Hidden True Crime - The Secrets of Sherri Papini Revealed - with Dr. John Matthias, Psychologist

Episode Date: July 8, 2024

A psychological deep dive into Sherri Papini unlike anything you've ever heard before. Papini is a California woman who, on November 2, 2016, went out for a jog near her home in Redding, California and vanished. Her husband Keith Papini begged for her return on national media until three weeks later when Sherri was found on the side of the road, beaten, branded and bound with chains. She said she'd been kidnapped by two Hispanic women. In 2022 DNA evidence lead investigators to the home of Sherri’s ex boyfriend where they learned she had stayed willingly during the time she was missing. A recent Hulu Documentary series "Perfect Wife: The Mysterious Disappearance of Sherri Papini" inspired this in-depth 2 hour discussion with Dr John Matthias, forensic and clinical psychologist. Lauren Matthias is a television reporter who, along with her husband, Dr. John Matthias - a criminal psychologist - started Hidden True Crime in 2020. What started as a simple conversation at their dinner table became a captivating podcast. Join the dynamic duo of Dr. John Matthias, a forensic psychologist, and Lauren Matthias, an investigative journalist, as they delve into the psychological facets of unthinkable crimes every week. Their unique perspectives and in-depth analysis offer a fresh take on true crime storytelling. Thank you for your support through sponsorships, subscribing, listening, and becoming a Patreon member at Patreon.com/HiddenTrueCrime Our Sponsors:* Check out Acorns: https://acorns.com/HIDDENTRUECRIME* Check out Acorns: https://acorns.com/HIDDENTRUECRIME* Check out Armoire and use my code HIDDENTRUECRIME for a great deal: https://www.armoire.style* Check out Effecty and use my code HIDDENTRUECRIME for a great deal: https://www.effecty.com* Check out Happy Mammoth and use my code HIDDENTRUECRIME for a great deal: https://happymammoth.comSupport this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/hidden-a-true-crime-podcast1836/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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John was not following it as closely as I was. I watched the whole thing unfold, the shock, the drama. the gasps, the you've got to be kidding me. And this is the case for a psychologist, right? For those that have been following this case, John's laughing, for years, this is one case that we need a psychologist on. If there's any case, we need a psychologist on, it's the case of Sherry Pippin. And I have been asking, I want you to know, Dr. John to delve into this case for years now, for years. We've had hidden gems writing us asking, this is long overdue for Dr. John Matthias' analysis,

but the time is now, John doesn't do things half-heartedly. You are ready, right, babe? You are ready for tonight. We'll let the listeners decide that, but I hope so. Well, we're ready. I'm ready. And then I want everybody to know that directly, after the show, John and I are doing a special Patreon members-only Q&A or live at patreon.com

slash hidden chew crime. For our Patreon supporters that support us every month with a membership, we like to give back. We do bonus episodes there. And we also do members-only Q&A's where we invite our Patreon members to ask us their questions. So we are going to be doing that directly after this live. Dr. John, where do we begin? Well, I feel like after the introduction, I feel like I need to defend myself a little bit and explaining why I wasn't necessarily following Sherri Pepini's case.

Of course, when she went missing, the whole world knew, and I knew, everybody knew, that followed the news at all. But then 22 days later she's found and she's in bad shape, bruises, you know, all the injuries, but she's okay. And most of the cases I follow or evaluate involve homicide or murder or significant assaults, violence. And so this case, didn't quite fit that profile. I mean, there was suspicions, of course, that her argument was that she was abducted. But I think right from the start,

it was pretty clear that people questioned whether this was an abduction, including the police, including law enforcement. So I think I was one of those who really had some serious questions about the abduction hypothesis, by the way. So arguably, you could say, and this is, I'm going to change my opinion

on this because of the documentary that I watched, which we should mention that a lot of this information is going to be based on the new documentary on Hulu. It's called Perfect Wife. It's a very detailed look at this case. It's an excellent documentary, by the way. It's probably one of the better true crime docs I've seen in years. It's well done. And this issue of whether there's any victims, I mean, of course, there's secondary victims. The children are hurt. The husbands hurt. There's untold amounts of resources spent

trying to find Sherry Pippini. And what she did is illegal. There's no question what she did is a felony. She lied to law enforcement. But I think part of the reason I wasn't drawn into this case as much was because it wasn't clear that there was a perpetrator here and it wasn't clear that she was a victim.

I thought that she could be. Initially, I thought she might be, but it wasn't clear cut. When she was arrested though in 2022, it picked my interest a little more. And I began paying a little more attention to it. And now that I've seen this documentary, it is a fascinating case. It's definitely a case that raises a lot of interesting questions. And it's a case that I would say now, definitely has some clear-cut victims.

So, and we'll get to that later. I hope that wasn't too much of a spoiler alert, but. No. So if I couldn't convince you, Hulu could. So thank you to the incredible documentary filmmakers. We're calling the show tonight the secrets of Sherry Pippini revealed. And I think that's a good way to think about this, that there's, there's clearly some secrets here. And I think there's a big secret, which we'll talk about later. A couple of big secrets, actually.

And I think one of the ways to really to begin unraveling this case is to think about how we get to those secrets and what those secrets are. I think by the time, by the end of the show, when we start talking about what those secrets are, I think everything will be clear. That by exploring these secrets and exploring why she felt compelled to keep these secrets, I think we'll learn a lot about Sherry Pepini. The story in a nutshell is that Sherri Pupini, at the age of 34 years old, Sherry has, she's married, she has two children. It's her second marriage. She's married to Keith Pippini. She goes out for a jog. She's at the end of her long road that leads up to their house, and she disappears.

She goes missing. After a fairly short amount of time, her husband discovers that her phone is at the end of the road. And her phone is, it has, it looks like it's cracked. It looks like it has some hair on it. It looks like potentially some type of struggle occurred. And he is concerned. He's concerned that she hasn't come home. He's concerned that her phone is on the side of the road, that she hasn't contacted him.

And so he reports the fact that she appears to be missing to law enforcement. Fairly quickly, within, you know, 24 hours, law enforcement believes that this is a missing person's case. And in the meantime, the husband is contacting the media and trying to make it known publicly as widely as possible that his wife is missing and he's deeply concerned. Numerous searches and resources are spent trying to find her with no success and nobody hears anything from her on Thanksgiving morning or I guess early in the morning. She shows up and she shows up in change. She shows up deeply injured and badly bruised. She's taken to the hospital. In the hospital, she gives statements to both law enforcement

and to her husband. So that's the beginning. So this is a missing person's case with somebody who appears to have been abducted and who is found alive in bad shape, but alive. She returns home. Obviously, police are interested in figuring out who, if this isn't a bit,

then who did it? She goes through a process of recovery, a fairly lengthy process of recovering. And during that process, police are interviewing her multiple times. They're collecting DNA evidence from her when she's found, when she's discovered again on Thanksgiving morning. They're obviously very interested in figuring out who the perpetrators are. So Sherry Pepini claims that two Hispanic women, one younger and one older, abducted her. and held her captive for 22 days. And then the younger one, the younger one who she calls Taint, for whatever reasons, it's not totally clear,

but Taint decides to release her and does so. And that's the basic story. So, of course, as you might imagine, Internet sleuths were absolutely having a field day with this case and weighing in. And one of the interesting parts of the documentary was looking at people's explanations for what happened. These were some of my favorite, by the way.

Here's my favorite was that a mountain lion, she went out for a jog. This is before she told the abduction story. That a mountain lion found her and ate her in the woods. I thought that was interesting. There was another one that there was a satanic shrine that was found not far from the crime scene.

So somebody weighed in on that. The most popular reason for the abduction abduction, and again, before they found her, was that strangers had abducted her. And of course, that's what Sherry said as well. So her reasoning, by the way, the explanation she gave was that they were going to sell her, that this was human trafficking, and they were going to sell her as a sex trade worker. And in fact, she said, during her recovery, she wrote a book, a fairly short book called 22 days, which was her recollection of events. And she did this partly for herself because she was in therapy, but also to help recover memories from the incident.

So one of the things she said was that the, she actually said that the person that was going to purchase her as a sex worker was a law enforcement officer. Her implication was that, I guess, was that law enforcement wasn't going to be of much help here because, in fact, they were involved in human trafficking and they were interested in actually purchasing her from the two or two captors. After a number of these statements and collecting evidence and, you know, people, people in online communities, true crime communities, of course, had a field day with this and we're trying to figure it out and investigate it. And basically, the case just went cold. It disappeared for a while until 2022 when she was arrested.

