Speaker 1: Pushkin. Hey, it's Jake. I hope you enjoyed our season
Speaker 1: The Truth about Sarah. We'll be having a live event
Speaker 1: later this year. It's going to be a conversation between
Speaker 1: me and my co host Jess McHugh, and we want
Speaker 1: to hear from you too. What questions do you have
Speaker 1: for us about this season? Send your questions to deep
Speaker 1: Cover at pushkin dot fm. That's deep Cover All one
Speaker 1: word at Pushkin dot fm and stay tuned for more
Speaker 1: details on this event heads up. In this episode, there
Speaker 1: are references to suicidal ideation and sexual abuse.
Speaker 2: Previously on Deep Cover. The chief of VA Police called me.
Speaker 3: And said, hey, you know, I think we might have
Speaker 3: a problem with an employee.
Speaker 4: What immediately occurred to me was that as soon as
Speaker 4: I told her I'd cancer, even though she was telling
Speaker 4: me it was okay, in the back of her mind
Speaker 4: she was thinking, I can take advantage of this.
Speaker 2: Do you realize that Sarah used to bill one of
Speaker 2: your mother's bills from Dana Farmer? And I said no,
Speaker 2: I didn't realize that.
Speaker 4: I didn't know that.
Speaker 3: I was so afraid, right, I was so so afraid,
Speaker 3: not because I thought it was illegal, not because I'm
Speaker 3: thinking I'm going to go to prison, but because I'm like,
Speaker 3: they are not going to be my friends anymore. I'm
Speaker 3: not going to have these people in my life.
Speaker 1: One detail that's often overlooked in this story, Sarah Kavanaugh
Speaker 1: was married. She had a wife, a woman named Nicole.
Speaker 5: For us, Nicole was kind of the black box in
Speaker 5: this story, the person who might hold the key to
Speaker 5: understanding Sarah, because no matter who Sarah pretended to be
Speaker 5: in public, she was coming home to Nicole most nights,
Speaker 5: to the cozy little house they shared in East Granwitch
Speaker 5: Trode Island. It's a charming cape with a steep gabled
Speaker 5: roof and dormer windows and the flowering dogwood in the
Speaker 5: front yard.
Speaker 1: And we wondered what went on in that home, What
Speaker 1: did Nicole know, when did she know it? And did
Speaker 1: she see a side of Sarah that the rest of
Speaker 1: the world didn't.
Speaker 5: Nicole is an intensely private person. She never talked to
Speaker 5: the press or investigators, never made a statement, just kept quiet.
Speaker 5: We wrote her letter, and to our surprise, she called
Speaker 5: us and invited us to her house for an interview.
Speaker 1: When we met, I did something I don't usually do.
Speaker 1: I just asked her, Why did you agree to talk
Speaker 1: to us?
Speaker 6: Yeah, I asked myself that question several times before I
Speaker 6: called you. I know a lot of people are curious,
Speaker 6: and I don't have an obligation to share, but I
Speaker 6: do think that it means something to me that the
Speaker 6: story is told in whole, in full, and not part way.
Speaker 5: We're going to take a deep dive into Sarah and
Speaker 5: Nichole's house, the place where their lives converged, and the pats.
Speaker 2: They both took to get there.
Speaker 5: Sarah's path was fraught, complicated, and full of hidden struggles,
Speaker 5: struggles that would re emerge and eventually lead to the
Speaker 5: moment when federal agents came knocking.
Speaker 6: Picked up the phone just to check my messages, and
Speaker 6: that she said, you need to come home. The FBI
Speaker 6: is here. That's when I knew it was that fast.
Speaker 6: I had nothing until I had that.
Speaker 1: I'm Jake Halper and I'm Jess Mchughe and this is
Speaker 1: Deep Cover, Season six, The Truth About Sarah Episode five,
Speaker 1: The Wife.
Speaker 5: Or interview with Nicole came with a disclaimer.
Speaker 6: There's a lot of things that I frankly, I just
Speaker 6: don't know if what I was told or what I
Speaker 6: know is even true. So I can definitely speak to
Speaker 6: my perspective on things of what I understood to be
Speaker 6: true at the time that I was living in But
Speaker 6: I have found out along the way that there are
Speaker 6: things that I thought were true that just aren't.
Speaker 5: It struck me that she was basically questioning her own
Speaker 5: perception of reality, and this we came to learn is
Speaker 5: where Nicole's mind still is still spinning, still grasping for
Speaker 5: traction on the solid truth we told her we get it.
