Michael Beach Nichols: Perfect Wife

Most of us have heard about Sherri Papini. She’s the woman who faked her own kidnapping in 2016, which terrified her husband and soon sparked outrage in her Northern California community. Michael Beach Nichols is the director and producer of the Hulu series, “Perfect Wife: The Mysterious Disappearance of Sherri Papini.” He tells US about his experience spending time with Sherri’s husband, Keith, for the documentary series. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
This story contains adult content and language. Listener discretion is advised.

Speaker 2 (00:12):
They definitely are two people that I think sort of
met their match as far as really being obsessed with
their image and the way that their family sort of
presented to the outside of the world as this sort
of perfect couple with these beautiful children.

Speaker 1 (00:30):
I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, a nonfiction author and journalism professor
in Austin, Texas. I'm also the co host of the
podcast Buried Bones on Exactly Right, and throughout my career
research for my many audio and book projects has taken
me around the world. On Wicked Words, I sit down
with the people I've met along the way, amazing writers, journalists, filmmakers,

(00:53):
and podcasters who have investigated and reported on notorious true
crime cases. This is about the true 's writers make,
both good and bad, and it's a deep dive into
the unpublished details behind their stories. Most of us have
heard about Sherry Peppini. She's a woman who faked her
own kidnapping in twenty sixteen, which terrified her husband and

(01:17):
soon sparked outrage in her northern California community. Michael Beach
Nichols is the director and producer of the Netflix series
The Perfect Wife, the mysterious disappearance of Sherry Peppini, and
he tells us about his experience spending time with Sherry's husband,
Keith for the documentary series. So this is a story

(01:38):
I think that's been told. A lot of people are
familiar with it, a lot of people aren't. But I
think that your perspective here, knowing all the players and
it's so nebulous at times, the story gets confusing of
Sherry Peppini and certainly their personalities. I want some clarity on.
So this is you know, we're going to unravel this

(01:59):
as a story first, but you know, this story I
think is fascinating, whether you know it or not.

Speaker 2 (02:05):
Yeah. Absolutely. When I actually first started, when I was
first brought onto the project, I had actually never heard
about the story. Somehow, you know, living on the East
I live in New York City. Somehow this just wasn't
on my radar. It's obviously happened in California, but it garnered,
you know, nationwide media attention, but somehow I was just
it slipped my radar. So when I first learned about it,

(02:26):
I was completely sucked in because it is it is
such a fascinating story that just keeps on sort of
going in another direction then you're sort of expecting. And
it lasts from about twenty sixteen up until really honestly
the present day, but the period of our time that
we spent telling the stories from twenty sixteen to twenty

(02:48):
twenty two essentially.

Speaker 1 (02:49):
And I think part of one of the themes of
this story for me is how well do you know
your spouse or how well do you know the person
that you sort of implicitly trust, whether it's a parent
or a child or your spouse. Because there's just such
a depth of deceit here for me that it's incredible
as a story. Why don't you set us up where

(03:12):
we are and who the main characters are in the story?

Speaker 2 (03:15):
Absolutely? So. This story takes place in a town called Redding, California,
which is in northern California. It's about two hours north
of Sacramento, so it's incredibly beautiful, mountains, super wooded. The
town is a bit different than a lot of other
towns in northern California. It's a very conservative sort of

(03:36):
town and the events of the story took place in
twenty sixteen in November, so really you have the backdrop
of the presidential election happening when everything starts taking place,
and so essentially the way the story begins is you
have this young family. You have a husband and wife,
Keith Peppini and his wife, Sherry Peppini. They have two
very young children. One is about two, the other is

(04:00):
a little bit under a year old, about eight months old.
On the morning of November two, twenty sixteen, Cherry goes
out for a jog and their house is basically it's
it's a pretty rural area, so the houses are sort
of spread apart, and she her typical jog apparently would
she would she would leave the house and jog down
to this mailbox. And the sailbox was basically all the

(04:21):
mailboxes for all of the houses in the community, about
a mile and a half away or so. So Sherry
goes on a jog. Meanwhile, Keith is at work. He
worked at Best Buy at this time. He comes home
from work later in the day around four o'clock or so,
and no one is home. His children are at home
from daycare, Cherry's not there. He starts, you know, calling

(04:43):
and texting. He decides to go drive down to the
mailboxes because he knows that she does like to jog there.
He drives down to the mailboxes. He finds a cell phone,
Cherry's cell phone with her earbuds and some hair. Some
of her hairs are sort of tangled than the airbuts
the cell phone is playing on repeat a song by

(05:04):
Michael Boublay, which is their wedding song. So Keith immediately
is freaking out. It looks like, you know what, the
hair is being ripped out. It looks like something has happened.
So he calls nine one one and it you know,
in a frantic panic, saying that his wife is gone.
She's been jogging, but she's not there. He finds out
that the kids are still at daycare. No one has
picked them up, which is incredibly unlike Sherry. So Keith

(05:27):
has his mother go pick up the kids, and law
enforcement comes to his house and.

Speaker 1 (05:32):
Then he has this missing wife. And I'm assuming the
police first thing look at him. What do they do
in this situation? Do they follow through with the assumption
immediately that this is a missing woman or are they
looking at the husband first?

Speaker 2 (05:45):
From my understanding, they're really doing a lot of things once,
So I yes, they are absolutely looking at the husband,
because that is obviously, you know, and in a lot
of these cases, that is the prime suspect, but they're
also trying to just build out a profile of who
share the PEDI is. They bring Keith down to the station,
they start interviewing him after of course, they do a

(06:07):
walk through of the house first, and Keith is kind
of showing them around the house, trying to give a
description of his wife what he thinks that she might
have been wearing on the jog. Then they bring him
to the police station, and we have a lot of
these interviews in the series because these are all recorded
in an interrogation room, and they you know, start asking
him if anything is wrong in their marriage, if there

(06:28):
are any stressors, And Keith is honestly sort of manic
in a lot of these interviews, and he's coming off
to someone who doesn't know him, to someone who doesn't
know the story is as as a person that is
seeming to be acting a little strange, acting a little
bit maybe suspicious, just because his mood is sort of

(06:48):
all over the place. But I think a lot of
that is also, you know, just what would you do
in that kind of situation, and that's what I always
sort of come back to myself, and I have no idea,
So it's really you don't ever want to judge the
way someone is behaving in the immediate aftermath, I think
of traumatic occurrence. But that is something that I think
a lot of people started to immediately have these suspicions

(07:09):
of Keith, especially law enforcement, based on a lot of
these sort of interviews they were doing with him, when
he would just kind of be all over the place.
He'd be sort of laughing and joking at in one
moment and sort of almost crying in the next. And
at the same time that they're interviewing Keith, they also
start speaking with all of the neighbors we had access
through Floya, through all of these different telephone calls that

(07:31):
law enforcement had made to Keith and Sherry's neighbors, and
a lot of those calls are a little bit disturbing.
A lot of neighbors talked about hearing very loud arguments,
hearing them yell at one another. They started reaching out
to friends of Sherry and Keith, and some of the
friends would say that Sherry confided and then that Keith

