 The question was, could they believe him? How did you corroborate the boyfriend's story?

Speaker 1 Once we learned of his information, that was another, you know, another little investigation inside the main investigation. Yep.
You know, you have to verify. And verify they did, or tried to.

Speaker 1 Piecing together tangible evidence of the odyssey Reyes described. Car rental receipts, phone records, following up at businesses.

Speaker 1 They talked to James's cousin. He lived right across the street from James's apartment.
What did you learn from him?

Speaker 1 Essentially, he confirmed that Sherry was down there at the time of the disappearance.

Speaker 1 He saw her during that time.

Speaker 1 But there was other evidence, too, to back up what James Reyes had told them. Like the extent of Sherry's injuries.
There was a lot of injuries, bruises on top of bruises.

Speaker 1 The injuries are all different stages of healing.

Speaker 1 The full extent and locations of Sherry's bruises and cuts and burns had never been made public. But James seemed to have no trouble remembering each one.

Speaker 1 What's more, some of the strongest corroboration for his story came from Sherry's own account.

Speaker 3 She described that there was a pole,

Speaker 3 you know, that ran up and down. That's what she was tied to or chained to.

Speaker 3 And she made diagrams and drawings, and that was turned over to the FBI.

Speaker 1 When investigators searched James's apartment, they found the poll, like this one, along with other items that matched Sherry's description of where she said she'd been held.

Speaker 1 When the FBI agent came out of the house, he just looked at me up and down, shook his head and said, this is the house.

Speaker 1 Add it all up, and investigators were convinced that Sherry Papini had indeed been in James Reyes' apartment. What they still didn't know was whether she went there voluntarily.

Speaker 1 Maybe James knew so much because he was the kidnapper. Based on the injuries and the information, she could have just easily been kidnapped by him.

Speaker 1 In August 2020, almost four years after Sherry's mysterious disappearance, Investigators brought her in to talk once again.

Speaker 1 So really going in the interview, we didn't know what we had, and she had another opportunity to blame it on him.

Speaker 1 If she wanted to change her story completely, it could have been a different outcome. But Sherry did not say James Reyes was her kidnapper.
She stuck with it being female.

Speaker 1 Sherry continued to insist she'd been abducted by two women. She said her ex-boyfriend had nothing to do with it.

Speaker 1 Even when investigators confronted her with pictures of the Costa Mesa apartment, she didn't budge. The precise things that she had been talking about earlier were right there in the pictures.

Speaker 1 She was dismissive of the information. When we showed another picture of the closet that was very unique, she wanted to dismiss it because it wasn't the same.
It seemed different.

Speaker 1 To a hole in the wall that she described specifically, she wanted to dismiss and say it wasn't the same. As Sherry brushed off this evidence, the rules of engagement changed.

Speaker 1 Investigators told her, lying to a federal agent is a crime. If she she was going to come clean about what did or did not happen to her, now was the time.

Speaker 1 When she was confronted by Detective Wallace and the FBI agent, she just went into a shutdown mode where

Speaker 1 looking down, non-responsive, even after they continued to trike. She didn't provide anything one way or the other other than basically saying it's not true.

Speaker 1 But according to court documents, When her husband left the room, Sherry admitted that she and her ex-boyfriend, James Reyes, did talk a little bit before.

Speaker 1 And she also said, I made a mistake and I talked to other men and I shouldn't have. I am horrible.

Speaker 1 Where did she cross the line or when or how into criminality?

Speaker 27 Well, it's really that 2020 interview.

Speaker 26 Agents made sure to tell her, Sherry, If you lie to us, that's a crime.

Speaker 27 We're just asking you to be honest.

Speaker 1 That gave you the opportunity to charge her with a crime. Yes, it opens the avenue.

Speaker 1 And that's how it came to pass that five and a half years after Sherry Papini first made headlines, she wound up making them all over again.

Speaker 1 Coming up.

Speaker 2 I contacted my newsroom and said, you know, you have a new lead story, right?

Speaker 1 Sherry Papini at the center of a whole new storm.

Speaker 6 People felt used and taken advantage of, and

Speaker 6 they they got bamboozled.

Speaker 1 When Dateline continues.