When she was arrested, not Tate. Not Taint. They never found Taint because Taint was a figment of her imagination. So, I mean, okay, so I, I'm, there's going to be some clear spoiler alerts here. So I hope, I hope people that haven't seen this documentary, um, you might want to watch the documentary first before listening to this discussion. But, but there was, yeah, there was no. taint. If someone tells you that they've been abducted by two Hispanic women who look like total,

so they had a sketch artist draw pictures of the two cats, supposedly captors, that look like total cliches, total stereotypes, and one of them is named taint. You might start questioning the whole scenario when you learn some of these details. And law enforcement, of course, was questioning the whole scenario. So the case really didn't, wasn't, It wasn't really blown wide open until the DNA evidence came back and matched someone. And when that match came back, law enforcement went to Costa Mesa, California, and they interviewed the person whose DNA matched. And that's when everything became clear. Shortly after that, Sherry Pippini was brought in by the FBI and local law enforcement for questioning.

and she did not acknowledge what happened. She denied it strongly, steadfastly. And because of that, it took a while to, well, I think law enforcement was hoping for a confession. She didn't do that. And I believe that was in like trying to remember. That was August of 2020. Incredibly long road.

But some stuff's come up. So over, we've always had the DNA out there in the world. Sorry, before we get too far, obviously, just like always, thank you for coming. We appreciate you to take the time to come talk to us. As always, your presence here is voluntary. You can go at any time, and all we want is truthful statements, because it's a crime to lie to federal officers. Wow, yeah.

Yeah, that's good. I understood. Sorry, forget about that part. So there's always been DNA out there, and we've done testing after test. done testing after testing, we've gone out to like the Parabon, which is a private company who does all like the genetics, and we've just hit wall after wall after wall. But recently we found some of a familial DNA hit. So what that does, it just tells us it came from a certain person. So like the mother or the father or a son or an uncle or however that is, it just hits that

like somewhere in this family tree is where the DNA comes from. Okay. So with that, we open up the investigation. We go into who could it be within the family. So once we started opening up those doors and looking through those family members and just trying to see Facebook stalking them, criminal histories, just that normal investigation that we do once we start looking into things, we started finding some interesting things. Trying to ignore the TV and stuff. I don't think you had a TV with you, right? Definitely not. What am I looking for for the window? Do you want to know if it's like the same height? Well, the type of window, the wall itself, anything from these photos that make you believe that this was where you were being held?

I feel like this wood paneling is too thick, but I mean, there was wood paneling, but I don't, I can't remember something like that being there. being there and I I don't remember then the all thread through the thing that's just in this just weird it's unique to this place like that's a pretty custom you can't just go out to IKEA and buy a closet that looks like yeah yeah right so once once we have all those things and we start talking to the person who lives here who had lived there who still lives there and start talking to his family and starting that whole investigation killing one thing back after another after another,

doing the same thing we've done for the last four years. It led us to a specific person, but not a female. It led us to the car that picked you up, but not an SUV. So there's lots of different aspects that are truths and falses. And we're to the point now that nobody would have ever imagined that this would have blown up the way that it did. So I've been a cop 15 years. I've never seen the media scale that this garnered

pretty quickly. How long have you been in law enforcement now? 12 years in the bureau. So like of the minds, Brian, who's been around 20 plus years, people have been in my office of 25, 30 plus years, the media attention that this got out was, was insane. So I think, With that being said, some choices and some decisions ultimately changed the original path of what happened. I don't think anybody would have wished the media frenzy that occurred for this event, no matter what the situation. If it was a kid, because the media skewed so many facts. It brought so many people in from the woodwork that if we didn't have the woodwork, it wouldn't have the noise. And that brings a lot of pressure when you get that kind of scrutiny.

So we'd like to talk to you more about those things, and we can do it with Keith here, or we're going to ask you to leave, to whatever you're comfortable with, so we can break down some of the problems if you want Keith here. All we want is to have the truth. All we want is be able to tell the truth. That's all we've ever wanted from day one. We talked to me for hours. We've been there.

We've done all these different things waiting for something, waiting for it to break, waiting for us to get, bleak something to hear. Because the DNA came back, like I said, to a specific person. That specific person told us very specific things. His family then told us specific things. So if we can talk with Keith or without Keith here, What would you like?

You want to step out or do you want to stay? Obviously I want to stay. Or we can do a little bit of both. Talk to you alone first and then I can come back in. It's completely up to you. And that's why not even looking at Keith. I don't care about your opinion, Keith. What we want out of this is just,

it's the truth. So we can get ahead of some things so we can help control things, how crazy things got. So the unknown, If I say certain things, what's Keith's reaction? Because you don't know what I'm going to say, right? So I don't know Keith's reaction either. So if I say other things like, oh, Keith won't worry about that.

He can come back in. But I'd rather give you the opportunity to hear things, be able to judge it because everything, right, I'm saying things to you that are making the nerve. It's making Keith nervous. It's changing the element, right? We change the tone of the interview. You can feel it already in the room.

From the way you walked into, you're feeling right now so well I mean law enforcement has always it's an issue so so if if you want to keep the leave I'll ask keep nicely to leave if you don't keep the leave then he can sit there's press on press on and we'll move on to the next stages and we can we can just skip to we can skip to the rock into the water and and ruffle up the pond if we want to now again this is your last awkward this the last time if you want to do this alone or with keith keith's been through this also on a different level so i'm i'm ready just to i'm ready to move on and and throw the dark and throw the rock and

see what happens to the water but sherry look at me what do you want i don't want her to get in trouble she's not going to get in trouble so the DNA came back to James Rays the DNA that was on you belongs to James Rase the picture and the picture of the picture of the table is James Rays his little brother he died recently he we talked to him we've been on a polygraph we talked to every around him we have the rental agreements phone rental car rental agreements we have we have everything that says that he said he told the truth that's James brother deceased Nick so everything you've told us so many truth in this

situation the reason why you can describe the room is because you stayed in the room in the dark for Howard for days on end the reason why you lost so much weight is because you stopped eating. The reason why he got a rash on your arm was because he cleaned his house. The reason why the brand is because he went to the store, bought the brand new tools, and branded you. The reason why your nose was broke is because of a hockey stick. I know all of those things and I know there was no sex. I know all of that because he passed a polygraph test. That said, it's not an abduction. She asked me to come to give her. No.

I ran a car. I drove up and picked her up. He passed the polygraph test, Sherry. If that's not what happened, what didn't happen, Sherry? There's no way. It's changed. There's no way. There's no way.

The DNA doesn't lie. His DNA was on you. There's no way. Robert saw you in the house while you were down there. While everything spoke out of control, his cousin. his cousin, why everything ran out of control on the initial. There's no way. It's 100% Robert, or James is being there.

You even collected blonde hairs from the room. He took us to the stores where he bought the chain. He talked to the friend who ran the car. The car that he rented drove over 900 miles in a day on the drop-off point. Sure, I know it was a lot to take in. But it's not like we don't know the answers to these questions. The only way for everybody to come together and heal, the whole community has to heal, is to, for us to be able to say, when we presented all of the evidence,

all the stuff that came forward, she, you told us the truth. You told us what happened. Because you did go in a dark room, that's true. You did lay in the back seat of a car. That's true. You did lose weight. You were branded. Your hair was cut. You did have bruises all over. But how those bruises got there are because you did it and James did some. The reason why your nose got broke is because you held the hockey stick to your face and he forced it into your nose. The reason why the brand is in a straight line is because he did it. He described his Most people don't realize how much their personal information is being bought and sold every day. Data brokers are making billions, pulling details about you from public records and the Internet, and then packaging and selling it, usually without your consent. That's how your information lands in the hands of scammers, spammers, even stalkers.

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Why does it make sense? What actions doesn't make sense? A lot of it doesn't make sense. Can you talk about those? No. What's one financial lesson you learned the hard way? I'll go first. It's not too late to start saving.

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So it took an additional two years. After that interview, it took roughly another two years to arrest her because the FBI and law enforcement needed more conclusive evidence to successfully arrest her. Right. Hence a longer amount of time, even though they stopped looking for taint. Yeah, I don't know. I'm not sure when they start, yeah, I'm not sure when they stop looking for Dane, but. Thank you for telling a summary of the story. I thought you did a great job. I typically do that, but you are on a role tonight. And we're so excited for you to host tonight and to share about what in the world is up with Sherry Pippini or, as we say, the secrets of Sherry Pippini revealed. How do you want to tell this, I guess?

Yeah, so if we talk about where she was and what she was doing, I think that's something that don't make more sense later after we kind of dive into some of the psychological components of this. So let me set the stage. So a lot of cases we talk about involve some type of childhood trauma or some type of childhood abuse or neglect. And this case is going to be no exception. to that. Her sister Sheila is a large part of this story. And it's interesting, the documentary

didn't talk about this, but Sheila actually stood by Sherry's story until the bitter end, until it was clear, until Sherry actually acknowledged that her story was fake, it was false, that it was concocted. It was only then that Sheila relented and basically said, okay, you know, it's this is false. So I think I think that's important to know about Sheila. Sheila was extremely loyal. And one of the reasons Sheila is so loyal to Sherry is because Sheila describes in the documentary growing up in a very dysfunctional family in a very abusive environment.

She doesn't provide a lot of details. So we have to kind of fill in the blanks in terms of thinking about what happened, what actually happened to Sherry. But what she does tell us is that the family had very little money. So they apparently grew up in poverty. And perhaps most importantly, what she says is that the parents were both fairly significant substance abusers. So both parents were addicts. Both parents, in that sense, seem to have difficulties functioning and caring for the family. So at the very least, you'd have to imagine there was neglect.