(07:51):
had told her if she ever left him, that he
would kill her. Just very very alarming sort of conversations.
And then other neighbors would say other friends would say, no,
that's that's not true, Like they had a wonderful relationship.
I don't know where that's coming from. And so law
enforcement was just the way that they sort of explained

(08:11):
to us is they were always kind of coming back
to back to sort of zero, like we don't, like
every time we hear something negative about Keith or Sherry's
relationship with her, something positive. So they just didn't really
know what was what was happening Sherry when she went missing.
You know, her wallet was at home, it was full
of cash. That didn't seem like she had any of
her like ATM or credit cards. So there was just

(08:33):
a lot of unknowns and there were there were just
sort of really non motivations. Keith couldn't really lay out
anything as far as you know, why Sherry might have
left on her own. He thought that that was an impossibility.
He was convinced that she that she was kidnapped, because
Cherry is a you know, she at that time, she
was you know, in her early thirties. She was a

(08:56):
very sort of petite blonde woman, so there was this
sense that perhaps she had been abducted. Years ago in
the same community, a young woman who Cherry had actually
gone to high school with named Tara Smith, had gone
missing while on a jog and she was never found,
and that was a big case in the late nineties

(09:18):
that really, I think traumatized a lot of the community
and reading. There were a lot of people that we
spoke with who had actually been on searches for Tara Smith.
So everyone knew about this young blonde woman who went
missing on a jog in the late nineties, and so
Sherry's disappearance was bringing up all of these echoes of
that in the Reading community and amongst all these family

(09:40):
members and friends of Sherry. So essentially, they what they
end up doing is they end up giving Keith a
polygraph test because they're noticing that there is a lot
of speculation about Keith. A lot of people are are
bringing up his name in the media, and because the
media attention was becoming really overwhelming, they decided they wanted

(10:01):
to do this polygraph test with Keith so they could
clear him or or not to the kind of put
it to put it to rest. And they ended up
doing the polygraph he passed, and so he was he
was crossed off at that point in time, But there
were as as the case went on, there were several
other leads that there had been text conversation between Sherry
and a man that she had met on a work

(10:22):
business trip years ago. They had been texting up until
the day before Cherry went missing. This is a man
that was living in Michigan. He had come to California
for a work conference and Cherry and him were talking
about potentially meeting up. So law enforcement actually went to
Michigan and spoke with this man, and it sounded like
him and Sherry were just having these kind of emotional

(10:46):
texts back and forth, kind of kind of floridy, where
Sherry would essentially tell tell him, you know that Keith
was this really controlling husband and that you know, she
wasn't happy with him, and so they were kind of
just building out this fantasy of being together. But it
looks like that, you know, nothing ever happened between them,
and they were able to clear that that person, so

(11:06):
he was sort of crossed off at that point.

Speaker 1 (11:12):
Okay, so when they're interviewing Keith and they're hearing these
stories of you know, the neighbors who are saying, I mean,
what I remember from the series is the neighbors were
saying it was loud, their arguments, it didn't seem like
there was physical violence happening, and clearly nobody called the
police right when they heard this. None of the neighbors
called the police for domestic violence, did they.

Speaker 2 (11:32):
No, there was only there was only one instance where
at one point police did show up, and it turned
out they were responding because so when he worked for
Best Buy, you would install like home stereo systems. So
he has this incredible home stereo system, just the loudest
speakers you can imagine. And so apparently they were watching
an action movie and there were guns and all kinds

(11:53):
of stuff like that, and so police came over at
one point, but Keith and Cherry were both there and
they're like, no, we're just watching a movie. He really live.
So yeah, there's been there's been no allegations. The only
other thing that came up was there was an instance
of Keith and Sherry were at some friend's house. They
were all playing Wei and apparently Keith was playing this

(12:14):
fruit slice game and he accidentally like swung his arm
and hit Sherry in the eye, and so she had
a black eye. We've noticed a pattern of Sherry sort
of siloing different groups of friends and giving them different
versions of events. And this is something that is historically
we've found through Sherry's entire life that's a common thread

(12:36):
where she will tell one person one version of a story,
another person another version of a story, and only if
those two people come together will they ever figure out
the truth. So Sherry had told some people that Keith
had punched her in the eye, and then it told
other people that it had been this wei game. When
the police called the hosts of the party, they said, no, no,
we were all there. Everyone was laughing about it. It

(12:57):
was this horrible accident, but you know it was accident.
We witnessed it. So you started to see this pattern
that Sherry displayed of having some kind of incident, some
kind of physical incident, and then basically blaming the person
that she's with for it.

Speaker 1 (13:12):
When Keith was talking to the police, did he frame
this as just the idealized marriage And they never had
kind of any issues except some of those loud fights
that she never showed any kind of erratic behavior. He
never lost his temper too badly more than any other
husband would.

Speaker 2 (13:30):
Yeah, I mean, he did say. He admitted that they
would have sometimes loud arguments that they could get that
especially Sherry could get a little bit a little bit angry,
and oftentimes when Scherry would get angry, she would leave
and she would just like peel out and drive off.
The only thing that Keith brought up that became that

(13:51):
was new information for law enforcement was the fact that
they had gotten a post nuptial agreement. And they got
this post nuptial agreement because he had come across some
texts on Sherry's phone that were between her and this
man from Michigan, essentially sort of talking about the fact
that they had just had a wonderful time together at

(14:11):
this work conference. They were planning to see each other again.
Keith saw this on Sherry's phone. He had Cherry's phone,
he told us, because a friend of his was over
at his house who was using his laundry machine. The
light bulb went out. Keith just grabbed Sherry's phone on
the counter to use the flashlight, and then this like
text message came in and He's like who, and the

(14:33):
text message was under a woman's name also, but then
he saw that the texts were kind of weird and
confronted at her about it. Cherry admitted to the fact
that she had met this guy, nothing had happened. She
was so sorry. So Keith was almost wanting to get
a divorce at that point. They didn't have this as
pre kids, but ended up deciding, you know what, we'll

(14:54):
just do a post nuptial agreement. We'll separate our finances
because Keith was really worried that if they did end
up getting a divorce, you know, that he would lose
he would lose half of his half of his money.
So they did had this post nuptial. So that was
one thing that was that law enforcement think flagged as
some kind of stressor in the relationship.

Speaker 1 (15:13):
Was that part of what I feel like was framed
as Keith is released in g and controlling with money.
Is that part of this also too?

Speaker 2 (15:21):
Yeah? I think I think that that is certainly how
some people have framed that idea. I mean, the way
that Keith explained it to us is Sherry was really
really bad with money, and so he would basically be
enlisted to help her just kind of be responsible like
she just had when they got together, she had a
lot of credit card debt, I don't. I think she

(15:43):
had a horrible credit score. And Keith is like the opposite.
He's just very, very very on top of members and
finances and things like that. So I can see how
that could be construed as sort of controlling. But for Keith,
this for him was an ideal, perfect relationship. And so
when that image was fractured by finding out that Sherry

(16:03):
was having this kind of emotional text message exchange with
another man, it sort of changed everything about how he
viewed his marriage. And so I think he was so
frightened of the possibility of the marriage ending that he
just wanted to basically create a way for him to

(16:23):
emerge unscape if it did end up. Yeah, they did
getting a divorce. Now.

