Bizarre kidnapping case baffles police

SAN FRANCISCO — Three weeks after Sherri Papini disappeared, the question of whether she was dead or alive was answered when the young mother and wife was spotted waving frantically for help along a California freeway early on Thanksgiving morning. But the mystery over what happened to her during those 22 days just seemed to grow stranger.

She was battered and bruised, her hands were chained, her long blond hair had been chopped off, and her flesh had been branded with a threatening message. The 34-year-old Papini told authorities that she had been kidnapped at gunpoint by two women Nov. 2 while she was out for a run near her home.

The bizarre turn of events — with many of the most sensational details released not by authorities but by her husband in an exclusive interview with ABC — has baffled police and set social media aflutter, with armchair detectives scouring the internet’s darkest corners for clues and others arguing that the case is some kind of twisted hoax, like something out of the movie “Gone Girl.”

Her husband, Keith Papini, has condemned the rumors as “exhausting and disgusting,” and police have said they have no reason to doubt his wife’s harrowing account. But they have a multitude of questions, among them: Who are these women? Where did they keep her? Was she selected at random or targeted? And, most of all, why? No ransom demand was ever received, and neither the Papinis nor their families are wealthy, according to Shasta County Sheriff Tom Bosenko. She is a stayat-home mom, he a Best Buy store employee.

Detectives are tracking hundreds of leads but haven’t elicited much information from Papini and have only the sketchiest description from her of her captors, who were said to be Hispanic. Authorities have not divulged the message burned into her skin, and she hasn’t been seen publicly since she was found.

“Sherri did her best that she could in providing the descriptions, but she was not able to provide a detailed description due to the suspects covering their faces, and at times Sherri’s head was covered,” the sheriff said. He noted also that victims of traumatic experiences sometimes suffer memory loss.

Among the leads detectives are following up on is a 13-year-old blog post on a white supremacist site signed by someone using Papini’s maiden name. The post claimed she and her family had white supremacist beliefs and disliked Latinos.

“We do not know that it has any relevance to this case or not,” Bosenko said Wednesday.

Papini’s former husband, David Dreyfus, defended her, saying it must have been written by someone else.

“People are bullies, and it’s easy to poke at people online,” Dreyfus told The Sacramento Bee. “With as diverse of a friends group as she and I had, that’s not her.”

Papini said she was seized about mile from her rural home outside Redding. She was found in Yolo County, 140 miles from home.