But she also says that there was a lot of yelling in the home. There was a lot of cursing. And one friend of Sherry says that Sherry revealed to her that at least on one occasion that one of her, that one of her parents grabbed her by the hair and dragged her down the hall. And so it seems reasonable to think that there was physical abuse. My guess is there were probably multiple forms of abuse going on here. I think if you know that Sheila is protective of her sister. So the way Sheila describes it, Sheila acts as a bit of a parental figure.

Because her parents were largely absent and because they were high, all the time because they were using drugs all the time she was stepped in and became kind of a surrogate mother for sherry and so Sheila is obviously going to be was and is protective very protective of Sherry and she was in childhood and so my guess is that whatever Sheila is telling us is minimizing to a very large extent whatever happened in that home there's a brief moment in this documentary where they actually the parents don't really say much, but they do talk to the parents very briefly. They make one short appearance, which is interesting.

I think they just wanted to acknowledge who they were in front of the camera, but the parents don't really say anything. So all we have in terms of understanding her childhood is Sheila, and you have to imagine that Sheila is minimizing a good deal of what happened. So if I had to guess, my guess is there's multiple forms of abuse, went out in this family. Those aren't revealed in this documentary, but I think at a minimum, you probably have some neglect in addition to physical abuse and potentially other types of abuse. At age 16, Sherry drops out of high school and she runs away. She moves to Los Angeles,

and she moves between L.A. and the Bay Area. We don't know a lot about that period, but we know that presumably she's mainly living on the streets, which, by the way, I mean, I think we can make certain inferences. I don't know for sure, but I think we can make certain inferences about what that means. If you're 16 years old and you're trying to make ends meet, I mean, you don't have a lot of options, right? And then the narrative later becomes that she's going to be sold into the sex trade.

She's involved in human trafficking. I think, you know, I'm not going to say, I can't prove this, but it seems to me that, that, you know, that you could have, that that could be a precursor to that story in her younger life. She says also that during that time when she runs away several years later, she meets this guy named James Reyes. The interesting part about James Reyes early on in this documentary is that not only Sherry but friends talk about how he's abusive.

That one of the commonalities of James Reyes is that his abuse, that he hits her, that he's physically abusive. And again, if this isn't said, but this will become a part of this analysis later, presumably there might be some type of sexual abuse, although we don't know for sure and it's not acknowledged. So you have this trust. trauma, fairly significant trauma, it seems to me.

And I could argue, and this isn't going to be important in terms of thinking about this case. I could argue, and let me say by the way, that this, any diagnoses I throw out tonight are gonna be provisional and speculative. I'm basing that on research and broad information. I'm not trying to diagnose, I will not try to diagnose, Sherry Papini here.

But I will, I'll make some general observations based on research and based on what we know about these types of situations. So I want to think about my analysis tonight in broad terms, not necessarily in terms of the specifics of this case. So what I would say is, and again, speculatively, is that based upon what we know about Sherry Papini at this point in her life as an adolescent and young, adult and child. I think there's a real possibility here of complex childhood PTSD. And that this complex PTSD will probably persist. This isn't the sort of thing typically that

without treatment is going to improve. So it's easy to imagine that the complex PTSD, complex trauma will continue into adulthood. And I think this is going to be an important part part of the story later and we'll understand why. But this trauma, so this trauma then really, I think, becomes instrumental in developing an analysis and understand what's going on with Sherri Papini. So in homes where there's a great deal of trauma and dysfunctional homes like this,

especially in homes where the parents are absent for a large part because they're, their addicts they can't care for their kids they can't provide their kids attention and nurturance right this is an environment that is provide that could that provides the perfect storm for insecure attachment so those who listen to us regularly know that I'm always talking about the importance of attachment in those early years and the reason that's true is because those early attachments and the first, let's say, three to five years of life,

are really critical in setting the stage for future relationships. They're really critical because during those early years, we develop mental maps of the world, and we develop mental maps of relationships. And when you have an attachment style that is not secure, so you have insecure and secure attachments, when you have an attachment style that is not secure,

Oftentimes, it's much more difficult to establish healthy, secure, stable relationships later in life. And I think in just looking at what I know about Sherry Pippini's background and history, it seems, if I had to guess, I would say that her attachment style was insecure, disorganized. And most of the criminals we talk about, a lot of them, almost all of them, have, what I call insecure, anxious, ambivalent attachment styles. And anxious ambivalent, so insecure, anxious attachment styles usually involve kind of an approach avoidance stance towards the caregivers. So a lot of times when an anxious attachment style means that a child, so a mother, there's something called the strange situation, which is the basis for this research.

The mother will leave the room and come back, and then the researchers observe how the child responds to the absent parent. When a mother, or a caregiver, when a caregiver leaves the room and comes back, usually when a child is anxious, the child will tend to approach and then avoid, there's kind of an approach avoidance stance with the mother. That the child wants connection with the mother,

but the child's afraid. There's some fear. There's some fear of rejection. So the child will both go to the mother, and then back away. Go to the mother and then back away. In an avoidant, in an insecure avoidant attachment style, it's exactly like the term avoidance says. When the mother comes back in the room, the child will avoid the mother. In fact, the child will often be angry that the mother left, and the child will engage in avoidance. It's exactly like it says. So an avoidance style, by the way,

as you might imagine, it's extremely unhealthy because children with that particular attachment style often have no interest in later in life and developing healthy relationships and they tend to avoid relationships. So that's the type of this attachment style where you see like schizoid type personality disorders. This attachment style that I'm talking about disorganized, which I think is probably relevant here, is it's an attachment style. that is the most unpredictable. When the mother comes back in the room, the child is all over the map.

The child will approach, back away, avoid, become angry. The reason it's called disorganized is because the child engages in all these behaviors that aren't predictable and they don't fit. There's no coherence. So it's exactly like the term says, it's a disorganized approach to the world. So typically with an insecure disorganized attachment style, you have a mental map that is characterized by fear, mistrust, inner conflict, and oftentimes self-hatred.

And you might throw in a little paranoia too. And so I think that's really important here because, if I'm right about this, because that is sort of the underlying theme. That's an underlying current with Sherri Papini, that she develops this insecure attachment. She seems to have kind of this disorganized approach to the world. And you have this underlying fear and mistrust and conflict and even self-hatred. And that's going to stay with her. No matter what happens to her, even though it's not obvious,

you're going to get that perception of the world. A lot of people thanking you in chat right now for explaining this the way you are. If you start with, so the trauma, an environment of trauma leads to potentially this insecure attachment style, which I've called disorganized, which also, which also potentially leads to personality disorders. So, in fact, I just revisited an article in the last few days that I haven't looked at for a few years, but there was an article in Scientific American that's excellent. So it's a really great article about trauma and personality disorders. The title of this article is,

borderline personality disorder may be rooted in trauma. It's by Diana Kwan. and she describes in great detail how a lot of research is now showing that trauma of the sort I've described might have some correlation with later personality disorders and in particular with borderline personality disorder. So again, let me make clear. I'm not diagnosing shiri Pupini with borderline personality disorder. What I would say is that it does seem, like this type of upbringing could potentially lead to what's called a cluster B personality disorder.

And you and I talk about cluster B personality disorders all the time. Those are the personality disorders that typically tend to follow criminality the most. And in that cluster, you have histrionic personality disorder, borderline personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder, and antisocial personality disorder. Now, what's interesting about borderline personality disorder is there's some research showing that not only past trauma can be conducive to borderline features, but disorganized attachment styles can be relevant to. And so I think there's, you know, I think there's a real question here about people have asked, well, is this mental illness? And, you know, there might be some mental illness here in terms of maybe depression and then anxiety. but it seems to me that there's a fairly strong possibility here that she's going to fit into this personality disorder category based upon her upbringing. And again, I'm not diagnosing her here, but I'm just trying to, I'm looking.

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Buy your car today on... Carvana. Delivery fees may apply. She did her background and trying to make observations that are consistent with the research. As Becky says, she doesn't not have borderline. She doesn't not, not. She doesn't not have borderline. Having discussed that, there are some other elements, I think, that come into play here.

So one of the things, if she is in Cluster B, by the way, one of the main components of, let's say, histrionic personality disorder is attention seeking. In fact, that's probably one of the, that's probably the main component of Histrionic Personality Disorder. And so maybe, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe the better way to talk about this is to put her in that general cluster. And, you know, maybe if somebody ever evaluates her and does some testing, they can sort out which one it is. But one of the components of histrionic and borderline personality disorder is, this need for attention. Borderline personality disorder,

oftentimes you'll see people on the extremes, that they'll go, they'll see something as all good or all bad, or they'll go from love to hate almost instantaneously. They'll idealize someone, and then they'll tear them down or devalue them very, very quickly. And a lot of that has to do with that same issue. They're very attention-seeking. They want to be noticed.

They want to stand out. And so I think that's an important part of the story as well. In fact, Sheila in the documentary, and I'm going to quote Sheila here, Sheila says, quote, referring to Sherry, Sheila says, quote, she wasn't getting the attention she wanted at home. She wanted to feel important. She always has, unquote. So her sister recognizes this quality too.