Speaker 1 (16:29):
I believe Keith's someone who said this. He was describing
Sherry as sort of the ideal kidnapping victim, and I
think he said, like, she's gorgeous and blonde and tiny
and hot essentially, and you know, now kind of knowing
the end of the story in a weird way. I
think it's kind of sweet that he said that. He
just seemed like there was just adoration for her all

(16:50):
over the place at the beginning of this.

Speaker 2 (16:52):
Yes, absolutely, I think that. I mean, one of the
most fascinating elements of this story to to me into
the film team were the scrap books that Sherry Sherry
would make and Keith was fully, you know, sort of
a participant in. She just had these incredibly elaborate photo
collages and kept every momento. Keith is the same way.

(17:15):
He even had middle school notes that they'd passed back
back and forth to each other. Because Keith and Sherry
were one another's first boyfriend and girlfriend when they were
when they were in middle school, so they'd known each
other for so long, and so they both had this
habit of sort of keeping everything, and once they were married,
you can just look like there are dozens of these

(17:36):
scrap books that just show Keith and Sherry just you know, kissing,
running on the beach, holding hands. It just looks like
like like the storybook romance out of like Princess Bride
or something like that, where you just are able to
kind of see how they're viewing, you know, their sort
of early marriage years. And then once they had the kids,

(17:56):
they're just having all these photographs of the kids. But Yeah,
they definitely are two people that I think sort of
met their match as far as really being obsessed with
their image and the way that their family sort of
presented to the outside world as this sort of perfect,
this perfect couple with these beautiful children.

Speaker 1 (18:14):
Now, she wrote somewhere that what he really wanted was
in nineteen fifty's Housewife. I mean, does that tally with
what you've known about their relationship and speaking to Keith?

Speaker 2 (18:26):
No, it really, I mean it really doesn't. You know.
I'm only obviously I'm getting I haven't spoken with Sherry,
and so I'm you know, I'm getting Keith's side. But
I from everything that Keith told me, and I believe Keith,
Sherry was really really happy working when she So she
was working for AT and T. She was like a saleswoman.
She'd go around to different branches and speak to customers.

(18:46):
And she ended up getting laid off. And this has
sort of been the lead up to her disappearance. She
ended up getting laid off, I think just it wasn't
anything to do with her performance. I think it just
had to do with restructuring. And so she became a
stay at home mom at that point, and that to
it seems like a bit of strife between them because
Cherry was not happy being at home. Seemed like she
really thrived off of, you know, being an independent person,

(19:10):
being an independent working person, sort of having these these
conversations with you know, her peers, and now she was home,
she was with very young kids. She wasn't sort of
getting that kind of you know, sort of like leaving
the house pure connection, so she was becoming unhappy. Keith
also just wanted her to go back to work. From
what my understanding was, he thought that she should because

(19:31):
he could tell that she wasn't as happy as she
used to be. So, yeah, it seems like it seems
like that was a moment where things, the sort of
balance of the relationships sort of shifted. And we also
learned that Cherry received a severance package when she was
laid off from AT and T, and she took that
money and she decided to get a breast augmentation surgery,

(19:54):
which is something Keith said they sort of argued about
because he's like, you don't need this. That seems like
a you know, why are you going to like save
your money, save your money, like you don't we don't
need to, like spend this money. You don't have a
job right now. You know, if I guess, if you
want to, you can do whatever you want, but I
don't think you need to. So those are sort of
things that, looking in hindsight, looked like it might have

(20:14):
caused sort of some kind of rift between them. On
the eve of Sherry disappearing.

Speaker 1 (20:20):
So while she is missing, what is her family saying
about all of this? I think you all interviewed her sister,
Is that right?

Speaker 2 (20:27):
We did. Yeah, we interviewed her sister, Sheila extensively. They
were I mean they were horrified. I mean, Sherry's sister,
Sheila was pregnant at the time, and her husband was
really worried about all the stress that was that was
placed on her, and he was really worried about the
baby being affected, you know, the unborn baby essentially being
affected because of all this, you know, the stress and

(20:49):
adrenaline kind of coursing through here on a daily basis
while she was out there helping with these searches. And yeah,
the parents were also really concerned. When law enforcement talked
to and they said that Sherry, you know, she had
left for a couple of days here and there, but
they thought there was no way she would leave for
this long, But it did come out that Sherry had

(21:09):
actually run away from home in high school. I believe
it was their sophomore year of high school she she left,
and she went down to southern California for a couple
of years, and she went up to the Bay Area
for a little while. So she had sort of left
left home and sort of CouchSurfing. So we found that
there was a little bit of a pattern of Sherry

(21:31):
just kind of I've been leaving at times in her life,
but at this at this point in time, her sister
and her parents, you know, they were just really really
worried that she had she had been abducted, essentially.

Speaker 1 (21:46):
So once Keith passes this polygraph test, which I have
to think they did that to try to pressure him
to give them more information because obviously it's in admissible
import and obviously it's not accurate. But I think that's
when a lot of investigators say, as well, we use
it as a kind of an intimidation factor. But they
must have started suspecting that at least Keith wasn't involved.

(22:09):
Are they still thinking it's a kidnapping once they crossed
him off the list.

Speaker 2 (22:13):
From what they told us, they were still essentially exploring
the two possibilities. They were exploring the abduction possibility, and
that was more of the fbit. What the FBI was
sort of looking into, and then what the local law
enforcement was looking into was this idea of her basically
walking out and meeting up with someone they thought it
could be that person in Michigan. It wasn't him. There

(22:35):
were other names that Keith gave them. He gave them,
you know, basically the names of ex boyfriends, this person
James Rays, an ex husband named David Dreyfus, and they
were supposed to be reaching out to all of these
people just to see Keith was also doing his own
investigation with some of his some of his good friends.
There's this family who were involved in the search for

(22:58):
tera Smith. One of the sons was a Navy seal. Basically,
the three of them with some other friends kind of
had this war room where they were sort of trying
to figure out where Sherry could be on their own,
and they were actually going around the neighborhood knocking on doors,
basically trying to find Cherry on their own. So there

(23:19):
was some almost extra legal activity going on because oftentimes
they were also armed, and that's something that law enforcement
was was, you know, kind of telling them to back
off and you know, just you guys, because these are
all us like really big dudes, and so they didn't
want them to just kind of like intimidating a lot
of people. But you know, I mean, the bottom line
was Keith and his family. They were just so concerned

(23:42):
and it just had no idea where Sherry was, and
so many tips were coming in, and so many of
these tips were unhelpful. So many psychics were calling and
telling them that Sherry's, you know, Sherry's by this, you know,
in this river, or Sherry's and her remains are in
a barrel, and so they were just kind of trying
to Unfortunately, you know, you don't know what's credible and

(24:03):
what's not. So they were just trying to chase down
every single thing that they could because they just they
didn't know where she was and they just desperately wanted
to find her. So Keith was just not sleeping, not eating,
and so Sheila was often just staying with him and
trying to almost be Keith's skilter to a certain degree,
because they didn't want Keith to get all of these
kind of tips telling him where to find his dead

(24:24):
wife because it was just, you know, obviously horrible for
his psyche.

