Sherri Papini, 34, had been missing for twenty-two days. Her husband Keith had reported her absent on the evening of November 2, 2016, after he came home from work to find her gone and couldn’t reach her by phone. He had driven the route she typically jogged and found her cell phone and earbuds — the earbuds with blonde hairs still tangled in them — lying at an intersection about a mile from their home on Sunrise Drive in Redding.
Her return triggered an immediate outpouring of relief. Keith Papini described her injuries in a statement to People magazine: “She was a warrior, fighting to get back to her kids.” He said her nose was broken, she had severe bruising across her body, and she had been branded — the mark on her right shoulder was later described as resembling a verse from the book of Exodus. She weighed 87 pounds.
The Shasta County Sheriff’s Office described the physical evidence and relayed Papini’s account: she had been taken by two Hispanic women, both of whom had kept their faces masked or her head covered to prevent identification. One of the women was armed with a handgun. The women had held her captive for the duration, she said, releasing her only on that Thanksgiving morning after approximately three weeks.
By evening, the story was on every major news outlet. The People cover story came quickly. The phrase “supermom” — drawn partly from Keith Papini’s characterizations of his wife’s love for their children and her devotion to fitness and family life — attached itself to the coverage and gave it a hook that audiences responded to viscerally. A young mother, gone for three weeks, found bound on a roadside on Thanksgiving. It was the kind of story that made people afraid and grateful at once.