On the afternoon of November 2nd, 2016, a thirty-four-year-old stay-at-home mother named Sherri Papini went for a jog near her home in Mountain Gate, a small community just outside of Redding, in Northern California’s Shasta County. She left her two young children at daycare, laced up her shoes, and headed out into a mild autumn afternoon. She did not come back.

Her husband, Keith Papini, returned from work that evening to find an empty house. The children were still at daycare — uncharacteristically uncollected. He used the Find My iPhone app to trace Sherri’s phone and drove to the location it showed: a roadside near Sunrise Drive, about a mile from their home. What he found there was her cell phone and her earbuds, lying in the dirt on the side of the road. Wound around the earbuds were several strands of blonde hair.

Sherri Papini was gone, and 22 days later she would reappear on the side of a road 150 miles from her home, looking gaunt, with a chain tied around her waist, and the word “exodus” branded into her back. It was a story that seemed to demand justice — and it would, eventually, get it, just not in the way anyone expected.

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