May 25, 2025
by Carla Hay

“Perfect Wife: The Mysterious Disappearance of Sherri Papini”
Directed by Michael Beach Nichols
Culture Representation: The three-episode documentary series “Perfect Wife: The Mysterious Disappearance of Sherri Papini” features a predominantly white group of people (with one Latina) discussing the case of Sherri Papini, who claimed to be kidnapped from her home city of Redding, California, for 22 days in 2016, and was convicted in 2022 of faking the kidnapping.
Culture Clash: Sherri Papini’s ex-husband Keith Papini and others say that Sherri did this elaborate hoax to get attention and because she was unhappy in her marriage.
Culture Audience: “Perfect Wife: The Mysterious Disappearance of Sherri Papini” will appeal primarily to people who are interested in true crime documentaries about fraud and people who went missing.

“Perfect Wife: The Mysterious Disappearance of Sherri Papini” delves into the high-profile case of Sherri Papini, who admitted to faking her own 2016 kidnapping. In 2022, she was convicted of crimes related to this hoax. This three-episode docuseries is notable for having an extensive interview with Sherri Papini’s ex-husband Keith Papini about her bizarre disappearance. The documentary is riveting but flawed for not fully investigating certain controversial accusations.
Directed by Michael Beach Nichols, “Perfect Wife: The Mysterious Disappearance of Sherri Papini” has interviews from a fairly wide variety of people, but Keith Papini’s perspective is mainly driving the narrative. By now, most of the facts of the case are widely known to a lot of people who would have an interest in watching this documentary. Sherri Papini declined to be interviewed for this documentary because she had a deal with Investigation Discovery to do her own documentary.
Sherri and Keith got married in 2009. Their son Tyler was born in 2012. Their daughter Violet was born in 2014. Both of the children are seen briefly with Keith near the end of the documentary and in home videos and photos. The family seemed to have an idyllic middle-class life in Redding, California. Several people who knew homemaker Sherri described her as a “supermom.”
On November 2, 2016, Sherri (who was 34 at the time) disappeared from Redding. On that day, she had planned to go jogging while her two kids were at a daycare center, and her then-husband Keith (who was 32 at the time) was at work. When Keith arrived home, he couldn’t find Sherri, but he used the Find My Phone app to find her cell phone, which was abandoned in an area about a mile from where the couple lived. Keith immediately reported Sherri’s disappearance to authorities. His 911 call is included in the documentary.
Sherri’s disappearance made international news. Although investigators received many tips, none of them led to finding Sherri. When Sherri was missing, some people in the general public speculated that Keith could’ve been involved in abducting, even though Keith had an alibi (he was at work), and investigators ruled him out as a possible suspect.
On November 24, 2016 (which was Thanksgiving Day), Sherri was found partially bound in chains, outdoors in Yolo County, California, about 150 miles south of Redding. She claimed that two Spanish-speaking Latina strangers kidnapped her and held her captive for the past 22 days, but the two so-called kidnapper women decided to let her go. Sherri had several bruises and burns on her body, she was branded with letters on her right shoulder, and she was emaciated.
Sherri could not describe the vehicle that was used to transport her because she claimed that she could not remember anything about the vehicle. She described the Latina kidnappers as one who was young and one who was middle-aged. Sherri said she couldn’t see their entire faces because she claimed that she only saw the two women wearing bandanas covering the lower halves of their faces, which is also the description that she gave to a police sketch artist.
Police could not find the women whom Sherri described as her kidnappers. The FBI was also involved in the investigation. Four years later, in 2020, there was a major break in the case: DNA that was found in Sherri’s underwear that she wore during her so-called kidnapping was traced back to James Reyes, her ex-fiancé who lived in Costa Mesa, California, which is about 585 miles south of Redding.
When interrogated by investigators, Reyes at first denied anything do with Sherri’s disappearance. But then, he confessed that Sherri had asked him to pick her up in his car at a designated meeting place and hide her in his house for the period of time that Sherri went missing. Reyes said that he and Sherri used pre-paid “burner” phones to secretly communicate with each other before the disappearance, which is why Keith didn’t know that Sherri had been contacting Reyes.
Sherri and Reyes have reportedly said in separate law enforcement interviews that their relationship when Sherri and Keith were married was an emotional affair, not a sexual affair. Sherri has also denied speculation and gossip that she had sexual affairs with other men when she was married to Keith. She will only admit that during her marriage to Keith, she would flirt and get emotionally involved with other men, mostly through online communication.
