Speaker 1: You're listening to a Mother mea podcast. Mama Mia acknowledges
Speaker 1: the traditional owners of land and waters that this podcast
Speaker 1: is recorded on from Mamma Maya. You're listening to No Filter.
Speaker 1: I'm mea Friedman and today I am bringing you an
Speaker 1: interview that I did a little while ago because there
Speaker 1: has been a big new update in this story and
Speaker 1: it remains one of the most fascinating true crime bizarre
Speaker 1: stories you have ever heard. It's about a woman called
Speaker 1: him out as a party, who keeps pretending to be
Speaker 1: a child. She's a grown woman, and she keeps getting arrested.
Speaker 1: And this story, if you saw it in a movie
Speaker 1: or a TV show, you probably wouldn't even believe that
Speaker 1: it's true. But it is true, and there's an update.
Speaker 1: I'll be back at the end to tell you what
Speaker 1: it is. So she won't seek help, she doesn't want
Speaker 1: to get better.
Speaker 2: Yeah, then the question arises, what do you do with
Speaker 2: someone like Samantha.
Speaker 1: When you hear the words scammer, you probably think of
Speaker 1: one of those bloody, annoying text messages that you get,
Speaker 1: the ones that try and trick you into clicking on
Speaker 1: a link and handing over you bank details. Or maybe
Speaker 1: you think of catfishing, where people pretend to be someone
Speaker 1: else online to trick someone into falling in love with
Speaker 1: them and sending them money. But the common denominator is
Speaker 1: money though, right, that's our understanding of what a scammer wants.
Speaker 1: But what you're about to hear is the story of
Speaker 1: a woman called Samantha as a Party and Dakota Johnson
Speaker 1: and Harper Heart and Aurora Hepburn and Emily as a
Speaker 1: Party and dozens of other names that she made up,
Speaker 1: along with forged documents, to trick people into into caring
Speaker 1: for her, worrying about her, giving her attention.
Speaker 2: One of the first things she said to me when
Speaker 2: we spoke was, Oh, I'm so relieved you're a real person.
Speaker 2: I thought maybe you were a forwardster because there are
Speaker 2: so many fraudsters on these Facebook groups like you do
Speaker 2: you not?
Speaker 1: Samantha is one of Australia's most prolific and determined scammers,
Speaker 1: but it's not money that she seems to want, and
Speaker 1: that doesn't mean that her twisted stories and extraordinarily elaborate
Speaker 1: schemes haven't devastated her victims. They have, and they include
Speaker 1: famous athletes, young couples, vulnerable teenagers, and even young children.
Speaker 1: One of the scams Samantha returns to most regularly is
Speaker 1: passing herself off as a schoolgirl, even enrolling in schools
Speaker 1: again and again, despite being in her twenties and then
Speaker 1: in her thirties.
Speaker 3: In her role, she looks about fourteen or fifteen.
Speaker 1: She just looks colds and frail. She seems like a
Speaker 1: traumatized young person to me. Samantha has been charged more
Speaker 1: than one hundred times in Australia and has been jailed
Speaker 1: for several of her crimes, which have occurred all over
Speaker 1: the world. But she just can't stop.
Speaker 4: Why would she do this? What is she hoping to
Speaker 4: gain from this?
Speaker 5: Now?
Speaker 1: I just think she's a great con woman.
Speaker 3: She's really good at.
Speaker 4: What she does.
Speaker 1: For Mamma Maya. I'm mea Friedman. You're listening to no Filter.
Speaker 1: Sharon Davis is my guest today and as a Walkley
Speaker 1: Award winning investigative journalist, she spent the past couple of
Speaker 1: years working on a podcast about Samantha as a party
Speaker 1: called Finding Samantha. So did she find her?
Speaker 3: Oh?
Speaker 1: Yeah she did? And that's when things got even weirder.
Speaker 1: This isn't just a fascinating story. It's also about the
Speaker 1: power of one small, unassuming woman to successfully trick hundreds
Speaker 1: of really smart people again and again for almost twenty
Speaker 1: years in County. Here's Sharon Davis. Sharon, this story doesn't
Speaker 1: start in Dublin, but I would like to start with
Speaker 1: the General post Office and a little girl that was
Speaker 1: found wandering in the street in October of twenty thirteen.
Speaker 2: This week there were reports that a teenage girl was
Speaker 2: found wandering in a dazed street on O'Connell Street in Dublin.
Speaker 1: What happened on that day.
Speaker 2: Well, on that day, as you say, there was this
Speaker 2: little girl looking sort of waiflike and disheveled outside the
Speaker 2: Dublin post Office and she looked kind of lost and
Speaker 2: forlorn and alone, and a police officer in the street
Speaker 2: saw her and became concerned about her welfare. Now, this
Speaker 2: is against a backdrop in Europe and in the UK
Speaker 2: and the Ireland where there was quite a lot of
Speaker 2: sex picking teenaged bills going on at that time. I
Speaker 2: mean there still is, but that was when people were
Speaker 2: starting to become aware of it, and authorities were certainly
Speaker 2: starting to become aware of it, and so the police
Speaker 2: officer approached her and couldn't really get any answers out
Speaker 2: of her about why she was there. In fact, she
Speaker 2: didn't speak, She wouldn't spect. They didn't know whether she
Speaker 2: understood English.
Speaker 6: Even she appeared pleasant or didn't communicate, didn't want to speak,
Speaker 6: no way contact.
Speaker 3: She kept her hair down over her face.
Speaker 2: So the police were concerned, and they contacted the station.
Speaker 2: The station said, well, we can't just leave her there.
Speaker 2: She may be in desperate trouble.
Speaker 1: Did she seem distressed, Yes.
Speaker 2: She seemed very distressed. So they contacted child welfare authorities
Speaker 2: who suggested that for her own safety, that she needed
Speaker 2: to be hostilepitalized while she was checked out as to
Speaker 2: what a health situation was, and while they also tried
Speaker 2: to ascertain who she was because she wasn't speaking.
Speaker 1: When she was admitted to hospital, she continued to not speak,
Speaker 1: but she drew some pictures. What did she draw?
Speaker 2: She was drawing planes, she was drawing stick figures, She
Speaker 2: was drawing I think at one point she drew a gun.
Speaker 2: They were all things that made the authorities concerned that
Speaker 2: what she was saying was that she had been sex trafficked.
