In his first interview since his wife was found alive after being missing for three weeks, Keith Papini has described her horror ordeal.
“She screamed so much, she’s coughing up blood from the screaming trying to get somebody to stop,” Papini tells ABC’s 20/20 in an interview scheduled to air Friday. “And again just another sign of how my wife is, she’s so wonderful. She’s saying, ‘Well maybe people aren’t stopping because I have a chain that looks like I broke out of prison,’ so she tried to tuck in her chain under her clothes.”
He described how her kidnappers, believed to be two Hispanic women, covered their faces and had a bag over his wife’s head. When they finally freed her they kicked her out of the car and kept driving.
“She was chained anytime she was in the vehicle,” he said. “They opened the door, she doesn’t know [where] because she’s got a bag over her head. They cut something to free her restraint that was holding her in the vehicle, and then kind of pushed her out of the vehicle.”
The driver who found Ms Papini on the side of the road has also given an interview describing the strange scene.
“I see this blonde woman waving what looks like a brown flannel shirt up and down desperately trying to flag someone down,” Alison Sutton told KOBI-TV. “I could have hit her because she was so close to the side of the road.”
Shasta County Sheriff Tom Bosenko told ABC News in the US that she had a strange ‘message’ burned into her skin.
“I would think that was some sort of either an exertion of power and control and/or maybe some type of message that the brand contained,” Mr Bosenko said.
“It is not a symbol, but it was a message.”
Police are still investigating details surrounding the abduction and are searching for the suspects.
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