She said that her captors had leashed her to a pole inside a closet, a bucket of kitty litter serving as her toilet. Then came the beatings. And when she tried to escape, she told investigators, she was branded.
That is how Sherri Papini explained to investigators what happened during her disappearance in 2016, a three-week ordeal that prompted an intense and costly search across Northern California, where she had been living, and several other states.
The widely reported missing person case wound down after a truck driver spotted Ms. Papini wandering along an interstate, but the investigation was not over.
Federal prosecutors said this week that Ms. Papini’s claims that two masked women had abducted her at gunpoint while she was on a run in Redding, Calif., had been made up, and that she continued her deception when investigators confronted her.
In fact, prosecutors claim, Ms. Papini, who is married with two children, was staying with an ex-boyfriend and had used prepaid cellphones to arrange for him to whisk her some 600 miles away to his home in Southern California.
Her bruises and burns were self-inflicted, said prosecutors, who announced that Ms. Papini, 39, had been arrested on Thursday on felony charges that included making false statements to a federal law enforcement officer and mail fraud. The fraud charges stem from more than $30,000 in therapy and ambulance services that prosecutors said the California Victim Compensation Board paid for.
Michael L. Johnson, the...
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