According to Reyes, he agreed to this plan to help Sherri go into hiding because Sherri told him that Keith was abusing her and she wanted to get away from Keith for a while. Reyes also said that Sherri asked him to use a brand on her and cause many of the injuries that were found on her body. Reyes also claimed that some of Sherri’s injuries were deliberately self-inflicted, which is an allegation that Sherri continues to deny. Reyes was not charged with any crimes in this case and so far has not given any media interviews. There has been no evidence that Keith physically abused Sherri. Keith has also not been charged with any crimes in this case.
In 2022, Sherri was arrested for lying to federal agents and committing mail fraud because she collected Social Security disability benefits as a result of reporting that she was an injured kidnapping victim. The case never went to trial because in 2022, Sherri eventually entered a plea deal. She pled guilty to one count of making false statements and one count of mail fraud. As part of the deal, she confessed to masterminding the kidnapping hoax.
Keith filed for divorce after Sherri’s guilty plea. Their divorce became final in May 2023. He got full custody of their two children. Sherri was sentenced to 18 months in prison and served 10 months before getting an early release in August 2023. She was also ordered to pay more than $300,000 in restitution for the costs of the investigation and for the money that she got from disability benefits and the therapy she got that was funded by the California Victim Compensation Board.
All of this has been widely reported already, but the documentary series tells the story in a way so that the mystery and how it was solved is chronicled for people who might not know the story before seeing this documentary. The first episode, titled “It’s a Wonderful Life With You,” describes the Papini marriage and people’s reactions to Sherri’s disappearance. The second episode, titled “Smegma Was Relentless,” details how cracks in Sherri’s story started to show and how the DNA evidence eventually led to discovering Reyes’ involvement in Sherri’s disappearance. The third episode, titled “You Never Found Me,” is about Sherri getting into legal trouble for the faked kidnapping and how the Papini marriage collapsed.
In the documentary, Keith describes his roller coaster of emotions and trauma during the ordeal of thinking of Sherri had been kidnapped, her surprising return, and then finding out the even more shocking truth that the kidnapping was a hoax that she concocted. Before Sherri was arrested, Keith said he and Sherri had temporarily separated, but he ultimately chose to believe Sherri for as long as he could because of the injuries she had when she was found.
Keith admits that he and Sherri had problems in their relationship, long before the kidnapping. Keith says on their first date, Sherri told him that she was married but separated from her husband. Sherri said her first husband was in the U.S. military, and she married him because she needed his medical benefits to get surgery for a heart problem. Keith says that this revelation was surprising to him, but he said that he accepted it, and it didn’t bother him at the time.
According to news reports, Sherri and her first husband David Dreyfus (who was a platoon sergeant) got married in 2006, and they got divorced in 2007. It’s unknown if she ever really had surgery for a heart problem, which would be harder to confirm because medical records are usually considered private under the U.S. law known as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). Dreyfus has given very few media interviews about Sherri. In the interviews, Dreyfus has only said nice things about her and said that their divorce was amicable. He is not interviewed in this documentary.
According to what Keith says in this documentary, another big problem in their marriage was Sherri would send flirty text messages to men whom Keith didn’t know. And so, in 2011, Keith decided that he and Sherri should have a post-nuptial agreement where if they divorced, he would get to keep everything that was in his name, including their house and cars. Without this post-nuptial agreement, California’s no-fault divorce laws would ensure that Sherri could conceivably get half of Keith’s assets if they divorced without a pre-nuptial or post-nuptial agreement.
Before Sherri became a homemaker, she worked for AT&T but got laid off. She spent some of her severance package money on getting a breast augmentation, which Keith said was her idea, not his. Keith also objected to Sherri wanting to spend money for daycare for their children when she was a homemaker and had the time to take care of the kids at home.
Even though Keith admits to these marital problems, he comes across as someone who downplays how disturbing their arguments were. The documentary has police audio recordings of interviews with a few unidentified neighbors who reported that they heard Keith and Sherri arguing loudly with each other. Keith was allegedly heard threatening to kill Sherri in at least one of these arguments.
Also interviewed in the documentary are Sheila Koester (Sherri’s sister) and Jenifer Harrison (Sherri’s former best friend since childhood), who both say that Sherri has had a long history of being a chronic liar. Koester says that she and Sherri grew up in an abusive household. Koester doesn’t go into details but she says that abuse of alcohol and drugs by her parents had a lot to do with the trauma that she and Sherri experienced as kids.
