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. Previously on deep Cover.
Speaker 2: She explained to me that she just got out of
Speaker 2: the Marine Corps and she needed help with some car
Speaker 2: payments because she was waiting for via disability to kick out.
Speaker 3: She was very likable, she was very charismatic, and then
Speaker 3: on top of it, she was a veteran and badass
Speaker 3: and had these injuries. We would kind of quietly make
Speaker 3: sure that when she was in our environment at the gym,
Speaker 3: she was protected.
Speaker 2: So I call up our records keeper and I say, hey,
Speaker 2: I need a copy of her DD Form two fourteen
Speaker 2: and he said, ooh, she just left my house two
Speaker 2: hours ago. She came here to the house to come
Speaker 2: get it. That's when I start thinking something's not right here, So.
Speaker 4: Like here, right when I get up in the morning,
Speaker 4: I make it a point to go outside.
Speaker 1: This is Sarah Katanaugh. She's the person you've been hearing
Speaker 1: about for the past two episodes, and.
Speaker 4: Like, step outside by myself, see the sunrise, look at
Speaker 4: the view because the view behind overlooks the mountains, and
Speaker 4: really enjoy that and just let that be the start
Speaker 4: of my day versus some of the intrusive thoughts about
Speaker 4: the past that would come up before, and I would
Speaker 4: let that dictate my day. So I've really changed how
Speaker 4: I let the past affect my moods, so I don't
Speaker 4: become just a continuous repetition of them.
Speaker 1: Jess and I spent the better part of several days
Speaker 1: interviewing Sarah. We talked about her past and her life
Speaker 1: now and a great many other things too.
Speaker 5: How we found her, where we found her. We'll get there.
Speaker 5: You're going to hear from her throughout the rest of
Speaker 5: the season, but for now, we just want you to
Speaker 5: hear some of the very first things that she said
Speaker 5: to us in person, so that you get a read
Speaker 5: on her just like we did. We started with small talk,
Speaker 5: like read any good books lately?
Speaker 4: Right now? I am reading The Secret History by Donna Tart,
Speaker 4: which is interesting. I had read Goldfinch The Goldfinch and
Speaker 4: I loved it, so now I'm reading this one, and
Speaker 4: I'm really enjoying it so far.
Speaker 1: This was just a few minutes into our first conversation.
Speaker 1: At this point, I knew a fair amount about Sarah Cavanaugh,
Speaker 1: what she'd done, about all the people she deceived and hurt.
Speaker 1: I had a pretty good picture in my head of
Speaker 1: who she was, and this this was not it. This woman, well,
Speaker 1: she sounded more like a high school guidance counselor or
Speaker 1: the type of person you'd hope would be taking care
Speaker 1: of your grandma the senior citizen home. In fact, she
Speaker 1: told us working with seniors that was her first job.
Speaker 4: So I was in undergrad working at an assisted living.
Speaker 4: I worked there for five and a half years, and
Speaker 4: I loved it. I did every thing from serving in
Speaker 4: the dining room to running activities to housekeeping. I did
Speaker 4: anything they asked me to do to basically pay my
Speaker 4: rent and pay my tuition and kind of survive undergrad
Speaker 4: at all costs. But I developed really meaningful relationships with
Speaker 4: the residents.
Speaker 5: Right as I sat there listening to her. I noticed
Speaker 5: Sarah was doing this a lot, ending a sentence by
Speaker 5: saying right. It's kind of subtle. She doesn't yank you
Speaker 5: through her version of events. It's more like she was
Speaker 5: feeling around for things that we might have in common,
Speaker 5: and if we nodded along, she'd say right.
Speaker 4: A lot of people don't like older people. I remember
Speaker 4: a lot of people I worked with who were like,
Speaker 4: she's grouchy, or she's this, or she's that, And I thought, well,
Speaker 4: they've had fifty years to practice right type thing. And also, like,
Speaker 4: I always think about our moods as a product of
Speaker 4: something else, right, I know that personally, and so I
Speaker 4: just think there was an appreciation there for me. But
Speaker 4: I didn't really know where that was going to go.
Speaker 4: I think I thought I was going to be like
Speaker 4: an activities director or something like that.
Speaker 1: But instead she got her master's and became a social worker.
Speaker 1: Eventually she got a job at the local VA in Providence,
Speaker 1: Rhode Island. That was her job, helping veterans in some
Speaker 1: pretty tough situations. And this is one hundred percent true.
Speaker 1: By the way, many of these people coming to Sarah
Speaker 1: for help, they showed up maybe on a Saturday kind
Speaker 1: of reluctantly, and it was Sarah's job to put them
Speaker 1: at ease.