Speaker 2: They were also concerned as to why she wasn't speaking,
Speaker 2: about whether she was so traumatized that she couldn't talk
Speaker 2: at all, or whether this was a language issue. I mean,
Speaker 2: this was a real conundrum in front of them. They
Speaker 2: had this young girl who they believed was about thirteen
Speaker 2: or fourteen, not speaking, lying in a hospital, bear very thin,
Speaker 2: who showed lots of signs of trauma and distress. And
Speaker 2: so they were calling in different psychiatrists, psychologists, doctors, health workers,
Speaker 2: child welfare workers to try and figure out what this
Speaker 2: story was about and who this young woman was.
Speaker 6: On Toursday, the tenth of October, at approx. Be four
Speaker 6: fifteen pm, members of Renguarded Chicana discovered a young female
Speaker 6: on O'Connor Street in a distressed stage. She is described
Speaker 6: as being favored sex and haste, slim bill and having
Speaker 6: a long blonde hair. Do you recognize this girl?
Speaker 1: How long until they decided to go public because I
Speaker 1: imagine revealing a photograph of her to the world to
Speaker 1: try and find out who she is was a big decision.
Speaker 2: That was a huge decision, and it was a decision
Speaker 2: that actually required because they believed she was a minor.
Speaker 2: It required the court to be involved, so they actually
Speaker 2: had to go to the court to get permission to
Speaker 2: publish her photo, and that was many, many weeks after
Speaker 2: she was first found in the street in Dublin, so
Speaker 2: she was in hospital for at least four weeks or
Speaker 2: more while this discussion went on about how they would
Speaker 2: approach this and how they might in the end find
Speaker 2: out who she was. And essentially why they wanted that
Speaker 2: photo was to try and release it to other police
Speaker 2: agencies around the world really to see if anyone could
Speaker 2: identify her before they went public. They didn't go public
Speaker 2: straight away with the photo. Even they did circulate it
Speaker 2: amongst police first of all around the world through Interpol.
Speaker 1: And they had no luck. Inter poll knew nothing.
Speaker 2: Well interestingly enough, they had no luck. But then what
Speaker 2: happened was they then circulated it publicly. This was all
Speaker 2: in a matter of a couple of days. But at
Speaker 2: the same time as they got a lead on this
Speaker 2: young woman from Ireland, there was also a police officer
Speaker 2: in Western Australia that contacted them and said I think
Speaker 2: I know who this girl is. So they had kind
Speaker 2: of two sources for their information. One was a man
Speaker 2: who lived in Ireland, who had been a stepfather for
Speaker 2: a while and the mother and he had separated and
Speaker 2: he had gone back to Ireland because he was Irish
Speaker 2: by origin, but he lived with the family in Australia,
Speaker 2: and so he contacted the police and said, I know
Speaker 2: who this girl is. That's the daughter of my previous partner.
Speaker 2: And at the same time they had this Western Australian
Speaker 2: police officer contacting them saying I think I know who
Speaker 2: this girl is.
Speaker 1: Because what they told the authorities in Dublin who were
Speaker 1: trying to find out who this little girl was, is
Speaker 1: that she wasn't a little girl. She was a twenty
Speaker 1: five year old woman called Samantha as a Party.
Speaker 6: Ireland's mystery girl who was feared was the victim of
Speaker 6: sex trafficking and it turned out to be an Australian
Speaker 6: woman who's known to police and who is now on
Speaker 6: her way home.
Speaker 4: Samantha as a Party was in fact a fraudster and
Speaker 4: had confections for fraud and Australia and this was her
Speaker 4: part of her mortus operande, and that fraud was something
Speaker 4: that she specialized in.
Speaker 2: That's right. She wasn't thirteen or fourteen years old, and
Speaker 2: she wasn't a human sex trafficked victim. She was in
Speaker 2: fact a young as you say, twenty five year old,
Speaker 2: not so young, but certainly a young woman from Campbelltown
Speaker 2: in Sydney.
Speaker 1: How did you get involved at this point?
Speaker 2: Well, it's interesting because you know, I've been making radio
Speaker 2: programs and podcasts for a while, and I have to
Speaker 2: admit me that I've always been fascinated by scammers, like
Speaker 2: a lot of us are. A few years ago, I
Speaker 2: actually wanted to make a series, a general podcast series
Speaker 2: about scamming and the psychology behind it and why people
Speaker 2: do it. And so I was collecting stories and this
Speaker 2: story emerged of this young woman just down the road
Speaker 2: from my Sydney in a city suburb who'd gone to
Speaker 2: school pretending to be a traumatized, down fourteen fifteen year
Speaker 2: old and she had been caught. But she'd been going
Speaker 2: to that school for a while and it was a
Speaker 2: school for troubled and disadvantaged kids.
Speaker 1: How long had she been going to school.
Speaker 2: Oh, she'd been there for more than a year.
Speaker 1: Just going to school, taking.
Speaker 2: Classes, taking classes, hanging around with other kids, pretending she
Speaker 2: was a literate. So she was getting special attention from
Speaker 2: social workers and literature teachers. She'd been found by a
Speaker 2: couple in the street in Auburn, outside of Sydney Western Suburbs.
Speaker 2: They had taken her in and had decided that she
Speaker 2: needed their help, and they thought she was a young girl,
Speaker 2: and she told them she was on a US Witness
Speaker 2: protection program and that she was hiding from a situation
Speaker 2: where she'd been sexually abused, and they believed her, and
Speaker 2: they put her into this school in Marrickville, the School
Speaker 2: of Good Shepherd in Merrickville, the disadvantaged kids who had
Speaker 2: education issues, and she was there for a really long time.
Speaker 2: But during the time she was there, what happened was
Speaker 2: the school needed to work out her identity. They needed
Speaker 2: some sort of bona fides. They asked for birth certificates,
Speaker 2: and a birth certificate wasn't forthcoming, And they also asked
Speaker 2: for medical records because she disappeared from school for a
Speaker 2: couple of months and they didn't know where she was.
Speaker 1: Was she still living with his family with a couple.
