Compulsive liar and serial fraudster Samantha Cookes has shot to international infamy after her activities were unmasked by the police, newspaper journalists, online sleuths and podcasters.
She is serving a sentence in Limerick Prison having been jailed over a €60,000 social welfare fraud. She passed herself off as terminally ill and claimed the benefits that came along with her (fictitious) condition, Huntington’s Disease.
That fraud, however, is only a tiny fraction of her story. She lost three children – one who tragically died and two taken from her by social services in Britain and Ireland.
While working with multiple families in Ireland as their au pair over a span of a decade, she variously claimed to be a qualified play therapist, a child psychologist, an occupational therapist, a women’s refuge founder, a coder, a producer of sensory toys and an award-winning author – all while supposedly terminally ill.
She told people she was the daughter of a millionaire mother who invented the sandpaper on sale in B&Q and who had an industrial diamond factory in northern Israel but was killed in a car crash in the United States.
While claiming to be from great riches, she defrauded people she met of relatively small sums of money: €840 in one case, £1,200 in another, though she soon upped her game.
But what made her do it?
Within the group of “typical” pathological liars, there is a “pseudologia fantastica” subset, says Dr Drew Curtis, a Texas-based psychologist and author of Pathological Lying: Theory, Research, and Practice.
“These are the individuals who don’t just tell a lot of lies, their lies are exaggerated with such a magnitude. One of the reasons people lie, in general, is for impression management. And we see with people who tell exaggerated lies, they do get a lot of attention,” he said.
At times the attention “becomes the gain” and the “reinforcer” of their behaviour, though lies were also told “for a specific financial gain”.
“You’re talking about this individual lying for impression management and really changing all aspects of her identity,” he said of Cookes projecting herself as a more capable, more qualified and wealthier than she was in real life and doing so under multiple aliases.
“For individuals with narcissistic personality disorder or antisocial personality disorder, they are lying specifically for control. They’re trying to manipulate someone else. For antisocial personality disorder, what we might refer to as psychopathy – psychopaths – they will lie in the realm of control. But we see almost the opposite for pathological liars. They’re lying at every turn, they’re out of control.”
Dr Denise Mullen, a consultant psychologist, said Cookes appeared to be a very capable person. She was surprised some of the frauds she had perpetrated were so modest. Usually people such as Cookes were successful in deceptions for much more significant financial gain.
However, she also noted the sums of money she was in receipt of in more recent years were higher, indicating an evolution in her activities by targeting the State and other agencies rather than individuals.
Stressing that she did not know Cookes and could not comment on her beyond appearances, Dr Mullen, speaking generally, said people engaging in deception such as Cookes’s were often “gifted intellectually”. Progressing in deceiving people, often for money, was their “profession” and they were very committed to it, she said.
“They have to be able to read other people; what works [on them], what doesn’t. It’s an intuition, a gut feeling, it’s a feral quality, so to speak. Somewhere along the line, they figure out what works. Generally with someone who is sociopathic ... they are exploitative on purpose,” said Dr Mullen.
“They set out to take, to get what they can. And they are elaborate in their story-making so they’re plausible enough to worm their way in and get what they want. Generally, it’s a very deeply owned, lifelong pathway. It’s not about getting their kicks; it’s generally woven deep in the pathways of their brain.”
Born in Gloucester in 1988, Cookes was brought up in the southwest English town before going to York University. Even during her childhood she had a reputation for telling lies, though there was real tragedy in her past. Aged 19 years, she became pregnant, giving birth to her daughter in 2008 - the child died aged four months, in November of that year, after pillows fell on her while she was sleeping. An inquest ruled the death accidental.
In 2011, Cookes was convicted of fraud in Britain after taking money from a couple who wanted to enter into a surrogacy arrangement with her. After taking an initial £1,200 from them, Cookes discontinued contact with them. A nine-month sentence was fully suspended.
Cookes became pregnant again, with another man, when aged 22, though social services intervened and custody of the child was awarded to the father. This occurred after she was diagnosed with pseudologia fantastica, or being a pathological liar. Her condition, it appears, was deemed a risk to her child.