Speaker 1 (24:29):
And she believed him. Then Sheila, right, she never suspected
that he was involved in any way.

Speaker 2 (24:34):
I mean, her husband, she told us that her husband
brought up maybe it could be Keith.

Speaker 1 (24:38):
Yeah, I mean.

Speaker 2 (24:39):
That's the part of this that's so that's so hard
when someone originally, you know, initially goes missing, is that
you do have people closest to you sort of just
always suspecting the person that's closest to the missing person.
And so she did have a moment where she was
like wondering if there was a thing, But then Keith's
sister Suzanne came in and was like, there's no way,
There's absolutely no way. Their relationship was credible, like, Keith

(25:01):
is not any kind of violent person. And so I
think that that was put to bed pretty pretty fast.
I think anyone could tell how Keith just from Keith's demeanor,
from the fact that Keith was just so just acting
like someone that was all he wanted to do was
find his wife, and of course that's something that could
be you know, a talented actor, chameleon could kind of

(25:23):
put that maybe performance on. But that's I think that's
a rare thing. I think everyone saw Keith as a
very credible husband who is alarmed.

Speaker 1 (25:31):
When does the next thing happen? Do we hear from
the kidnappers in Cherry's situation or kidnapper?

Speaker 2 (25:37):
So yeah, So essentially Cherry is gone for twenty two days.
Keith at this point is just imagining the worst Cherry.
Cherry's sister Sheila had had. After only a couple of days,
she had kind of resigned herself to the fact that
her sister was probably dead. And then on Thanksgiving morning
twenty sixteen, there is a series of nine more one

(26:00):
calls around four am and they're coming from Yolo County,
which is near Sacramento, and it was this woman who
was in shackles on the side of the road and
a trucker had pulled over, and the woman said her
name was Sherry Peppini, And so immediately they call Kyle Wallace,
who was the lead investigator from Shasta County. They also

(26:21):
call Keith, so Keith immediately gets in the car. He
goes and picks up Sheila. They drive down to Yolo
County Detective Kyle Wallace drives to Yellow County. Everyone is
just sort of stunned and shocked when they get there
and they see Sherry in the hospitals. She's in horrible shape.
She's emaciated. She was already very petite. She looks like

(26:44):
she's lost another twenty pounds in the three weeks that
she's been gone. Her hair has been chopped off. She
had a chain around her waist and one of her
hands was shackled to it when she was found by
the side of the road. Her skin is covered in
ska and bruises and some kind of rash, just horrible,
horrible bruises. Looks like her nose is broken, and they

(27:07):
find a brand on her back spelling out what looks
like the words exodus, law enforcement. Immediately, you know, everyone
is trying to, you know, care for her, assure her
that she's okay. She is incredibly nervous and doesn't want
to even speak to law enforcement because she's saying that

(27:27):
law enforcement is somehow involved, and she's saying they told
her that law enforcement was involved. So Keith finally comes
into the room and they have this incredible moment of
this reunion, and you can hear it's all recorded on audio,
and they start essentially having Keith ask her the questions
because she doesn't want to speak to law enforcement and

(27:48):
so this is very unorthodox. So she tells Keith that
it was two Hispanic women that abducted her in a
dark colored suv and they wore mass so she never
saw their faces, and they decided there was some kind
of some kind of violent altercation that morning and one

(28:09):
of them shot the other one and then released Sharry
on the side of the road. And so so that
is sort of where they're starting with. On the first
day that Sherry, Sherry's made this reappearance. But meanwhile, you know,
media is so so happy. It's this Thanksgiving Day miracle,
everyone calls it. You know, Sheerry's back on Thanksgiving, and
so everyone is just so so relieved. On the way

(28:32):
to from one ambulance to another hospital for Sharry to
get some more tests done, she learns that Trump has
been elected president and she's very excited about that. She
hadn't known that because she was in captivity. And so
essentially after that, law enforcement then starts to do these
really long interviews with Sherry to try to figure out
more details about what's happened.

Speaker 1 (28:52):
And had these two Hispanic women who had kidnapped her,
had they reached out and what was the point? What
did she say she believed it was the point of
of all of this and why her Yeah.

Speaker 2 (29:03):
And I think that became a real, uh, sort of
sticking point for a lot of you know, the public,
a lot of law enforcement is that there wasn't really
a clear motivation for why these people had taken her.
The fact that they spoke Spanish also meant that Cherry
could not understand what they were saying. So Sherry couldn't

(29:24):
give a lot of details about about, you know, sort
of what was happening, what they were saying. The only
things that sort of came out was she's She had
mentioned that they had told her that they were going
to sell her to someone, and and her buyer was
a cop. So there was some there was some hints
of sex trafficking and with a law enforcement officer maybe

(29:45):
being interested in buying. But of course that was something
that a lot of people had questions about, just because statistically,
people that are abducted for sex trafficking, you know, tend
to be much younger. They tend to It tends to
be something that is not just you know, sort of
a stranger being abducted off the street. Shery was also
quite a bit older than that demographic would typically be,

(30:05):
so yes, there wasn't There was no communication with any
with any of the alleged kidnappers. So motivation was a
big was a big question, and I think that and
that was never really answered, I think to anyone's satisfaction.

Speaker 1 (30:18):
Well, it sounds like except for Keith, I mean, he
just was so happy right for her to be home.
Did he question her in any way at all other
than you know, are you okay? And and can I
take you home and take care of you?

Speaker 2 (30:29):
Yeah, it's really it's really fascinating because Keith told us
that the very first moment that he saw Sherry in
the hospital, after she had been gone for three weeks
and he was about to have for the first time,
lay eyes on her, he says that when they first
made eye contact, he had this moment where he thought
that she might be lying, oh yeah. So when he
told us that we are you know, our jaws sort

(30:50):
of dropped. And then he told us that once he
went over and hugged her and felt all of the
scabs and saw the bruises and just saw her the
state of her body.

Speaker 1 (31:01):
All of that.

