{"id":96539,"date":"2025-05-12T23:16:08","date_gmt":"2025-05-12T23:16:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/96539\/"},"modified":"2025-05-12T23:16:08","modified_gmt":"2025-05-12T23:16:08","slug":"incredible-story-of-fraudster-samantha-cookes-skilfully-told-in-excellent-documentary-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/96539\/","title":{"rendered":"Incredible story of fraudster Samantha Cookes skilfully told in excellent documentary \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

Gaslighting, fake illnesses, real pregnancies \u2013 and a trail of deception leading from Yorkshire to Kenmare<\/a>. The first episode of the excellent two-part documentary Bad Nanny (RT\u00c9 One, Monday) takes off like a true crime podcast on rocket boots as it tells the incredible story of Carrie Jade Williams, aka Samantha Cookes<\/a> \u2013 a serial fraudster who posed as a terminally ill author when she moved to Kenmare, Co Kerry.<\/p>\n

Seemingly sweet and harmless, the chirpy Englishwoman was in her element in small-town Ireland. \u201cIf I met her today, I\u2019d still like her. She has that personality,\u201d says one former acquaintance. \u201cShe\u2019s very likable. She\u2019s a people person. You would go, \u2018she\u2019s lovely\u2019.\u201d Those qualities allowed her to deceive her neighbours, her landlord \u2013 even RT\u00c9\u2019s Documentary On One, which greenlit a radio doc <\/a>about her trip to Los Angeles for experimental surgery for her terminal Huntington\u2019s disease, her regular updates about her health having made her a minor star on TikTok. <\/p>\n

But Carrie Jade Williams was not terminally ill \u2013 and her backstory was a tissue of fraud<\/a> extended to university and earlier. In Shrewsbury in England, an old college friend recalled how bubbly and friendly his pal \u201cSam\u201d had been. Until, that is, he asked for his money back after she claimed to have booked tickets for a weekend away. <\/p>\n

Confronted by her friend, the mask fell away. \u201cShe went from the bubbly girl to being really horrible.\u201d When a tutor advised the friend to dig deeper, he discovered she had been convicted of defrauding a couple by posing as their surrogate parent. <\/p>\n

One twist follows another. Cookes\u2019s first child had been removed from her by social services in the UK and entrusted to the care of the father. Then she became pregnant again. She turned up pregnant in Edenderry, Co Offaly, where she ran a camp for kids and hoodwinked locals into paying for a non-existent weekend in Disneyland.<\/p>\n

[\u00a0Serial fraudster Samantha Cookes\u2019s funding applications considered by Arts Council on \u2018artistic merit\u2019Opens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

However, the most disturbing aspect of the documentary concerns her work as a nanny in Tullamore, Co Offaly, where she bonded with Layla and her daughter, Charlie. \u201cI was 10 turning 11,\u201d says Charlie. \u201cShe was genuinely a big ball of fun, everything up my alley.\u201d Once again, lie followed lie, and after \u201cLucy\u201d, as the family knew her, faked a fainting fit in Tesco in Maynooth, Co Kildare, Layla\u2019s mother went through the nanny\u2019s belongings.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere was a little index card notebook and I just started to read,\u201d Layla recalls. I just went, \u2018Who have we had looking after our children?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

This horribly gripping case has also been the subject of an RT\u00c9 podcast. But the unsettling story translates readily to the screen and Bad Nanny skilfully weaves together Cookes\u2019s many deceptions to tell the hard-to-believe tale of a woman whose forked tongue allows her to move freely around Ireland and Britain and whose ultimate superpower was her ability to be nice to strangers. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Gaslighting, fake illnesses, real pregnancies \u2013 and a trail of deception leading from Yorkshire to Kenmare. The first…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":96540,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3935],"tags":[77,45126,45125,3943,16788,31952,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-96539","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-kenmare","10":"tag-kerry","11":"tag-movies","12":"tag-offaly","13":"tag-rte","14":"tag-uk","15":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114497413695923239","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96539","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=96539"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96539\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/96540"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=96539"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=96539"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=96539"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}