Ray William Johnson: True Story Podcast
She Faked a Whole Kidnapping - The Sherri Papini story
Mon, 10 Feb 2025
This is the story Sherri Papini of Redding California and her kidnapping hoax.
What happened on the day Sherri Papini disappeared?
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-pews. 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's 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 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.
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