Speaker 2: She was living with his family. Her story was, you know,
Speaker 2: and the family story was that she hadn't been well
Speaker 2: and hadn't been able to attend school. And then they
Speaker 2: get a birth certificate, and you know, it later emerges
Speaker 2: that their certificate is fake, but it shows her as
Speaker 2: a US citizen called Harper Heart, and the school starts
Speaker 2: to kind of look at a little bit further because
Speaker 2: they're really worried that there's something that isn't quite right
Speaker 2: about this. But this is all going on over a
Speaker 2: process of months, you know, months and months and months,
Speaker 2: and in the meantime, you know, Samantha is getting these
Speaker 2: resources and a lot of attention from some of the
Speaker 2: school teachers.
Speaker 1: How old was she at this time?
Speaker 2: This was only a few years ago. This was twenty
Speaker 2: and seventeen, so she was at the time about twenty seven.
Speaker 3: Wow.
Speaker 2: Yeah, she's good. She's really good at doing this stuff.
Speaker 2: She was drawing freckles on her face at that time,
Speaker 2: according to the police officer who eventually did the investigation
Speaker 2: into her at the school, detected Barren Power from Berwood
Speaker 2: Police Station.
Speaker 7: When we arrested her, we noticed the freckles she had
Speaker 7: on her face, making it look like a little thirteen
Speaker 7: year old girl, were actually fake.
Speaker 3: They're actually drawn on by her. They'll make up.
Speaker 2: What was her response when she was arrested, She.
Speaker 3: Knew who we were was like she could smell police.
Speaker 7: She was very cool and calculated. She seemed very disciplined,
Speaker 7: showed no emotional response. I wouldn't cooperate with police, wouldn't
Speaker 7: answer any questions, and maintained her right to silence.
Speaker 2: He was quite taken by how good she was at
Speaker 2: changing her identity. He called her a chameleon.
Speaker 1: When was the first time that she came to the
Speaker 1: attention of authorities?
Speaker 2: Okay, so in two thousand and seven she appeared in
Speaker 2: rock Hampton. As far as I know, that was the
Speaker 2: first time she attracted police attention. At that time. Her name,
Speaker 2: she said, was Lindsay Lana John Bennett, Coplan. It's interesting
Speaker 2: that her names often have some relationship with either movie
Speaker 2: stars or people of some notoriety, And at that time,
Speaker 2: I think that John Bennett case in the United States
Speaker 2: was really known and popular. So she turns up in
Speaker 2: rock Hampton and she's charged with a couple of minor offenses,
Speaker 2: and those offenses were intentioned to defraud. She was using
Speaker 2: fake Medicare cards, so she'd obviously got them somewhere, and
Speaker 2: she'd also been picked up for shoplifting and a thing.
Speaker 2: But then she kind of flies under the radar for
Speaker 2: another couple of years, and to be quite honest, I
Speaker 2: think there's other stories about Samantha out there that still
Speaker 2: haven't come to the surface. So she flies under the
Speaker 2: radar for a couple of years and then re emerges
Speaker 2: again in about two thousand eight ten in Brisbane and
Speaker 2: then she is Dakota Johnson. She wants to enroll in
Speaker 2: a school in Brisbane. Again. She gives a story about
Speaker 2: her uncle who has been sexually abusing her, and that
Speaker 2: she's run away. She was trapped on an island with
Speaker 2: her uncle. And she basically turns up at this school
Speaker 2: and wants to enroll, and the welfare authorities again become involved.
Speaker 2: They become very concerned about her. They enleissed a number
Speaker 2: of social workers to help her. The social workers, of course,
Speaker 2: have to involve the police. You have to notify police
Speaker 2: when you've got a child who you expect is in
Speaker 2: danger in the same way that that had to happen
Speaker 2: in Dublin, So they contact the police. There is an
Speaker 2: investigation that started. It's found that she's not who she
Speaker 2: says she is, but again takes about a month. It
Speaker 2: involves child protection authorities, it involves the police. It involves
Speaker 2: social workers, and she's charged with falsely representing herself with
Speaker 2: intention to defraud. She's again charged with a whole range
Speaker 2: of documents, having a whole range of other people's documents
Speaker 2: in her possession. You know, when she's picked up by
Speaker 2: the police, she refuses to give her name, her day
Speaker 2: to birth, so again the police have to go into
Speaker 2: quite a lot of investigation to find out who she
Speaker 2: really is. So she was charged with that as well,
Speaker 2: but she got a sort of a wrap over the
Speaker 2: uncles and a fine.
Speaker 1: Sharon. Usually, when you think about fraud, you think about
Speaker 1: or scammers, you think about someone trying to get money.
Speaker 2: Yep, right.
Speaker 1: And what's fascinating to me about this story and about
Speaker 1: Samantha is that most people spend their lives trying to
Speaker 1: get away from school.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I know.
Speaker 1: And she seems to spend her life trying to go
Speaker 1: back to school.
Speaker 4: Yes, this was a woman that was ten years older
Speaker 4: than the person she was portraying to be going back
Speaker 4: wanting to go back to school. Most kids, you can't
Speaker 4: get them to go to school, let alone go back twice.
Speaker 1: And this is something that keeps happening throughout her life,
Speaker 1: doesn't it.
Speaker 2: It does, and I think it may have a relationship
Speaker 2: with her childhood. I think she had interrupted schooling when
Speaker 2: she was a child. I think school was particularly difficult
Speaker 2: for her. I think that she may have had some
Speaker 2: learning difficulties. She was certainly at one point in a
Speaker 2: section of the school which was for learning difficulties. When
Speaker 2: she was at Ed's High School in Campbelltown. People that
Speaker 2: knew her at school, some of the people that I
Speaker 2: spoke to were really scathing about her, and I thought
Speaker 2: that was pretty awful. You know how school playgrounds can
Speaker 2: be really nasty, and if you're dealing with someone who's
Speaker 2: particularly vulnerable, that can have a real impact on someone.
Speaker 2: And I think at that time in her life she
Speaker 2: was very vulnerable, and I think she was also having
Speaker 2: some mental health issues. Certainly there were schisms in her family.
Speaker 2: Her mother and father had separated. It appears that she
Speaker 2: wasn't very settled as a child, that she was moved
Speaker 2: around a lot to a lot of different schools. Now,
Speaker 2: I'm speaking as somebody who had that experience in my
Speaker 2: own life as a child, I was moved around a lot,
Speaker 2: and my family were not a happy family, and I
Speaker 2: know what that means. I know how that can kind
Speaker 2: of disconnect you in many ways and make you feel
Speaker 2: like you don't have a firm surface to sort of
Speaker 2: stand on to grow. So I sort of see that
Speaker 2: in her, and I see that in that history of her.