Speaker 4: I would just say, hey, how are you like, it's Saturday,
Speaker 4: you know, what's how do you feel about this? How
Speaker 4: do you feel about being here? And if they were like,
Speaker 4: I really don't want to be here. I had to
Speaker 4: get up early and I had to drive to Providence,
Speaker 4: and I'd be like, yeah, I understand.
Speaker 1: When her clients did open up. Sarah took this approach.
Speaker 4: When someone said something like I'm you know, I'm struggling
Speaker 4: with I might be homeless, or my my wife and
Speaker 4: I are fighting, or something like that, I wouldn't respond
Speaker 4: with surprise. I would just be like, yeah, those things happen.
Speaker 4: Those things happen, and okay, what do you think you
Speaker 4: need right now?
Speaker 1: Because of that, what she never wanted to do was
Speaker 1: send veterans elsewhere to some other program, you know, push
Speaker 1: them off on someone else.
Speaker 4: I know that when I've opened up and told people things,
Speaker 4: if they've turned away from it because it makes them uncomfortable,
Speaker 4: I've then kind of thought, oh, this makes other people
Speaker 4: feel uncomfortable.
Speaker 1: Shouldn't talk about this, right?
Speaker 4: And I don't want to do that to them, but
Speaker 4: you have to be present in a way that silently
Speaker 4: says I get it.
Speaker 5: When she talked about her old life as a social worker,
Speaker 5: I got this strange sense that I was seeing the
Speaker 5: Sarah Kavanaugh that won over everybody's hearts. Because, let's be clear,
Speaker 5: the people we interviewed for this story, once upon a time,
Speaker 5: they all loved Sarah, and listening to her talk, started
Speaker 5: to understand why she knew, in her own words, how
Speaker 5: to be present in a way that silently says, I
Speaker 5: get it. It's weird to say, but I found her
Speaker 5: really likable by the time we met in person. I've
Speaker 5: been talking to her over the phone for nearly a year,
Speaker 5: and I've been hearing about all the terrible things she'd
Speaker 5: done for just as long. Sarah, she seems pretty aware
Speaker 5: of her effect on people then and now, of all
Speaker 5: the ways big and small said and unsaid that people
Speaker 5: come to trust each other to trust her.
Speaker 4: I've always been told I'm a really good listener, right,
Speaker 4: and I maximized that while I was lying people. When
Speaker 4: you create space, people fill that space. And I had
Speaker 4: always been really I had always been able to kind
Speaker 4: of keep my mouth shut and be quiet and not
Speaker 4: share anything. I'd really learned that really well.
Speaker 1: Sarah went on from there, talking about her old job
Speaker 1: and who she once was, because, as you might have guessed,
Speaker 1: she's no longer a social worker. She has another life now,
Speaker 1: very different life, one in which she has a great
Speaker 1: deal of time to think about what she did and
Speaker 1: the people she hurt most.
Speaker 4: I don't think it's ever going to be easy to
Speaker 4: think about the people I hurt, and because these are
Speaker 4: people that even before they knew I heard them right,
Speaker 4: I was hurting them right because I was lying to them.
Speaker 4: And they were people I called every day, that I
Speaker 4: spent most of my weekends with, that they were my friends,
Speaker 4: some of them my best friends. And I think about
Speaker 4: that now, I mean, that's really hard.
Speaker 1: When Sarah says this, she's really talking about two people
Speaker 1: who trusted her deeply. In this episode, we're going to
Speaker 1: hear from both of them. And these aren't just stories
Speaker 1: about friendship. They're about what happens when you meet someone
Speaker 1: a confidant who seems to get you and understand what
Speaker 1: you're going through, someone who listens quietly with what seems
Speaker 1: like empathy. But here in lies the danger. What if
Speaker 1: that very person takes your most personal struggles and uses
Speaker 1: them to their advantage, sees them as an opportunity. Then
Speaker 1: the line between empathy and manipulation is thinner than we'd
Speaker 1: care to admit. And sometimes the people who know us
Speaker 1: best are the ones we should fear the most. I'm
Speaker 1: Jay Calburn and I'm Jess mchuughe and this is Deep
Speaker 1: Cover Season six, The Truth About Sarah, Episode three, The Confidante.
Speaker 5: Last fall, Jake and I, along with our producer Amy,
Speaker 5: went on a road trip to Rhode Island. We wanted
Speaker 5: to meet the people in Sarah's inner circle, people who
Speaker 5: were closest to her, who each knew some part of
Speaker 5: the truth. One morning, Amy and I went to meet
Speaker 5: someone named Sam. We're just going to use her first
Speaker 5: name to protect her privacy. We spoke at her boyfriend's house,
Speaker 5: sitting around the kitchen table. Sam is in her fifties
Speaker 5: with short blonde hair. She's a physical therapist and for
Speaker 5: years she was Sarah's physical therapist.