Her sister is essentially saying she's very attention seeking. attention seeking she has this need to feel important and significant and I think so I think that's that's that's going to be a big part of the story as well that oftentimes borderline personality disorders or historic or whatever let's call it cluster B personality disorders they kind of they have that need they have that desire to stand out and feel important and some of that I think to is driven by the shame and the helplessness and the vulnerability that victims of trauma feel. The victims of trauma can't control their environments.

They feel extremely helpless. And they have this shame. And I think in this case, when we're talking about poverty, and I don't know how bad it was. I'm just using Sheila's term that they didn't have much money. I think there's oftentimes for children, especially in school, there can be shame attached to that. So part of that feeling of shame is the opposite. It's one of the counters to shame is pride. It's hubris.

It's wanting to feel important. It's wanting to feel worthy of attention and significant. And so I think that's another component of this story. And that may or may not fit under the personality disorder component. But I think it mostly does, but I think it's worth mentioning that. Shame is not, by the way, one of the criteria for borderline personality disorder, but oftentimes you'll see it go along with it. So I think these are all.

elements of the story that that are going to turn out to be important. Do you feel like I feel like maybe I've set the stage but you have keep going keep going you've definitely set the stage so let me let me talk about another so before I get into some specifics here and really start making sense of some of the elements of this case Let me talk about another really critical component psychologically of this situation. And that has to do with this idea of fantasy. Just based on what I can gather from Sherri Puccini's life, it seems to me that she's very fantasy prone. And that she has this tendency to really kind of live in fantasy and operate in fantasy

and create these imaginative scenarios that in some instances, in many instances, they really kind of cut her off from the demands of the real world. And that's a problem. You know, when you're rooted in fantasy too much, you know, it really interferes with your ability to function. And I would say, I would go further than that and say that if you're, you're fantasies are largely based in fear and mistrust and let's call it let me call it now masochistic self-hatred because masochism is a big part of the story then you're you're potentially setting

yourself up for some very very difficult situations and and i think that a lot of her fantasies are based in that realm and so some examples of that in this documentary early on. One of the things that Sherry does consistently is she refers to Keith as being abusive. She tells her friend Jennifer that if her husband Keith, yeah, her husband Keith. She tells everyone who will listen how abusive Keith is, how controlling he is, and she tells her friend Jennifer that if she ever leaves Keith, that Keith will, quote, cut her into pieces and he would he would murder her and cut her into pieces and and have no qualms about doing so so she in 2011 at a at a work conference she meets this guy named

Don Donovan Misk and she tells Donovan quote my husband is the most evil man in the world she tells Donovan that he's violent abusive he keeps her locked up and that he wants to harm her all the time. You know, this documentary is interesting. You hear this stuff early on, right? And I'm thinking how much of this is real? Law enforcement is obviously interrogating Keith because the husband is always a suspect after someone goes missing. Always.

And he said he understood that. He's like, yeah, yeah. My wife watches me. I know I'm a suspect. Okay, let's do this. You know. But in the documentary, they're pairing that narrative of law enforcement interviews, interviewing Keith, the husband, with this other narrative that friends are saying, hey, this guy is saying that supposedly this guy is saying that if Sherry leaves him, that he's going to cut her up in pieces and leave, right, and leave her.

her remains all over the place, that she's telling these people, she's the random people, she's meeting at conferences, that he's evil, that she tells people, there's a, there's an, they're at over at friend's house and they're playing we, they're playing the game we, did I hope I'm pronounced that right. Yeah, you did. And Keith is right next to Sherry, and apparently he's doing something with the joystall. and he elbows her in the face accidentally. And so Sherry has this bruise on her face

that looks like she was hit. And Sherry tells anyone who will listen that Keith hit her and Keith abused her. And that's more confirmation, except for the fact that law enforcement wants to look into that because it's relevant to an abduction and they go to the friends

and the friends say, no, I was there, that was an accident. Keith meant no harm whatsoever. His elbow accidentally hit Sherry's face. That was not an abusive moment. Right. So in other words, this is the beginning of the investigation. Sherry's been kidnapped, kidnapped, air quotes.

And Keith, her husband is being investigated because, of course, he's a suspect. naturally. And we're learning that Sherry's telling some friends, some things about Keith being abusive and hitting her, while other friends are saying, no, I watched something happen. And they're playing we and E. L.

or her on accident. So she is creating a variety of stories here. We're learning now at the beginning of this investigation. I repeated what John said, but I just thought journalist Lauren should jump in and give you a break because we all want you to just keep. going but there you go there's the story you just shared on repeat that was a transition for you babe and so what's important why am i why am i talking about this the reason this is important because

it shows how fantasy prone sherry peppini is that even with her husband who she met in 2006 she started dating him in 2006 and she said at the time she kept a journal and she said at the time she said of Keith, she said, he's, quote, the most grounded person I've ever met. I thought that was fascinating. So I picked up on that because she's calling Keith grounded, right? When in fact, she's probably the opposite of grounded. She's flighty. She tends to be a little unstable, right?

She's insecure. At least if I'm correct about the possibility of maybe a cluster B personality disorder. and insecure attachment, then those are the types of terms I would use to describe someone who would fit those categories. They're not, they're the opposite of grounded in many ways. And so here, what's interesting here is that she's married to this guy, Keith, who's grounded, and she's telling everyone who will listen how violent he is. She's creating this, this dark universe. She's creating this alternative universe that's filled with violence. And it's filled with threat and control, right?

And it's a world where you hit someone with your elbow, and all of a sudden your husband is this abusive evil guy who's trying to harm you. When in fact that's not true at all. And so it's fantasy that's driving this. It's her fantasy of she can't let go of this, this world that she knew when she was a teenager, and this world she knew in her home that's really destructive and dysfunctional.

She's still clinging to that world. And she's expressing it, even though from all accounts, people, her friends all call her supermod. From all accounts, they seem to have a good marriage. It's stable. There seems, the kids seem to be happy. She can't live with that. She has to resort to this fantasy that her husband is

this terrible abusive guy that's just pummeling her day and night. In other words, she's creating a world that confirms the threatening view of the world that she knows from presumably when she was on the streets, from her dysfunctional family. This is a world that she's familiar with. This is a world she's comfortable with. She's bringing that world with her. So you have an interesting scenario here where somebody who's in this fantastic world of violence and dysfunction is now meeting a guy who's, quote, grounded and stable, and he's offering her a life that she's not used to. So you have this clash. You have this clash between Sherri Bapini, who comes from this really abusive, sadly abusive environment,

dysfunctional environment, and Keith, who comes from what seems to be a fairly stable home and who she refers to as grounded, you have this clash of worlds. And that's going to bring me to perhaps one of my main points here. And that is what Freud called the repetition compulsion. The repetition compulsion. The repetition compulsion. This isn't right. I mentioned it before on some of our podcasts, but I don't talk about it all the time.

So you're probably saying, what is the repetition compulsion? The repetition compulsion according to Freud is, and not just Freud, but according to other later theorists, depth psychologists, the repetition compulsion is when we, essentially, we replay endless variations of destructive and distressing situations and relationships over and over again in our lives. So a simple example of this would be, and I'm sure I hope, I'm guessing most of our listeners are familiar with this idea, but a simple example would be you get in a relationship with someone who you know isn't good for you. You're attracted to them for whatever reasons.

they cause a lot of grief, they cause a lot of harm, they cause a lot of suffering. So you break up with them, you take some time and you say, never again am I going to do that? Right. I can't, you question yourself, you question your decision making, and ultimately you come to the conclusion. I can't believe I did that. That was such a dysfunctional relationship. and then two months later, you go out with the same person. Not exactly the same person, but a variation of that person.

And here you go again. You're back in this destructive relationship. It's causing you a lot of grief. You know it's not good for you, and you do it over and over and over. That's the repetition compulsion. Now, what's interesting about the repetition compulsion is that Freud had this idea early on, he called the pleasure principle. Freud believed that human beings were essentially guided

by the search for pleasure. So his basic premise early on was that we seek out pleasure and we avoid pain. But later on, when Freud comes up with this idea of the repetition compulsion, he's essentially saying the opposite. He's saying that for many human beings, we actually seek out a certain level of pain. In other words, the repetition compulsion is a version of masochism.

And the interesting thing about Freud's insight here, not only is he negating a lot of his early theory, but Freud can't really fully explain this. And so he tries to explain it with something he calls the death drive. And the death drive for Freud is this perception that we're all destructive in a certain sense, because we're all mortal creatures. But I don't know. I mean, the death drive is highly controversial,

and for a lot of people, it doesn't explain this idea of the repetition compulsion. So, but the main point I want to make here is that, that I think we're all familiar with this idea and the sense that we engage in behaviors that we know aren't healthy, but we do it over and over again, right? And so one thing that is,

that's relevant about the repetition compulsion is that we particularly, we often see it in cases of trauma. It doesn't have to involve trauma, but in particular, when there's traumatic experiences, like with combat veterans, for example, they relive that experience over and over again. And they tend to act out that trauma in certain ways over and over again, no matter how dysfunctional it is. So what's important about the repetition compulsion, for me at least, is I think it's an attempt by human beings to try to make sense of their pain. It's an attempt to try to understand what went wrong in their lives. And perhaps most importantly, to me at least, this is my take. I think it's an attempt to master old wounds.