Speaker 5: Let's start from the beginning.
Speaker 1: Nicole grew up in New Mexico, but moved to New
Speaker 1: England in her late twenties. She's out doorsy, just like Sarah.
Speaker 1: So when the two of them connected online, one of
Speaker 1: their first dates was a hike. They met at Lincoln Woods,
Speaker 1: a park with rugged hills, treeline train and a tranquil pond.
Speaker 6: I just remember it being falling, you know, the leaves
Speaker 6: here in the fall are gorgeous, and it was nice
Speaker 6: out that day, and she and I always just had
Speaker 6: really good conversation and connection. It was easy. She's very
Speaker 6: easy to talk to, you know, just made you feel
Speaker 6: like you're the only person there.
Speaker 1: Nicole says, Sarah was just very in tune. Those were
Speaker 1: her words. Sarah presented herself to Nicole as a native
Speaker 1: New Englander with a brother and two divorced parents. All true.
Speaker 1: By the way. She said she worked as a mental
Speaker 1: health professional, also true.
Speaker 6: So I understood that she was a basically a social
Speaker 6: worker at the via got it.
Speaker 5: And at that point did she tell you that she
Speaker 5: was a veteran or No?
Speaker 6: No, she never told me she was a veteran. Not ever.
Speaker 5: Sarah and Nicole became close quickly, and after about a
Speaker 5: year or so, they bought a home together that cozy
Speaker 5: little I told you about in East Greenwich. Nicole says
Speaker 5: that moving in was a big deal and that Sarah
Speaker 5: had certain expectations.
Speaker 6: One thing that she was big on was she didn't
Speaker 6: want to be roommates forever, which can happen to people,
Speaker 6: especially same sex couples. And she was like very adamant
Speaker 6: that she didn't want that kind of relationship. She wanted
Speaker 6: a committed love relationship, not roommate relationship.
Speaker 5: So on their first night in their new home, Nicole
Speaker 5: had a little surprise waiting for Sarah.
Speaker 6: I had her like take a bath, and then I
Speaker 6: put out a bunch of candles leading to the back
Speaker 6: deck and roses. So when she got out of the bath,
Speaker 6: I led her downstairs, so she was all relaxed and
Speaker 6: comfy and proposed at the house on the first day
Speaker 6: that we moved in, so we didn't spend any night
Speaker 6: in that house that we weren't engaged.
Speaker 5: A year later, they got married in Vermont. You may
Speaker 5: recall Sarah's Jim Buddies helped arrange the wedding. Red barn birch,
Speaker 5: pergola flowers and maple syrup buckets, the whole Eddie Bauer vibe.
Speaker 1: The pictures from that day are radiant. Nicole in her
Speaker 1: crisp white dress, looks lovingly at Sarah and her soft
Speaker 1: ivory gown. In one shot, they waved at the camera playfully.
Speaker 1: In another, they sway together on the dance floor, arms
Speaker 1: around each other with the warmth of summer light casting
Speaker 1: soft shadows. Sarah and Nicole were now a married couple,
Speaker 1: but according to Nicole, they continued to live independent lives.
Speaker 1: They had different hobbies and different friend groups. Nicole was
Speaker 1: into softball and was in a serious travel league, off
Speaker 1: and away on the weekends, and Sarah was working for
Speaker 1: veteran organizations and had to travel for that. At least
Speaker 1: that's what she told Nicole, and yet living independent lives
Speaker 1: seemed to work for them. This doesn't seem totally weird
Speaker 1: to me, by the way. I've been together with my
Speaker 1: wife for twenty eight years, and one of the main
Speaker 1: reasons our marriage still works is that we know how
Speaker 1: to give each other space. We have our own interests,
Speaker 1: our own realms. But let's face it, marriages are rarely
Speaker 1: as tidy as we imagine. They're messy by nature, and
Speaker 1: no one stays perfectly within their own lanes, especially when
Speaker 1: children enter the picture. And for Sarah and Nicole, it
Speaker 1: was precisely this issue children that forced some very hard choices.
Speaker 5: Nicole told us that she and Sarah had been planning
Speaker 5: to have kids, but then about two years after their wedding,
Speaker 5: things took a turn. Sarah came up home and told
Speaker 5: Nicole she had brain cancer, which is horrible, right catastrophic,
Speaker 5: but initially it wasn't. Actually the doctor said it was treatable.