Cookes became pregnant again in 2013 and disappeared from West Mercia in the West Midlands in England to Ireland, in an apparent bid to prevent her child being taken from her. However, social services in Ireland intervened and, for the second time, Cookes lost a baby to the child’s father.
She remained in Ireland, mostly applying for jobs as a live-in au pair by answering adverts online. She has worked as an au pair for couples with young children in Dublin, Mayo, Kildare, Cork and Kerry.
She presented using the names Lucy Fitzwilliams, Lucy Hart, Lucy Fitzpatrick, Sadie Harris, Rebecca Fitzpatrick and Carrie Jade Williams.
In most cases the families were impressed with her skills as a child minder, adding that she was very charming. But gradually they began to smell a rat, her fantastical stories eventually wearing thin.
Her promises to organise trips for children to Lapland, for which she collected deposits in Wicklow and south Dublin in 2016, and to Disneyland never came to pass.
Once she had run out of road with a variety of families, she disappeared from their homes with no notice. She often left behind belongings confirming the families’ fears they had an impostor living under their roof, caring for their children. This included multiple burner phones – more than a dozen in one case – a bank card with her real name and a wedding dress, though her fiance never existed.
By early 2017 she was working as a live-in au pair in Cork, under the name Rebecca Fitzgerald. She was telling people she was a child psychologist, even carrying out an assessment on a child with special needs and charging the family €840.
In May 2019 she was convicted in the courts in Cork on four fraud and theft charges; three relating to the bogus trip to Lapland and one over the fake child assessments in Cork. Her 14-week sentence was suspended.
She then turned up in Kerry in early 2020, and her deception – at least the money she derived from it – significantly escalated. She initially lived in Cahersiveen, and later Kenmare, presenting as Carrie Jade Williams, an author writing about having terminal Huntington’s Disease.
[ Understanding the unique impact of Huntington’s diseaseOpens in new window ]
In 2020 she won an essay-writing competition run by the Financial Times. She became writer in residence at the Irish Writers Centre, Cill Rialaig, south Kerry.
In 2021 came an Arts Council grant, for €15,000, while a second, worth €21,250, followed. Around the same time she was telling people she had sold scripts to Netflix, reached out to RTÉ suggesting they record a radio documentary about her and became an influencer on social media.
By early 2022 she was renting a three-bedroomed house in Kenmare, Co Kerry, posing as a terminally ill author. She sublet rooms on Airbnb, which generated income. At the end of 2022 she left Kenmare, by which time internet sleuths had linked her to some of her past convictions and exposed the fact she was not Carrie Jade Williams, but Samantha Cookes.
But she continued her deception , changing her name, her hair colour and length, and even losing and gaining weight to alter her appearance. In 2023 she had relocated to Co Kildare, working as an au pair for a family in Celbridge, this time presenting as Sadie Harris; living and working there until last year.
But then the law caught up with her again.
Last July Cookes was arrested outside a post office in Tralee for social welfare fraud of €60,334.35. She was sentenced to three years last week and has been in prison since her arrest last summer.
The root of why she is so deceitful is unclear but it has spawned two podcast series – by RTÉ and Sue Perkins, the British comedian – with an RTÉ-BBC Northern Ireland TV documentary due to air next month.
One mental health expert in Ireland, who has dealt with mentally ill people and fraudster criminals, takes an unforgiving view of Cookes. He says the concept of being a “pathological liar” is not a medical diagnosis.
“It is a feature of psychopathy but psychopathy is not a disease of the mind; it’s a personality disorder. And personality disorders are not mental illnesses. They can’t be used in Irish law as a basis for a plea of insanity of diminished responsibility,” he says.
In his experience, people such as Cookes, who base their lives on lies, deception and fraud, do so not because they are mentally ill, but because they consciously and very deliberately decide to do it for personal gain.
“Is this culpable? Totally it is. People do this mainly for money. Men do it for sex as well, cunning their way into the affections of women. Also it’s for status. Describing yourself as a play therapist, for example, can be a very high-status thing, especially among young women.”
He describes them as “highly culpable, destructive, hurtful ego-trippers”.