Speaker 2 (31:02):
Doubt just completely went away. It wasn't anything that he
felt incredible shame for feeling that, but later he would
tell us that during therapy. So Sherry started therapy after
her abduction and it would be four hours a week,
split into two sessions, and she did this therapy with Keith,

(31:22):
and they went to these sessions for about four years.
So this is hundreds and hundreds of hours of therapy
that the two of them went to. And in one
of these sessions, the therapists had asked Keith if he
thought that Sherry could have done any of this to herself,
and Keith told her that he thought maybe she could have,
and he then told us this story about Sherry. In

(31:43):
the early stages of their relationship, Keith had noticed that
she had these two scars on her back, these two
sort of symmetrical scars on each side of her of
her spine, about an inch inch and a half long each,
and he asked Sherry about those, and Sherry told him
that it was an ex boyfriend, James Reyes, who had
had taken two knives, one knife in each hand and

(32:04):
stabbed her in the back, and he was just like,
oh my god, this is this is horrifying. He found
out later through one of Sherry's best friends who we
interview in the series, Jennifer Harrison, that Jennifer had been
told a different story by Sherry. Cherry had told Jennifer
and her father had taken a box cutter and held
her down as a punishment and cut these you know,

(32:27):
cuts into her back. Then Sherry admitted to Jennifer that
she had actually done it to herself, and Keith found
that out from Jennifer, and for Keith that was like, what,
this is so strange because Keith is just very in
some ways kind of a sheltered guy, Like he's just
this incredibly He is sort of the stereotypical, like wholesome,

(32:48):
like all American guy who just kind of believes the
best in people and you know, takes people out their word.
And so as he's finding out that his wife was
sort of capable of self home and then blaming her
father and then blaming her next boyfriend, he was starting
to wonder if there was anything to these injuries that

(33:09):
Sherry had had had gotten from her abduction, and so
he was starting to wonder. But every time he would
start to wonder about it, he would just be like,
this is insane. She was so beat up. How could
she have done this to herself. There's there's no way,
there's no way anyone would have ever done this to themselves.
And also, he was just so invested in being a
good husband and having his wife back that for him,

(33:32):
his entire relationship, his entire family was all built on
this foundation that she had been abducted. Because if had
she not been abducted, had she been making this up,
had she done this to herself, then then everything would
be over. His perfect romance, his perfect marriage, is perfect wife, like,
none of that would be real because she it would
have all been you know, this this lie. So for him,

(33:54):
he just kept coming back to it is so impossible
to imagine that she actually that this is a hoax.
I have to just take her for at her word,
even though there are a lot of things that are
a little bit weird, the fact that she doesn't remember
a lot of things. She has a hard time remembering,
you know, getting in the car with them, and they
so so Sherry said on the jog this suv pulls

(34:16):
up and these two women are in the suv and
they're basically asking for help. So she goes over to
the car. They step out, they have a gun. They
get her in the car, but of course Sherry says
that these women are always wearing masks, and so this
begs the question, you know, why would Sherry go over
to an suv with these two women who are both
covering their faces in masks and sort of waving her over.

(34:39):
You know, it seems like a very suspicious, you know,
sort of circumstance, like why would you sort of approach
people like that are wearing masks. But so anyway, so
they are all of these like little questions. And Sherry
also had a lot of just sort of strange moments
that she would talk about that happened during her abduction
where she she was essentially she just I had been

(35:00):
chained out. She had a chain around her waist that
was chained to the sort of pipe in the closet
that the chain was long enough that she could lie
in a mattress that was on the floor. They gave
her a little like office garbage can to use as
a bathroom, and they were just sort of feed her
like kind of scraps, like black beans, banana, like, just

(35:22):
like not a lot of food, and Sherry claimed that
she thought the food was drugged, and so she was
also saying, well, I was drugged a lot of the times.
So I don't really remember a lot of things that
were happening in this in this house. So I think
that Keith was always sort of questioning Sherry and asking,
you know, about what happened, and her answers were never
really satisfactory to him or to law enforcement for that matter.

(35:42):
No one really could get get too many details. And
the sketch, the sketches that eventually came out of the
two Hispanic women were so sort of generic and and
most of their faces were covered that it just seemed
like like we're never going to find these people like
this is these don't look like real people.

Speaker 1 (35:58):
And what is the reaction from the Hispanic community and
reading and around that when they come under suspicion. I
don't know how long that lasts with the police, but
I'm surely they must have felt offended to a certain extent,
or were they cooperative or what.

Speaker 2 (36:12):
Everything that we've learned about that reaction was that there
was a lot of fear. There was a lot of fear,
especially if there was two women going out together. A
lot of two women didn't want to be together. To
Hispanic women wouldn't want to be seen out in public
together because everyone was sort of so on edge. And
this is also taking place in you know, twenty sixteen,

(36:33):
when you obviously have the election of Trump and you
do have this demonization of Hispanic people coming from the
White House, and you have the Emerald Triangle, which is
very close to Reading, which is sort of notorious for
a lot of you know, sort of organized crime around
cannabis industry pre legalization. So you do have missing people,

(36:56):
you know, sort of happening in that part of northern California,
and so you know, the idea of someone of a
mom being sex trafficked or being abducted by some kind
of like gang member. This was all sort of leading
to a lot of paranoia in the community of Redding,
where a lot of a lot of women, especially were
you know, not wanting to go out on jobs by themselves,

(37:18):
and we're basically taking self defense classes and running with
mace and that kind of thing. So people were just like,
what is happening in Redding, where we have Tara Smith
go missing in nineteen ninety seven, I think, and then
Sherry Peppini goes missing in twenty sixteen. You know, Tera
was never found. Scherry, thank god, was but she was
so beaten up, so just brutalized that she's not even

(37:41):
really speaking to the public anymore. Cherry from twenty sixteen
to twenty twenty two really didn't really leave the house
very much. I mean she really She had Keith cover
all the windows with the big curtains and sheets. She
wouldn't want to go out in public anywhere. If Keith
and Sherry did ever leave the house, they would leave town,

(38:02):
so people didn't know them because there was so much
media come into their house trying to get interviews with Sherry,
and Sharry didn't want to speak to the media at all.
Keith had only spoken to the media to try to
drum up awareness of Sherry's disappearance, but then once she
was back, he had sort of opened Pandora's box, and
the media still wanted to continue talking to him and
figure out, Okay, now she's back, you have to tell us, like,

(38:24):
what is happening, what's law enforcement asking you? Who abducted her,
and so they sort of hunked her down and were
just in their house all the time, going to therapy
twice a week, and Keith just described walking on eggshells
essentially all the time because Sherry had such a level
of PTSD. She'd sleep with the lights on every night.

(38:45):
She would get scared by any kind of noises in
the house. If you'd come down the stairs and Sherry
was downstairs, she would get startled and start screaming. And
so Keith was just sort of trying to do anything
that it took to protect to make her feel safe
and comfortable, while also being a little bit freaked out
that whoever had abducted her could come back and could

(39:07):
try to take her again, try to take the children,
because they just didn't know what the motivation was. And
so it just sounds like this period of time where
Erry's family members, Keith and her little children were just
constant witness to Sherry's PTSD and all of these sort
of triggers that she had, and it just really ends

(39:28):
up taking its toll. As you see in the series,
there's this incredibly heartbreaking moment. It's a home video where
Sherry is sitting at the table and she is about
to try this spicy hot sauce and Keith is like,
just take a tiny little bit. She is a tortilla,
and she kind of dips a little bit of the
hot sauce on the tortilla and she takes a bite
and she starts just kind of coughing and coughing. And

(39:50):
her young son, who is about seven or eight at
this point, he comes over and it seems like, you know,
he's like, Mom, are you okay? And they're kind of laughing,
and Cherry can't talk because she's coughing, and then he
just like breaks down and just is like sobbing and
sobbing and hugging his mother, and you can just for us,
that really illustrated. I think how much the children had

(40:13):
grown accustomed to seeing Cherry being upset and just feeling
sad or feeling scared for her. And so her son
she's just having some hot sauce and kind of coughing
and her son is just like sobbing, And Yeah, that
really kind of says so much to us. I think
about the effect of Sherry's behavior on her on her
children and her very young children.

