a day ago
CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews last night's TV: Will we ever know the truth about ALL this serial scammer's evil lies?
Despite her eager smile and open face, Samantha Cookes is a compulsive liar. She is also a deeply evil woman.
As the true-crime documentary Bad Nanny unfolded, chilling parallels with another highly plausible but evil criminal emerged.
For anyone who finds it impossible to believe in killer nurse Lucy Letby 's guilt, this two-part report, which concludes tonight, should be required viewing.
None of the charges against Cookes, a 37-year-old serial scammer, is as appalling as Letby's murder of at least seven babies on a neonatal ward — though there are disturbing circumstances around the death of Cookes's own infant daughter in 2008.
Letby operated by befriending the people whose babies she murdered. Gloucester-born Cookes has a record of defrauding friends with scams of exceptional callousness.
In 2012, for instance, she posed as a willing surrogate for a Yorkshire couple desperate to have a baby. She took thousands of pounds from them, and then disappeared.
Turning up in Ireland under another name, she sought out mothers with disabled children and weaselled her way into their lives, before taking their money.
In 2022, at the height of the TikTok craze, she launched her most brazen fraud — masquerading as a terminally ill patient facing death with inspirational courage.
Social media is so overpopulated with people seeking attention for their diseases, real or imaginary, that a word has been coined for them: 'sickfluencers'.
But Cookes, now calling herself Carrie Jade Williams, took her pretence to extreme levels, by claiming that she was being sued by an American couple who had rented her home on Airbnb.
These paying guests, she said, had been traumatised by her illness, and were now demanding £450,000 in compensation.
Stated so baldly, it's all an obvious lie, but Cookes is a highly convincing liar. Money poured in to help her.
She has been diagnosed with a psychological condition called 'pseudologica fantastica', or pathological lying.
But that doesn't explain her obsession with targeting mothers of young, often fragile children.
Cookes was eventually arrested for benefits fraud and is serving a four-year sentence. The whole complex saga was recounted by a dozen or more of her victims, but the fraudster herself refused to comment, so we never fully understood what drove her to invent such vicious lies — just as no one really knows what goes on in Letby's head.
On at least two occasions, when she fled a neighbourhood overnight, she left sheafs of incriminating notes — similar to the confessions scrawled on Post-its that helped to convict Letby.
'I stand shoulder to shoulder with the coroner that I did not murder my daughter,' read one. Her baby, Martha, was found suffocated in her cot, hours before she was due to be handed over to social workers from an adoption agency.
A verdict of accidental death was recorded. Whether that or anything else in Cookes's life can be taken as true, we'll never know.