Speaker 5: Nicole heard all of this, by the way, secondhand from Sarah.
Speaker 5: She didn't attend any of the oncology appointments. Since Sarah
Speaker 5: had been diagnosed during COVID, when patients were generally going
Speaker 5: to the hospital alone. Nicole says that Sarah tried to
Speaker 5: keep things upbeat. They nicknamed the tumor her brain buddy,
Speaker 5: and apparently the buddy didn't seem to be getting any bigger.
Speaker 5: So despite the bad news, they pressed ahead with their
Speaker 5: plans to have a baby.
Speaker 6: We were gonna like do in vitro fertilization and I
Speaker 6: was going to carry. I had been to the doctor
Speaker 6: several times, like I'd been through some procedures. They're checking out,
Speaker 6: you know, my system here to make sure that we
Speaker 6: were good to go. So I had a doctor's appointment
Speaker 6: that I was going to go to, which would have
Speaker 6: been the final like sign off before the actual event.
Speaker 6: So I remember the day before the appointment, she said,
Speaker 6: I think you should pause on the appointment because I
Speaker 6: have this doctor's appointment and I don't know if it's
Speaker 6: going to go well. And I was like, okay, what's
Speaker 6: going on. She made it sound like that we need
Speaker 6: to wait because this might be really serious.
Speaker 5: Soon after this, Sarah tells Nicole that the cancer has
Speaker 5: gotten much worse, possibly terminal, which changed everything.
Speaker 6: It flips into you know, you take care of your
Speaker 6: significant other, like now, I'm just like that's on pause
Speaker 6: and okay, we can pick that up later. What's going
Speaker 6: on with you?
Speaker 5: Their plans to expand their family were put on hold.
Speaker 5: Nicole pursued a promotion at work, thinking the extra money
Speaker 5: would help as the medical bills piled up. Meanwhile, Sarah
Speaker 5: arranged for in home support from a specialist trained to
Speaker 5: work with people with traumatic brain injuries, someone who came
Speaker 5: multiple times a week. What Nicole didn't know was that
Speaker 5: the Wounded Warrior Project was paying for this. I interviewed
Speaker 5: that person, the specialist she helped Sarah for years, thinking
Speaker 5: Sarah had a brain injury while also battling cancer.
Speaker 2: But even while taking.
Speaker 5: This help, she still kept her wife Nicole, at a distance.
Speaker 6: She didn't involve me, Like, she wouldn't involve me, She
Speaker 6: wouldn't lean on me. She was like, I do this
Speaker 6: on my own. I don't want you to worry about it.
Speaker 6: Anytime I tried to talk with her about it, She's
Speaker 6: just like, I can't, I don't want to talk about it.
Speaker 6: So it was very it was something that separated us.
Speaker 6: She didn't lean into me, she leaned away.
Speaker 5: When it came time for Sarah's doctor's appointments. Even after
Speaker 5: COVID restrictions were lifted, Sarah was explicit she didn't want
Speaker 5: I want Nicole to be there. Nicole says she was hurt,
Speaker 5: but she didn't really feel like she had the right
Speaker 5: to express her frustration.
Speaker 6: Are you gonna blame the spouse with cancer? Like, what
Speaker 6: do you you know is she's having a hard time
Speaker 6: coping with it and is choosing to withdraw, Then you
Speaker 6: know that's it's kind I chopped it up to that, like,
Speaker 6: when she's ready for me to support her, she'll allow
Speaker 6: me to support her, and I'm just going to keep
Speaker 6: being here until she's ready. That's how I rationalized it.
Speaker 1: What Nicole didn't know at the time was that, of course,
Speaker 1: Sarah was living a double life. When she traveled for
Speaker 1: veteran events, she was sometimes attending all expense paid retreats
Speaker 1: posing as a war hero. When she was out with
Speaker 1: her veteran buddies, she was playing the role of the
Speaker 1: VFW commander, And when she went away on her own
Speaker 1: sometimes she was actually with Sam, the physical therapist whom
Speaker 1: she'd become romantically involved with. The whole thing was bound
Speaker 1: to unravel and then one day it did. When Nicole
Speaker 1: got the call, the call that the FBI was at
Speaker 1: her house, she hopped in her car and rushed home.
Speaker 6: There was a ton of black SUVs and a ambulance
Speaker 6: and cop cars and all kinds of vehicles in the road,
Speaker 6: So I like park down the street. You have to
Speaker 6: do like a walk of shame to get to my house.