Speaker 6: She was really kind. She definitely knew me, and she
Speaker 6: knew I think what I wanted to talk about type thing,
Speaker 6: if that makes sense.
Speaker 5: What was it that drew you to her in those early.
Speaker 6: Yeaies, it definitely was her intelligence. I mean her intelligence
Speaker 6: like just sparked something in me.
Speaker 5: Sarah and Sam first met in the fall of twenty eighteen,
Speaker 5: just a few months after Sarah's wedding to Nicole, the
Speaker 5: wedding attended by all her VFW friends. By this point,
Speaker 5: Sarah was fully immersed in this veteran role. Sam told
Speaker 5: me about the moment when Sarah first came in for
Speaker 5: a consultation.
Speaker 6: She was really quiet and reserved.
Speaker 7: You know.
Speaker 6: She answered questions, but very kind of matter of fact,
Speaker 6: definitely seemed like things were she was uncomfortable with, Like
Speaker 6: she didn't want me to look at her hip.
Speaker 5: This was the Sarah who, in her own words, had
Speaker 5: always been able to quote, keep her mouth shut and
Speaker 5: be quiet and not share anything, someone who let the
Speaker 5: silences do the talking. But Sarah did say she had
Speaker 5: been injured in Iraq.
Speaker 6: She said they hit an id and she got hit
Speaker 6: with the door that got blown in and a hitter
Speaker 6: and the hit. She wasn't really limping this because this
Speaker 6: wasn't a brand new injury. This is something that happened
Speaker 6: a long time ago, so it was more like a
Speaker 6: chronic thing.
Speaker 5: Sam had worked with trauma patients before, so when Sarah
Speaker 5: didn't want to show Sam her scar, she didn't push. Plus,
Speaker 5: she already knew a little about Sarah's supposed military past
Speaker 5: because one of Sarah's Jim buddies had connected them. Sarah
Speaker 5: got into a routine of twice weekly pt with Sam,
Speaker 5: and eventually the Wounded Warrior Project started paying for it.
Speaker 5: Sarah was part of their Independence Program. It's super selective
Speaker 5: program for the most severely wounded veterans, usually people with
Speaker 5: traumatic brain injuries, which Sarah claimed she had. Over many
Speaker 5: months of these weekly appointments, these two women became friends.
Speaker 5: They talk about nature, gardening, or books they both love reading.
Speaker 5: They also talked about more in smith things. Sam was
Speaker 5: recently divorced, and Sarah told her in that way she
Speaker 5: does so well, I get it. My marriage isn't working
Speaker 5: out either. Yeah, that's right. Sarah told Sam that she
Speaker 5: was also getting divorced.
Speaker 6: It was less than a year after they got married
Speaker 6: that she said that just the marriage wasn't working out
Speaker 6: and did they were separated, but she also said they
Speaker 6: did have an open marriage.
Speaker 5: None of this was true, at least not according to
Speaker 5: Sarah's wife, Nicole. At the time, they were still living together,
Speaker 5: still married, and not in an open marriage. But that's
Speaker 5: not what she told Sam. This, by the way, is
Speaker 5: also classic Sarah, as we've learned, and it's a pattern
Speaker 5: I've seen with women scammers in general. They often find
Speaker 5: emotional common ground with victims, even when that shared trauma
Speaker 5: is totally made up. And it worked.
Speaker 6: I think, like anything, basically, just you spend more time
Speaker 6: with someone and then you just appreciate who that person is,
Speaker 6: and then you find yourself wanting to spend more and
Speaker 6: more time. We just like enjoyed our time together and
Speaker 6: then it just turned into more.
Speaker 5: And by more, Sam means Sam and Sarah went from
Speaker 5: having a professional relationship to a friendship to a love
Speaker 5: affair one that was really romantic. Started going on a
Speaker 5: ton of trips together.
Speaker 6: Let's see, we went to Florida, we went to Vail,
Speaker 6: we went to the Bahamas, so we went to California,
Speaker 6: and then like you know, little driving around New England
Speaker 6: type stuff, and it wasn't just a fling.