Speaker 1: You know, when she kept going back to school as
Speaker 1: an adult pretending to be a child, did she befriend
Speaker 1: are the kids? Was she popular? Was she also just
Speaker 1: a bit of a misfit at school?
Speaker 2: She did befriend the other kids. And we have had
Speaker 2: some correspondence with parents of those kids who are very
Speaker 2: angry about the fact that her school friends believed that
Speaker 2: they were dealing with someone their own age, and then
Speaker 2: they find out that she's in fact an adult and
Speaker 2: she's a fake, and that nothing that they've told them
Speaker 2: is true. So they're very angry about what that means
Speaker 2: for their children. None of those kids have been willing
Speaker 2: to speak, and I kind of understand that there's a
Speaker 2: lot of traumatized people in the story, including Nothink Samantha,
Speaker 2: and so it's very difficult, and a lot of them
Speaker 2: are young, so it's very difficult for them to talk
Speaker 2: about their experience again, and a lot of them and
Speaker 2: their parents don't want them to have to relive it.
Speaker 2: I think the big thing that she did in those
Speaker 2: wool rules, she got a lot of attention from teachers.
Speaker 2: She got a lot of extra attention and help. And
Speaker 2: maybe that's what she craved. Maybe that's what she craved
Speaker 2: at school. Maybe that's the basis of all of her scams,
Speaker 2: is some sort of feeling of being protected and looked
Speaker 2: after and loved and nurtured in a way that maybe
Speaker 2: didn't happen at school.
Speaker 1: She turned up in Canada in twenty fourteen. She was
Speaker 1: twenty six by this time. What was her scam in Canada?
Speaker 2: Oh, my goodness, this scam is so complicated. What'samantha does
Speaker 2: is she often sets up her scams as well, So
Speaker 2: there's quite a lot of pre planning and pre thought
Speaker 2: to a lot of her scams. So what she did
Speaker 2: was she rang the police and said that her sister
Speaker 2: Aura had gone missing, and that her sister and herself
Speaker 2: were part of a cult and they'd run away from
Speaker 2: the cult and their lives were in danger. And of
Speaker 2: course in the cult there was sex abuse and there
Speaker 2: was all sorts of weird stuff going on. So she
Speaker 2: reports her sister as a missing person.
Speaker 1: So she makes up a fake person to report herself,
Speaker 1: who was also fake to be missing.
Speaker 2: Yep, exactly. It's complicated, isn't it. Sometimes this stuff does
Speaker 2: your head in.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so this is.
Speaker 2: All via phone. She rings police, and the police put
Speaker 2: an alert for this missing girl, and then two weeks
Speaker 2: later she walks into another police station and says she's
Speaker 2: the missing girl. Aurora, Aurora.
Speaker 8: It was on September sixteenth of twenty fourteen that a
Speaker 8: young girl walked into the Alexandra Community Health Center, which
Speaker 8: is in downtown Calgary. She was complaining about nausea and
Speaker 8: vomiting that she'd.
Speaker 1: Had a head injury.
Speaker 8: She said her name was Aurora.
Speaker 2: Hepburn again, she's hospitalized. There's a lot of hospitals that
Speaker 2: come into this story as well. The person in a
Speaker 2: hospital there is the focus of attention, aren't they. They're
Speaker 2: getting a lot of attention, a lot is happening around them,
Speaker 2: but they're the focus. So yeah, she's put into a
Speaker 2: hospital while the police do investigations. Her fingerprints are taken
Speaker 2: and by this time her fingerprints are on file and
Speaker 2: they figure out that she's in fact samanthas a party
Speaker 2: Australian Samantha as a party, they detain her. She goes
Speaker 2: to jail there and they deport her from Canada.
Speaker 9: Calgary Police Service of Chars and Australian Women with mischief
Speaker 9: after claiming she was underage victim of sex trafficking and exploitation.
Speaker 9: The woman told investigators she'd endured years of violent sexual
Speaker 9: abuse torture for several weeks. Investigators and healthcare workers spent
Speaker 9: countless hours working on the alleged victims to establish the
Speaker 9: extent of her abuse and provides services for her recovery.
Speaker 2: But again, you know, she's basically spent thousands of dollars
Speaker 2: in state resources and in resources such as nurses, hospitals,
Speaker 2: care workers that probably would have been spent on somebody
Speaker 2: who really was a victim rather than somebody who's just
Speaker 2: playing a game.
Speaker 1: So each time this happens overseas is she deported back
Speaker 1: to Australia in Ireland.
Speaker 2: The first time she was accompanied back to Australia by
Speaker 2: Irish police, she didn't talk on the whole flight home.
Speaker 2: She capped up the ruse of being up, the ruse
Speaker 2: on the whole.
Speaker 1: Victim of sex slavery.
Speaker 2: When she arrived back in Australia, from Canada. She was
Speaker 2: actually arrested because she'd been traveling on passports, so the
Speaker 2: Australian authorities met her at the airport and arrested her.
Speaker 2: And she did sometime in jail in twenty fifteen because
Speaker 2: of traveling on false passports. So she has done a
Speaker 2: bit of jail time as well, but it doesn't seem
Speaker 2: to be a huge deterrment. She did jail time for
Speaker 2: the Merrickville Harper heart story as well, but it wasn't
Speaker 2: a huge deterrent. She's done time in Melbourne. That's when
Speaker 2: Samantha's offending becomes even more serious. Somethink up.
Speaker 1: Next, Sharon tells us what happens when Samantha made her
Speaker 1: way to Melbourne and the family that unknowingly became involved
Speaker 1: in yet another of her scams. This one was just devastating.
Speaker 1: Let's talk about Melbourne. What happened when she got there
Speaker 1: in twenty nineteen.