It's an attempt to go back and relive those traumas and to somehow transform them. And I think that's why it's so compelling, is because there's this belief, oftentimes, I think it's a false belief, it's a magical belief that somehow we're going to go revisit these past traumas and now we're going to be healed. Now we're going to be transformed. So we're trying to take that story, that very painful story of a dysfunctional past, and we're trying to rewrite that story and we're trying to transform it. And by the way, in a very literal sense, that's what therapy attempts to do.

The difference is that with the repetition compulsion, the person who goes back and relives those past trauma or reenacts those past traumas or the person who ax them out is not getting the help of someone who can see it. The therapist's job is to see those destructive behaviors and those destructive patterns and then to help intervene and to help bring awareness to it and to help rewrite that story. But when a person engages in the repetition compulsion without help, without therapeutic intervention,

and they have no self-awareness, it's going to almost always be destructive. They're almost always going to go back and recreate the scenario and they're not going to learn from it and they're going to keep doing it. As Dr. John said in the past video, refraising in quote if you don't consciously tell your story you'll tell your story unconsciously right if we don't tell our story our stories tell us in a nutshell

which is which is a version of the repetition compulsion there's a there's a great quote by the way by B.F. Skinner so B.F. Skinner is the one of the founders of behaviorism he's he's the guy who put rats through a maze and you know he's he's a very very strict behavioral guy meaning he doesn't really think that human beings that he doesn't when I talk about mental maps B.F. Skinner would question that because he doesn't think that human beings really engage in a lot of cognition that were shaped by our behaviors and our behaviors control us and guide us and behaviors

dictate what we do so even BF Skinner said this I love this quote. B.F. Skinner in a lecture he gave at Harvard in 1959, he said, quote, the difference between rats and people is that when a rat gets shocked at one end of the maze, he never goes there again. So in other words, rats have it figured out. In other words, we need to be more like a rat? No, his point is he's making an argument for the.

repetition compulsion. He's making it, he's saying that there's a part of human beings that he doesn't understand. That human beings, if human beings are getting shocked at the end of the maze, they shouldn't go back for more shock. But they do. And nobody really has been able to make perfect sense of this, this, you know, this kind of self-destructive masochistic behavior that human beings engage in, right? For most people, if we're self-aware and we have some ability to reflect on our behaviors, we shouldn't engage, we shouldn't engage repeatedly in these very self-destructive

behaviors. No, but we do. Right. But we do. Be more like rats. Anyway, go on, yes. Okay, so now I've explained the repetition compulsion. I've explained what I think are some of the foundational elements

of the Sherry-Papini case. I've explained how these two worlds, the Keith's world of stability and groundedness, which is the term Sherry uses to describe him, and Sherry's world of dysfunction and instability, how these worlds are going to clash. and this is going to start getting us into secrets. Sherry Papini secrets revealed.

They get married. They date for several years. They get married. Keith and Sherry. We're talking Keith and Sherry. They date for several years. And lo and behold, Keith starts discovering texts from other men. that Sherry is reaching out to these other men.

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Protect yourself now at aura.com slash remove. There are many of them. There's many suitors in the picture. One of them, by the way, is the person I just mentioned. In 2011, Sherry meets this guy, Donovan Miss, get a conference in Michigan. and presumably we're never told exactly what happened, but presumably there's infidelity. There's almost certainly infidelity, although Sherry denies there's any infidelity. There's a lot of men out there.

They stay in touch with Sherry. And I think Keith at some point, he's starting to see this and get wind of this. And you have to think there's a story that. Do you remember the Keith? The story is that Sherry threw something at him. Do you remember what that was? Yeah, she threw a picture frame, I believe. Picture frame.

At him. She was upset. She threw a picture frame, Adam. And according to one of the friends, the reason she did that, which Keith acknowledges, by the way, the reason, according to a friend that she did that, that is because Keith was catching on that there were a lot of men she was communicating with. To Keith's credit, by the way, like, you know, Sherry apparently was denying that there was any

infidelity. I guess she must have been telling him that these men were just friends or that they, right, that these relationships were platonic. Uh-huh. Yeah. So I think they're getting, you know, you're right, you're getting some conflict, you're getting some problems. in this marriage. Some neighbors say that they hear them arguing more than usual over the last few years before the so-called abduction. I think probably what's going on is that Keith is starting to learn some of these secrets. I don't think he ever learned until after the fact the full extent of these communications with other men. But he's certainly starting to get the hint, And he's starting to understand that this marriage might be having some problems.

To say the least, the surface is breaking or cracking. There are cracks in the surface. So I don't know exactly what the triggers are that lead up to the so-called abduction. But I'm guessing that Keith has provided stability. Sherry has been probably since the beginning of this relationship. She's been flirting with other men. She's probably been unfaithful. And I'm guessing that a lot of this is starting to come out.

Sherry is probably under a certain amount of stress. I think she's feeling like she needs to do something extreme. And did she ever? So she reaches out to this guy James Reyes, who supposedly was abusive by Sherry's own accounting that James Reyes had been abusive in the past. This was like in the early late 90s, early 2000s, I think roughly 2002-ish, 2003. You mentioned him earlier in this podcast. Now we're bringing him up again, full circle, James Reyes. So she reaches out to James Reyes and she asks him to.

drive up to Reading to near her home to pick her up essentially and take her back to his place in Costa Mesa. He does that. He drives up. He gets her. There's no abduction. It's totally consensual. In fact, I'm not even sure he's aware of her scheme. Takes her back to his small home in Costa Mesa. and at her request, he essentially physically abuses her in a number of ways. So James Reyes is an old hockey player. He's an ex-hockey player. One of the things he does at her request is he shoots a puck at her repeatedly. Per her request, which she later acknowledges.

One of the other things he does. So this is how she gets her injuries. If you see the pictures of her injuries, they're, they're, severe, their jaw dropping. You know, it's hard to, it's hard to look at those pictures and think, oh, these are self-inflicted. I think that's one of the, that was one of the huge curiosities of this case, was that the injuries are so serious and severe and her bruises are so deep.

She's even branded. She has a brand on her back. It's hard to believe that someone would actually request another human being. to harm them at this level. And I think for Keith, for example, one of the things he kept going back to is, but look at the injuries. So Keith would question her

and the validity and truthfulness of her story. And he'd say, but nobody would do that to themselves. Right. But Sherry Pupini would, apparently, James Reyes, he did in Pocke, there's something called a cross check, which is apparently you hold your stick up and you hit the other person with it.

And so he held the stick up. And Sherry apparently ran into it with her face, causing a broken nose. You get the point here that she's asking him to harm her. And he's obliging. He's apparently a willingly obliging. Yes. So if I ever say, hit me, babe, hit me. Sorry.

Yeah. It's weird. I'm just pointing out that it is, it's an odd. Self-harm. It's odd when you include someone else in your self-harm. I guess maybe that's what I'm trying to process. Yeah, well, well, yeah, and that's a relevant point here because James Reyes, when the police show up at his door, he obviously knows there's a potential problem in the sense that she's got these horrible injuries. Both of them are denied that any sexual activity occurred. But let's be honest, that's probably false. They found DNA material without getting specific. They found DNA material on her underwear that belongs to James Reyes. Right. Although they both deny sex. Consistent with the scenario and her past, one of the first things I thought of without them talking about it in this documentary was the real possibility of like BDSM type stuff.

BDSM stands for bondage, dominance, sadomas. masochism. This takes me back to the repetition compulsion in the sense that the repetition compulsion is a very masochistic type of behavior, that we repeatedly engage in these destructive behaviors. And here you have a situation where Cherry Potini, I think in many ways, so I said earlier that I believe her mental map that's from insecure, from insecure, disorganized attachment, her mental map is characterized by fear, mistrust, conflict, and self-hatred. Here you see that. She's setting up and engaging in this masochistic behavior to reinforce her perceptions of the

world, to reinforce her self-hatred. And more than anything, I think that in many ways she feels unlovable. She thinks she deserves to be punished. And so she's engaging in this masochistic behavior to prove. her unloavability to herself, I think, first and foremost, because she can't handle at some level, at some very deep unconscious level, she can't handle the stability and the groundedness and the love that Keith is offering her. She can't handle this normal family life that's being given to her. And so here she goes. She's going to show herself, and I guess eventually the world,

that she deserves to be mistreated. And James Reyes is going to be the guy to do it. So for 22 days, she stays in James Reyes' house. She is subjected to a number of, I guess, self-inflicted, both some are self-inflicted, some are the result of her requests to have him injure her. She, during this time, she's on her phone every day.