Speaker 6: Everybody's like looking, and I'm like, I don't know, guys,
Speaker 6: I don't know what's happening.
Speaker 5: Nicole arrived home to find an FBI agents her doorstep.
Speaker 5: The agent explained that Sarah had threatened to harm herself
Speaker 5: and needed to be taken to the hospital, but Sarah
Speaker 5: had refused to go without Nicole, so Nicole hopped back
Speaker 5: in her car and followed the ambulance to the hospital.
Speaker 6: It doesn't matter what else is happening in that moment.
Speaker 6: I don't really know, but I'll get the facts whatever.
Speaker 6: I'll get home later and we'll figure it out. You
Speaker 6: just go into like take care of your significant other mode.
Speaker 6: The most important thing is, like she's getting into an ambulance,
Speaker 6: I'm gonna go.
Speaker 5: After a long way to the hospital, they cleared Sarah,
Speaker 5: determining she wasn't an immediate danger to herself. Sarah was
Speaker 5: allowed to leave the coal and the two returned home
Speaker 5: together in Nicole's car.
Speaker 6: It was silent. It was just silent. I said, what's
Speaker 6: going on? It was quiet for a long time. I
Speaker 6: just waited for her to answer. I don't have answers.
Speaker 6: I'll wait until you answer.
Speaker 5: Eventually, Sarah vaguely admitted to lying about some things mentioned
Speaker 5: she might be in trouble. Understatement of the century. By
Speaker 5: the way Nicole's head was spinning.
Speaker 6: I'm trying to be gentle in the way of you
Speaker 6: have somebody who's struggling with some mental health stuff in
Speaker 6: this moment right now, but I also need to know
Speaker 6: what's going on, and I need her to talk to me.
Speaker 6: I said directly to her, do you have cancer? And
Speaker 6: she said yes, and I was like okay.
Speaker 1: When they arrived back home, the cop cars are all gone.
Speaker 1: The neighbors are back in their homes and their quiet
Speaker 1: New England Street is once again a quiet New England Street.
Speaker 6: We walk in the house is a disaster. The drawers
Speaker 6: are all pulled out and things are knocked over and
Speaker 6: things like that. They didn't break anything, but it's a mess,
Speaker 6: and we didn't keep our house messy. So it's like
Speaker 6: was startling.
Speaker 1: As they're picking up the mess, Nicole's mind keeps returning
Speaker 1: to the cancer because if there's one thing that she
Speaker 1: needs to be true, it's that It's why she took
Speaker 1: the promotion, worked the extra hours, built up their savings,
Speaker 1: and it was the cancer that in a way helped
Speaker 1: explain why Sarah had been struggling so much, why she'd
Speaker 1: been so distant, and most of all, it was the
Speaker 1: cancer that prompted them to postpone their plans to have kids.
Speaker 1: And so as they're cleaning up, she asks Sarah again
Speaker 1: about the cancer, and once more Sarah insists, yes, it's true.
Speaker 1: But Nicole, she can't let it go, this question. It
Speaker 1: plays on her exhausted mind.
Speaker 6: So then we laid down to sleep that night, and
Speaker 6: in the dark, laying laying in bed in the dark,
Speaker 6: kind of like pillow tongue, I asked her one more time,
Speaker 6: do you have cancer?
Speaker 1: And then she just waited, somehow sensing that maybe under
Speaker 1: the cover of darkness the truth might finally emerge.
Speaker 5: One of the many questions that we had was how
Speaker 5: did Sarah get to this moment? Lying in her bed
Speaker 5: in the dark, next to her spouse, being asked this
Speaker 5: terrifyingly simple question, have you been lying to me about
Speaker 5: having cancer? In order to understand how she got here
Speaker 5: to this moment, we actually have to go back too
Speaker 5: much earlier in Sarah's story, because the way Sarah sees it,
Speaker 5: her double life wasn't initially Sarah the social worker and
Speaker 5: Sarah the war hero. Her first double life began as
Speaker 5: a little girl.
Speaker 3: I think this feeling of like always wanting a different
Speaker 3: life had been really persistent for me for some time,
Speaker 3: or for most of my life.
Speaker 1: Sarah admits she lied a lot growing up about all
Speaker 1: kinds of things. At first, some of the lies we
Speaker 1: heard about seemed to us like they'd fall in the
Speaker 1: category of just stuff that kids do. She'd tell her
Speaker 1: parents she was at school when she wasn't. Sometimes she'd
Speaker 1: lie to other kids. We spoke to her best friend.