Speaker 2: Well, she answered ads on all Pear sites. What I've
Speaker 2: found in the process of making this is that because
Speaker 2: childcare is so hard to come by, and there's a
Speaker 2: lot of busy women out there who really need to
Speaker 2: find a solution to their childcare issues, they often don't
Speaker 2: do enough due diligence on who they're bringing into their
Speaker 2: homes they're making part of their families. Now that was
Speaker 2: certainly the case with Samantha. Is that she answered ads
Speaker 2: on an all pair site in Melbourne. But before she
Speaker 2: went to Melbourne, she'd also answered an AD on all
Speaker 2: peir site in Brisbane, so she'd been in Brisbane. So
Speaker 2: if we wind back a little bit, she'd been in
Speaker 2: Brisbane she answered an ad on or all pair site
Speaker 2: and she got picked up by the Jarvis family Jazzy
Speaker 2: Jarvis and Tom Jarvis and Tom is a famous bass
Speaker 2: before and so she had all paired for them and
Speaker 2: their daughter for about six months in Brisbane. They were
Speaker 2: very happy with her. She works very well in families
Speaker 2: and she often has a great relationship with the kids
Speaker 2: that she's all hearing. We had no confounds at all
Speaker 2: quite a time.
Speaker 1: Loved her.
Speaker 2: They got on really well. We weren't.
Speaker 4: She met our I met our family, she met our friends.
Speaker 1: She was at.
Speaker 9: Basketball games with fifteen thousand people and nobody suspected she
Speaker 9: was thirty one.
Speaker 4: You know, she looked really really young and nobody suspected
Speaker 4: A theme.
Speaker 1: Does she do it as herself under her own name. No,
Speaker 1: and does she give herself a backstory?
Speaker 2: Oh, she gives herself a great backstory. She often comes
Speaker 2: from rich parents. There are often some of her parents
Speaker 2: are lawyers. They're often based in the US, or if
Speaker 2: they're Australian, they travel a lot, so they're often not
Speaker 2: living in the country at the time. She supprised photos.
Speaker 2: She has photos of her on yachts and all sorts
Speaker 2: of things. I think she's pretty good at manipulating social media.
Speaker 2: Often the photos don't have full pictures of her face,
Speaker 2: so they could be her, but they couldn't be her
Speaker 2: as well.
Speaker 1: She's got long blonde hair. It's not that hard.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And she's good at stealing other photos of Facebook pages.
Speaker 2: We've now realized, you know that she's quite good at
Speaker 2: lifting pictures, Sharon.
Speaker 1: This sort of marked a real shift, as you say,
Speaker 1: you know, going from portraying herself as a victim of
Speaker 1: abuse or sex trafficking to being a very privileged young
Speaker 1: woman who is there to take care of other people's children.
Speaker 1: So she's no longer pretending to be an abused child
Speaker 1: but a privileged woman. This is like quite a big shift,
Speaker 1: isn't it? Does it work better for her. Do you
Speaker 1: think she just ran out of that story.
Speaker 2: Yeah, quite possibly, because by that stage she was starting
Speaker 2: to get a little more known, and there were fingerprints
Speaker 2: on file and maybe, you know, all of her stories
Speaker 2: are around being childlike. Maybe this was just another sort
Speaker 2: of step in the progression. Maybe at times she thought
Speaker 2: it was a bit harder to pretend that she was
Speaker 2: thirteen or fourteen. But I'm not so sure about that,
Speaker 2: because she then came back to Sydney later on and
Speaker 2: pretended to be a fifteen year old, so she still
Speaker 2: gets away with that. I've seen Samantha. She's very young looking.
Speaker 2: You know, you can look at her and feel incredible
Speaker 2: empathy for her. You can feel like she's very young.
Speaker 2: She certainly doesn't look thirty three or thirty four, which
Speaker 2: she is now. She's very thin, she looks at times
Speaker 2: very very distress. It's very easy to kind of get
Speaker 2: drawn into that. But I do think that there was
Speaker 2: something about with the or pairing. There is something about
Speaker 2: the fact that she was becoming more known, so she's
Speaker 2: got to sort of vary the story a little bit.
Speaker 1: And as an O pair, you live in with a family.
Speaker 2: Usually again you're a bit more of a focus.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you take care of the children, but you're also
Speaker 1: a little bit of a child yourself, you know, in
Speaker 1: terms of you get your meals made and you get
Speaker 1: to live as part of the family. Yeah, in exchange
Speaker 1: for you know, doing some late housework off of looking
Speaker 1: after the children. So she lived with the Jervis's. They
Speaker 1: were happy for six months. Why did she leave?
Speaker 2: Oh, she didn't leave. They had to move to Melbourne.
Speaker 2: And so what they said was they wanted to take
Speaker 2: her to Melbourne with them, and so she moved to
Speaker 2: Melbourne with them, and she was all pair for them.
Speaker 2: But then a few things started to happen in the
Speaker 2: Jarvis family that made Jazzy Jarvis a bit concerned about
Speaker 2: who this young woman was and what she might be
Speaker 2: presenting herself as. In Melbourne, people rang Jazzy and said
Speaker 2: that they'd seen a woman with their child who wanted
Speaker 2: free things and had said that she was married to
Speaker 2: Tom Jarvis. And when they confronted Samantha about it, and
Speaker 2: again Samantha was amusing her name. She was harper Hermandez.
Speaker 2: When they confronted her about it, she had some sort
Speaker 2: of fantastic story, but it didn't kind of ring true,
Speaker 2: and there were a series of incidents like that that
Speaker 2: started to make Jazzy Jarvis particularly a little bit unsure
Speaker 2: about who this young woman was in their home. The
Speaker 2: worst thing that happened, though, was that while she was
Speaker 2: actually living with the Jarvises, she was also running a
Speaker 2: couple of other scams that they knew nothing about. So
Speaker 2: she would have holidays where she'd go and see her family,
Speaker 2: but what she was actually doing while she was supposedly
Speaker 2: going to see her family was running these other scams.
Speaker 2: So she had put a couple of ads up as
Speaker 2: a talent scout saying that she was looking for young
Speaker 2: teenage girls to appear in animations, and a couple of
Speaker 2: young girls answered those ads. One was a girl in
Speaker 2: Sydney and another girl was a young girl in Melbourne,
Speaker 2: and she was meeting with those girls at separate times.
Speaker 2: This was a few months apart. She was a different
Speaker 2: name for each of those girls, and she worked for
Speaker 2: a different international talent agency. But she was meeting those
Speaker 2: girls and getting them to perform these kind of very
Speaker 2: bizarre tasks under the guise of auditions. So she would
Speaker 2: get them to go into say a Center Link office
Speaker 2: and say that they'd been sex trafficked. She'd paint bruises
Speaker 2: on their faces. There were all sorts of strange things
Speaker 2: that she was getting them to do. She went by
Speaker 2: the name Maali to us.