Speaker 1 (40:35):
So this drags on for years, poor Keith and the kids.
This drags on for years and years. When do the
tables turn on Sherry? Is it out of the blue
that they're starting to test DNA on her clothing?

Speaker 2 (40:46):
Yeah, so the DNA. They end up finally doing the
DNA testing twenty twenty, and it ended up taking so
long because apparently, and this is this is a big
question for all of us, like why did it take
so long to test this DNA? Because is when Cherry
was found there there was DNA on her clothing that
belonged to both a male and a female, and Cherry
had only given a story about two females, So there

(41:09):
was just always this question, who's male DNAs on Sherry's clothes?
So law enforcement apparently for law enforcement to do these
DNA tests, there are just a lot of logistical hurdles.
You have to get all kinds of approvals, and you
also have to apparently do some fundraising. It sounds like
from like the local Shasta County Sheriff's office. It's apparently

(41:30):
incredibly expensive to do some of these tests, and so
they basically just were not able to get that completed
for four years. That process, wow, which is hard to
wrap your head around, because as soon as they got
the clear, they got clear to do the testing, they
immediately got a familial DNA hit and so it was

(41:53):
everything moved very fast at that point. So they got
a familiar DNA hit, which meant that there was someone
had done twenty three and meters or something like that
who was related to the person whose DNA was found
in Cherry's clothing. It went led back to an ex boyfriend,
this person, James Rays, who lived in Coasta Mesa, which is,
you know, an Orange county very close to Los Angeles.

(42:14):
The DNA hit was with him. So law enforcement detective
Kyle Wallace from Sasta County and an FBI agent they
go down to Coasta Mesa. This is in August of
twenty twenty and they do a three hour interview with James,
and the audio of all of that exists, and at
first James is basically telling law enforcement he yes, who

(42:36):
used to date Cherry back in two thousand and two,
two thousand and three era they dated for a couple
of years wow, And he says he hasn't seen her.
Law enforcement continues to push, push, and he finally admits
to everything. And so James's story is that he had
been in the hospital because he had some kind of infection.

(42:57):
Cherry had heard about it. She had sent him a
care package when he was in the hospital. This is
around twenty fifteen twenty sixteen period, so this is before
she disappeared, and that sort of resparked their communications. They
would text with each other quite a bit. Cherry then
went on to send James another care package that had
a burner phone and asked him to communicate with her

(43:19):
on this burner phone. So this is the sort of
first red flag. So Cherry and James are communicating on
these burner phones. Cherry had one for herself too, and
she starts telling James that Keith is abusive. Keith is controlling.

Speaker 1 (43:33):
Standard standard is what they say to that. Yeah, I
mean just like that's how you manipulate someone, right, Yeah.

Speaker 2 (43:38):
Just make James feel sort of like the Knight and
Shine armor. This is something that we found that she
had done to this person at Michigan as well, where
she was just trying to sort of, yeah, get the
attention of someone. You know, my husband is so horrible,
My life is horrible. So she asks James to pick
her up in reading so James drives up to Reading.

(43:58):
He it's about an eight or nine hour drive. He
ends up driving up the night before. He sleeps in
Trader Joe's parking lot. The next morning, he reaches out
to Sherry. She tells him where she's going to be,
which is going to be by those mailboxes that she
would jog to. The way that James describes it is,
she gets in his car, sits in the back seat,
and then basically just lies down in the back seat,

(44:19):
and he carives her to Coast to Mesa. He says
they didn't really talk a lot in the car, but
he just felt like she was traumatized and sort of
wanted to give her space, and you know, brought her
into his house. She wanted to go in the back bedroom.
She asked if he could put boards up over the
windows because she didn't want I guess the neighbor's house

(44:40):
is kind of close. She didn't want any neighbors to
see in. So he put these boards up. He used
to have boards up in the room anyway, because it
used to be a grow room where he would grow cannabis.
So he puts up these boards and just kind of
lets Sherry live in his house. He's meanwhile, he's working,
he is he was playing hockey. I think he was
working at a a nice gating rink at the same time,

(45:02):
so he'd be at work during the day, he'd come
home in the evening. And after a few days Sherry
started having these injuries. He came to learn that she
was injuring herself, and he thought that this was very strange.
He comes across as someone who is sort of in
love with Sherry, sort of hoping that her relationship with

(45:23):
her husband is crumbling and maybe her and him can
get back together. So he's being a little bit careful
with what he's asking her in terms of these injuries
that she's creating. And then things start to get even
weirder because then he says that she asks him to
help injure her, and he's incredibly weirded out by this,
doesn't want to do it. I think she's a very

(45:44):
persuasive person, which we've seen from her history, and so
he agrees that he'll know bake hockey pucks off of
her body to help create bruises. He did a cross
check on her shoulder, on her arm where she is
this horrible, horrible bruise. And then the sort of capping
moment is when she wants him to grand her. So

(46:07):
he goes to the store. He buys a wood burning
kit and he brands what she wants on her shoulder.
He doesn't really even understand what it is. He's just
seems really, really just disturbed by this whole thing. He
also says that Sherry, you know, has basically been like
reducing what she's been eating this whole time, so she's
been losing all this weight. She got all these rashes

(46:30):
on her arms because she wanted to clean his house
because it was kind of a party house that James
was looking in, you know, I mean, he's a younger
guy athlete. It just seems like it was like a
bro house, and so Sherry wanted to clean it up.
And apparently her skin is very sensitive. She got a
lot of rashes from just scrubbing the floors and trying
to sort of clean up the house. So then on
you know, the night before Thanksgiving, she basically tells James

(46:51):
that she wants to go back home. James has been
you know, at the time, he didn't have a TV
in the house, but he was aware of the fact
that local news was covering and national news was covering
the fact that Sherry was disappeared. So he did know
that Sherry everyone thought Sherry was missing. And so I
think this all added to perhaps why he kind of

(47:15):
went along with a lot of these bizarre requests, because
I think that he could tell that she was trying
to kind of build up some kind of a story
to explain her disappearance, because it was just, you know,
good Morning America is talking about I mean, just everyone
is talking about this, Yeah, her being missing, and she's
in his house, and so he's just like, this is

(47:38):
he seems like a very earnest, naive guy who just
truly thought he was helping this friend of his, this
woman who he I think still had feelings for protecting
her from her husband. But now all the media is
reporting on it, so the whole thing for him, it
just sounded like this total just sort of bizarre, surreal experience.