Speaker 5: Their lives became really entwined. Much of this I actually
Speaker 5: learned from other interviews. Sarah would talk about Sam as
Speaker 5: her partner so much that it got really confusing for
Speaker 5: us as we reported this. There were times I would
Speaker 5: talk to someone for this story and they'd mentioned Sarah's
Speaker 5: significant other, and I had to double check, who did
Speaker 5: you think was Sarah's wife? A woman named Sam or
Speaker 5: a woman named Nicole. Oftentimes people said Sam Sarah was
Speaker 5: living a full on double life with Sam, a second
Speaker 5: double life because she was still living with her actual
Speaker 5: wife at the time, Nicole. Still, Sarah found a way
Speaker 5: to spend lots of time with Sam. In fact, Sarah
Speaker 5: and Sam would socialize with Sarah's VFW pals. Sam met
Speaker 5: Sarah's mom and a brother. Sarah told Sam she was
Speaker 5: really close with her five siblings and talked about them
Speaker 5: all the time.
Speaker 6: She told me that she had a twin who was
Speaker 6: also marine and died in combat, and then she had
Speaker 6: two older brothers and they were all like in the military. Yeah,
Speaker 6: and she said that her dad was a two star general.
Speaker 5: Sarah would show Sam pictures of her five brothers with
Speaker 5: their wives and kids, Brody, Joel, Oliver. She'd tell her
Speaker 5: about their marriage spats, or what they were dealing with
Speaker 5: at work, about their childhood growing up in Georgia. One
Speaker 5: brother in particular was worrying Sarah Joel. She told Sam
Speaker 5: that he was also a VET who now did private
Speaker 5: military contracting.
Speaker 6: He decided that he was going to do this mission
Speaker 6: because they would make a lot of money for these missions.
Speaker 5: Sarah told Sam that while Joel was on this mission,
Speaker 5: he got shot and ended up in a coma, and
Speaker 5: that her mom flew to the Middle East to bring
Speaker 5: him back to the US, but the doctors couldn't revive him.
Speaker 5: They told Sarah that he would never wake up. One day,
Speaker 5: Sarah tells Sam, I need to fly to Georgia now.
Speaker 5: I have to be the one to take him off
Speaker 5: of life support.
Speaker 6: I said, I'll go with you, and this is gonna
Speaker 6: be a really hard thing. I'll go with you. You know,
Speaker 6: we can fly down there and you know I can
Speaker 6: support you. And She's like, no, no, it's fine, I'll do it.
Speaker 6: And she called me at two o'clock in the morning.
Speaker 6: I'll never freak. She called me at two o'clock in
Speaker 6: the morning and said that it's done and he was gone.
Speaker 5: Sam was devastated for Sarah. Here was this woman dealing
Speaker 5: with all of these injuries and now this, and just
Speaker 5: to zoom out for a second because it can be
Speaker 5: easy to get lost in Sarah's world. The people in
Speaker 5: those photos that Sarah shared, they were real people with
Speaker 5: real lives of their own. They just weren't Sarah's brothers.
Speaker 5: This version of Sarah, the person with the big military
Speaker 5: family from Georgia, it's someone only a few people saw.
Speaker 5: And my take is that. But maybe it's because she
Speaker 5: couldn't really let Sam into her family life, because her
Speaker 5: whole family had watched her Mary Nicole, they'd been to
Speaker 5: the home that she and Cole still shared. But I
Speaker 5: think it's deeper than that. Sarah seems to have understood
Speaker 5: something fundamental. Tragedy brings us together, whether it's a friendship
Speaker 5: or a romantic partnership. Being vulnerable enough with another person
Speaker 5: to let them help you through a crisis, stand by
Speaker 5: you at a funeral or a hospital bed. This is
Speaker 5: where real intimacy is created, and Sarah seems to have
Speaker 5: taken this idea and just run with it. Same of course,
Speaker 5: didn't know any of this at the time. She continued
Speaker 5: bringing Sarah deeper into her world, her real world.
Speaker 6: She was very very meshed into my life. She knew
Speaker 6: my family intimately.
Speaker 5: Sam's mother has been battle stage three ovarian cancer for years.
Speaker 5: So while Sam drove her mother up to Boston for
Speaker 5: treatment at Dana Farber, Sarah would help out. She'd help
Speaker 5: Sam's kids with their homework, plan meals for the family,
Speaker 5: walk her mother's dog, and get this. While Sam was
Speaker 5: taking care of her mother's illness, holding her hand through chemo,
Speaker 5: she was also doing the same for Sarah. Sarah had
Speaker 5: told her the cancer lie too, said she had lung cancer.
Speaker 5: Sarah told Sam, I'm terrified, overwhelmed with medical results. I
Speaker 5: just can't take any more bad news. So Sam started
Speaker 5: receiving Sarah's test results, and then she would be the
Speaker 5: one to relay those results to Sarah more than once.