Speaker 1 On March 3rd, 2022, five years, four months, and one day after her husband called 911 to report her missing, Sherry Papini drove her kids to the music school where they took piano lessons.

Speaker 1 As Sherry waited for the kids, a woman came in and told her there had been an accident involving her car.

Speaker 1 That was what law enforcement calls a ruse.

Speaker 1 The woman was an FBI agent. And when Sherry went outside, an eyewitness told us, they tackled her and placed her under arrest.

Speaker 2 I was at the gym in the afternoon, put my phone down for just an hour, came out of the gym. Sherry Papini's been arrested.

Speaker 2 I contacted my newsroom and said, you know you have a new new lead story, right?

Speaker 6 Tonight, a Northern California mother is under arrest, accused of faking her own abduction.

Speaker 10 I was shocked.

Speaker 1 The charges, lying to a federal officer about her non-existent kidnapping, and 34 counts of mail fraud.

Speaker 27 And that's defrauding the California Victim Compensation Fund of more than $30,000. And because she used the mails to do so, it becomes a federal offense.

Speaker 1 So now a new sentiment spread of the speed of Twitter.

Speaker 10 Makes my stomach hurt.

Speaker 10 I can't imagine what all the donors

Speaker 10 who donated all those funds must feel like. Even her friends, even her family.
The betrayal.

Speaker 17 That makes me angry. There's the $30,000 from California's Victim Witness Fund that

Speaker 17 if this is all a hoax and a lie, there are real victims who won't have access to those funds because they were given to her.

Speaker 6 The community really invested their hearts and their time into finding this woman. People felt used and taken advantage of and they got bamboozled.

Speaker 1 The Papini family issued a statement which read in part,

Speaker 1 We love Sherry and are appalled by the way in which law enforcement ambushed her in a dramatic and unnecessary manner in front of her children.

Speaker 1 Longtime public defender Mary Ellen Attridge has defended more than a thousand people over about 30 years, some high-profile trials.

Speaker 1 She's been following this case, and she thinks Sherry Papini's arrest might have been handled differently.

Speaker 8 It's unfortunate they didn't allow her to surrender because she had gone in for interviews voluntarily, so she is somebody that is not a flight risk and would have surrendered.

Speaker 1 So what's the point then of coming to her school and pulling her out and doing it there in front of people?

Speaker 8 It's what's called the perp walk. It's public shaming.
It's like the Salem witch trials hit the digital age.

Speaker 1 Hey, Sherry.

Speaker 1 Five days after Sherry Papini's arrest, a federal judge ordered her released on $120,000 bail, provided she agreed to undergo psychiatric treatment and surrender her passport?

Speaker 1 The charges against her raised other questions too. For example, about the role of Sherry's ex-boyfriend, James Reyes.

Speaker 1 What's a simple way of explaining to people why he wasn't charged? I think the easiest way to describe it is he was doing what a friend asked. She asked to be hit.
She asked to be burnt.

Speaker 1 And he just went along with what she said. It's two consenting adults.
And as far as him not coming forward, you know, there's no law that makes somebody have an obligation to report what they know.

Speaker 1 So that's why there's no criminal prosecution against him.

Speaker 1 James Reyes is staying with family in Arizona. We went to talk with him there, but he declined our request for an interview.

Speaker 8 He is here.

Speaker 1 Just stop talking. Okay.

Speaker 1 And what about Sherry's husband?

Speaker 1 According to the criminal complaint, After Sherry reappeared, Keith Papini took more than $31,000 from the GoFundMe account and put it in his personal checking account.

Speaker 1 The complaint says the couple used GoFundMe money to pay credit card debt and other personal expenses.

Speaker 26 Funds that were used for Sherry and Keith's personal benefit to pay off credit cards and the like. The question is, what did he know and what was the extent of his participation in all this?

Speaker 1 Detectives revealed what they think is the answer to that question. They told us about that fateful interview in 2020, the one where they showed Sherry pictures of James Reyes' apartment.

Speaker 1 Keith, they said, was in the room with Sherry and when he saw the pictures?

Speaker 1 Jumping up and down, doing jumping jacks, trying to contain his excitement. Did he think that he here was finally proof that her story was true, that she was indeed kidnapped?