Speaker 1: Her name is Ariel. They met as teenagers and the
Speaker 1: two of them remain very close. Ariel gave us a
Speaker 1: window into Sarah's world back in high school. Ariol remembers
Speaker 1: Sarah spinning wise, that didn't even it really makes sense,
Speaker 1: Like when Sarah would tell people that she was adopted.
Speaker 1: According to Ariel, Sarah's mom called her out on this,
Speaker 1: saying stop it, You're not adopted, but Sarah would keep
Speaker 1: on saying it. Ariel always found this strange and never
Speaker 1: quite understood why Sarah did it.
Speaker 5: But as we dug deeper into Sarah's story, we uncovered
Speaker 5: another set of lies that she told as a teenager
Speaker 5: that did seem out of the ordinary. We tracked down
Speaker 5: a few other people who knew Sarah back then. They
Speaker 5: told us that they knew Sarah not as a new Englander,
Speaker 5: but as a Southern girl, and more specifically as a
Speaker 5: victim of Hurricane Katrina. This was just after that hurricane,
Speaker 5: so it was still really fresh in people's minds. Sympathy
Speaker 5: for Katrina victims was running high. Our sources said that
Speaker 5: Sarah talked in detail about the ordeal of surviving Katrina.
Speaker 5: Told people she was rescued from the roof of her
Speaker 5: house just barely made it out alive. Apparently, Sarah told
Speaker 5: some people that her father died during the flooding. These
Speaker 5: lies earned her sympathy and friendship. To me, it seems
Speaker 5: like a test run of what she'd do with veterans,
Speaker 5: and that happened ten years prior.
Speaker 2: I asked Sarah.
Speaker 5: About all this, by the way, and she denied it.
Speaker 5: Told me I never told people that. I don't know
Speaker 5: why they think that.
Speaker 1: Sarah told us that things happened to her as a
Speaker 1: child that made her want to live a different life,
Speaker 1: be someone else, lie escape.
Speaker 3: When you lived two separate lives for so long, it
Speaker 3: feels normal, right. I had to be someone else in
Speaker 3: front of other people when I was a child, and
Speaker 3: that was normal.
Speaker 1: Sarah says that there was a man who sexually abused
Speaker 1: her for years when she was a girl. Her mother
Speaker 1: attested to this in official documents. Nicole also confirmed us
Speaker 1: that this abuse was something that Sarah had shared with her.
Speaker 5: According to Sarah, this abuse kind of split her life
Speaker 5: in two.
Speaker 3: When I go to school, I'm able to just like
Speaker 3: excel and act like everything is fine, and play a
Speaker 3: sport and play an instrument and do all of these things.
Speaker 3: And no one knew anything was going on for a
Speaker 3: very long time.
Speaker 5: That included her high school friend Ariel, who he told
Speaker 5: you about. Ariel says she had no idea that Sarah
Speaker 5: had been sexually abused. To Ariel, Sarah came across as
Speaker 5: funny and friendly, always up for an adventure. She played
Speaker 5: on the high school's basketball team. She was openly gay,
Speaker 5: and she even helped Ariol come out of the closet herself.
Speaker 5: She seemed so confident, but Sarah says the truth is
Speaker 5: she was unraveling.
Speaker 3: It began to drink really young. I was like thirteen
Speaker 3: when I started drinking. I definitely overused alcohol right and
Speaker 3: when I started to get into therapy finally, when I
Speaker 3: was like fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, my symptoms were really really
Speaker 3: like I could barely get through school certain days, or.
Speaker 2: I would just leave.
Speaker 5: At first, things seemed to get somewhat better. When Sarah
Speaker 5: got to college. She was stable enough that she was
Speaker 5: able to help others. Her best friend Ariol had ended
Speaker 5: up homeless, and Sarah was the one to say, come
Speaker 5: live with me. She even let Ariol sleep on her
Speaker 5: couch for a whole year. To this day, Ariel is
Speaker 5: deeply grateful and loyal to Sarah, and sure Sarah was
Speaker 5: still drinking a lot, but wasn't everyone In college, I.
Speaker 3: Thought I pretty much had an under control where I
Speaker 3: was going to school, I had an apartment. Things felt okay,
Speaker 3: so to.