Speaker 5: Sam remembers sitting anxiously in her pet practice, refreshing her email,
Speaker 5: waiting for results to come in.
Speaker 6: I remember crying in my practice, getting bad, bad news,
Speaker 6: But then I remember getting really great news and then
Speaker 6: being able to tell her and that kind of stuff.
Speaker 8: It was a big rollercoaster.
Speaker 9: It's awful.
Speaker 6: It was awful. Yeah, there was a lot of emotional
Speaker 6: strife on my part, you know, a lot.
Speaker 5: As both Sarah's partner and her caregiver. Sam was in
Speaker 5: Sarah's world twice over totally enmeshed. Fast forward to January
Speaker 5: twenty twenty two, the moment when everything started to spiral
Speaker 5: out of control. News was getting around that Sarah may
Speaker 5: have lied about a great many things, including her service
Speaker 5: in the Marines, her medals, possibly even her claims of
Speaker 5: having cancer. When the news first reached Sam, she was
Speaker 5: in total disbelief. She'd seen a pile of proof over
Speaker 5: the years, her enrollment in the Wounded Warrior Independent Program,
Speaker 5: years of blood work that she'd received directly from the VA.
Speaker 5: Sam was trying to wrap her head around this, so
Speaker 5: she hopped on the phone with one of Sarah's VFW buddies,
Speaker 5: a guy named Justin. Had gotten to know each other
Speaker 5: over the years. She wanted his perspective.
Speaker 6: Can you believe this?
Speaker 8: This is crazy.
Speaker 6: Someone's making this up, you know, Like, why would they
Speaker 6: do this? Why would they make this up about her?
Speaker 6: This is insane, Sam told Justin.
Speaker 5: I've seen years of medical documents, even her cancer diagnosis.
Speaker 5: There's no way Sarah's lying. How would someone even make
Speaker 5: that up? More after the break.
Speaker 1: While Jess was meeting with Sam, I was just a
Speaker 1: few miles away meeting with Justin. He's the guy that
Speaker 1: Sam called to get a reality check. When the rumors
Speaker 1: first started, Justin was one of Sarah's buddies from the VFW,
Speaker 1: and initially, like Sam, he was very much in disbelief.
Speaker 1: Even now, knowing everything he knows about Sarah, Justin still
Speaker 1: struggles to wrap his head around everything that happened.
Speaker 9: I'll be honest, I was a little hesitant to kind
Speaker 9: of relive this, but I think now we're going to
Speaker 9: tell a story, I think it needs to be told fully,
Speaker 9: and so that's that's why I'm here.
Speaker 1: Justin is in his early fifties. He's fit, he looks
Speaker 1: like he could be part of a marketing campaign for
Speaker 1: Peloton or something, and he has this really disarming, gentle
Speaker 1: energy about him. Feels like an old soul to me.
Speaker 1: I wanted to talk to Justin for a whole bunch
Speaker 1: of reasons, but mainly because Justin's story. It's really compelling
Speaker 1: in its own right, which is probably why Sarah was
Speaker 1: drawn to it. Justin spent most of his career as
Speaker 1: an officer in the Navy as an aviator, and when
Speaker 1: he looks back on his life on all the dangers,
Speaker 1: all the near misses, all those moments that quietly changed
Speaker 1: the course of things. He often thinks back to two
Speaker 1: thousand and eight, when he was in his mid thirties
Speaker 1: stationed in Iraq, and what he remembers is the fog.
Speaker 1: The fog came every night, thick and heavy with the wind.
Speaker 1: It got so bad some nights they could barely breathe
Speaker 1: this fog. It would stay with Justin in the years
Speaker 1: to come in ways that he could never have foreseen.
Speaker 1: It would lead him right into the haze of Sarah
Speaker 1: Kavanaugh's deceptions. The fog in Iraq. It started like this.
Speaker 9: We weren't on a base called Taji, which is outside
Speaker 9: of Baghdad, and we're we lived. We had this kind
Speaker 9: of compound area. It was about fifty yards from a
Speaker 9: burn pit. And at night the wind would shift and
Speaker 9: our whole living area was enveloped in what was a fog.
Speaker 9: You couldn't you. You could barely see in front of you,
Speaker 9: a fog of what smelt like burning plastic. Every night.
Speaker 1: This fog that Justin's talking about, it's really a miasma
Speaker 1: of smoke and fumes. It came from a burn pit,
Speaker 1: which is how the military disposed of waste in both
Speaker 1: Iraq and Afghanistan.
