Ray William Johnson: True Story Podcast - She Faked a Whole Kidnapping - The Sherri Papini story

Episode Date: February 10, 2025

This is the story Sherri Papini of Redding California and her kidnapping hoax.

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Gambling problem? Call 1-800 gambler. So one day, this woman goes for a jog around her neighborhood. When suddenly, bam, an SUV pulls up out of nowhere and two women get out. And they both have pew-pues, and they grab her and they force her into the SUV. And the SUV speeds away. Now the woman who was kidnapped, she's a normal suburban mom, her name Sherry. And on that day, Sherry doesn't show up to pick up her kids after school.

And her husband, this guy, Keith, Keith gets worried and he starts freaking out. And he calls the police and then boom, a search gets underway. And suddenly everyone's looking for Sherry, and this story is all over the media. And they announce a reward for any information about her disappearance. Someone sets up a GoFundMe to help with the search, and it raises over $50,000. But unfortunately, weeks pass, and no one has heard anything. And there's no sign of what might have happened to her. Until...

22 days go by, and it's 4 a.m. And a woman driving along the highway, she spots a disheveled person on the side of the road. So she calls police. So police come and they find it's Sherry there on the side of the highway, and she looks terrible. She's seriously beaten up, she's starved down to 87 pounds, all her hair is chopped off, and strangely, she has a Bible verse branded on her shoulder blade. And of course, police know exactly who she is. They know she's been missing, it's been all over the news.

So they bring her in and they question her a few times, trying to figure out exactly what the hell happened to her during those 22 days. But Sherry, she's being really odd about the whole thing. She's not telling them a lot. But after a few sessions with her, she eventually gives them this story. She says that that day she was out jogging, two Latina ladies pulled up in an SUV, and they held her at gunpoint, and they put her in the SUV, and they drove her to some shady location,

and there they chained her up. Now, from this story, police get enough of a description of the kidnappers to draw these two sketches. But unfortunately, their faces are covered, so the drawings aren't much help. But police hear this story, story and they keep wondering, why the hell did the kidnappers burn a Bible verse into her skin? And so Sherry tells them something, but she keeps changing the details of the story.

And it's especially weird because this Bible verse basically says, anyone who kidnaps someone else should be put to death, which seems like a weird thing for actual kidnappers to burn into someone's back. So of course, by this point, police are suspicious of this whole thing. So they do DNA testing on Sherry's clothes from when she was taken. And the tests show that there's male DNA on the underwear she was wearing. But it sucks because that DNA doesn't match with anyone in their criminal database. Double until! At this point, about four years have passed since she was abducted.

But then, out of nowhere, pow, their DNA finally links with someone in their database. And basically, the results show that while they can't find a match for this DNA, they did find that it's close to someone else's DNA in the database, meaning that it's probably their relative. So they investigate and they find that this relative is related to this guy, James. And James just happens to be Sherry's ex-boyfriend. So police find James and they confront him and he quickly crumbles and he tells police that basically Sherry must have kidnapped herself. So here's what really happened. Sherry goes to the jogging track that day and she randomly calls James to come pick her up. And when he does, she leaves her phone and her ear pods there where she was

jogging, so it will look like someone abducted her. James then drives Sherry nine hours away to his place to live with him. There, she starves herself to lose a bunch of weight, she cuts off all her hair, she beats herself up, and she has James brand a Bible verse on her shoulder blade for some reason. Allegedly, Sherry was just tired of her suburban life, or maybe she just wanted attention, it isn't actually entirely clear why she faked her own kidnapping. But after 22 days of living there with James, she decides she's done with this whole plot, and that kidnapping herself was a terrible idea. So she suddenly asks James to drive her roughly nine hours back near her home in Northern California and drop her off on the side of the highway. And that is where the police found her. But here's

the craziest part. According to James, he wasn't even in on the whole scam. He had no idea she was faking her own kidnapping. Allegedly, when she called him to come pick her up that day, he thought she wanted to be with him and that she was just running away from her family and her abusive husband which by the way it turns out her husband keith was never abusive she made that up too so anyway police arrest sherry i don't have a mugshot but here's what she looks like in real life and also here's what james looks like in real life and so sherry goes to court she pleads guilty to all this and she's sentenced to 18 months in prison and she's ordered to pay back all the money her hoax cost the state which is around three hundred thousand dollars while james

wasn't charged with any crime at all. Also, two days after she pled guilty, her husband Keith filed for divorce. Good for him. Shout out to California.