Alayna Shulman

Record Searchlight

Samantha Hunt stopped using the Sacramento River Trail in June.

An unknown man had savagely beaten an elderly woman there for no apparent reason, and Hunt, 32, just couldn’t live with the risk.

But come October, Hunt had finally let her guard down a little. “Maybe if is start jogging in my neighborhood, I’ll be OK,” she told herself.

Then Sherri Papini disappeared after reportedly doing just that.

And now that it’s been revealed the 34-year-old mother was tortured before her captors let her go on Thanksgiving, Hunt’s fears are back — and worse.

“It’s like a nightmare realized,” Hunt said. “She got taken, and I’m like, ‘It’s the gym for me.’”

Hunt is not alone. Many North State women fear they’ll suffer the same fate as Papini, whom Bosenko said was branded and tortured by her two alleged female captors.

“This case, the Smart case are the straw that broke the camel’s back,” 39-year-old Chrissy Phillips said, referring to still-missing Lewiston resident Stacey Smart in addition to Papini. “We don’t live far from where (Papini) was abducted.”

While Papini’s disappearance is considered unrelated to Smart’s, the vanishing of two women and re-emergence of Papini beaten and starved down to 87 pounds, according to her husband, has local women on edge.

Papini has given a vague description of the women, but Bosenko said their faces were covered and Papini’s was as well for part of the 22 days she was gone. She described both of them as Hispanic, one older and one younger.

Bosenko says the public should remain cautious until the suspects are identified, but also has reminded people that abductions of adults are extremely rare. And — while it’s still unknown whether Papini was taken at random or targeted — so far nothing indicates Papini was abducted for sex-trafficking or at the hands of a cartel, Bosenko has said.

Still, 24-year-old Danielle Maldonado believes Papini may have been abducted for sex-trafficking, and she now has pepper spray “on the ready no matter where I am.”

Maldonado goes to Shasta College, and she said the lighting there is not good.

“I half run to my car,” she said.

She wants to start exercising more, but “even if I had a person with me, I would still feel unsafe.”

She’s even asking for a stun-gun for Christmas.

But Danny Detenbaugh, a former Dallas FBI director, said that as hard as it is for the public not to know specifics that would indicate whether they’re also in danger, it could also protect them.

“It is not more beneficial to the public’s safety for no one knowing,” he said. “You can’t protect if you compromise investigations.”

Bosenko said that may have already happened now that Papini’s husband, Keith, sent a statement to Good Morning America detailing her injuries in response to online comments suggesting her disappearance was a hoax.

“I think he’s giving out way too much information on the case,” said Joe Giacalone, a retired New York police sergeant and professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. “(The branding) is something you would never want out in the media, because that is the sole clue that you have the right person.”

As strange as it may seem, revealing Papini’s injuries will have people “falling out of the trees trying to take credit,” Detenbaugh said.

“The way you solve these cases is by knowing something that only a specific person would know,” he said.

Giacalone had a slightly different take on what the Sheriff’s Office should be releasing. The office not putting out a more specific warning about roving kidnappers snatching up random women is “disturbing, or it’s foretelling.”

“As the police, you have to prevent further victimization,” Giacalone said. “What if it happens to someone else?”

That being the case, Giacalone said he doesn’t think Papini was targeted at random.

“I don’t think this is a random act in the respect of somebody’s just driving down the street,” he said. “Somebody knows a lot more about her than they’re letting on.”

Detenbaugh also noted that kidnappings are usually not random.

“I think that the general public’s got a lot more to be worried and afraid of than being abducted off the street, unless they’ve done something illicit or illegal,” or are known to be exceptionally wealthy, Detenbaugh said.

Random acts of violence by multiple women are even more rare, according to the journal Violence and Gender, which weighed in on the Papini case this week.

Mary Ellen O’Toole, a retired senior FBI profiler and criminal investigative analyst who also is editor-in-chief for the publication, said inconsistencies in the Papini case “must be answered in order to understand if this case is an aberration form more typical kidnapping cases, or there are other reasons why this occurred.”

O’Toole also noted that a man and a woman might kidnap together, but “for two females to have committed a kidnapping is extremely rare.” And while women can be “capable of significant violence,” they usually don’t hunt for victims to kidnap the way male offenders do.

She called kidnapping of adults “almost exclusively a male crime” for that reason.

But local women are still shaken up by the strange case.

“I’m not as friendly to strangers as I used to be, and when people ask for help, I’m not as willing to give them help anymore because I have to start sitting there thinking, what are their motives? What are they doing? Do they really need help, or is this a set-up?” Hunt said.”All my girlfriends, all my sisters, my female cousins, we’ve all been talking about it.”

Phillips has also changed her life because of the incident.

She has the men who work at the business across from hers watch to make sure she gets into her store early in the morning, and she’s making her 14-year-old daughter talk to her on the phone for the entire walk to the bus stop.

“It is causing me to be way more observant of my surroundings,” Phillips said.

Hunt has a young daughter she worries about, too.

Her 9-year-old somehow found out about the Papini case at school, so she’s had to figure out how to tell her about safety — without terrifying her.

“I had to have a talk with her again about this, ‘This is why we don’t talk to strangers,’ ‘This is why we have a safe word,’” Hunt said. “‘There are some people that are bad and want to hurt people, and as much as I don’t want it to happen, it’s out there and I need you to be aware of it.’”