Speaker 9: Like, when you eat, there's no there's not there's no
Speaker 9: water to do dishes. So when you go eat, everything
Speaker 9: is off plastic and that all gets thrown away. They
Speaker 9: dig a big pit. They throw all this stuff, plastic,
Speaker 9: medical waste, batteries, whatever, into this giant pit. They throw
Speaker 9: jet fuel on it and they light it on fire.
Speaker 1: Justin was responsible for nearly five HUND service members. Their
Speaker 1: safety was on his shoulders, and he and his leadership
Speaker 1: team were worried about the long term effects of the fog.
Speaker 9: We knew this wasn't gonna be good, right, and the
Speaker 9: contractor kept claiming that they do They did air tests
Speaker 9: and it was it was, it was okay, But I
Speaker 9: didn't buy that for a second.
Speaker 1: Then one day it all kind of came to a head.
Speaker 9: My master chief and I actually drove out there to
Speaker 9: the burn pit because we just saw this thick black
Speaker 9: smoke coming out, and we're like, what the hell's going on?
Speaker 9: And we went out there and you know, just like
Speaker 9: yelled at the guy basically like what the hell are
Speaker 9: you doing?
Speaker 1: Justin says the contractor just shrugged and said that's what
Speaker 1: I was told to do. No explanations, just business as usual.
Speaker 1: It would be more than a decade later before Justin
Speaker 1: learned the real consequences of those burn pits. By then,
Speaker 1: he was living in Rhode Island with his wife and
Speaker 1: three kids. He was happily retired from the military. All
Speaker 1: was good until he started to feel this small ache.
Speaker 9: I felt like, what it was a slightly pinched nerve
Speaker 9: on my left chest. And you know, I exercise, so
Speaker 9: I get pinched nerves and stuff for once in a while.
Speaker 9: So I'm like, oh, it'll just go away.
Speaker 1: But it didn't go away, and eventually Justin's doctor at
Speaker 1: the VA suggested that he get a CT scan just
Speaker 1: to be safe. That's when they found the mass in
Speaker 1: his lungs. At first, the doctors told him not to worry.
Speaker 1: It probably wasn't anything too serious. I mean, he was
Speaker 1: so young, so healthy, so fit. But then he went
Speaker 1: to see a pulmonologist at the VA and learned he
Speaker 1: had stage four lung cancer.
Speaker 9: It was a huge shock. I'm working out, I'm healthy,
Speaker 9: everything's going great, and then someone tells you you're about
Speaker 9: to die. I just like I couldn't wrap my brain
Speaker 9: around it. My wife was I just kind of like
Speaker 9: broke down.
Speaker 1: Justin says his wife had always been his lifeline. Even so,
Speaker 1: this cancer diagnosis was uncharted territory for Justin and his family.
Speaker 9: When you know you're dying, it's a very lonely thing.
Speaker 9: I mean, it's very comforting that I have a family
Speaker 9: around me and a wife to support me and everything.
Speaker 9: But at the same time, you're the one that's dying
Speaker 9: and you're the one going through this personally, and it
Speaker 9: feels like you're very much alone.
Speaker 1: But he did have someone who seemed to get it
Speaker 1: at a personal level, and that was Sarah Kavanaugh. Sarah
Speaker 1: and Justin knew each other from the VFW. They've been
Speaker 1: close for several years, ever since Justin joined the Post
Speaker 1: back in two thousand. In seventeen, and that whole time,
Speaker 1: Sarah herself claimed that she had been fighting cancer, lung cancer.
Speaker 1: Sarah claimed the cancer came from her military service, claimed
Speaker 1: her vehicle had been hit by an ied and she'd
Speaker 1: inhaled the metal particles in the blast. For some people,
Speaker 1: cancer is now a chronic condition, something you can manage
Speaker 1: and live with, and that seemed to be the case
Speaker 1: with Sarah.
Speaker 9: So I immediately went to Sarah, thinking, okay, well, there's
Speaker 9: someone going through the same experience I am. I don't
Speaker 9: feel so lonely anymore. I was still scared, but what
Speaker 9: she was sharing, what her experience was someone who's already
Speaker 9: started this journey is telling me, you know, things are
Speaker 9: going to be okay. That definitely helped.
Speaker 1: Sarah had always been a friend, but in this moment,
Speaker 1: their friendship seemed to take on a deeper meaning.
Speaker 9: No one really was in my shoes except her. At
Speaker 9: least that's what I thought, here's another veteran that's going
Speaker 9: through the same thing I'm going through, so at least
Speaker 9: she knows we can support each other. And then we
Speaker 9: started actually opening up more about our treatments and how
Speaker 9: our treatments were going.