Speaker 5: She made me pretend that I had been going through
Speaker 5: like really bad mental health problems and that I needed
Speaker 5: to see a social worker, and she pretended to be
Speaker 5: my mom. So it was a bit like scary when
Speaker 5: I found out that I wasn't allowed to tell anybody
Speaker 5: about it. I was a little bit weirded out and
Speaker 5: ordered to tell my parents, but I wasn't allowed.
Speaker 1: So it's almost like a form of moonshousens and munshausens
Speaker 1: by proxy.
Speaker 2: Yeah, very strange where.
Speaker 1: For attention you you fabricate. Usually it's a physical illness,
Speaker 1: but in this case it's almost a victimhood that she fabricates,
Speaker 1: either on herself and now on these other young girls.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, very similar stories getting these young girls to
Speaker 2: play out, very similar stories to the ones that she
Speaker 2: had in fact played out when she was in Dublin
Speaker 2: and in Canada and in Queensland and in Western Australia.
Speaker 1: And why do you think she did that? Is it
Speaker 1: to get the attention vicariously. Again, it wasn't a financial scam.
Speaker 2: It is vicarious attention. But maybe it's also about power.
Speaker 2: Maybe it's also about getting some sort of enjoyment out
Speaker 2: of the scam in a way, getting some sort of
Speaker 2: thrill about the fact that you are able to trick people,
Speaker 2: that you're good at it. I think there's an element
Speaker 2: of that in Samantha that certainly as her scams have progressed.
Speaker 2: Maybe they did start out this way, maybe they started
Speaker 2: as something to draw attention to herself, but I think
Speaker 2: as time has gone on, I think she does get
Speaker 2: some sort of pleasure or sense of power out of
Speaker 2: tricking people.
Speaker 1: When did things escalate to the point that she was
Speaker 1: arrested for child's dealing.
Speaker 2: Well, what happened in Melbourne was that Jazzy Jarvis let
Speaker 2: her goes I say, she'd had all of these sort
Speaker 2: of things occurring that made her uncomfortable, so she let
Speaker 2: her go as an all pair. At the same time,
Speaker 2: she's running this talent scout scam with these young girls.
Speaker 2: Both of those young girls, I have to say now
Speaker 2: and did be traumatized, and so are their mothers and
Speaker 2: their parents because they feel like their children are really
Speaker 2: vulnerable and that they had some responsibility for that because
Speaker 2: they were taken in by her as well, and thought
Speaker 2: that what she was getting the kids to do were auditions.
Speaker 2: They were sort of pretty naive. They didn't really know
Speaker 2: how these things went. One of the families did their
Speaker 2: due diligence and looked up this international talent agency and
Speaker 2: there was a person with the name and blah blah blah.
Speaker 2: So you know. Anyway, she gets dropped by the Jarvisism
Speaker 2: or pairs, so she answers another or pair site. She's
Speaker 2: employed by a family who are French and they've only
Speaker 2: recently arrived in the country and she's got the care
Speaker 2: of two young kids. I think one was one year old,
Speaker 2: the other one was three. She's there for a couple
Speaker 2: of weeks. Things seem to be going okay. She asked
Speaker 2: the mom if she can take the kids on a picnic.
Speaker 2: The mom says fine, but thinks it's a picnic just
Speaker 2: down the road. She takes them to Bendigo, which is
Speaker 2: a long way. She's living in a stay in Melbourne
Speaker 2: that's two hours into a regional area. She takes these
Speaker 2: kids to Bendigo and as I was saying before, she
Speaker 2: sets up scams well ahead. She goes into this mental
Speaker 2: health place in Bendigo with the kids, and she's also
Speaker 2: got another backpacker in Toe who speaks French with the kids.
Speaker 2: That she kind of advertised a job, some sort of
Speaker 2: data collection job that this backpacker had answered. So she's
Speaker 2: got her in Toe as well, who doesn't know that
Speaker 2: she's involved in this big scam. She's been sexually abused
Speaker 2: again by a relative and these kids a result of that,
Speaker 2: and the woman behind the counter recognizes it and calls
Speaker 2: the police. As I say, she'd set this scam up
Speaker 2: well ahead. She'd had three months of contact with this
Speaker 2: used mental health service in Bendigo before she actually walked
Speaker 2: in there and did this, So this was planned. It
Speaker 2: was all pre planned.
Speaker 1: And Sharon, is that the CCTV footage I've seen of
Speaker 1: her in a school uniform carrying a baby?
Speaker 2: Yep, she had a school uniform which she also bought
Speaker 2: online some months earlier.
Speaker 1: Because that's deeply unsettling. I mean, she does look like
Speaker 1: a schoolgirl and she's got this toddler toddling behind her,
Speaker 1: she's got a baby on her hip. It's like a
Speaker 1: private schoolgirl uniform. She's sort of got this hat and
Speaker 1: I think she claimed that she was pregnant at the time.
Speaker 1: This is a woman who's at this stage in what
Speaker 1: her late twenties, early.
Speaker 2: Thirties, yeah, early thirties.
Speaker 1: And so the police came, she was arrested.
Speaker 2: Well, no, what happened was she figured out that something
Speaker 2: was up, so she actually took off, went into a
Speaker 2: local shopping center and tried to kind of disappear, but
Speaker 2: a police found her and was following her and actually
Speaker 2: called out Samantha, and she turned around, and so they
Speaker 2: arrested her. But the other disturbing thing about this is
Speaker 2: when she was arrested, she totally maintained her silence and
Speaker 2: wouldn't tell them who the children belonged to. So it
Speaker 2: was only by sort of getting a hold of her
Speaker 2: phone and getting into the details of her phone that
Speaker 2: they actually figured out who the kids belonged to. So
Speaker 2: there was a period of a couple of hours, even
Speaker 2: after she had been arrested, where the police could not
Speaker 2: identify who the parents were. Oh my god, Now those
Speaker 2: parents are like totally traumatized, as you would be. The
Speaker 2: mother of those kids no longer trusts anyone to mind
Speaker 2: her children that has had a huge financial aside from
Speaker 2: the psychological impact that it's had on that family, a
Speaker 2: huge financial impact on the family because the mum was
Speaker 2: a working mum and she doesn't want to do that
Speaker 2: anymore because she doesn't know who to trust.
