Sherri Papini Case
Many of you have written to me asking me my opinion on the Sherri Papini case.
It’s one of the strangest cases we’ve seen in a long, long time. You have a husband who comes home from work to find his family is nowhere to be found. He quickly comes to the conclusion his wife is missing and calls police after finding her phone.
Then we have a shady character by the name of Cameron Gamble, who is a self-proclaimed expert in abductions. He gets involved in the case, separate of law enforcement. Supposedly an anonymous donor offers money for Sherri’s return and Gamble is the designated spokesperson. The sheriff was adamantly opposed to his involvement, but the husband, Keith Papini, goes forward anyway.
But in a strange twist, Gamble takes the money off the table just hours before Papini is found alive on a highway at 4 a.m. Thanksgiving morning.
What are the odds?
Taking a few minutes to look at the case closer, I am flagged on several levels. The husband’s behavior raises my eyebrows as well as Cameron Gamble, and I haven’t seen Sherri at all.
I can’t come to any conclusions at this point, but I will tell you I have a lot of questions I’d like answered!! Things aren’t passing the sniff test for me at this point.
What do you think?
I’ve seen this on TV shows, so just keep that in mind that as far as I know is just what writers came up with. But the jist of it is there are Mexican cartels will kidnap someone then communicate with the family through an independant broker. Since the broker usually has a track record so the cartel trusts him not to go to the police and the family trust him to get the kidnap victim returned unharmed. Sounds like a scam, but if one of your loved ones was kidnapped I could see how tempting it would be to turn to them.
See, what a lot of nay sayers would think is that this isn’t possible but the Mexican cartel is very underground, secret and dangerous and IMO your scenario is possible. We shall see what happened if anything comes out of it.
The Columbian cartels in the 80’s kidnapped thousands and terrorized the whole country. I thought of a book I read years ago, when the husband said Sherry had been kidnapped. It was written by Gabriel Marquez and called News of a Kidnapping. The cases were not similar at all to the Papinis. The women were not roughed up but suffered greatly and missed their families. They were a pawn in tense negotiations of Pablo Escobar and the government of Columbia and US. There was a reason they took these prominent women of newspaper families and they made their needs known that they did not want to face extradition and justice in the US courts. The book was so descriptive I was pretty terrorized just by reading the whole ordeal. In the case of Papini, it seemed like a hoax and we never found out a motive for why two women would take her and beat her up for 3 weeks. What use was she to them? I would think she would be a encumbrance on them, that they have better things to do than keep her around for 3 weeks and watch her the whole time. Her story says two women abducted and kept her prisoner. That’s not a cartel with several guards taking shifts to watch out, not buying it.
You’re right. The Columbian cartel has gotten way out of hand. They’ve been stealing money out of my paycheck every week for decades. Things are so bad that i’m thinking of moving to Colombia.
I’m dying to know your thoughts on this, Renee! I’m watching the 20/20 episode right now & drove through Yolo County/Redding CA right after she disappeared. What do you make of the bit that she was “branded” with a message???? I am SO curious about what happened here…on my drive I saw MULTIPLE billboards warning people about human trafficking. It was a little unsettling.
I was going to write you and ask your opinion on this case because I thought it was off, and the husband’s statements to the press seemed off to me. So I’m glad to see you take this on. Taking the money off the table, as you indicated, right before she was found, seems awfully suspicious. I want to believe the husband had nothing to do with this, but somehow, my gut doesn’t. Some people have speculated they did this for financial gain, to set up a gofundme account and keep the donations, but that doesn’t make sense to me either. If I were the police, I would be checking the husband’s computer/phone records/work records etc.
Although only somewhat less suspicious and “coincidental” (what are the odds?), the negotiator stated on November 18 when he set up the reward/ransom web site, that the reward was only good until Wednesday (100 hours from the 18th). So, either he/they already knew on the 18th that the planned release date would be the 23rd? or …
If her ordeal does involve the husband, why wouldn’t the wife be telling the police about what her husband did to her (cause her injuries, etc. were not fake)? And how could she be a part of this, aka ‘faking’ anything, when the good Samaritan found her coughing up blood from having screamed so much on the highway?
Not to follow the conspiracy theories, but Cameron Gamble was a virtual unknown before the Sherri Papini case. So did this self-proclaimed kidnapping negotiator, stage a real kidnapping to catapult his business into fame, with Sherri Papini the unwitting victim? It wouldn’t be that hard to travel to Mexico and hire two women willing to do the dirty work. I just watched his creepy promotional video for his business (which predates the kidnapping) where he features a blond-haired girl who gets kidnapped.Eerily similar given the fact the girl is blond and “disappears”. I think it’s called Project Taken, done in 2012. Just seems coincidental, as though there’s there’s a high prevalence of kidnappings of white girls that would warrant his promoting a video like THAT, when in reality it seems there are more minorities taken. Of course, the cops aren’t telling us more because they don’t want to compromise the case. And Sherri Papini isn’t talking because she’s probably signed an exclusive book deal and/or interview with 20/20 that will come out at a later date. But again, I do believe she was the unwitting victim.
What stood out to me was the way he said the word Sick on the 20/20 show. Out of all the words he said, this word stood out.
Holy self proclaimed experts, Batman! That guy Cameron Gamble (what kind of name is that anyways?!) looks soooo dodgy!!!! In interviews, his youtube films, everywhere. On his “last warning” youtube video he leaks contempt when he says “…everybody listening…” eh? Poor Sherri looks a bit gullible to me. Her husband. Don’t know. Have to see more content with him but something is wrong with him as well.
What I noticed on 20/20 is how fake it seems. They have this perfect romance, they kept all their old love letters, all the cute family photos, Sherri’s “supermom.” Keith claims every time he came home from work, his kids and wife rush to greet him. It’s over the top.
20/20 also mentions how private Keith is and he doesn’t have Facebook. He doesn’t seem like a private person to me.
Why would a cartel want to kidnap Sherri since they don’t have a dime?
Cannot wait until the truth comes out.
None of this makes sense.
If it comes out that Sherri was indeed kidnapped by random, well, then maybe I’ll believe Kim KarTrashian was indeed robbed in Paris……
Besides the fact this weird. I think the connection with Gamble and Papini’s. Maybe for money and attention. I think they are counting this to be their paycheck. They are waiting for it to cool. I also wanted to say that having a find my phone app and he was looking for it and push the alarm for it. You touch the phone to turn off the alarm. He said he only took pictures of it. Plus you get email alerts for them.
The thing that stood out the most to me was that he took pictures of the phone instead of picking it up to see who she may have called or who may have called her. At that point he didn’t even know she was abducted. She have may have dropped the phone and still been out jogging.