Speaker 1: Sarah told Justin she was on an experimental dose of
Speaker 1: an immunotherapy drug and it was working, but according to Sarah,
Speaker 1: the VA was cutting back on her treatment. This story
Speaker 1: hit home for Justin. He'd faced his own bureaucratic roadblocks
Speaker 1: within the VA. In fact, he'd eventually gone outside the
Speaker 1: system to Dana Farber in Boston to get the experimental
Speaker 1: treatment that he needed, and it seemed to be working,
Speaker 1: which gave Justin an idea.
Speaker 9: I thought well, Dana Farbers is this amazing place, and
Speaker 9: I know that they can help her. And I said, well,
Speaker 9: do you have private health insurance because you need to
Speaker 9: go to someplace like Dana Farber and get real help,
Speaker 9: because the VA is not going to help you. And
Speaker 9: she said, well, I don't have or I can't afford it.
Speaker 9: She just kept saying like she couldn't. That was too
Speaker 9: much for her.
Speaker 1: The whole thing was frustrating for Justin, and he felt
Speaker 1: like he couldn't just sit there and do nothing.
Speaker 9: We veterans look out for each other, and I'm not
Speaker 9: going to sit here and let a fellow what I
Speaker 9: thought at the time was a fellow veteran die from
Speaker 9: lack of treatment when I know there's an alternative if
Speaker 9: I can help it. So I said, look, I will
Speaker 9: at least begin by paying for this insurance for you
Speaker 9: to be able to go to Dana Farber.
Speaker 1: It was an incredibly generous offer, which Sarah turned down.
Speaker 9: She initially said no, I can't ask you to do that, No, no, no,
Speaker 9: but then she kept telling me that, you know, she
Speaker 9: wasn't doing well, and eventually, you know, I said, look,
Speaker 9: I don't want you to die.
Speaker 1: At last, Sarah agreed. In the months that followed, Justin
Speaker 1: gave her money to pay for private insurance, over five
Speaker 1: thousand dollars in total, all in the hope that it
Speaker 1: would keep her alive. Then one day, Justin gets a
Speaker 1: call from Dave Ainslie at the VFW. You know, the
Speaker 1: guy with the handlebar mustache. He was the previous commander
Speaker 1: at the post before Sarah.
Speaker 9: Dave told me like, hey, you know, like I got
Speaker 9: to tell you something about Sarah, and she's you know,
Speaker 9: she's fake, She's not a veteran, and I was just
Speaker 9: in shock and trying to just like wrap my brain
Speaker 9: around it.
Speaker 1: Dave explained how he tried to retrieve Sarah's discharge papers
Speaker 1: her d D two fourteen, and how Sarah had been
Speaker 1: one step ahead of him, absconding with the paperwork before
Speaker 1: Dave could get his hands on it. Justin says that
Speaker 1: he believed Dave, but part of him resisted, part of
Speaker 1: him was in denial. He kept asking himself, who would
Speaker 1: do something like this and why. Around this exact same time,
Speaker 1: rumors began to swirl about Sarah being a fraud, and
Speaker 1: then Justin heard from Sam. Her head was also spinning,
Speaker 1: trying to make sense of all this.
Speaker 9: Sam and I talked on the phone and Sam was
Speaker 9: still in i think, still in denial, and said, this
Speaker 9: is not true. She actually does have cancer. I've seen
Speaker 9: the record, her medical records.
Speaker 1: Because remember Sam, she'd seen all the proof, the wounded
Speaker 1: Warrior enrollment forms, stacks of medical records, someone claiming to
Speaker 1: be Sarah's VA caseworker had even sent Sam official docum,
Speaker 1: blood work, diagnoses, intake forms. It all looked legit. It
Speaker 1: was enough to give Justin a moment of pause.
Speaker 9: There was a little bit of a question in my mind.
Speaker 9: I'd say, she's actually seen medical records. What does that mean?
Speaker 1: Like, was there some other explanation here, a story that
Speaker 1: made sense of it all, that turned the world right
Speaker 1: side up again and somehow transformed Sarah back into Sarah.
Speaker 1: And if not, well, then so many other questions bubbled
Speaker 1: to the surface, like where did that stack of medical
Speaker 1: records come from? And what if the rumors were true?
Speaker 1: What did that mean for Justin? If the one person
Speaker 1: who got it, who'd been through it, what if that
Speaker 1: person was just performing, mimicking his own pain, where did
Speaker 1: that leave him?
Speaker 5: In the days after that phone conversation with justin. Sam
Speaker 5: still held on to the hope that maybe this was
Speaker 5: just some terrible misunderstanding. Sarah kept maintaining her innocence, saying
Speaker 5: she had the paperwork to prove it. Sam says she
Speaker 5: believed it, maybe because she wanted to believe it. At
Speaker 5: one point, Sam was driving to work and talking to
Speaker 5: Sarah on the phone about all of this. She got frustrated.