Speaker 1 And here's the evidence for it. He thought we found the house.
He thought we did it all until we started doing the confrontation part.

Speaker 1 And once the confrontation started, obviously he became upset and left the room. Was that the moment when he realized he'd been lied to himself all this time?

Speaker 1 I think it was the first time that he actually realized that what was reported wasn't what occurred. And not only has she lied to a lot of people, she lied to him, her husband.

Speaker 1 Through a spokesman, Sherry and Keith Papini also declined to be interviewed. But we should note, detectives told us there is no evidence Keith ever harmed Sherry.

Speaker 1 That apparently was another lie she told. In the case of the big lie about the kidnapping, the charges against Sherry Papini carried a maximum sentence of 25 years.

Speaker 1 And it was time to face the judge. Why did you do that?

Speaker 1 Coming up.

Speaker 8 She had a brand. She had burns.
It seems to me that this is a symptom of a mental disorder.

Speaker 1 An illness or a crime. A new story at last from Sherry Papini.
And it is never too late to do the right thing.

Speaker 1 To police and FBI agents who spent years investigating Sherry Papini's disappearance, the case was as clear-cut as it was infuriating.

Speaker 1 The community stood up for her and offered her not only monetary funds, but emotional, moral support as just a complete farce for law enforcement and for the nation.

Speaker 1 Veteran Defense Attorney Mary Ellen Attridge, who is not involved in the Papini case, has a different perspective.

Speaker 8 In my view, it's about what was driving that one person. Not the fact that we need revenge, but what made her so unfortunate to get involved in this series of events.

Speaker 1 Attridge reviewed reviewed the lengthy criminal complaint and we asked her how she might defend Sherry Papini.

Speaker 1 She offered her own theory that the case is not so much about a crime as about an illness.

Speaker 8 It seems to me that this is a symptom of a mental disorder, specifically something called factitious disorder, where you embrace this false narrative and act on it and you convince yourself that it is true.

Speaker 1 Attridge is not a doctor and there's no evidence to suggest Sherry has been diagnosed with this disorder. But if she were, Attridge believes,

Speaker 1 it could explain the drastic lengths Sherry went to.

Speaker 8 She had self-injured in extreme ways. She had a brand.
She was hit with a hockey puck. She had burns that she self-inflicted.
It makes me shudder to think what she did in order to show these injuries.

Speaker 8 And so I don't think that it's normal behavior.

Speaker 1 But Ashasta County Sheriff Michael Johnson points out, Sherry's convincing abduction claims had a very pricey chain reaction.

Speaker 1 From the time they actually assigned that project code to the end, we're in excess of $150,000 into this investigation.

Speaker 1 So for a local law enforcement agency's budget, that's a huge dent.

Speaker 1 The defense attorney countered that Sherry did nothing illegal when she disappeared.

Speaker 8 As long as you're not doing it for nefarious reasons,

Speaker 8 people disappear every day. Yeah.

Speaker 1 If the police want to use resources to go look for them, well, that's on them.

Speaker 8 Yeah, and I think that brings also up

Speaker 8 another thing in criminal justice in America that is problematic, and that is that when a white female disappears and she happens to be young and blonde, then it's a panic.

Speaker 8 So I think that's more a systemic issue because there are black females, there are Hispanic females, there are Indigenous females who disappear every day.

Speaker 1 All the time. I can definitely see people's opinions about what case gets more attention, but that's

Speaker 1 I don't think that's an accurate depiction of how law enforcement in general conducts cases. Captain Jackson told us his department works every case with the same intensity.

Speaker 1 It doesn't matter about the demographics of the person. We're going to investigate the missing person case or whatever the case is until we can come to a resolution.

Speaker 1 And as for the suggestion that the sheriff's Department didn't have to spend all that time and money investigating Sherry Papini,

Speaker 1 that's another tactic, a diversion tactic, to get us away from the real issue.

Speaker 1 And the real issue is here that we have somebody who tried to deceive everybody and cost everybody a lot of emotional time and resource efforts.

Speaker 1 Attridge noted that after Sherry returned, she spoke with a therapist for several years.

