Forensic Tales discusses topics that some listeners may find disturbing. Listener discretion is advised. A 34-year-old wife and mother of two young children is kidnapped in Redding, California while out on her jog. Her cell phone and headphones are discovered less than a mile from her house with a clump of her long blonde hair. Her disappearance was dubbed as the kidnapping of supermom.
A beautiful woman simply vanished. After 22 long days, Sherry Papini, Supermom, was discovered on Thanksgiving morning wandering a California freeway. Her nose was broken, she was covered in bruises, her long blonde hair cut short, and she had been branded on one of her shoulders. What happened to Supermom back in 2016?
Was she targeted? Or was there another explanation behind her disappearance? This is Forensic Tales, episode number 39, The Kidnapping of Sherry Papini. ♪
Welcome to Forensic Tales. I'm your host, Courtney Fretwell.
Forensic Tales is a weekly true crime podcast that discusses real, bone-chilling true crime stories and how forensic science has been used in the case. Some cases have been solved through cutting-edge forensic techniques, while other cases remain unsolved.
If you're interested in supporting my show and getting access to exclusive content and bonus material, consider visiting our Patreon page, patreon.com slash forensic tales. I want to give a huge shout out to this week's newest patron of the show, Emily C. Thank you so much for your support, Emily. You're amazing.
Every contribution, big or small, helps me to continue to produce the true crime content you love. Please consider supporting the show on Patreon. Another way you can support Forensic Tales is by leaving us a rating with a review. Now, let's talk about the mysterious kidnapping of Sherry Papini.
Hi, Forensic Tales listeners. The story that we're covering this week on the show has more questions than it does answers. It's a story that left people divided. You're either on one side or you're on the other. You either believe she's a victim or you believe she's a liar.
I'm talking about the kidnapping of Sherry Papini, a then 34-year-old wife and mother of two from the city of Redding, California. She went out for a jog one afternoon in 2016 and never returned home. On the show this week, we're going to take a deep dive into the case, and we're also going to discuss possible theories that explain Sherry's disappearance.
At the end of the episode, I'm going to tell you why I think forensic science will finally be able to solve this one. In November 2016, Sherry was living with her husband, Keith Papini, and their two young children in Redding, California. Now, Redding is a city in the north end of the Sacramento Valley within Shasta County, California.
On November 2nd, 2016, she told her husband Keith that she would pick the kids up from daycare later on like she usually did and that she was going to go for her normal jog around a hiking trail not too far from her house around 2 p.m., which according to Keith is something that Sherry always did. This was a running trail that Keith said his wife was known to jog at.
Later that afternoon, Keith returned home from his job working at Best Buy and returned home to an empty house. Sherry wasn't there. Their two kids weren't there, which Keith found to be very strange. It wasn't like Sherry or the kids to not be home when he got back from work. So he decided to call the kids' daycare to find out what time Sherry picked the kids up at. But the daycare told Keith...
that the kids were still there, that no one had come by to pick them up yet. Once he learned Sherry never picked up their two kids, Keith was really worried about his wife. So he called his mother to go pick up the kids from daycare while he started to find out where Sherry might be.
According to Keith, the first thing he did was use the Find My iPhone tracker to see if he could figure out where Sherry's iPhone was, which he knew Sherry always carried with her. The tracker reported her cell phone to be at the intersection of Sunrise Drive and Old Oregon Trail, a spot about a mile away from the Papini house.
According to Keith, he drove down to where the tracker said Sherry's cell phone was. And next to her phone were also her headphones and a clump of Sherry's blonde hair that appeared to Keith as having been ripped off her head.
Now, later on, some would speculate that the headphones and the cell phone appeared to have been neatly placed there. Particularly the headphones were neatly wrapped up. They didn't appear to have been ripped off as a result of some sort of struggle. Keith returned back to the house and decided he needed to call 911 and report Sherry missing a little before 6 p.m.
This 911 call would later be highly criticized over the internet and in the media, which we'll talk about in just a moment. But on the 911 call, Keith told the operator that he came home from work, his wife Sherry and their kids weren't home, and that he used the Find My iPhone tracker to locate her cell phone about a mile away.