She's looking at the news. She's seeing how she's making national headlines, how people are looking for her, how those endless searches. She's watching this every day from her bed in captivity. Finally, on day 22, it's Thanksgiving. She decides that she misses her children too much. So she has James Reyes drive her back up to Shasta County and essentially drop her off somewhere randomly. And then, as you pointed out, she finds someone who calls 9-11. and then she's hospitalized.

Yes. So in other words, she leaves. It's wild to hear the 911 call of the man who found her. And she's crying in the background and she's hysterical and she's beat up and she's chained. And she's, I mean, it looks like she's been brutally beaten and branded. Then she got kicked. Okay, just be safe where you are. What is she asking for?

She's asking for an ambulance. What's wrong with her? Ask her, what's wrong with her? Yeah. She's chained up. She's chained up, her vision, Lori, and she needs an ambulance. Do you see her chained up? Yes.

Her name is Sherry Panini. Babini. Ask her who chained, or can she talk at all? Yeah. Can I talk to her? Here. Barry, I need you to listen. me. Listen to me. Do you know where you are?

No. I've been in the car. Okay. Sweetie, listen. Listen to me. I need you to take a deep breath. Calm down and listen to what I'm saying. I have an officer in route. We've had several calls. Are you chained up? Yes. Yes. Okay. Take a deep breath, sweetie. Who chained you up? Do you know the person or were you kidnapped? Listen to what I'm asked. Listen to what I'm asked. Sherry, take a deep breath because it's hard to help you if I can't understand you, okay? I know you're upset, but we have help on the way. We have help on the way.

Listen to me. Deep breath, Sherry. Deep breath. How did you get chained up? What happened? Who took you? Do you know? No.

Okay. Okay, listen. Listen, I have help on the way. I want to call my husband. Okay, listen, listen, listen, take a deep breath. Where were you taken from? From Reading. From Reading. You were taken from Reading? I live in Redding. Okay, how did someone take you?

Okay. And she's in the hospital, and you see a lot of photos of her. You can see those photos through Google. We're not going to show too many here. It's just shocking. It looks like she's just gone through hell. Right. It looks like she's been tortured.

So there is, so consistent with my argument here and the repetition compulsion, she has other injuries on her body prior to this abduction. So there's two huge scars, one on the right, one on the left side, of her back that she, that people notice because they never really healed fully. I mean, they heal, but they're massive. And she tells people that James inflicted those years ago. She tells different stories about how she received those scars until she finally admits to one of her friends that they were self-inflicted.

She tells Keith, by the way, the version that's not true. She tells Keith that somebody else inflicted those wounds. The fact, but the reality is, as we learn later, that she did it. So this is someone who was quite capable of self-harm and suffer injury well before this abduction and more than likely probably engaged in these types of behaviors for many years prior to this abduction. So again, this takes us back to the childhood trauma, the mental map she's developing from more than unlikely insecure attachment from probably some type of personality disorder, I think, that has now, as a young adult, has now become a habitual way of interacting with the world. So that's what a personality disorder is.

It's an habitual pattern of responding to the world, to the environment. So you have that. And then you have this other layer of fantasy, which. which kind of undergirds all of this, that she's very fantasy prone and she's quite capable of imagining that she's abducted, for example, by two captors, when in fact she wasn't,

when in fact she set the whole thing up. And so that's another really fascinating part of this story. So she's rescued. She's rescued, she's hospitalized, And she starts, according to Keith, she starts engaging in some type of recovery. Now, this part of the story was really, really interesting to me. Because you have someone here who is showing all the symptoms of PTSD. Yeah.

But technically is not- After the kidnapping, you mean, after this kidnapping. After the kidnapping, after she's brought home, she's recovering, she's having night terrors. She can't, she's having insomnia. She can't sleep. She's having flashbacks. She's depressed. She's anxious.

She's got all these symptoms of PTSD. And this goes on for years, too. And it looks like it too. Yeah. Go ahead. Correct. It goes on for years. And so, but the problem is you can't have PTSD.

if you haven't experienced a life-threatening event. Well, you can, let me put it to be diagnosed with PTSD, generally speaking, there is some involvement with a life-threatening event or the perception of a life-threatening event. This isn't a life-threatening event because she set it up. Because it's predictable. She knows how she's going to get injured.

In fact, she's creating the agenda here. Right. So when a combat veteran goes into war, that veteran knows that that, that veteran knows that they're going to experience trauma. They know they're going to engage with an enemy, but they can't control it. If they find themselves in a life and death scenario that they didn't predict or anticipate, that's going to potentially lead to PTSD. That's very different than what Sherry Bepini is undergoing here. Yeah. And so how is it, how is it that someone like Sherri Papini in this situation looks like she has PTSD when she doesn't?

Or, I mean, it's complicated, right? Like she does, she is subjected to very severe injuries. So I guess I guess you could argue that even though she knows they're coming, it's still traumatic. Right. So something's still traumatic. But, but what? I think you mean is she seems that PTSD because of this kidnapping and because of taint. And yet the kidnapping and taint don't exist. So how is it? They're not real. So how could this be? This is something that you found really interesting in this documentary. This was. Because yes, because she doesn't she she she's she's creating this scenario for the so-called PTSD. Yes, she is she is experiencing very traumatic events. People are hitting her with hockey stick.

or one person is hitting her with the hockey stick. One person is, is, you know. She's starving herself. She's created a fake kidnapping. There's a police investigation. There's national media. There's a lot of traumatic things going on in her life. But what sets the entire thing in motion is completely fake.

Correct. And so I think this is where this case becomes really, fascinating because I think it's the combination of fantasy and wait for it it's the combination of fantasy and the complex trauma from her childhood that's reappearing now and really forcing her to deal with a past that was extremely dysfunctional even though she's not talking about that past she goes into therapy to talk about the abduction and not her childhood trauma. And so it's the fantasy around the abduction and the fantasy about that abduction being real.

And this inability to distinguish the trauma from the abduction that she's creating from the trauma of her childhood. that makes this case really, I think, from a psychological standpoint, fascinating. Because those two intermingle. At some point, those two come together. She doesn't mean them to come together, but they do. And again, this gets back to the idea of the repetition compulsion. I could argue in a really peculiar way that Sherry Pippini subconsciously wants to deal with the dysfunction from her childhood, but doesn't know how. So she creates this

abduction scenario to do that, even though it's extraordinarily dysfunctional. And so this situation forces her to come face to face with all the trauma from her past, from the supposed trauma from her deduction. She goes into therapy. She's forced to really, which I don't think it's effective by the way. It's certainly not the most effective way to deal with this. No. But I, obviously, right? So you have kind of this perfect storm of fantasy and reality of fantasy trauma and real trauma coming together. And I think that creates this difficult, this very difficult and traumatic situation for Sherry Pippini. And that by the, that is where I do

have a lot of empathy for her. Fantasy trauma mixed with childhood trauma. Right, with real trauma. And it's that intersection of those two, I think, that makes this case particularly interesting and unique. And as I said, that's where I have some real empathy for her, given that blend. of the two types of trauma. You know, I think that there's something real there,

that there's something real and deep and difficult that she's forced to deal with in that situation. Of course, by denying the abduction, she's not helping matters, right? And by not being capable of sorting out those two types of trauma, it's not helping her. To say the least. So, yeah, broken nose, Amy Kruh, broken nose, shoulder, branding, bruising, starving, that is trauma, self-inflicted, but trauma.

Right, but is it life-threatening? Does she perceive it? It is trauma. I don't disagree. But is it, it's trauma that she's orchestrating. So in that sense, it's not trauma that's going to lead to her demise ultimately. Ph. Joy, this is bananas. Yeah, well, it gets more bananas because in 2020, when the FBI brings her in for questioning, so the FBI figures out that the DNA, I mentioned this early, the DNA on the underwear belongs to James Reyes. They go talk to James Reyes, and he tells the truth, he tells the story. She sets up the adduction. she requests him to harm her essentially.

You know, James Reyes, by the way, I'm sure James Reyes is thinking, oh, man, he's walking a tightrope, right? Because why didn't he report it? Right. I agree. Why is he not in jail? He said he was watching. He knew.

I you know I think if if you if he's watching the news and he knows that she's missing and she's claiming she was abducted and she happens to be in his place I think he knows there's potential problem there so I'm sure he's I'm sure he's I'm sure James Reyes is walking a fine line there trying to keep himself out of prison or jail right right right he's like it was me I branded her. That was me. She's over here, guys. I mean, yeah. Right. Hey, guys. Yeah, I'm the one who locked her in my place for 22 days. That was my hockey puck. That was me. I'm a hockey player. Yeah. Right. Right. But she really, really wanted me to do it. Right. I mean, yeah, good luck with that argument. So the FBI brings her in for questioning. They have indisputable evidence. They have DNA evidence. They have her description of the room and the place where she's being held matches almost exactly Reyes is. There's so much here that's tied this crime, potential crime, this so-called abduction to James Reyes and to his apartment.

And so they confront her on it, and she denies it. In fact, not only does she not deny it, but what she says is she saved my life. Find her. I don't want to be arrested. I don't want to press charges on her. I don't want to find her. I don't know.

