Shelley Papini’s ex-husband still wonders why the mother of two faked her kidnapping.
“I think the main thing is attention,” Keith Papini told Fox News Digital. “I think she likes people to sympathize with her and see her as the victim … no matter who the victim is. I honestly don’t think she understands what she’s done, what lives it’s affected, the ripple effects of it, how much pain she’s caused to so many people.”
“I always think about all the people [who tried to help] Those 22 days [she was missing]”Kids who probably weren’t allowed to ride their bikes anymore, women who couldn’t go for a jog anymore… I don’t think she really understood how damaging it was,” Keith recalled.
After seven years of silence, Keith is speaking out about a high-profile prank that rocked his Redding, California community.
He appears in Hulu’s new true crime docuseries, “The Perfect Wife: The Mysterious Disappearance of Shelley Papini.”
An attorney for Keith, 41, did not immediately respond to Fox News Digital’s request for comment.
“I’ve been approached by various media outlets over the years,” Keith said of why he’s coming forward now.
“I feel like I’m finally able to speak out about all the pain Shelley caused our family… I wanted to reveal the truth about what really happened.”
Keith says his life was like a fairy tale before it turned into a nightmare. He said he was instantly smitten with the blue-eyed “sexy blonde.” After marrying in 2009, he and Shelley had a son and a daughter together. Their life together was picture perfect.
“I never felt unloved by her,” Keith says. “She wrote me songs, she wrote me letters all the time, she told me how happy our marriage was, and that she would never get a divorce. She loved me very much, and I repeated that to her.”
“I never would have imagined she would fake injuries and make things up to this extent,” he said. “I never expected that. But I think we’ve had a happy life. We have great kids.”
“It caught me off guard,” Keith added.
On November 2, 2016, their lives began to fall apart. That evening, Keith realized his wife was not at home to pick up their child from daycare, so he reported her missing. Her purse and jewelry were left behind.
A massive search for the missing mother ensued, and it wasn’t until November 26th that Shelley, emaciated and covered in bruises, was discovered by a driver, bound in a restraint device, about 150 miles from her home.
Shelley told authorities that two masked Hispanic women forced her into an SUV at gunpoint and held her captive.
Her blonde hair had been cut to shoulder length, she had a faint “branding mark” burned into her right shoulder, and her body and clothing had both male and female DNA on them, authorities said at the time.
A GoFundMe campaign raised more than $49,000 to help the family, which the couple used to pay bills and other expenses, according to court documents.
During the lengthy investigation, Keith willingly took and passed a lie detector test, and he also provided “his mobile phone, his computer, and anything else the police needed.”
Keith said he was initially overjoyed to be reunited with his loved one, but then began to have doubts about Shelley’s story.
“There were a lot of things that didn’t make sense, but I wanted to support my wife,” Keith admitted. “If I couldn’t trust her, who could I trust? I just kept telling myself, ‘I’d do anything for her.’ I was led to believe that she was happy with us and didn’t want to live with anyone else… I just wanted to support her throughout our time together. That being said… I’ll never know the whole truth.”
Keith wasn’t the only one with doubts.
Shelley gave FBI sketch artists a detailed description of her alleged abductor and detailed details of how she was allegedly kidnapped. However, investigators later found evidence that contradicted her story. Authorities said that, in fact, Shelley had been staying with an ex-boyfriend about 600 miles from her home and had self-harmed to support her false statements.
“When a young mother went missing in broad daylight, it caused fear and anxiety in the community,” U.S. Attorney Philip Talbert said in a statement at the time. “The investigation ultimately determined that no abduction occurred, wasting time and resources that could have been spent investigating an actual crime, protecting the community and supporting the victim.”
AP
According to court documents, DNA found on Shelley was eventually linked to her ex-boyfriend, who told investigators that she had stayed over at his house while he was away, but that they had never had sex.
According to a 55-page affidavit filed in court in support of the criminal complaint, authorities verified his story by tracking the location of two prepaid cell phones the two used to make secret calls as early as December 2015. The ex-girlfriend’s cousin also told investigators that she saw Shelley at the man’s apartment twice, both times unrestrained.
Records corroborated his story that his ex-boyfriend rented a car and drove Shelley back to Northern California.
Shelley was arrested and charged with making false statements to federal agents and mail fraud in March 2022. A month later, she formally pleaded guilty and acknowledged that the kidnapping allegations were fabricated.
Keith said he initially tried to protect his children from the possibility that Shelley’s abductors might return to “finish their mission”, but after Shelley confessed, he tried to protect them from relentless media scrutiny.
“We lived in fear that someone was following us,” he said. “It was as if our children were being taught to run inside if they saw anyone playing outside. I know in my heart that Shelley nearly took six years of my children’s childhood away.”
According to the docuseries, Shelley claimed Keith was a controlling spouse, a claim that Keith called “hurtful” and “untrue.”
“…She said I was hitting her and the cops were not doing anything,” Keith alleged. [When it came to] “I heard this from mutual friends… it was a completely different story… Right now I can’t sleep, I can’t eat, it was hard to hear those stories. I’m fighting for my wife’s life, and it was hard to know she was going around telling these… lies… but I see a pattern here.”
In September 2022, Shelley was sentenced to 18 months in prison for faking the kidnapping. She is set to be released in early 2023.
Shelley has never offered a rational explanation for her behavior, and her actions have baffled independent mental health professionals as they do not fit a typical diagnosis.
Her lawyer, William Portanova, said Shelley’s death was the result of “a tempest that had been going on in her head for a long time” but that she was now a changed woman. She had been “pursuing a meaningless fantasy,” he said in court documents before the sentencing.
After her initial arrest, Shelley underwent more than $30,000 in psychiatric treatment for anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder, which she has been ordered to pay back as part of her restitution to the state’s victims’ compensation fund.
After Shelley pleaded guilty, Keith filed for divorce and sought custody of the children.
He claimed she had “showed absolutely no remorse.”
“…This wasn’t just a lie that would end when she was arrested,” Keith said. “This was a lie that she lived every minute of every day…Maybe she wasn’t happy being a stay-at-home mom…She has never apologized to me or the kids…She acts as if nothing happened.”
“The Perfect Wife” is now available to stream. The Associated Press contributed to this report.