Speaker 5: Speak, but then in her senior year of undergrad her
Speaker 5: mental health took a turn.
Speaker 3: I was hospitalized for a suicide attempt and then I
Speaker 3: was referred to like this outpatient program at one of
Speaker 3: the local hospitals.
Speaker 1: Sarah started taking medications for her anxiety after this, and
Speaker 1: she says she really evened doubt. But then her insurance
Speaker 1: stopped covering her medical provider, so she went off her meds.
Speaker 1: It was a rough time. She says that she tried
Speaker 1: to take her own life on multiple occasions. All of
Speaker 1: this is to say, Sarah told us she faced some
Speaker 1: pretty difficult moments in her life from a young age.
Speaker 5: Then in twenty sixteen, when Sarah was twenty five, two
Speaker 5: things happened, two really important things. The first was that
Speaker 5: she met Nicole, who would eventually become her wife. The
Speaker 5: second was that in this same year, she joined the VFW,
Speaker 5: where she found a community of veterans.
Speaker 1: These two things, her wife and her veteran buddies would
Speaker 1: become Sarah's pillars, her support, but they were also destined
Speaker 1: to push against one another and create tension in a
Speaker 1: way that would ultimately bring everything crashing down.
Speaker 5: The community that Sarah found at the VFW seemed to
Speaker 5: be so meaningful to her. She says everyone there seemed
Speaker 5: to get that she was working through a trauma from her.
Speaker 3: Past, like you don't have to hide like that you're
Speaker 3: uncomfortable or that like people talking loudly or yelling makes
Speaker 3: you feel like triggering, Like you don't have to hide
Speaker 3: those things. Those are like socially acceptable for veterans. And
Speaker 3: like I remember being out of work thing once in
Speaker 3: like a colleague, like a male colleague, like coming in
Speaker 3: for a hug and being like, oh my gosh, and
Speaker 3: like awkwardly like turning and like my somebody I worked
Speaker 3: with at the time, like being like are you okay
Speaker 3: and being like, oh my god. That never happens to veterans.
Speaker 3: It's like the socially accepted thing, Like we're not going
Speaker 3: to question them. They have a good reason to be there.
Speaker 1: What Sarah is describing here are symptoms of PTSD, which
Speaker 1: she says stemmed from her trauma, the sexual abuse from
Speaker 1: her past, and she says that veterans seem to understand
Speaker 1: this kind of trauma innately, almost like it was part
Speaker 1: of their shared memory and their unspoken language. She told
Speaker 1: us she felt safe with them, like for once, no
Speaker 1: one was judging her because they understood.
Speaker 3: I think that I had kept a lot of secrets
Speaker 3: in my life from my childhood, and so I don't
Speaker 3: think I had ever let anybody really know who I was.
Speaker 1: Out of.
Speaker 2: I don't know.
Speaker 3: Maybe that selfishness, right, but also maybe that's for protection.
Speaker 1: Sarah told us she always felt different, but when she
Speaker 1: was posing as a veteran, she felt like she belonged.
Speaker 3: I didn't always think like I'm going to go out
Speaker 3: and lives. I'm just going to go out and drink
Speaker 3: with my friends and try to feel better and like
Speaker 3: be around people I care.
Speaker 1: About, around the people that she cared about. And that,
Speaker 1: right there was the problem because these people, the people
Speaker 1: she cared about, were the same people that she was
Speaker 1: deceiving and manipulating and taking money from. Sarah says that
Speaker 1: what she did stem from a deep need and some
Speaker 1: seriously flawed thinking.
Speaker 3: I just think, like, when you feel inadequate for so long,
Speaker 3: that it manifests in irrational ways. Right, and lying to
Speaker 3: that extent was irrational.
Speaker 2: Right, it was deliberate. I deliberately lied.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 3: No one can say that someone forced me to tell
Speaker 3: those lies. No one did, but they were absolutely irrational.
Speaker 5: Sarah says she used the lies that she'd constructed about herself,
Speaker 5: the whole tragic war hero story, to distract herself from
Speaker 5: her real problems. But of course, what she was doing
Speaker 5: by lying and taking money that wasn't going to fix anything.
Speaker 2: It was only going to.
Speaker 5: Cause more problems, more damage, not just for her, but
Speaker 5: also for those close to her, like Nicole.