I don't want them to find her. You're not listening to me. Because she saved me. She saved my life repeatedly, but she saved my life. This is when they're like sort of discovering and they're still investigating. And now she's like, I don't want to press charges, as you just said. This is me jumping into. Yep.

Okay, keep going. Keep going. This is a question many people are asking. So the FBI is pointing out, hey, look, it's Reyes. It's in his, we know what happened in this place. We know it's him. you know, just come clean. Just tell us what happened.

But she won't. James said you had your job broken by him. And that's why it came and got you because you were an abusive relationship? So were you an abusive relationship? Most people don't realize how much their personal information is being bought and sold every day. Data brokers are making billions,

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Have you told other people in your life that, like, China, that Keith has abused you in the past when that wasn't true? China told me that day two, where there was an incident at a party that you got hurt playing like I don't know we or missionary or something and then you told other friends that Keith heard you when there was witnesses at the party that said you just that you got hurt during a party and then you go tell James that you were being hurt you were being abused and you couldn't come forward because Keith has friends of law enforcement if all of that is that true has Keith ever

been abusive towards you we are not talking about my husband I love my husband So why leave? Is James lying to us? My children. I would never leave my children. You didn't leave them permanently. You came back to them. Ultimately.

No. You left them every day at daycare. So it's not like, hey, James talked about that decision when you were driving down, how hard it was. You left at 10 o'clock knowing that Keith was going to get home late, knowing you were going to leave the kids at daycare, and how much that tore you up on the bed. drive down. He told us that. Then things got out of control. James and I talked about that.

We did talk about that before. What? What? What? What happened? Always talked with other guys. You were in Eureka, you give them a call. Did you start chatting with them? Told him some of your problems. When did it turn from just chatting to his plan to get away? So many truths because you put yourself They were true. You're absolutely... See, you don't want to talk about the women. So the one...

We're saying James' DNA was on you. We know that you were in that room at his house. Then if you were the woman... That's why we're asking you. Did the woman put a pointed gun at you and put you in the car, yes or no? Is that where we're at? Remember. You don't remember if a female pointed a gun at you and put you in the car?

put you in the car? No what you're saying, sure. I've always told you I don't remember getting in the car. I've always told you I don't remember getting in the car. She refuses. Now, I think part of the problem here is that Keith is sitting next to her. I think she knows quite clearly that she tells the truth that Keith's going to run out of the room screaming and file for divorce

instantaneously. It was a very interesting interview to watch for that reason, how he's processing it, thinking that they have a lead and how she's processing it thinking, uh-oh, it's, you know, I'm in trouble. Yeah. So she tells the investigators, the interrogators, repeatedly, she saved my life, meaning Tate saved her life. She says repeatedly, there's no way.

There's no way. There's no way. It's James. There's no way. He, and she even said that there's no way it's James. There's no way he loves. me. She said he loves me. So not that, you know, not that this never happened, that it, it, it couldn't have happened because James couldn't do this because he loves me. That's interesting,

right. She says, quote, I am with my children because of her, meaning taint. She kept saying, I am with my children because of her, I don't understand. I don't understand. So, you know, it's, it's this absolute, incredible moment when fantasy meets reality and she's going to stick to the fantasy. She's not going to relinquish the fantasy. I think part of the reason she's not going to relinquish the fantasy is because she has to save face with Keith. If she wants any chance for that marriage to work out, she can't say essentially, yeah, I, or, orchestrated this abduction with one of my exes who abused me, by the way. And now he abused me again.

And oh, yeah, we engaged in some BDSM. And, you know, but hey, don't worry about it. We'll get through this. Our marriage, our marriage is strong. Right. Let's put a bomb in it and see how strong it is. Right. So I think that's a big part of it.

A bond goes off. Yeah. I think that's a big part of it, but another part of it is, and this is something we talk about all the time with many of the cases we deal with, like Daybell, just how much people resort to fantasy to try to affirm their sense of the world. That people just, they won't relinquish fantasy no matter what. Because to relinquish that fantasy means that Sherry Pepini has to see herself in a different way. Yeah. If she's in that room as supermom, which her friends constantly call her super mom, and if she's in that room as the perfect wife, which is the title of this documentary,

then she clearly is not going to acknowledge or want to acknowledge that she set up her own abduction and essentially abused herself. So I think that's another moment in this documentary that's really worth looking at. And the interrogation interview with the FBI in August of 2020 is really something to behold. How she maintains the fantasy. They can't break her denial. And she's steadfast about the fact that Taint and this other captor were involved, right, that Taint saved her life. Yeah, it's wild.

People are saying so no therapy for her, no, she was attending. therapy this entire time. Yeah. She had been in that moment in 2020, she had been in therapy for years. And her story never changed. Right. Her story

never changed. She'd been in therapy for years. So again, it... And she wrote a book. Well, she wrote a book for herself. It wasn't... She wrote it. But it was her fantasy. It was her kidnapping. She wrote a book in therapy. It was the details of this book about taint.

Her sister says later on, her sister's reflecting on why this happened. Her sister says, quote, because of her trauma, meaning Sherry, so Sheila says this, her sister, quote, because of her trauma, she would exaggerate a lot and she wasn't honest a lot. And that, again, that, Sheila is making the argument, if we're thinking about motive here, Sheila's making the argument that her sister is fantasy prone, that she's given over to exaggeration, which again, exaggeration and kind of these extreme behaviors would be typical of someone with potentially someone with borderline personality disorder. She's attention seeking. We know that. Sheila said that earlier.

And beneath all of this, there's this, as I said earlier, I think you've got this mental map that essentially that she can't shake from her childhood that's really characterized by this underlying fear and mistrust of the world and this conflict and this self-hatred. And so I think she constantly comes back to that. That when things are going too well in her world, when there's too much stability,

I think she's trying to sabotage that. She's finding ways to sabotage it. She's reaching out to other men. She's texting other men. She's engaging in affairs. And ultimately, I guess, her masterpiece is that she's setting up this abduction where the world's going to notice her and the world's going to pay attention to her. And she's going to be on center stage, at least for a little bit, with the entire world. Prairie Roots just said her ability to live in fantasy was what

probably allowed her to survive her trauma from the past. And what served her survival as a child was probably her demise as an adult. Right. And that, by the way, I haven't really talked about this today, tonight. But this tendency for trauma victims to resort to fantasy for survival is a version of dissociation. And so that could likely play a role here too. I haven't really gotten into that. I want to try to keep this fairly streamlined.

But certainly there's the potential for a dissociative element during all of this. That when she's experiencing or when she's abducted and undergoing that abuse, that's what's called self-inflicted abuse for lack of a better way of saying it, that perhaps in that room that she's dissociated. to some degree. Okay. And I just put up a picture of the branding. Showing people.

And let's let me go a little, let me go a little further with this idea of fantasy too, that the Keith, when Keith and the documentary, when Keith starts reflecting on what happened to his wife, I guess now ex-wife, Keith believes that it was the combined elements of, of Elizabeth Smart, the abduction of Elizabeth Smart. So she, according to Keith, he thinks that, for example, that he knows that Sherry read Elizabeth Smart's autobiography and what happened to her. And there's a lot of elements of Elizabeth Smart, right? The captor that's assaulting her repeatedly and torturing her. She's familiar with the book Gone Girl,

in which in Gangoril, the injuries are self-inflicted. And of course, she's also familiar with the abduction of a local resident named Tara Smith in 1998, who went out for a jog and never came back. In fact, the Papini family befriended the Smith family, and they knew them fairly well, I guess. But Keith also sees. sees this element of fantasy as being really important here, that he believes that this propensity that Sherry has for exaggeration and attention seeking and that it all comes together

from for Sherry when she reads Elizabeth Smart's book, when she reads Gone Girl and given her familiarity with Tara Smith, that he sees Sherry taking all of these elements and combining them and fantasy and creating her abduction scenario based on that. So near the end of the documentary, there's a moment I think that really brings all this together. And I want to talk about it because it's so critical. Sherry's in prison and I think she just went to prison and Keith is with the children. And he's so he's now raising the children by himself. And one of his kids says to him, oh, daddy, aren't you going to do that thing that mommy would do to make us sick?

And Keith was, Keith was like, what? What did you just say? And so one of his children explained to him that Sherry would take a washcloth and soak it with rubbing alcohol. and she would put it in a Ziploc bag and she would tie it around the children's necks so that they can inhale the rubbing alcohol and she would keep the bag on their neck long enough so that the children would get sick

and when the children were sick from inhaling the rub and alcohol so in other words she poisoned the children when the children were sufficiently poisoned and showing symptoms of illness she would take them to the hospital. She told the kids it would make them feel better. That's why the daughter brought it up. She thought her dad was sick.

And she said, well, why don't you start smelling rubbing alcohol? That's what mom would do for us when we were sick. So this, to me, this is the most extraordinary moment in this documentary because it really puts the pieces together. And what I mean by that is now this crime is shifted from, so some people have argued, and this is what I thought initially, that the main victim in this case, arguably, was Sherry Pippini. And I guess you could argue that, that she was a victim of childhood trauma, right, that in theory, nobody was directly hurt by her behaviors, I guess.

