Hoodwinked: Sherri Papini’s kidnapping hoax ends with arrest outside her kids’ piano lessons
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Hoodwinked: Sherri Papini kidnapping hoax series
Click the arrow below for more coverage on Sherri Papini and the kidnapping hoax that garnered nationwide attention.
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This is the final of three stories that chronicle Sherri Papini’s kidnapping hoax. If you missed the first stories in the series, click here to read part one and here to read part two.
Sherri Papini’s children, aged 7 and 9, were at piano practice with their mom in Redding on a morning in early March. Just then, a man came inside and told Papini her car had been hit.
He was really an FBI agent.
Another was waiting outside to place her in handcuffs. When they went to grab her, she screamed, “No!” She tried to run. She threw her cellphone 20 feet.
After they put her in cuffs, they would drive her down the same freeway past where James Reyes, her ex-boyfriend, dropped her off to the Sacramento County Main Jail, which serves as the holding center for local prisoners accused of federal crimes. She’d spend the next five nights there.
Papini’s family remained very much in her corner on the day of her arrest.
The family hired a Utah public relations firm to issue a statement that night. The firm’s founder, Chris Thomas, handled media relations for the family of Elizabeth Smart, whose kidnapping at age 14 also became a tabloid sensation.
The statement read:
We love Sherri and are appalled by the way in which law enforcement ambushed her this afternoon in a dramatic and unnecessary manner in front of her children. If requested, Sherri would have fully complied and come to the police station, as she has done multiple times before, where this could have been handled in a more appropriate way. Sherri and Keith have cooperated with law enforcement’s requests despite repeated attempts to unnecessarily pit them against each other, empty threats to publicly embarrass them and other conduct that was less than professional. We are confused by several aspects of the charges and hope to get clarification in the coming days.
Papini’s family declined to be interviewed for this story, said Linda Luchetti, who’s fielding media inquiries for the family on behalf of Thomas’ firm.
Would Papini disappear again? A judge weighs in
In Sherri Papini’s first court hearing the day after her arrest, her then attorney, Michael Borges of Redding, asked that she be released immediately. He told the judge he was concerned about the conditions in the jail, where Papini was being held in isolation as part of the facility’s routine 14-day COVID-19 quarantine protocols.
Borges said Papini has food allergies and had only been able to eat part of an apple since her arrest.
U.S. Magistrate Judge Jeremy D. Peterson continued the matter of whether to release her on bond until after the weekend.
At the next hearing, prosecutors said her behavior at her kids’ piano studio showed she was a flight risk. They also noted that Papini had already proven she couldn’t be trusted.
“This defendant ran and successfully hid from law enforcement for three weeks,” said Assistant U.S. Attorney Veronica Alegria.
Borges argued she was merely startled at the piano studio and had been trying to run toward her children.
“She’s not a danger to the safety of anyone,” Borges said.
Citing her lack of criminal history, a federal judge agreed to set her free on a $120,000 bond.
She was required to surrender her passport and her and her husband’s firearms. She was ordered to limit her travel, abstain from drugs and alcohol, not commit any crimes and undergo psychiatric treatment.
After the hearing, around two dozen reporters and a handful of friends and family members waited for Papini to come through the jail’s main lobby doors and onto the street. She ran when she saw the TV cameras. Her sweatshirt was pulled up over her head. She was sobbing.
Reporters chased her down the street, yelling questions. Her friends and family members tried to shield her with their bodies before they sped away in a car.
Keith Papini wasn’t among them.
The price of Papini’s ruse
Keith Papini isn’t facing any charges in the case. Neither is Reyes, the ex-boyfriend with whom she stayed those 22 days.
Instead, prosecutors said Papini bears sole responsibility.
Prosecutors initially charged Papini with 34 counts of mail fraud and one count of lying to the FBI. If convicted on all counts, she could have spent up to 25 years in prison and paid $500,000 in fines.
The mail fraud counts stemmed from Papini’s receipt by mail of about 35 payments totaling $30,694.15 from the victim compensation board, and her use of the mail to send $2,997 in victim funds she received to pay a therapist for “treatment for anxiety and PTSD for her purported ‘kidnapping,’” court records say.
In mid April, though, she agreed to plead guilty to two of the counts in the hopes of getting a lighter sentence.
The day she entered her plea, Papini appeared before Senior U.S. District Judge William B. Shubb via Zoom. She wiped her nose and struggled not to cry as she sat in her lawyer’s office in Sacramento.
“How do you feel today?” the judge asked as he began inquiring about whether she was mentally fit to enter her plea.
“I’m sorry, your honor,” Papini answered. “I’m sad. I feel very sad, your honor. I feel very sad.”
“Were you kidnapped?” he asked.
“No, your honor.”
“Did you lie to government agents when you told them you were kidnapped?”
“Yes, your honor.”
The ‘turmoil’ wreaked on Papini’s family
Sitting inside the sheriff’s office in Redding two days later, Capt. Jackson had this to say when asked about Keith Papini learning the truth — that his wife had been lying to him for years: “Everybody has their choice of what they want to do to forgive. And if that’s his choice, then God bless him.”
Jackson didn’t know that Keith Papini had already filed for divorce.
It was a dramatic about-face for the loyal husband who had defended his wife so vigorously when she returned home and who sat by her side through all those interviews as she lied to detectives.
In his divorce filing, Keith Papini said his days of doing interviews with reporters are done for now. He’s not going to do any more of them.