Speaker 1: The odd part about all of this is that Sarah
Speaker 1: did have his other life, with a pretty home and
Speaker 1: a caring spouse, a life that seemed pretty good. Even now,
Speaker 1: when Sarah talks about Nicole, you can hear a tenderness
Speaker 1: in her voice. She calls her Nicky, and as far
Speaker 1: as we can tell, Nicky was a lifeline for Sarah.
Speaker 1: It was Nicky who took Sarah and walks and Lincoln Woods.
Speaker 1: It was Nicky who lay rose petals through their house
Speaker 1: to show Sarah just how much she cared. It was
Speaker 1: Nicky who wouldn't let Sarah spend one single night at
Speaker 1: their new house without the promise of a wedding. Even now,
Speaker 1: Sarah gets really emotional when she talks about what it
Speaker 1: meant when Nicole came into her life.
Speaker 3: She really stabilized me. She brought so much to my life,
Speaker 3: and she really saw me for who I was, and
Speaker 3: I didn't have to like be ashamed of where I
Speaker 3: came from, or who my parents were or anything that
Speaker 3: had happened.
Speaker 6: And I was okay.
Speaker 2: I was stable.
Speaker 5: But that stability was short lived. As Sarah went deeper
Speaker 5: and deeper down the rabbit hole posing as a veteran,
Speaker 5: she pulled further and further away from Nicole. Sarah says
Speaker 5: that after work, she'd walk the dogs and then race
Speaker 5: off to various meetings or events with veteran groups. Sometimes
Speaker 5: she'd tell Nicole she was seeing Dave or the VFW guys,
Speaker 5: and other times she just invents something else entirely. As
Speaker 5: she went through the motions, she was constantly preparing for
Speaker 5: the next round of deception, trying to keep her story straight,
Speaker 5: and when she was at home, she was often emotionally unavailable.
Speaker 3: My relationship with Nicole had disintegrated so much because of
Speaker 3: my lies as a veteran and because I was involved
Speaker 3: in all of these events and things like that.
Speaker 2: Even so, Nicole was not ready to give up on her.
Speaker 3: She really wanted to reconnect and wanted us to get
Speaker 3: through this moment and was really trying to kind of
Speaker 3: pull me back, and I did not respond. I put
Speaker 3: no effort. I did not return those emotions. I was
Speaker 3: consumed with what I was doing right with my lie
Speaker 3: and how I was feeling, and she was so unhappy,
Speaker 3: and I was so unhappy because we were just like
Speaker 3: strangers in the night for so long in our house. Right.
Speaker 5: I always thought there must be a true version of Sarah,
Speaker 5: Sarah without masks, living out there somewhere, showing her true
Speaker 5: face to someone. And for a while I thought that
Speaker 5: person was Nicole, that we would find a true version
Speaker 5: of Sarah in their house, like an artifact we could excavate.
Speaker 2: But that just wasn't the case, maybe.
Speaker 5: Because there's an unknowability about Sarah, an invisible wall she
Speaker 5: puts between herself and the world.
Speaker 1: For Sarah and Nicole, the weight of their marriage and
Speaker 1: the years of secrets and lies came to a head
Speaker 1: in February of twenty twenty two. After they returned from
Speaker 1: the hospital and cleaned up the mess from the search,
Speaker 1: they went to their bedroom and with the lights out,
Speaker 1: they lay silently side by side. The room itself had
Speaker 1: once been their inner sanctum the cocoon of their intimacy.
Speaker 1: Nichole had always seen this home as the start of something.
Speaker 1: Years before, she had carefully scattered rose petals and glowing candles,
Speaker 1: creating a trail that led Sarah towards the future that
Speaker 1: they had imagined. But now there was no light, just
Speaker 1: darkness and quiet. Until Nichole finally spoke.
Speaker 6: I asked her one more time, do you have cancer?
Speaker 6: And then she said no, I don't. I think she
Speaker 6: needed the darkness, like the anonymity of that space. I
Speaker 6: don't think she could. Honestly, I don't think she could
Speaker 6: have looked me in the eye and say it. I
Speaker 6: think she needed to be in the dark kind of
Speaker 6: I guess hidden, I would say.
Speaker 1: For Nicole, this moment sliced through everything.
Speaker 6: She can lie to me about that straight to my
Speaker 6: face for how long we've been doing this. I mean
Speaker 6: that lie was over and over and over as we
Speaker 6: worked through and built upon. You know, there's layers to
Speaker 6: that lie, and it if she could build that lie
Speaker 6: to me directly, I didn't feel like I could be,
Speaker 6: you know, connected with this person ever again. I left
Speaker 6: the next day and I never lived in that house again.