Speaker 8 Not only is it emotionally disturbing to go to therapy, therapy, but it's time-consuming. That's a lot of therapy.
So I find that to be a fact in favor of her being mentally ill.

Speaker 1 According to the criminal complaint, the therapist who spent hours and hours with Sherry diagnosed her with PTSD.

Speaker 1 To the sheriff, those therapy sessions were just another way Sherry bilked the system. And she paid for that out of money that she got from the state? That's correct.
Yes.

Speaker 1 Which all comes back down to you and I, right? We all pay into that. Those type of monies are set aside for real victims, real witnesses, and we were defrauded that way as well.

Speaker 1 Of course, fraud implies that the suspect knew she was lying. And Defense Attorney Attridge asked, what if she didn't?

Speaker 1 But surely she would have known as she was doing these things that she was going to put an awful lot of people out, terrify her family, cause all kinds of destruction and harm.

Speaker 8 Well, we don't know what she was thinking. I mean, maybe she wasn't thinking about that at all.
Maybe she was just thinking about her own needs,

Speaker 8 her need for attention.

Speaker 1 She got plenty of that.

Speaker 1 Hey, Sherry.

Speaker 1 Was Sherry Papini a sick woman or a criminal? And how could she pay for what she had done?

Speaker 1 Five weeks after she was arrested, Sherry Papini made a plea agreement with federal prosecutors. It's nice that she did finally do the right thing.

Speaker 1 We were with the sheriff's detectives when the news came down. And at the end of the day, we know that we did a good job and we're glad for the outcome.

Speaker 1 Sherry Papini issued a formal statement apologizing for what she'd done. I am deeply ashamed of myself for my behavior and so very sorry for the pain I've caused my family, my friends.

Speaker 1 All the good people who needlessly suffered because of my story.

Speaker 1 At Papini's first court appearance after the plea agreement was announced, she and her attorney waded through a crowd of reporters and the attorney said how sorry his client was.

Speaker 1 It is never too late to do the right thing. And of course we thank everyone for all the work they did, but we're sorry and we're trying to fix this thing.

Speaker 1 And though the apology helped, said Elizabeth Parker, It all still stings a bit around Reading.

Speaker 6 It's mixed feelings. You want her to be held accountable, absolutely.

Speaker 6 But at the same time, for her children, her husband, there was a lot of unneeded victims through all of this, and hopefully with a plea agreement, it will kind of help heal some wounds.

Speaker 1 On Monday, just a few days ago, Capini pleaded guilty to reduced charges, one count of mail fraud and one count of lying to a federal agent.

Speaker 1 She agreed to pay at least $300,000 in restitution. She also faces fines fines that could run into hundreds of thousands of dollars, as well as prison time.
Her sentencing is scheduled for July.

Speaker 1 When the judge asked Sherry how she felt, she responded, very sad.

Speaker 1 You don't see this as somebody who is genuinely sorry for what she did? Absolutely not. I don't think that.

Speaker 1 If that was true, this would have come a lot earlier. Two days after Sherry Papini pleaded guilty, Keith Papini filed for divorce.

Speaker 1 The next day, citing a need to prevent irreparable harm, a judge issued a temporary emergency order giving Keith custody of the children and said visitation by Sherry was to be within father's discretion.

Speaker 1 Keith said as a statement that reads in part, I'm asking that the court help me protect my children from the negative impact of their mother's notoriety.

Speaker 1 With all the attention Sherry Papini got, the parents of Tara Smith couldn't help but wonder about the stone cold case of their daughter.

Speaker 16 There must have been some serious investigation going on for six years to prove that she told a lie. Our case got maybe a year and a half of scrutiny.
That doesn't seem right.

Speaker 1 As Sherry Pavini pays the price for this chaos she conjured, we finally know what happened to her. But why it happened?

Speaker 1 Maybe someday we'll find out.

Speaker 1 And then again,

Speaker 1 maybe not.

Speaker 1 That's all for this edition of Dateline. We'll see you again next Friday at 9, 8 Central.
And of course, I'll see you each weeknight for NBC Nightly News. I'm Lester Holt for all of us at NBC News.

Speaker 1 Good night.

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