And in his own words, he's, quote, totally freaking out, thinking like somebody grabbed her, end quote. Police immediately arrived at the Papini house, which began a large manhunt that lasted through the entire night and into the morning of November 3rd. Law enforcement didn't waste any time in their search to try and find Sherry.
They brought in tracker dogs, they used helicopters, and the case was even immediately covered on all local and national news outlets. The media quickly started referring to Sherry as the missing supermom. Sherry was last seen on Sunrise Drive around 2 p.m. on November 2nd. Within a few days, Keith had already set up a GoFundMe page in order to raise additional money.
He wasn't happy with how law enforcement was handling the case. So according to Keith, the GoFundMe page, which would go on to raise almost $50,000, was to hire two private investigators to help search for Sherry. In any case like Sherry's, the first person that police want to speak to is the significant other.
Police questioned Keith on a number of different occasions following Sherry's disappearance. He was never officially ruled out as a suspect, but he did in fact pass a polygraph. But here's where I want to go back to that initial 911 call. I mentioned that many people have found some of the things Keith said on the phone call just a little strange.
For starters, one of the first things he told the operator is that he used the Find My iPhone feature to try and track down her cell phone. It's kind of like he's anticipating being asked how he was able to find her cell phone so quickly after learning she wasn't home. Too often we hear people, possible suspects, say,
offer up unusual information without being asked, in some way anticipating future questions. And also, a few times during the phone call, Keith says he's really freaking out, which is interpreted to some as overstating his emotional state.
If a husband discovers his wife's cell phone along the side of the street with a large clump of her hair, you don't need to state several times how freaked out you are. Again, leading some people to speculate that Keith may have known a little more than he was leading on to, which we'll get into when we talk about the possible theories here.
So Sherry's disappearance was very similar to a kidnapping that happened back in 1999 in the same exact area of Reading. Back in 1998, 16-year-old Tara Smith was last seen jogging in the exact same area that Sherry was. Even now, in 2020, Tara Smith has never been found.
Because Tara and Sherry's cases were so similar, they were both jogging in the same area, and both were presumably kidnapped, police couldn't rule out the possibility that somehow these two disappearances were maybe connected. But before this theory could really get further developed, three weeks after Sherry went missing, the case was turned completely upside down.
That's because three weeks after Sherry disappeared, on Thanksgiving morning, around 4.30 a.m., she was found wandering Country Road 17 near Interstate 5 in Yolo County. She was discovered about 150 miles away from her home when a motorist spotted her alongside the road. She had a chain around her waist, which was tethered to her left wrist with a zip tie.
Hose clamps were fixed to her ankles that would later on be described by the sheriff's department as pain compliance restraints. She also had some pretty significant injuries to her body, which I think is really important to talk about here. She had a broken nose. She had black and yellow bruises all over her body. Her long blonde hair had been cut short and
And probably most disturbing was that she had a brand mark that had been burned into her shoulder. A brand mark just like what you would see on cattle. When Sherry was discovered, she weighed only 87 pounds and had been missing for 22 days. Now this is what Sherry Papini said happened. She said she was kidnapped by two Latina women while out on her jog.
She said the women were wearing masks, so she wasn't able to get a good look at their faces. According to Sherry, the two women confronted her with a gun, put a bag over her head, and forced her inside a dark-colored SUV. She said the women, who mostly spoke Spanish, drove her to an unknown location where she was held against her will for a little over three weeks.
She said that she remembered very little about where she was or what happened to her over the course of 22 days, which isn't helpful at all to investigators because she isn't able to provide a description of the women. She doesn't know where they drove her to. She doesn't even remember much of anything for the three weeks while she was held captive. Not a thing.
So what was released to the media about Sherry's kidnapping didn't come from the police. Most of what has been released came directly from Sherry's husband, Keith. Once Sherry returned home, Keith went on a number of different news outlets telling the media about what happened to his wife and basically retelling her version of events.
So let's talk about some of the forensic evidence in the case. When Sherry showed up on Thanksgiving morning, she was wearing different clothes from when she went missing. She wasn't wearing the jogging clothes that she would have had on. And on the clothes she was wearing, they found a DNA profile belonging to a male.
Also on her body at the hospital, they found a second DNA profile who belonged to a female. Both DNA profiles were run through the FBI's Combined DNA Index System, or CODIS, but neither DNA profile came back as a hit, meaning the DNA didn't match any of the profiles stored in CODIS. And also, the male profile didn't match Sherry's husband, Keith.