I mean, the children were obviously hurt. She wasn't around for them. Keith was hurt. But now that argument shifts. Now you have two kids. that are poisoned. Now you have a real crime. Now you have real victims. This, I think, changes the entire equation here. Correct. It does. And that's, that's, and it did for Keith as well. And that's what he said. He kept thinking to himself, she loved her children. She would never hurt them. She'd never leave them. I don't understand it. And then he learned this. This piece is really critical for a lot of reasons. But, but now we're starting to move into some diagnoses that I think makes sense. And again, I'm just speculating here. I haven't interviewed

Sherry Papini. I don't have the facts of this case in front of me. I don't have any discovery. I haven't done any testing on anyone. But let's take this at face value. Now we're getting towards, now we're moving towards factitious disorder, factitious disorder imposed on self and factitious disorder imposed on another. That used to be called Moonshausen. So you have Moonschausen disorder, which is essentially inflicting injury on yourself deceptively, and then presenting yourself is injured, and then Moon Chousins by proxy, which is inflicting injuries on someone else that are deceptive and then presenting the other person is injured. So now you have this unique combination of, in many cases of Monkhausen by proxy are affected.

disorder imposed on another. It's usually one or the other. But here you have both. You have factitious disorder imposed on self, which is the self-inflicted injuries. So those would be the injuries that Sherry performed or, you know, that she inducted on herself. And then you have the poisoning of the kids that were brought to the hospital. And in both cases, you know, cases, the commonality is attention. Yes. That oftentimes factitious disorder or Munchausens and Munchausen by proxy involve this element of attention seeking.

There's a research article by Jimenez et al 2020 who did a review of factitious disorder, not factitious disorder imposed on another, but just factitious disorder. And two of the critical. elements he found in factitious disorder were the need, the extreme need for attention, not just the need for attention, but the extreme need for attention and or childhood abuse or neglect. And you have both of those here with Sherry Pippini. We know that the research shows, although there's not a huge amount of research on factitious disorder imposed on another, the research shows similar characteristics that oftentimes parents who engage in moon

child's by proxy are extremely attention seeking many of them have personality disorders there's often an association with borderline personality disorder and many of them have experienced childhood abuse or neglect so i think this piece really starts putting everything together You see how these pieces all combine, the trauma, the insecure, disorganized attachment, a possible personality disorder, this need for attention, and this fantasy-prone component. They all come together here and with these actual victims that these children are being poisoned. And now I think this becomes something, and I don't, I wonder if anything's going to be done about. that by the way yeah i don't know but now this moves over into clearly into uh the criminal realm yeah it was upsetting you know it was upsetting but it wasn't surprising to me i don't know if that

makes sense but moon chow's and you know her need for attention and and the lying and the self-harm and uh you know was i wrong to not necessarily be shocked it it was heartbreaking it was awful but it was a moment of like okay how awful but it makes sense i wasn't necessarily well i think that i think the you know to me it was um it was a bit of a bombshell to me it was came out of left field because they didn't really set up they didn't show or set up any harm to the children previously in fact the children were were almost entirely left out of the picture until that last moment right so So I think it would have been, I think it would have been, it was momentous, but I feel like it was a little bit of a slight of hand.

I think it would have been, to me, it would have been a little better if they could have given us a few hints that maybe the children will retake into the hospital more often than necessary. Right. Like there could have been some, there could have been, there could have been a few indicators. I like the way that they did it because the entire documentary was sort of a character development of Keith. He starts out as just your average dude, maybe not so likable. And it's sort of his journey. And it was done in order of events. And at the very end, after all was said and done, and he's alone, being a single dad, raising these kids, divorcing her, still confused, still confused about this love. and the mother she was, he learns this.

There's like this final piece of healing or understanding for him to be able to be like, yeah, this is really bad and now I've got to take care of my children and protect them. So for me, I liked it. Sorry, and we're not movie critic. At the beginning of the show, I promised that we could understand Shuri Papina better by learning about her secrets. And now I think we know her secrets. And let's talk about that.

One of her secrets was the infidelity. And I think the infidelity was a big clue to what was going to happen later with the abduction. I think that that was starting to, you know, there were cracks in the marriage. And I think that Sherry probably felt she needed to mastermind this dramatic event to direct attention away from the infidelity and towards, you know, being this victim of the victim of this abduction. Obviously, another huge secret we now know is this poisoning of the kids. This idea that all her friends said she was supermom. Clearly, Sherry Puffini never felt like supermom. She didn't act like supermom.

That this has to be the biggest secret of all, that she's poisoning her kids. This whole supermom ideal is a facade. It's a mask. It's covering these feelings of inadequacy. and I think probably most important that the biggest secret of all that Sherry Pippini holds is that she's unlovable. I think the secret that she wants to protect more than any other secret is that she is not lovable, that she's unlovable. I think that's also her greatest fear, that everything she's doing here is to try to feel loved, to try to obtain love, whether that's through a figure, whether that's through going to the doctor's office to get attention about what a wonderful mom she is, right?

That ironically her greatest desire, her greatest wish is that she is lovable, that she's a super mom. The title of this documentary is perfect wife. That's what she wants. But she can't do it. She can't get past that fear. She can't get past that secret of feeling unlovable. feeling unlovable. And I think that's what's driving her here.

There's a moment in this documentary that you, you latched onto this instantaneously. But there's a moment here that speaks to this issue that when Sherry spends some time in jail, she's arrested and then she's released, she comes home and she goes to her aunt's house, or Keith's aunt's house, Keith meets her at this home where she's staying.

And he comes in the house and she's not there. And all of a sudden, she opens the door to one of the back rooms. And she's naked and she tries to pull him in. And she says, she basically just says, I want to have sex with you. And he's shocked. He's like, you know, I don't know what's going on. I haven't seen you in months. I don't even think he's like I don't even know you so he rejects her and she says when he

rejects her this is what she says and this is probably the most important line in the entire documentary it's simple but here's what she says quote i just want to feel love unquote i just want to feel love that's the theme for sherry papini that's the theme for sherry papini that's the underlying theme and yet I think the fear her greatest fear her greatest secret is that she doesn't feel love she feels unlovable and so I think almost all of this acting out this false abduction the personality disorder all this stuff is driven by this fear and belief that she's unlovable I want to just conclude with the final thought. Could you put that, so the brand or the tattoo, the brand on her

back I think is highly symbolic. So the brands, it says Exodus, E-X-O-D-U-S. I want to end with some thoughts about this brand, Exodus. So the last shot of this documentary is it's a shot of Keith closing a metal gate on James Reyes' apartment. And it's an extraordinary shot because it's, it's, the cameras on the inside of the, of the apartment, and Keith is on the outside on the other side of the gate. So Keith is essentially outside the room, the camera's inside the room. And, you know, when I saw that, I thought, this is a metaphor. This is, and I don't know if the filmmaker, I don't know if the director intended this,

but this is a metaphor for Sherri Papini's mind. She's trapped in this small room where she believes she's abducted, and there's this metal gate that's holding her in. This is a metaphor for Sherry Papini's psyche, that she's imprisoned in her own mind. She thinks she's abducted. She thinks she's a prisoner. She thinks she's being held captive in that room,

but she's not. She's creating that perception. Her belief is that in many ways that she's a prisoner of this traumatic past from which she can't escape. And that brings me to this brand exodus. So when I think of Exodus, I think of, you know, I guess historically the term Exodus means a deportation, but it also refers to Exodus from the Bible, where the Israelites essentially left Egypt, right?

They were captive and they were held captive. They were slaves in Egypt and they leave Egypt. And so Exodus has this meaning of you're a captor. and then you're seeking your freedom, and more than that, you're seeking home. You're trying to find home. So to me, Exodus broadly defined means someone who's in exile. It means to be exiled.

It means to escape. To, to, there's, so this, this idea for me is the idea of kind of this constant search, this constant search for a home. that's safe and where you can find love. And so to be exiled is to be a, I don't know, it's, it's to be a searcher, it's to be a wanderer. It's to be someone who is looking for home.

Correct. And I think that's the story of Sherry, that's the story of Sherry Pippini. That this brand on her back is, She's telling us the whole story. She feels like she's been exiled her life. All she wants to do is find home. She can't find it.

She can't find a place that's safe. She can't find love that feels right, that feels secure. She's an endless exile. She's an exodus. And that's what this tells us. Thank you, Dr. John. Thank you, John. People always ask, do you call him Dr.

John when you're not on your show. Not usually. Although our son did the other day, with a big smile on his face like he knew he was being hilarious. He was like, oh, Dr. John. Right. He was,

he was trolling me. Yes, he was. He was like, Dr. John, can I have. some cookies. And of course, because I didn't want them to feel like an exile, I said yes.

Yes. Thank you. Thank you, babe. Let's continue this conversation over on Patreon. It's patreon.com slash hidden true crime. Thank you to those that support us over there. We're able to go be a little bit more intimate over there. We'll see you guys.

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