Why I Believed Her

Sherri Papini faked her own abduction and torture and lied about it to authorities-and her husband for six years. Now Keith Papini speaks out

- CORIN CESARIC

For 22 excruciating days in the fall of 2016, Keith Papini waited for news-and clung to hope. On Nov. 2 his wife, Sherri, the mother of his two young children, disappeared while jogging near the family's home in Redding, Calif., leaving behind only her iPhone and strands of blonde hair. "I wasn't eating, I wasn't sleeping. It was the worst time of my life," recalls Keith, now 40. As police and volunteers scoured the neighborhood for clues, Keith appeared on national TV to tearfully appeal for her safe return.

And then, just as suddenly as her alleged abduction had made headlines everywhere, Sherri reappeared on Thanksgiving Day beside a highway near Sacramento, some 150 miles from home. She had a chain around her waist and metal clamps on her ankles and told police she had been kidnapped and held in a dark room with a bucket of kitty litter for a toilet.

Sherri's survival appeared to be a miracle. But when Keith rushed to a hospital, where police made him wait five hours while they questioned Sherri before leading him to her bed, he was struck by a fleeting doubt. "As soon as I saw her face-the way she was looking up at me-I just felt it: This is fake," he says. Yet when he hugged her, Keith felt scabs on Sherri's back and saw bruises all over her body. "It made me believe there's no way somebody could do this to themselves," he says. "Then I felt guilty that I even thought it." It was a pattern that had repeated countless times over the course of his life with Sherri, 42, whose terrifying false account of being kidnapped at gunpoint, held against her will and tortured by two Hispanic women riveted the nation in the 2010s. For six years after her apparent release, Keith stood by his wife's side, supporting her despite doubts in 2020 when authorities, citing DNA, claimed she had orchestrated her ordeal with help from a former boyfriend in Costa Mesa, Calif.