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Red Collar

The "Supermom" Kidnapping Hoax: Sherri Papini

Red Collar

Catherine Townsend

History, Red Collar, Con Artist, Investigation, American Greed, Society & Culture, Blood Money, Love Detective, White Collar Crime, Catherine Townsend, Hell And Gone, True Crime, Fraud, Murder, Documentary, Red Collar Crime, White Collar, Red Collar Diaries

4.6604 Ratings

🗓️ 29 September 2022

⏱️ 49 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Sherri Papini was kidnapped while jogging in broad daylight and tortured by her female captors before a dramatic Thanksgiving Day escape...but the whole thing was a hoax. A deep dive into secret lovers, stolen money, and shady hostage negotiators in the small town of Redding, California.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

The Supermom story was the story that captivated the entire nation.

0:09.2

On November 26, 2016, just a few weeks before Thanksgiving, a 34-year-old mother of two named Sherry Pupini decided to take a jog during her lunch break.

0:20.2

At 1037 that morning, Sherry texted her husband, 32-year-old Keith Papini, to ask him whether

0:26.8

he would be home for lunch.

0:28.8

She would later tell investigators she sent kind of a jokey message.

0:33.1

Really, she was asking if he wanted to come home and have sex with her.

0:36.4

But he didn't see the message

0:37.9

until a little bit later, so he replied that he wasn't going to make it home that day. So she decided

0:43.1

to go for a run instead. Keith got home at around five, and he was surprised to see that the house

0:49.1

was empty. So he made some calls and figured out that Sherry hadn't picked the kids up at daycare.

0:55.2

Keith was worried.

0:56.7

He used the Find My iPhone app to track his wife's phone,

0:59.7

and he got a hit right down the road from them about a mile away

1:02.4

at the intersection of Old Oregon Trail and Sunrise Drive.

1:06.2

This was pretty much exactly the spot where their mailbox was.

1:09.8

You had to drive out to get to it. So he did,

1:13.3

and that's when he saw her cell phone. It was sitting there about two feet from the side of the road.

1:18.6

The earbuds were kind of wrapped around it, and there were strands of blonde hair attached to it.

1:24.9

At 5.51 p.m., Keith reported Sherry missing, the Shasta County Sheriff's Office.

1:31.0

At first, she was listed as missing voluntarily, but Keith and Sherry's family insisted that she had

1:37.9

been abducted. He said it was totally out of character for his wife, who the press referred to as

1:43.7

supermom pretty much from that point

...

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