Harrison says that when she and Sherri were children, Harrison once saw Sherri’s mother hit Sherri hard and drag Sherri on the ground. Sherri’s parents (Loretta Graeff and Richard Graeff) are not interviewed in the documentary, but there are some short archival clips of Sherri’s parents doing a TV news interview about Sherri’s disappearance. Harrison says that Sherri has a pattern of accusing men in Sherri’s life (including Keith) of being abusive to her. “She does tend to be a little dramatic, a little exaggerative,” Harrison comments on Sherri’s credibility.
Other people interviewed in the documentary are Kyle Wallace of California’s Shasta County Sheriff’s Office; Courtney Lantto, Denise Farmer and Peter Jackson, three of the FBI special agents who worked on the case; Keith’s aunt Pam (whose last name is not shown in the documentary), who let Sherri live with her the first time that Sherri and Keith separated; and Tim Scarbrough, a blogger who openly said that Sherri’s disappearance was a hoax when most media outlets were reporting her disappearance as a probable kidnapping.
Scarbrough says that an early indication that the disappearance was a hoax was there was no sign of a struggle on the street where Sherri supposedly had been kidnapped. On the day that Sherri was found, there was video surveillance of Sherri running without chains to the area where she was found partially chained. Scarbrough also admits that for a time, he was suspicious of Keith being involved in Sherri’s disappearance, but Scarbrough changed his mind about Keith after Sherri was found.
“Perfect Wife: The Mysterious Disappearance of Sherri Papini” is fairly thorough when it comes to presenting the facts of the case. There is a traditional mix of archival footage (such as TV news reports and audio/video police interviews) with original footage that was filmed specifically for the documentary. However, there are two main areas where the documentary falls short. More independent investigation was needed in these areas.
The first area that needed improvement has to do with addressing the racial fallout of Sherri’s admitted lie that two Latinas kidnapped her. Angela Gutierrez, who is identified in the documentary as a “local radio host,” comments in the documentary on Sherri’s deliberately false description: “It affected those around me. Women in the Hispanic/Latino community, they didn’t want to drive together, hang out together, walk the streets together.”
There’s an element of racism when someone deliberately tells a lie that someone of another race committed a crime. Sherri was arrested six years after her faked disappearance. Hispanic/Latina women were under a cloud of suspicion in the community during the period of time that Sherri lied about being abducted by two Hispanic/Latina women. The documentary could have had more insight into how this false accusation affected the Hispanic/Latina women in the community, beyond just having one Latina comment about it in the documentary.
The documentary briefly mentions an online editorial attributed to Sherri Graeff (Sherri Papini’s maiden name) that was made on a white supremacist forum, years before she was married to Keith. In the editorial, titled “Being aware and having pride,” someone using Sherri Graeff’s name and photo makes racist comments about Hispanic/Latin people. According to Keith, Sherri told him that she never made those comments and doesn’t know how those comments got on that online forum.
The other area that needed more investigation is regarding a bombshell dropped at the end of the documentary. Keith claims that his daughter Violet told him that when Keith and Sherri were still married, Sherri would soak rags of alcohol, put the rags in Ziploc bags, and make Violet and Tyler wear the bags around their necks. Keith implies that this was done to keep the kids passive and to make the children sick.
This disturbing allegation hangs over the conclusion of the documentary and just brings up more questions that the documentary doesn’t answer. Were these alleged druggings reported to any authorities? If so, to whom? And was there an investigation? Violet and Tyler are not interviewed in the documentary. And that’s understandable because these kids have been through more than enough trauma. But there’s no indication that anyone who worked on the documentary tried to find out if this allegation is true or not.
Keith making this serious public accusation that Sherri was drugging their children just opens up more scrutiny on what kind of parenting these kids have been getting. At the time the documentary was released in 2024, Keith and Sherri were still battling in court over custody of Tyler and Violet because Sherri wants to have joint custody. “Perfect Wife: The Mysterious Disappearance of Sherri Papini” certainly presents plenty of facts regarding the solved case of Sherri’s disappearance, but it’s questionable whether or not this documentary is an appropriate forum to bring up child abuse accusations that the documentary doesn’t investigate.
Hulu premiered “Perfect Wife: The Mysterious Disappearance of Sherri Papini” on June 20, 2024. ABC premiered the series on January 30, 2025.