Speaker 10: She has that charisma of getting people to trust her
Speaker 10: straight away, and that's an art form, and she's getting
Speaker 10: people to invest in her, invest their time, invest their heart,
Speaker 10: invest their care in her. I'm not suppanted she betrays
Speaker 10: all of that.
Speaker 1: What I really got from your podcast and from this
Speaker 1: story was it's easy to say it's a victimless crime
Speaker 1: because no one is physically harmed. There's no actual physical
Speaker 1: abuse in most cases, there's no large amounts of money stolen.
Speaker 1: It's all really playing with people's trust and people's emotions.
Speaker 1: And in talking to some of these people, what did
Speaker 1: you discover that the legacy was because by now we're
Speaker 1: talking about she'd been involved in over one hundred scams,
Speaker 1: or she'd been charged over a hundred times by now,
Speaker 1: hadn't you.
Speaker 2: Yeah, these are not victimless crimes. In some ways, these
Speaker 2: crimes are tougher than if she had a stolen money
Speaker 2: or you know, identity documents. These are crimes that play
Speaker 2: with your head. These are crimes that make you wonder
Speaker 2: who you can trust, who you can let into your life,
Speaker 2: make you question your own judgment about everything you know,
Speaker 2: and particularly with the kids and your pair stuff. They
Speaker 2: make you really question how you are as a parent.
Speaker 1: Like, how could I have left my children?
Speaker 2: How could I have put my kids in this sort
Speaker 2: of danger? What kind of parent am I? Am I
Speaker 2: actually fit to be a parent? I don't know whether
Speaker 2: you ever get over them.
Speaker 1: Every time she was in front of a judge, what
Speaker 1: did the judges do? Because often the actual things she
Speaker 1: was charged with were not serious enough for a custodial sentence,
Speaker 1: or certainly not a long custodial sentence, and yet she's
Speaker 1: a menace to society.
Speaker 2: Well, the judges are really concerned because they've got a
Speaker 2: young woman in front of them who has done these
Speaker 2: same sorts of things over and over again. Some of
Speaker 2: the judges have been very angry about the fact that
Speaker 2: she continues to offend and have actually given her custodial sentences,
Speaker 2: But they're also sort of weighing up often the fact
Speaker 2: that she clearly has a background where she has had
Speaker 2: problems in her background, possible sexual abuse in her background,
Speaker 2: certainly mental health problems in her background.
Speaker 1: Is that what her defense is each time she's charged,
Speaker 1: because she has to table a defense. What is her defense?
Speaker 2: Well, it's not her defense because she never speaks in
Speaker 2: courtner She's always represented by a lawyer. When she appears
Speaker 2: in court, she rarely says a word. It's the same
Speaker 2: sort of approach that she has to police when she's arrested.
Speaker 2: She rarely says anything.
Speaker 1: Why is that do you think?
Speaker 2: Oh, I think it's clever. Other people do all the defending.
Speaker 2: I mean, she always pleads guilty. She doesn't plead not guilty.
Speaker 2: There was only one time where she did that, and
Speaker 2: she changed her plea fairly quickly.
Speaker 1: What's the significance of that pleading guilty?
Speaker 2: The significance is that the victims don't appear in the court.
Speaker 2: She never has to face her victims. Sometimes there'll be
Speaker 2: victim statements like they were in Melbourne, which is how
Speaker 2: I know how impacted those families were. But quite often
Speaker 2: she doesn't have to confront what she's done to these families.
Speaker 2: And she has lawyers, they're all legally lawyers. She never
Speaker 2: has her own lawyers, and they are always different lawyers,
Speaker 2: but they genuinely represent their client as somebody who has
Speaker 2: a background with mental health issues. Jail clearly is in
Speaker 2: the deterrent. She's been in there a few times, She's
Speaker 2: come out and pretty much offended straight away. You can
Speaker 2: put mental health orders on her if she had to
Speaker 2: attend psychological counseling, etc. And that was mandatory, and if
Speaker 2: she broke that, she would be back before the court.
Speaker 2: Or she broke that within a matter of months. And
Speaker 2: so then the question arises, what do you do with
Speaker 2: someone like Samantha?
Speaker 1: So she won't seek help, she doesn't want to get better?
Speaker 2: Yeah, does she actually understand the extent of her problem?
Speaker 2: I think so? Why doesn't she seek help? I can't
Speaker 2: really understand that. My feeling is it's not easy being Samantha,
Speaker 2: and that I don't I think that that life would
Speaker 2: be a life that you would choose, if you could
Speaker 2: make choices. Maybe sometimes people grow out of this stuff.
Speaker 2: But she is now close to mid thirty in.
Speaker 1: Your research and working on this case for such a
Speaker 1: long time on this story, does she have relationships, a
Speaker 1: romantic relationship something that she ever seeks out?
Speaker 2: No?
Speaker 11: Never, she told one of her psychiatrists in her report
Speaker 11: before the court that relationships don't mean anything to her
Speaker 11: and that she hasn't really ever had any relationships, and
Speaker 11: I don't think she's got a lot of friends either.
Speaker 1: What about family.
Speaker 2: Her family, at different times, particularly her father, has been
Speaker 2: it seems quite supportive of her, certainly when she was
Speaker 2: before the courts last year, when I was following her
Speaker 2: through a trial in front of picked in court, she
Speaker 2: was living with her father. But at various times she
Speaker 2: has told the courts that she's estranged from her family
Speaker 2: and doesn't really want anything to do with them. So
Speaker 2: it's kind of really hard to know what the truth
Speaker 2: of the family situation is. Of course, in the making
Speaker 2: of the podcast, I reached out to a number of
Speaker 2: family members, but none of them wanted to speak.
Speaker 1: This wasn't the end of my conversation with Sharon. We
Speaker 1: kept the microphones turned on for Mum and me as subscribers,
Speaker 1: because in the next part of this interview that's available
Speaker 1: now via the link in our show notes, we discuss
Speaker 1: how Sharon's life became unexpectedly and really weirdly entangled with
Speaker 1: this case and the impact that Samantha has had on
Speaker 1: Sharon personally. Here's a taste.
Speaker 2: So she does her research, she works out people's vulnerabilities,
Speaker 2: she works out areas of connection. She does a lot
Speaker 2: of research, and she's clearly with me, had done research
Speaker 2: on me as well. So you know, when you get
Speaker 2: call from someone who's saying they've got documents you need
Speaker 2: to see about international corruption, and you've got experience and
Speaker 2: a profile as an investigative journalist that does those kinds
Speaker 2: of stories, well you're going to buy it. I'm an idea.
