How fraudster spent 12 years conning the vulnerable & faked terminal illness to scam £50k before lies caught up with her
A MOTHER'S instinct is a powerful thing, and observing occupational therapist Lucy Fitzwilliams interact with her five-year-old son, Hillery Geelon had a feeling all was not as it seemed.
“Rhys has several conditions, including ASD [autism spectrum disorder] and isn’t capable of waiting.
"Lucy turned up with a box of things, but made him wait ages before she took out some colouring pens,” remembers Hillery, 48.
“Rhys has no pincher grip, so the act of holding pens hurts him, which she seemed oblivious to. He tried to do it to impress her, but he was in pain and flung them around.
"He then went outside to calm down by playing on his scooter and she let him scoot off on his own, before chasing after him. It was so strange, I knew something wasn’t right.”
Hillery was spot on. Lucy was, in fact, serial fraudster Samantha Cookes, who is the subject of a hugely successful podcast called The Real Carrie Jade.
Her aliases have included Lucy Fitzwilliams, Carrie Jade Williams, Jade Williams, Jade O’Sullivan, Sadie Harris, Lucy Hart, Lucy Fitzpatrick and Rebecca Fitzgerald.
In addition to her roll call of fake names, Cookes also purported to be everything from the daughter of a millionaire to a domestic violence campaigner.
After 12 years of conning vulnerable people across the UK and Ireland, Cookes’ luck ran out in July last year, when she was arrested at a Post Office in Tralee, County Kerry, while trying to claim disability benefits.
Eight years after Hillery’s encounter with her, Cookes has now been jailed for three years, after pleading guilty to stealing £50,000 in disability allowance.
Born in Gloucestershire in 1988 to an ordinary family, Cookes moved to Telford as a child with her mother and stepfather after her parents divorced.
There, she attended a run-of-the-mill secondary school – not a prestigious Steiner School, as she would later claim – where she soon gained a reputation for telling fantastical stories.
Even her own mum, who has never been identified in the press, would allegedly warn boyfriends that her daughter was a notorious liar.
In 2008, as a first-year student studying occupational therapy at York University, she became pregnant and dropped out of her course.
Her baby daughter, Martha, tragically died at four months old of what Cookes said was sudden infant death syndrome.
However, an inquest in 2009 concluded that Martha had died from accidental “occlusion of her airways”, where “a pillow came to be positioned over her face while she slept alongside her mother.”
‘She said she was an expert in child therapy and was supporting abused women by opening a refuge’
The identity of Martha’s father has not been made public, but he told the podcast that Cookes lied on a chronic scale, to the extent that when she told him she was pregnant, he didn’t believe her.
Three years after Martha’s death, Cookes was found guilty of fraud by false representation.
She’d offered surrogacy services to a couple in North Yorkshire, duping them out of £1,200, before they went to police.
She was spared jail after the court heard she had undiagnosed psychiatric problems relating to her baby’s death.
She went on to have two more children in 2012 and 2014, but both were taken into care when authorities decided she posed a risk to her children’s development.
In 2014, after moving to Ireland, Cookes was convicted of deception for running up a £590 debt living in a hotel in Tullamore, County Offaly, and was given a suspended sentence.
Two years later, she popped up in Dublin posing as occupational therapist Lucy Fitzwilliams. There, she met Hillery through mutual friend Lorraine Bolger.
“I befriended Lucy when she came into my salon,” says hairdresser Lorraine, 48, from Dublin.
“She was a lovely person. She told me she was an expert in child therapy and was providing support for abused women by opening a refuge.”
Lucy’s session with Hillery’s son Rhys – for which she paid £85 – left the mum feeling unsettled about the supposed occupational therapist’s credentials, but she told herself she must be mistaken.
Not long after, Hillery, Lorraine and a few other friends gave Lucy a total of £1,250 for a trip to Lapland she said she was organising.
She’d told us her mum was a millionaire, yet all her clothes were from Primark, which seemed strange
Just a few months later, however, in July 2016, Hillery and Lorraine began to have serious doubts about Lucy.
“She’d told us her mum was a millionaire, that she was engaged to someone wealthy and lived in a house on one of the most expensive streets in the area, yet all her clothes were from Primark, which seemed strange,” says Lorraine.
“One day, she phoned me from hospital saying she’d collapsed and asked if I could collect her,” remembers Hillery.
“But when I did, the receptionist said there was nobody by her name on the ward, and insisted the woman in Lucy’s cubicle was called Samantha. Lucy seemed panicked and insisted we leave.
“I brought her to my home to recuperate for a while, and I started to sense there were cracks in her story – the names mix-up, the clothes. . . She seemed paranoid, like she was always looking out for someone or was worried someone was looking for her.”
When Lucy suddenly vanished a month later – along with their money – Hillery and Lorraine realised their suspicions had been justified.