If the DNA profiles could have been matched at least to one of the profiles, this could have cracked this case wide open because it would have given investigators at least one potential suspect. And at this point in the investigation, they had nothing. They had no suspects. It's also important to point out here, speaking of the forensic evidence, Sherry's claim is that it was two Hispanic women who kidnapped her.
But on her clothes, there was a male DNA profile and a female DNA profile. So does this mean there's also a male offender involved? Or does this have some sort of other explanation? I think the discovery of these two unknown DNA profiles is going to be a big deal when we talk about some of the possible theories of this case.
After Sherry returned home, she went pretty much off the face of the earth. No one outside of her immediate family even saw her for over a year. She had become somewhat of a recluse. But the Shasta County Sheriff's Department continued to work the case to try and figure out what exactly happened. And that's when bigger questions about the case started to come up. Police couldn't figure out a motive in the case.
Was Sherry specifically targeted or was this some sort of random kidnapping? Even though there wasn't any apparent motive, investigators started to learn a little bit more about who Sherry was. And one of the things investigators learned is that Sherry, well, Sherry isn't a runner, at least according to her neighbors.
All of Sherry's neighbors reported to police that in all of the years that they lived next door to the Papinis, no one ever saw Sherry go for a run or go for a jog. And the one time that she does go running, she's kidnapped. It's also discovered that Sherry has a history of mental illness.
A December 2003 report taken by the Shasta County Sheriff's Department reported that Sherry had physically harmed herself. Although the report obtained by the media is very limited, it was speculated that during this incident, Sherry had harmed herself and attempted to blame the injury on her mother. But this claim hasn't been confirmed.
but if true, speaks to the prior incident in which Sherry physically harmed herself and blamed the injury on someone else. A few years before the 2003 incident in 2000, Sherry's father called police to report that his daughter had vandalized his home. There was also another report taken that Sherry had made some unauthorized withdrawals from his checking account.
Again, in 2003, Sherry's sister, Sheila, made a police report that the back door of her house had been kicked in and that she suspected that Sherry was the one who did it. None of these police reports or incidents provided any details about any arrests that were made, and no one in Sherry's family has confirmed whether or not charges against her were ever filed.
Investigators also learned about other aspects of Sherry's life. Before the kidnapping, authorities uncovered text messages between Sherry and a man who lived in Michigan. Sherry and this guy clearly had a very strong texting relationship with each other. The two had been communicating for several months prior to her disappearance.
Police haven't confirmed whether or not the relationship between this guy and Sherry was ever romantic, but we do know that this man visited California just a few days before the kidnapping, but he wasn't in Redding the exact day she went missing. It's also important to mention here, this man was reportedly saved under a female's name in Sherry's cell phone.
So it's not clear if she was attempting to hide this man's identity from her husband, or there's some other explanation. But more than anything else here, this just opens up the door to alternative theories, which we'll definitely discuss. Four years after Sherry's kidnapping, the Shasta County Sheriff's Department has said that this still remains an active case within the department.
Investigators are still searching for that dark colored SUV and the two Latina women involved. Over the course of the investigation, deputies have issued over 20 search warrants, searching items like cell phones, bank accounts, and social media accounts. But investigators who are working on the case have kept a lot of what they found a secret.
Remember, almost everything we know about Sherry's kidnapping and her injuries come directly from Keith and his appearances in the media. None of those details or information was ever released from the police. And in reality, the police actually told Keith that he should stop talking to the media and that this could be sensitive information that could be used to help solve the case.
Let's talk about and get into some of the theories of the case and why I believe forensic science could actually be what finally solves this case. So what actually happened to Sherry Papini? One theory that has emerged is that Sherry left on her own. She wanted to start a brand new life.
At some point while being gone, she decided she made a mistake. She wanted to come back home and she made up the story of the two Latina women. Now, if you believe this theory, we have to tackle the fact that Sherry had some pretty serious injuries. That if this whole thing was made up, she would have had to inflict those injuries on herself.
But that's not entirely impossible. In 1987, Tawana Browley, a 15-year-old African-American girl from New York, created a media firestorm after she claimed she was raped by six white men. When Tawana was found, she had KKK written across her chest, and her hair was covered in feces.