Speaker 1: Our interview with Nicole happened in the new place where
Speaker 1: she lives, a tidy townhouse at the edge of a
Speaker 1: busy commercial strip. We had to turn off the heat
Speaker 1: for the interview so our mike wouldn't pick up any
Speaker 1: extra noise. The point is it had gotten kind of
Speaker 1: cold in the room and dark too. The sun had
Speaker 1: gone down, and for a moment we just kind of
Speaker 1: sat there, and then Nicole said this.
Speaker 6: The hardest thing to reconcile for me personally was finding
Speaker 6: out your perception of reality isn't true and accepting that
Speaker 6: I won't know. I won't know from this point on
Speaker 6: forever what was real and what wasn't real as it
Speaker 6: relates to your spouse, right and kind of making peace
Speaker 6: with that was the journey for me following all of
Speaker 6: the aftermath.
Speaker 5: And there are things that Nicole is still figuring out
Speaker 5: without realizing it. We were the ones who broke the
Speaker 5: news to her about Sarah having an affair with Sam.
Speaker 5: We didn't even mean to do this. We just mentioned
Speaker 5: Sam and then realized that Nicole still didn't know, so
Speaker 5: we turned off the tape recorder and explained seemed like
Speaker 5: the right thing to do. Things like this kept happening.
Speaker 5: As we reported this story, there were a bunch of
Speaker 5: times when the people we were interviewing kind of turned
Speaker 5: the tables and started asking us questions like what did
Speaker 5: we know about Sarah?
Speaker 2: Was this true?
Speaker 5: Or was that true? And in a way, the whole
Speaker 5: thing that Nicole said to us about not trusting her
Speaker 5: perception of reality, it kind of pertained to almost everyone
Speaker 5: in this story. Everyone was and is grasping for answers.
Speaker 1: For Sarah, the aftermath was something else entirely. She was
Speaker 1: now in the house alone with hardly anyone to rely on.
Speaker 1: She'd been outed, The media was buzzing with stories of
Speaker 1: her lies. The authorities had seized many of her personal possessions.
Speaker 1: She had no phone, no wife, no heroic backstory to
Speaker 1: fall back upon. Whether she realized it or not, there
Speaker 1: was nothing left to do but wait for the arrest
Speaker 1: and a much more public reckoning next time. On the
Speaker 1: finale of Deep Cover The Truth about Sarah.
Speaker 7: I didn't necessarily have any second thoughts about representing missus
Speaker 7: Galana and anything. It is more of intrigue as to
Speaker 7: how she ended up in the situation that she was in.
Speaker 1: Every defendant comes before court having had some sort of loss.
Speaker 2: Or trauma in their life.
Speaker 1: Human has such things, but not every human goes out.
Speaker 2: And he mixed crime.
Speaker 4: She came in like behind me. I turned around and
Speaker 4: she was there, and that was kind of it was
Speaker 4: almost like getting hit by lightning, kind of like just
Speaker 4: kind of like this fight or flight response.
Speaker 3: I knew his last name. I knew he was enrolled
Speaker 3: in care. There those aren't excuses, that's not right, but
Speaker 3: those are facts that I knew, which made it reliable
Speaker 3: to go to that document.
Speaker 1: Deep Cover The Truth About Sarah was produced by Amy
Speaker 1: Gaines McQuaid and Tally Emlin. Additional production support by Sonya Gurwood.
Speaker 5: Our show was edited by Karen Shakurji. Our executive producer
Speaker 5: is Jacob Smith. Mastering by Jake Gorsky.
Speaker 1: Original scoring in our theme We're composed by Luis Gara.
Speaker 1: Our show art was designed by Sean Carney. Fact checking
Speaker 1: by Anika Robbins.
Speaker 5: Special thanks to Sarah Nis, Izzy Carter, Daphne Chen, Jake
Speaker 5: Flanagan and Greta Cohne.
Speaker 2: Additional thanks to Vicky Merrick.
Speaker 1: I'm Jess mceugh and I'm Jake Halpern. Hey it's Jake,
Speaker 1: and look I got a little favor to ask. If
Speaker 1: you like the show, please just take one minute and
Speaker 1: review us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Honestly, it really
Speaker 1: helps new listeners find the show, which in turn helps
Speaker 1: us conte you making these stories for you. Thanks a lot.