Lorraine turned into a private detective and established the house Lucy claimed to own wasn’t hers, and the neighbours had never heard of her.
“I visited a woman who I knew Lucy had previously lodged with, and she told me the police had once visited the house when Lucy was out, but she didn’t know why,” explains Lorraine.
At that address, Lorraine discovered bags left behind with 14 burner phones, notebooks and a credit card from an English bank with the name Samantha Cookes on it – and approached the police with her concerns.
“We’d taken her at face value, but she’d disappeared with our money for a trip to Lapland that was never going to happen. We felt devastated,” she says.
Cookes couldn’t stay out of trouble for long, though, and in 2017 she was arrested in Kinsale, County Cork, after stealing a mobile phone from a family she was working for as an au pair, under the name of Rebecca Fitzgerald.
She was deemed medically unfit to be interviewed by police and voluntarily entered psychiatric treatment, before moving to a shelter for homeless women.
In 2019, Cookes was convicted in court of defrauding a father of £700 by posing as a psychiatrist and compiling a fake report on his daughter.
The theft of the money for the Lapland trip from 2016 was also taken into account when she was given a 14-week suspended sentence.
Then, in 2020, her story took a new turn when she won the Financial Times Bodley Head Essay Prize – a writing competition to discover new talent.
She had entered using one of her false identities – Carrie Jade Williams – with a moving essay about living with incurable Huntington’s disease.
She claimed she was diagnosed aged 31, and that she’d been born to an Irish mum in a mother and baby home, before being adopted by an English woman who raised her in the UK.
The essay was widely read and lauded, and Cookes went on to appear at literary festivals, giving interviews under her latest assumed identity.
‘I wouldn’t believe a word that comes out of her mouth’
The following year, she emailed RTÉ’s Documentary On One podcast team – who’d later make The Real Carrie Jade – alleging that, in addition to Huntington’s disease, she’d also lost a baby who died after a reaction to vaccinations.
Ronan Kelly, one of the podcast’s producers, travelled to Kerry to interview Carrie.
He says: “My recollection was that her story was utterly heartbreaking and compelling. I remember getting really upset as she told it.
“But now, after researching her crimes and speaking to people she’s conned, I wouldn’t believe a word that comes out of her mouth. I won’t speculate why she does it, but there must be mental illness there.”
Perhaps getting cocky with her lies, Cookes went viral in 2022, when she claimed to her 18,000 TikTok followers she was being sued for £450,000 by Airbnb guests who’d stayed in her home in Kerry.
But this would prove disastrous for her.
A thread started on Reddit claiming Carrie Jade Williams was a fake persona and the real person in the videos was called Samantha Cookes, while a link was posted from a newspaper article in 2011 about her fraud conviction for posing as a surrogate.
Her lies catching up with her, she shut down all her social media – but not before stating Samantha was her sister and she, Carrie Jade, was “an entirely separate individual whose mental health past has been dragged into my life as an attempt to discredit my advocacy work".
At this point, Ronan realised he too had been scammed by Cookes emailing his team as Carrie.
“I couldn’t believe I’d taken her at face value and had been conned, like everyone else. It was then that we decided to start looking into her for a podcast,” he says.
Having spent hundreds of hours researching and speaking to vulnerable people she conned, Ronan says Lorraine wasn’t the only person to find Cookes’ burner phones.
“She defrauded landlords, including stealing furniture from one. Properties she stayed at in Dublin and Westport had several burner phones in them, and on the back of each was the name of the character she was pretending to be. Her creativity was limitless – she’d have been an amazing soap storyline creator,” he says.
“One of her aliases was Sadie Harris, but that’s a character from Grey’s Anatomy. Sadie’s character is flaky – like Samantha.”
Following her arrest in July, Cookes was imprisoned, before appearing at Tralee Circuit Court on February 11 this year, where she pleaded guilty to 18 charges of theft and deception, and stealing almost £50,000 from the state after duping a GP into believing she had been diagnosed with incurable Huntington’s disease.
Earlier this month, she was sentenced to three years behind bars for her crimes.
Commentating on the court case, Ronan says: “I’m delighted for the victims. They pursued Samantha and worked tirelessly to stop her cruel behaviour. And the Irish police were dogged in their efforts.”
Hillery adds: “In court, she didn’t look at us [her victims] – she put her head down. She’s got absolutely no remorse. Once she’s released, she’ll start again. I don’t think there’ll ever be an end to it.
"I’m expecting that even when I’m 80 years old, somebody will ring me up and say: ‘I think I know the same lady, she’s just scammed me.’ She’s compulsive and I don’t think she’ll ever stop.”
For both Hillery and Lorraine, their brush with a real-life Walter Mitty has left an impression, for all the wrong reasons. But one thing Cookes told them was true.
“She used to say she was going to be famous,” says Lorraine. “And now she is.”
- The Real Carrie Jade is available on all podcast providers.