Speaker 1: Remember, you can listen right now by clicking on the
Speaker 1: link in the show notes. This episode was produced by
Speaker 1: Cassie Merrett and Emmeline Gazillis. The executive producer of No
Speaker 1: Filter is Eliza Ratliff, with sound production by Madeline Joanna.
Speaker 1: I'm mea Friedman and thank you for having me in
Speaker 1: your ears. I told you that story was incredible and
Speaker 1: here are a couple of updates. Not long after this
Speaker 1: interview was recorded, Samantha was actually released from jail and
Speaker 1: was immediately back to her old tricks. One of the
Speaker 1: first things she did was to reach out to our
Speaker 1: editorial team here at Mamma Mia under a fake name.
Speaker 1: We believe it was her, and claiming that she had
Speaker 1: new information about Samantha and it was not what everybody thought,
Speaker 1: and it was so clearly her. Anyway, we engage with
Speaker 1: her for a little while and then she sort of
Speaker 1: disappeared again. But she's been in the news this last
Speaker 1: couple of weeks because the serial scam artist, who is
Speaker 1: now thirty five years old, she's been busted again. Despite
Speaker 1: these multiple jail terms, the deportations, and the long list
Speaker 1: of victims, some of which you just heard about then,
Speaker 1: many of whom have probably never come forward because they're
Speaker 1: too traumatized or too embarrassed. Yet again, Samantha as a
Speaker 1: party has been caught out in an elaborate fairy tale
Speaker 1: of her own making. Except it wasn't a fairy tale,
Speaker 1: it was actually a nightmare. So just a few weeks
Speaker 1: after she was discussed on No Filter, Samantha, apart from
Speaker 1: reaching out to us, we think she did reach out
Speaker 1: to family violence support services in Melbourne Southeast and Northern
Speaker 1: s Burbs, claiming to be a seventeen year old victim
Speaker 1: of domestic violence at the hands of her abusive stepfather.
Speaker 1: Now she said she was from Belgium and that she
Speaker 1: needed housing and transport and clothing and the services because
Speaker 1: this is what they do legitimate victims. They jumped in
Speaker 1: to support her. They gave her gift cards, public transport cards,
Speaker 1: and other financial and physical support to the tune of
Speaker 1: twenty thousand dollars. She then faked a pregnancy test, explaining
Speaker 1: to the workers in broken English because she was from Belgium. Remember,
Speaker 1: she told them that she was also the victim of
Speaker 1: sex trafficking. And this would actually turn out to be
Speaker 1: the combination of several other scams that she had on
Speaker 1: the go at the same time. Because while she was
Speaker 1: faking her life to these incredible support services, who honestly
Speaker 1: it's just shocking that they were taken advantage of, she
Speaker 1: was not just pretending to be a Belgian sex trafficking victim.
Speaker 1: She was also posing as an eighteen year old Norwegian
Speaker 1: backpacker called Asta Hansen. And it was as Asta in
Speaker 1: this persona that she made up. She convinced an unnamed
Speaker 1: Danish backpacker, a young woman, that she was working for
Speaker 1: the Hollywood Studio Village road Show and that she was
Speaker 1: being paid to record her travel diaries, and she would
Speaker 1: use yet another alias to pose as an employee from
Speaker 1: that company to convince the backpacker to join her on
Speaker 1: the road. This is how she does it. She creates
Speaker 1: these webs and all of these different personas to back
Speaker 1: up the stories that she's invented. So she made the
Speaker 1: Danish woman sign a non disclosure form and as a
Speaker 1: condition of her employment of this Danish woman, she told
Speaker 1: her that she was required to pose as a party's
Speaker 1: sister as they stayed in low budget accommodation all around
Speaker 1: the country that was supposedly for this TV show. Now
Speaker 1: the low budget accommodation turned out to be women's refuges, again,
Speaker 1: taking beds and accommodation and resources from women who really
Speaker 1: really needed it. And when the Danish backpacker became suspicious
Speaker 1: and raised her concerns, this woman was contacted by the
Speaker 1: village road show employee who was actually as we know
Speaker 1: Samantha as a party who said to the backpacker, you
Speaker 1: have to stay there to continue your employment. And it
Speaker 1: just got more and more complicated while they traveled around Queensland.
Speaker 1: The victim, this Danish woman, tried to get away from
Speaker 1: her employment contract and her fake sister who was Samantha,
Speaker 1: but Samantha told her that the police were after them
Speaker 1: and they needed to travel to Melbourne where they would
Speaker 1: hide again. Doesn't this all sound familiar? And that's when
Speaker 1: the backpacker realized that her phone and her passport had
Speaker 1: gone missing, so she was completely vulnerable. When they were
Speaker 1: in Melbourne, Samantha created a new identity and attempted to
Speaker 1: change her appearance, and this time she called herself Ocean
Speaker 1: Jones and she used a credit card that she'd taken
Speaker 1: out in another woman's name to get freckles tattooed on
Speaker 1: her face to also her appearance. This is where in
Speaker 1: Melbourne she contacted the Family Violent Support Services, telling them
Speaker 1: that she and her sister were being abused, and they
Speaker 1: put them up in this emergency housing. Now, the teams
Speaker 1: of domestic violent staff, who are already working tirelessly to
Speaker 1: protect women who are actually victims of family violence, then
Speaker 1: got a phone call from police. They believed that the
Speaker 1: girl in the care of this domestic violence refuge was
Speaker 1: serial connard of Samantha as a party, and in fact
Speaker 1: it was, and in court just a few weeks ago,
Speaker 1: the magistrate could not believe the extraordinary lengths that Samantha
Speaker 1: as a party went to to deceive the people around her,
Speaker 1: and the magistrate said, she's organized, cunning, and a repetitive offender.
Speaker 1: And look, this is me speaking now. She's an absolute
Speaker 1: puzzle for the justice system to know what to do
Speaker 1: with because on one hand, she clearly has massive mental
Speaker 1: health issues, but on the other hand, she's able to
Speaker 1: execute these plans where she really harms other people psychologically, financially, emotionally.
Speaker 1: And we'll be watching this case and no doubt monitoring
Speaker 1: our inbox for further developments, of which we will keep
Speaker 1: you posted