(48:00):
When she asked him if he could take her home,
you know, he was he was a little bit annoyed
because he thought she might they might have some you know,
a relationship, they might they might get back together.

Speaker 1 (48:10):
Did they sleep together while he was.

Speaker 2 (48:12):
With her, No, he said no, Yeah, he said they
never slept together. The sort of theory of how the
DNA got on her clothes is essentially that they just
washed their clothes together and some of the seminole fluid
seminole fluid from you know, his underwear or something like
that got on hers. So that's his story at least,

(48:33):
and he also took a polygraph. He passed the polygraph
after law enforcement, you know, got his story. But of course, yeah,
as we know that those aren't those aren't always credible.
But he said they never had sex. He said that
she would just basically be in the room all day
and then he would help her with these injuries. So
before he dropped her off, he said that she asked

(48:53):
him to go to the hardware store to buy a chain,
to buy a lock, to buy zip ties, and he
didn't again consistent with sort of the way that James is,
He didn't ask her a lot of questions. She just
did it, and then he drove her to Yolo County.
She got out the car around four am, and she
took the chain, she took the lock, she took the

(49:15):
zip ties, and then when she she was found bound
essentially running along the side of the highway with the story.
And what's really interesting is that when she's first, when
the first person is calling nine one one, you can
hear him on the phone and they ask him what
happened if he knows what happened to the woman, and
he says, she says, her boyfriend dropped her off, and

(49:35):
then you hear Sherry's screaming no. So it seems at
that moment there was some kind of slip where maybe
Sherry had said, inadvertently told the truth to this person
when she was on the side of the road that
her boyfriend led her out of the car. But immediately
she's sort of changing the story right there. And so
in hindsight, when you hear that, how would this person
know that her boyfriend had dropped her off? I don't

(49:57):
think the stranger would make that up. It seems like
he had Cherry had said that to him. Yeah, so
from the very beginning you're starting, you're starting to kind
of see that the see breadcrumb's sort of leading back
to James.

Speaker 1 (50:09):
So wrap this up for me, you know, moving forward,
the DNA comes back the police and I'm assuming at
some point Keith confront her. Are their charges or what's
the what's the synopsis of the conclusion of this.

Speaker 2 (50:23):
Yeah, so that's it becomes another moment of surrealness for
Keith because in twenty twenty, a few days after they
go and interview James, they bring Sherry and Keith into
the FBI office and they do this long interview, this
long video interview with Sherry, where they're basically show telling
her that they they're sort of laying out their case.
They've they've found the house, they found the closet that

(50:45):
had the all thread pipe that she said she had
been chained to. They talked to people there who had
seen Sherry there. Sherry is acting as if this is
all sort of exciting news to her, but she's saying,
the closet looks a little bit different. I don't know
if that's it. And then finally they tell her the
DNA belongs to James Rayes, and it's this huge moment.

(51:07):
You can see Keith in the interview room just sort
of start scooting his chair away from Cherry. Cherry continues
to deny it. She is acting in like she's in shock.
She's like, James loves me, he would never do this
if he was there. I never saw him. She's still
maintaining that it's these two Hispanic women. She says she
doesn't want to get these women in trouble because one

(51:28):
of them let her go and that's the reason why
she gets to be with her kids. So at the
end of that meeting, Keith is assuming that they were
they will arrest Sherry. He kicks her out of the house.
She goes to Keith's Anne's house to stay the night,
and she just is just bombarding Keith with texting phone calls,
saying like, Babe, they're lying, they're lying, they're lying. This
is not what happened. This is not what happened. Meanwhile,

(51:50):
days go on, there's no arrest made, and Keith starts
to think that maybe law enforcement is a lying and
he talks to one of his really good friends, this
mentor to him who basically tells him, you know, you're
really only for another side of the story. You've now
heard James Rayes's side of the story, but there's still
no conclusive evidence to the fact that this is that

(52:11):
that is exactly what happened. So Sherry is essentially able
to get back into the house and essentially convinced Keith
that law enforcement has nothing, otherwise they would have arrested her.
And this goes on for two more years. So now
Sharry and Keith are just living together. They found this DNA.
Sherry is just able to tell Keith it's bullshit, this

(52:32):
is not this is not what happened. Law enforcement is
just not to get us, and Keith just decides to
just believe his wife instead of believing this guy James Rays,
who seemed like, according to Sherry, an abusive ex boyfriend.
And then finally in twenty twenty two, Sherry ends up
getting arrested by the FBI six years later, years years later,

(52:55):
So this happened in twenty sixteen, Cherry's confronted with the
DNA evidence twenty twenty. She's finally arrested in twenty twenty two,
and it's only when Sherry tells Keith that she is
going to take a plea deal and admit that she
had lied about it that Keith is like, I'm done,
I'm done. I can't and she's like, no, it's just

(53:19):
I'll just be wearing an ankle monitor. I won't have
to serve any jail time, like it's the only way,
and he's like well, if you didn't do this, you
can't admit to doing it, because then everyone, everyone in
the community that looked for you, everyone that did so
much to try to find you, that did so much
to support you, that rallied around you, is going to
hate you and demonize us as a family if you
admit to doing this. If you didn't do it, so

(53:40):
don't admit to it. But she does. She pleas out
and Keith files for divorce at that point in time
because he's just like, I can't, I can't do this.

Speaker 1 (53:50):
So she never serves any time at all.

Speaker 2 (53:52):
She does, so she ends up getting sentenced to eighteen months.
There's some mail fraud charges as far as like the
payment for the for the all the therapy that she
had to do that was paid for by the California
Victims Compensation Fund, so there's some there's some male fraud
that she ends up getting charged with. So she admits
in court that she lied about everything. This this whole

(54:15):
thing was a hoax. She apologizes, and she ends up
serving a total ten months in prison. She gets out
in twenty twenty three, and in that period of time
that she's in prison, Keith has this disturbing revelation with
his daughter where she tells him, you know, Keith had
been working out, he was really sore. He was kind

(54:38):
of like, oh, like I feel I feel I feel bad.
And his daughter's like, oh, you should, you should do
this trick that mommy does. And he's like what and
she's like brings him into the bathroom. She gets some
toilet paper. She knows where this there's alcohol in the closet.
She pours like rubbing alcohol on the toilet paper and
she says, here, just breathe this. And Keith is like,
what are you talking about? And his daughter's like eight

(55:00):
years old at this time, and he's like when would
how often would you do this? And she's like, well,
when we would get sick. We would do it every
time that we were sick. And so Keith is just
like doesn't understand. He's like, okay, you know, let's let's
go to bed. We'll talk about this in the morning.
He ends up calling Sheila, Sherry's sister. He's like, have
you ever heard about this as any kind of like

(55:20):
sort of holistic kind of treatment And Sheila's like, that's insane.
That no, that is not that is not heal someone
to breathe and rubbing alcohol fumes. So then Keith goes
to the doctor. They have sort of a forensic analysis,
you know, interviews with the kids, and they sort of
explained that Sherry would often soak you know, tissues and alcohol,

(55:41):
put it in plastic bags and sort of have a little,
you know, string around the kid's neck, so they would
just be around the kid's neck all day. They could
kind of breathe it in, and so you know, the
theory is then that makes you feel more sick, and
then you have to go to the doctor and it
becomes this sort.