He described a living hell for him and his two children that “kept life in turmoil for 5½ years.”
“For a substantial time, we received anonymous messages, hate mail and even death threats,” he wrote in his divorce filing.
“The children have now learned that their mother lied to them about her disappearance, lied to them about how she was abused by two Hispanic women, and lied to them about her arrest,” he wrote. “The fact that their mother lied to them on such a major issue is something they, and I, are having a hard time dealing with.”
He argued he should get sole custody of the couple’s children who hadn’t seen their mother in weeks. His filing said she’s been staying with a relative in Chico, though he didn’t say whom.
Redding: A community left with anger and sadness
Missy McArthur, the former Redding mayor, said she feels for Keith Papini and especially their kids. The Papini name is forever tainted in Shasta County.
“I’m not of the opinion she should go to jail for years and years, because that just hurts her kids,” she said, “and, you know, they’re still her kids.”
But the victims extended well beyond family.
There were the half dozen people, including Sarah Steiger, the young woman who received the frightening nighttime visit from two deputies. They had their phone records searched, their privacy violated, without their knowledge all because of Papini’s lies.
“That’s a lot of energy to put into something that’s fake, you know?” Steiger said. “That’s terrible.”
There was Donovan Miske, the Michigan man who had the cops show up at his work. He said the terrifying ordeal nearly cost him his client.
“I believe it was the first or second day of me working with this client,” he said. “So it made me look like a real bad person to work with, and I was just starting my company.”
There were the hundreds of people in the small Latino community in Shasta County.
“They weren’t safe. They won’t say they were fearful or frightened, but they were afraid,” said Alan Ernesto Phillips, the local Latino advocate. “They were taking precautions to protect themselves, their families.”
“And that’s the sad part,” said Jackson, the sheriff’s captain. “This incident instilled that fear in people, and it didn’t need to happen.”
Luce Maria Galvana, who works at a Redding Mexican restaurant, felt like a target after Papini returned.
“It felt kind of in a way racist,” she said. “Her story didn’t add up. I just never believed her story. Lie after lie.”
There was Alison Sutton, the woman who spotted Papini on the side of I-5 and called 911. She feels like she was one of Papini’s victims, too.
She did something that morning that would haunt her for the next five years. She kept driving, leaving Papini standing alone by the side of the darkened highway.
“I had been carrying around some guilt,” she told The Bee, “about the fact that my daughter and I didn’t turn around and go back.”
Sutton’s guilt has turned to anger now that Papini has admitted to lying.
Sutton said she’s been a victim of domestic abuse, so she knows as well as anyone just how hard it is to get people to believe survivors’ stories.
She worries that Papini’s story is a troubling setback at a time when there’s a national “Believe Women” movement that seeks to take their stories of abuse at face value to encourage more women to report without fear of suspicion or victim blaming.
“Everybody who cries wolf,” she said, “they make it worse for the people who have really been hurt.”
And lastly there are the costs that can be calculated — right down to the last dollar.
Prosecutors say her lies led to people donating $49,000 to the GoFundMe account her family set up when she was away. The Papinis used that money to pay off credit cards and for other unspecified personal expenses. That money is gone.
She also took $30,694 from the California Victim Compensation Board. Papini spent the money intended to go to actual victims of crime on therapy sessions, ambulance services and $1,000 to buy window blinds for her home.
And Papini falsely claimed $127,567 in disability benefits from the Social Security system.
Finally, there is this: Authorities estimate Papini wasted at least $150,000 in law enforcement resources as detectives and FBI agents scrambled to find her and later prove her story was false.
“Many, many hours of investigative resources were devoted to these efforts by conscientious and hard-working officers and agents,” U.S. Attorney Phil Talbert told The Bee in a written statement for this story, “hours that could and should have been used to protect the public from actual crimes.”
As part of her plea, federal prosecutors agreed not to pursue charges against Papini for taking the Social Security benefits.
However, Judge Shubb told her at her last hearing she may be ordered to pay back that money, as well as the rest she took. She may also have to compensate the sheriff’s office and FBI for their lost time and resources.
“It could be more than that,” Shubb warned her.
Papini almost certainly will be required to serve time in federal prison, though prosecutors agreed to only seek the “low end” of the range on their sentencing guidelines as part of her plea agreement. They recommend she serve eight to 14 months.
Shubb warned her that there’s no guarantee he’ll treat her so kindly when he sentences her on Sept. 19.
“The bottom line here is,” Shubb said, “if the sentence turns out to be more than you expected, you’ll still be bound by your plea and you can’t withdraw it.”
But just as she can’t take back her plea, no amount of prison time or financial restitution can undo all the damage, some of which might still come to pass.
McArthur wonders: Will people want to help strangers as much? Will other missing persons cases get the same level of attention?
“Definitely,” she said, “it makes people hesitant to maybe jump in and pitch a hand, give a little bit of effort and say, ‘Can we help? Can we solve this problem? Can we find her?’
“I feel like the whole community was victimized.”
This is the final of three stories that chronicle Sherri Papini’s kidnapping hoax. Did you miss the first and second parts? You can read the story of her disappearance here. And here you can find the second story about the events that followed her reappearance.
This story was originally published July 28, 2022 at 5:00 AM with the headline "Hoodwinked: Sherri Papini’s kidnapping hoax ends with arrest outside her kids’ piano lessons."