Speaker 5: She asked Sarah, begged her, really.
Speaker 6: Where's the paperwork? And she's like, I can't find it.
Speaker 6: I'm like, what what do you mean you can't find it?
Speaker 6: You're the most organized person I know. And she's like
Speaker 6: then she said, it's all a lie. And I was like, wait, wait,
Speaker 6: were you.
Speaker 7: Ever in the military?
Speaker 5: And that's when Sarah finally said it, a one word confession. No,
Speaker 5: she'd never been in the military.
Speaker 6: I literally turned around and I was going to my work.
Speaker 6: I turned around and I went right to her house.
Speaker 5: What was that drive?
Speaker 6: Like, I don't even remember. I don't even remember like
Speaker 6: that drive. I don't remember walking into her house. I
Speaker 6: remember sitting on her couch and like me like telling her,
Speaker 6: asking her is this real?
Speaker 7: Is this real?
Speaker 6: Is this real?
Speaker 7: Is this real? You know?
Speaker 8: And she was like no, no, no, no no.
Speaker 5: It was an avalanche of betrayals. The cancer, the military service,
Speaker 5: the family down in Georgia, the brother she'd taken off
Speaker 5: life support. None of it was true. Sarah had been
Speaker 5: lying to her every single day for years about nearly everything,
Speaker 5: even things unrelated to her stolen valor scam, like still
Speaker 5: being married to Nicole, and in doing so, she had
Speaker 5: made Sam the other woman. We actually talked to Sarah
Speaker 5: about this very moment.
Speaker 4: I remember her coming to my house and having that
Speaker 4: conversation and her sitting on the couch across from me
Speaker 4: and telling her the truth, like watching it hit her,
Speaker 4: you know, watching it overcome her. It was like watching
Speaker 4: her heartbreak, you know. And she started to cry and
Speaker 4: told me she couldn't do this and how could I
Speaker 4: do it? And all of those things.
Speaker 5: Sarah had spent hours and hours with Sam and her
Speaker 5: family in their home, nursed the wounds of Sam's divorce,
Speaker 5: helps her find happiness again. Sarah hurt Sam in all
Speaker 5: of these intimate, profound ways, and then she made that pain, dirty, shameful.
Speaker 8: I'm still coping with it. Would it be upset?
Speaker 7: Now?
Speaker 6: Will come up and I'll be like, oh did that
Speaker 6: really happen, and I think probably not, it was probably
Speaker 6: a lie.
Speaker 8: Because I'll still like be.
Speaker 7: Like driving or whatever, and then memory will come and
Speaker 7: they I'll be like, oh, I wonder how Brody's doing,
Speaker 7: like things like that, you know, like it's so crazy.
Speaker 5: To me, Brody one of Sarah's fake brothers. Memories like
Speaker 5: this come back to Sam even now. And then there
Speaker 5: was the fact that Sarah was also Sam's patient, that
Speaker 5: she'd been getting physical therapy from her for years, and
Speaker 5: some of those bills had been paid for by a
Speaker 5: wounded warrior. That meant that the very basis of their
Speaker 5: relationship was a theft, a crime. She sat on the
Speaker 5: couch confronting Sarah, the implications became crystal clear.
Speaker 6: I was like, oh my god. I was like, you
Speaker 6: basically stole money. And I said to go, You're gonna
Speaker 6: go to jail, Sarah, And She's like, you think.
Speaker 5: Next time. On deep Cover, I said.
Speaker 3: Like, hey, we are at your house.
Speaker 1: It's the police. Are you in the house.
Speaker 4: We need you to come to the door.
Speaker 1: Deep Cover The Truth About Sarah was produced by Amy
Speaker 1: Gaines McQuaid and Tali Emlin, additional production support by Sonya Gerwit.
Speaker 5: Our show is edited by Karen Chakerjee. Our executive producer
Speaker 5: is Jacob Smith, mastering by Jake Gorsky.
Speaker 1: Original scoring in our theme were composed by Luis Gara.
Speaker 1: Our show art was designed by Sean Carney, fact checking
Speaker 1: by A Robbins.
Speaker 5: Special thanks to Sarah Nis, Izzy Carter, Daphne Chen, Jake
Speaker 5: Flanagan and Greta Cone. Additional thanks to Vicki Merrick, I'm
Speaker 5: Jess McHugh.
Speaker 1: And I'm Jake Halpern. My co host, Jess McHugh is
Speaker 1: currently researching a book on female con artists.