Speaker 1 (55:57):
Of Munchausen biproxy exactly exactly.

Speaker 2 (56:00):
And so once that happened, when Keith found out from
his daughter that Cherry had been doing that when he
was at work, it was kind of done for him emotionally.
He was completely over Cherry. And this is when Cherry's
in prisoned, so this he only found out about this
when she was out of the house. And so for Keith,
that was I think that's the moment where he truly

(56:21):
realized that the danger of this woman on his family,
and it's what prompted him to want to tell his
story in a documentary series. Was because he was concerned
that once she came out of prison, that she would
have her own story, and knowing how convincing and perspasive
a person she is, that people might believe her story

(56:45):
and she would get access to the children again. And
so for him this was a huge moment where he
could really tell his truth and hopefully get ahead of
Cherry's inevitable lives, which unfortunately we've seen in this new
documentary series as Sherry just participated in, where she is
completely rewriting history with this unbelievable story of what happened?

Speaker 1 (57:12):
And am I right? I'm looking at this now? Am
I right? And seeing that she wrote a memoir also, yes,
it's a new tell all book. Serry Peppini doesn't exist.
Who gave her that platform? I mean, that's unreal to me.

Speaker 2 (57:25):
I think that might be a self published book. But
what's really fascinating is she had been writing a book
shortly after her disappearance, and a lot of that book
we got access to and we got to read and
we use excerpts from that book in the series, and
our story in that version was these two Hispanic women

(57:45):
had abducted her, and basically she went through everything that
they had done to her. There was no mention of
James Rayes. There's no mention of you know, Keith being abusive.
The book was dedicated to Keith, and so it seems
like she been writing one version of the book and
then once she got out of prison, she started writing
another version of the book and then it looks like

(58:07):
she's self published it on the back of this Discovery
I D series.

Speaker 1 (58:11):
Do you know what Keith's doing now and his two kids?

Speaker 2 (58:14):
Yeah, I mean, he's really it's been really difficult for him,
is this as this other Sherry's series came out? For him,
It's been really hard just being quiet because just all
of these things that she's saying about him are just
completely untrue, and so for him to just hear her
just you know, slander his name and and try to

(58:35):
make him out like this abusive person is really hard
for him. So because they're still in a custody battle,
and I believe that they have I believe they have
a court date in September or October that will basically
see if Sheerry is able to get you know, fifty
to fifty custody of the children with Keith. Up until then,

(58:57):
she's been getting supervised visits. I think once a month
or so. Her son doesn't want to see her, but
the daughter we'll see her. So she's been seeing her daughter,
but she hasn't really been seeing her son because I
think her son is just very sad and sort of is,
you know, older, and just can't understand why my mom left.

Speaker 1 (59:17):
Well, what I can't understand is why mom abused her
kids and now anyone is even considering giving her anything
but supervised custody, you know, once a month. I mean,
I guess they weren't able to prove it at that
point the abuse charges.

Speaker 2 (59:33):
Yeah, exactly, You're exactly right, they weren't able to prove it.
So it's just it's just his word and his children's
word against against Sherry's.

Speaker 1 (59:41):
Well, I mean, what a flipping story. It's just it's
so upsetting, and especially you know when if you watch
the Netflix series and you hear that woman's story in
her boyfriend's story about not being believed at all and
then having gone through all of this, and then you
end up with Sherry Peppini, who you know is now

(01:00:04):
discrediting so many people by doing what she did, and
you know, most importantly, even more importantly than in Keith,
just traumatizing those kids. They're going to be living with
this forever. How are you gonna know who to trust
if your own mother isn't someone you can trust, you know.

Speaker 2 (01:00:21):
Yeah, it's so it's so incredibly tragic. I mean, I
feel so it's so tragic for women, Yeah, for victims,
for you know, coming forward, you're already faced with people
not believing you, intimidation, like all of these kind of things.
And then Sherry is the sort of she she just
takes us all so far back as far as just

(01:00:42):
not being an incredible person, not being an a credible woman.
So it's just, yeah, it's really really sad. And these yeah,
these four kids are going to be you know there
the son, I think is in middle school at this point.
So I mean, I think, you know, your kids in
school are going to have seen, you know, these stories
and just go online on the internet and you just
look up a peenie and this and all you get

(01:01:02):
all you get are these kind of results. So it's yeah,
it's really it's really unfortunate for them. I feel really horrible.

Speaker 1 (01:01:09):
I mean, one last thing, one sad part I think
of the film is exactly what you're talking about. If
I remember this right, He asked the kids, should we
change our last name? And they said no, how horrific,
feeling like you have to change as a kid, your
whole identity because of what your mother did.

Speaker 2 (01:01:25):
Yeah, it was so when when they told us that, Yeah,
it was really heartbreaking and really also really reassuring too
that they wanted to keep the name, and they were
sort of yeah, they were sort of able to like, no,
we're going to shoulder this, We're going we're going to
carry this. This is our name. Why should we have
to change because of, you know, what what mommy did.

Speaker 1 (01:01:44):
Well, if you guys haven't seen this show, I mean,
this interview doesn't do it justice. I think, you know,
one of the most powerful things is all the footage,
home video, the interviews with you know, the police, with
the family members, all the support that Keith seems to get.
I think, you know, if you want the real story,
this is the series for you to watch. And I

(01:02:07):
think you guys did a wonderful job. Michael, absolutely, well,
thank you so much.

Speaker 2 (01:02:10):
Now. That means so much. And it's always, you know,
we always want to do right by anyone that participates,
and we always want to tell the truth. And Keith
is entirely credible person, and I completely believe him. All
of us believe him. He's been through, he's been through
the Ringer, and you know, we're just hoping for all
the best for him and his family as they try
to move on from this horrible event.

Speaker 1 (01:02:42):
If you love historical true crime stories, check out the
audio versions of my books The Sinner's All About the
Ghost Club, All That Is Wicked, and American Sherlock, and
Don't forget There are twelve seasons of my historical true
crime podcast, tenfold More Wicked right here in this podcast feed,
scroll back and give them a listen if you haven't already.

(01:03:03):
This has been an exactly right production. Our senior producer
is Alexis Amerosi. Our associate producer is Christina Chamberlain. This
episode was mixed by John Bradley. Curtis Heath is our composer,
artwork by Nick Toga. Executive produced by Georgia Hardstark, Karen
Kilgarriff and Danielle Kramer. Follow Wicked Words on Instagram and

(01:03:24):
Facebook at tenfold More Wicked and on Twitter at tenfold
More And if you know of a historical crime that
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