She had been brutally beaten. During her first interview with police, she was reportedly so traumatized that she could only answer in yes or no questions. But after a seven-month-long investigation into the case, police learned, well, she made the whole thing up.
She made the story up in order to avoid getting in trouble for running away. And those injuries? Well, she did it to herself. And some other people who believe this theory have compared Sherry's case to Darlie Routier's. Now, we covered Darlie's case in an earlier episode of the show.
Darlie was convicted of killing her two young sons and also inflicting some very serious injuries on herself that she claimed was from an intruder. Of course, Darlie was found guilty of the two murders, but she suffered very serious injuries and might have been self-inflicted, including one that missed her carotid artery by just a few centimeters.
Now, another aspect of Sherry's case that possibly supports the theory that she may have staged the kidnapping is maybe the most obvious. It's really, really rare for women to abduct other women. Now, of course, it does happen. But from a criminological perspective, this type of crime is very rare.
It's also uncommon for kidnappers who physically assault or even sexually assault their victims to go out of the way to disguise their appearance.
The only physical description Sherry could provide was that one of the women had long and curly hair, while the other female, who was a little bit older, had straight hair and she had thick eyebrows. The rest of their faces were covered up the entire time. So in cases like Sherry's where the victim is kidnapped and held captive, and in her case for 22 days,
It's uncommon for the kidnappers to suddenly release their victim and just let them go. Hasn't been explained why she was kidnapped in the first place and why after 22 days was just free to go. Typically, we see offenders kidnap their victims and unfortunately, a lot of the time, it ends up in murder.
or they're kidnapped and they're sex trafficked or something like that. We hardly have any cases where the kidnapper or kidnappers just let their victims go after a few weeks. But what would be Sherry's motive to run away in the first place? Well, some people point to the relationship that she had with a man in Michigan, the one that was saved in her cell phone under a female's name.
This theory points to the idea that Sherry ran away from her current life, wanted to start a new one with this man, and somewhere down the road got cold feet and changed her mind. And that in order to come back home, she staged the kidnapping story and as a result inflicted those wounds on herself. There's been some speculation that Sherry was involved in other affairs outside of her marriage to Keith.
which may have also played a part in her disappearance. But I want to be absolutely clear that in all of my research on this case, this claim has never been substantiated with facts and has never been reported by the Shasta County Sheriff's Department. So at this point, this theory or this aspect to this theory simply remains speculation.
A second theory in the case is that Sherry staged her kidnapping in order to seek attention. Many people who believe that she did this because she was attention-seeking point out the fact that she was discovered on Thanksgiving morning, that the quote, supermom being kidnapped in broad daylight while out on her jog would absolutely make headline news.
They also point to the earlier 2003 allegation when police responded to the Papini residence after Sherry suffered some sort of physical injury that she claimed came from an attack from her mom. Now, I don't know if this theory holds as much ground as the first one does. Since Sherry's return back home,
She's become practically a recluse. So if it was attention that she was seeking, she has stayed completely out of the public eye ever since she returned back home. Finally, the third possible theory, well, is that Sherry Papini is telling the truth, that she was kidnapped by two Hispanic women while out on a jog. Sherry's husband, Keith, has been extremely outspoken about the case and
saying that everything his wife claims is absolutely true and that the entire Papini family is extremely hurt by any armchair quarterbacks who think that she made this up or that she staged her own kidnapping. And if that's the case, what Sherry Papini went through is what nightmares are really made of.
She's going out for a run, is kidnapped, thrown inside of an SUV, and is held captive for three weeks. And when Sherry was finally discovered, she had significant physical injuries. She lost 15% of her total body weight. She was almost unrecognizable.
The Shasta County Sheriff's Department has maintained that this is an open investigation and that the department is actively investigating Sherry's claim. They haven't come forward to say that they believe Sherry was somehow staging her kidnap or that somehow Sherry made it up.
So I want to go back to the forensic evidence because that's what I believe will actually solve this case and will actually provide some answers about what really happened to Sherry Papini. The forensic evidence will tell us which theory or possibility is really true in the case.
And the biggest piece of forensic evidence is the two unknown DNA profiles found on Sherry when she was discovered. There was a male profile on her clothes and a female DNA profile was found on her body in the hospital. Here's why, once we know whose DNA profile it belongs to, we'll have a much better chance at finally solving this case.
The FBI ran the DNA profiles in Decodas, which is our national DNA database here in the United States. So when you're arrested and convicted of an offense or when you choose to plead guilty to charges, most likely the prosecutor's office will request your DNA to be collected. And once it's collected, it's put in Decodas.
ENCODIS is used by law enforcement agencies all across the country, and it can be matched to known offenders in the database to DNA profiles collected at crime scenes. But in Sherry Papini's case, the police are limited to the DNA profiles that are in ENCODIS. The DNA profiles in ENCODIS only represent a tiny fraction of all DNA profiles.
If Sherry's kidnappers haven't had any prior contact with law enforcement, their DNA isn't going to be stored in CODIS. So that's why investigators should start looking outside the box of CODIS and explore a field and topic that we've covered many times on the show, and that's genetic genealogy.
I think you guys know me by now, and you know that I absolutely love this new tool of genetic genealogy. We've talked about it so many times over the show in so many different cases, and I always say it. I keep saying genetic genealogy is one of the best recent gifts to forensic science. I think in another life, I should have been born to be a genetic genealogist.
So genetic genealogy allows forensic investigators to link a DNA profile to someone in an offender's family. So when we have a DNA profile, but we don't have a suspect because they aren't in CODIS,
we can run the profile through different ancestry websites and possibly get a hit to one of the offender's family members who have previously submitted their DNA to the website. This ability for investigators to use these ancestry websites to expand their pool of DNA profiles has really opened up millions of additional DNA profiles.
It doesn't just limit investigators to CODIS anymore. And the great thing is we don't need the offender's DNA. We can get a familial DNA hit off of these websites from as distant as a second or third cousin to the offender. Once we've identified a family member, we can start to work backwards to find out who possibly could be a potential suspect.
and finally get the DNA profile that we really need. Now, one of the most popular genealogical websites used for these types of cases is a website called GenMatch. GenMatch has almost 2 million DNA profiles on its website, making it one of the leading websites for investigators to use. And in case I need to sell my love for genetic genealogy even more,
Using ancestry websites like GEDmatch has solved over 70, 70 cold cases in just the last two years. None of these cases could have been solved using CODIS. Now, according to an article from Reading.com, if 2% of a population gives DNA to an ancestry website,
Nearly 99% of that population will find a relative who is a second or third cousin or even closer on the website's DNA database. That's just 2% of the population. So if 23andMe or any other website wants to become a sponsor of my show, please reach out.
In Sherry Papini's case, the only valuable evidence they have, and really the only shot investigators have at finally solving this one, comes down to the two unknown DNA profiles from her clothing and from her body. If investigators can get a hit using a website like GEDmatch to find a relative of either of the two DNA profiles, then
Investigators will have a really good shot at solving this one. They don't have to wait until one of the suspects enters their DNA through CODIS. They will finally prove what theory can explain what really happened to Sherry Papini. The kidnapping of Sherry is still an active investigation.
Detectives working the case ask that with anyone with information about the suspects to call the FBI at 916-746-7000, option 1. There's also a $10,000 reward for any information that leads to the identification of the two suspects.
If you want to hear what I think and which theory I suspect really happened, consider signing up to become a patron at patreon.com slash forensic tales. As a patron of the show, you'll get full access to my personal thoughts on the case and what theory I'm leaning towards. Forensic Tales is a Rockefeller Audio Production.
The show is written and produced by me, Courtney Fretwell. For a small monthly contribution, you can gain access to bonus content and be one of the first to listen to new episodes of the show. Or if you simply want to support what I'm doing, head over to our Patreon page, patreon.com slash forensic tales.
Don't forget to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to Forensic Tales. Leaving us a rating with a review greatly helps support the show. Forensic Tales is a podcast made possible by our Patreon producers, Tony A, Nicole L, William R, Joseph F, David B, and Amanda M.
If you'd like to become a producer of this show, head over to our Patreon page or shoot me an email at Courtney at ForensicTales.com to find out how you can become involved. Please join me next week. We release a new episode every Monday.
Until then, remember, not all stories have happy endings.