The Truth About Sarah Revisited (LIVE at WBUR)

This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human. Hi, everyone. I'm investigative journalist and park enthusiast Delia D'Ambra. And every week on my podcast, Park Predators, I take you into the heart of our world's most stunning locations to uncover what sinister crimes have unfolded in these serene settings. From unsolved murders to chilling disappearances, each Tuesday we dive deep into the details of cases that will leave you knowing sometimes the most beautiful places hide the darkest secrets. Listen to Park Predators now wherever you listen to podcasts. Pushkin. Hey everybody, it's Jake. I hope you enjoyed our special presentation of Snowball. We just wrapped that up with a bonus episode. a conversation between me and Snowball's host, Ollie Wards. We talked about what it was like for him to make that show, to report on his own family's experience of getting scammed by a woman they thought they could trust. And this conversation, well, it reminded me a lot of the victims of Sarah Kavanaugh. And we talked about the parallels there. Today, I want to bring you back to Sarah's story and to the stories of the veterans and friends who got tangled up in all of this. Earlier this month, I got to sit down with Jess McHugh, my co-host for season six, The Truth About Sarah, for Deep Cover's second ever live event. We met up at WBUR City Space in Boston to talk about the value of trust, to share some never-before-heard tape, and to give an update on what's happened with Sarah since our season ended. And in the spirit of the holidays, we raised some money for Patrol Base Abate, an organization fighting back against the mental health crisis among veterans by providing retreats and fostering community, all completely free of charge. If you recall, that's the place up in Montana in the mountains where Sarah met Dex and Natalie in our first episode. If you'd like to support Patrol Base Abate, there's a link in the episode description. I really encourage you to do that. This is the charity of choice for the Halpern household this year. We just made our donation, and honestly, if you're looking to give somewhere and you're looking to support veterans, I could think of no better place. Okay, now, on to the show. Thanks all for coming out. We're really excited to have this live show with you. It's going to be fun. We are going to play some tape that didn't make the series, some stuff from the cutting room floor and some cool behind the scenes stuff. And we're also going to try to sing the praises of an awesome charity that was featured in the series, Patrol Base Abate. That's the place in Montana, the beautiful retreat where veterans can go to kind of regroup and restore themselves. And we're going to hope to raise some money for them tonight. As we get into this, we're going to start with basically how the story happened, which I can take no credit for. It came from my collaborator Jess McHugh. Jess, so tell us how this comes onto your radar. For sure. So I've been really fascinated by female scammers, women con artists for many years. And so I was, you know, working on this new book that I was trying to pitch and I was scanning around for kind of characters, stories. And so I looked to a little place called the New York Post, which has a very great scam section. I've actually found a lot of good fodder there where it's often, you know, not super in-depth, shall we say, 500-word stories about various things. But a lot of the stories that they cover, they cover in a way that I wouldn't do, but have given me ideas for much kind of broader investigations. And so I just saw the headline version, which was something like, you know, 26-year-old social worker steals a quarter of a million dollars pretending to be a wounded Marine. And I just felt like I have to know more about that. So, but how do you, how do you develop that? Where do you take that from reading that piece to, yeah, what's next? The thing that I love about journalism in general is speaking to the people involved as much and kind of as in depth as possible. So I tracked down Sarah, who was already in prison at the time. And I wrote her, you know, a handwritten snail mail letter saying, hey, this is who I am. We come from very similar backgrounds, small towns in New England. We're about the same age. I really suspect that there is much more to your story than this short piece that I read. And I'd love to hear more. And she wrote back, which I was kind of surprised by. Yeah. I remember that's around the time that we started talking. You'd actually been in correspondence with her and you were saying that maybe she'll talk. Did you feel optimistic that this would pan out, that she would go on the record with you? I didn't. I'm not really an optimist in general. And I also never want to strong arm someone into talking and have them regret speaking to me. So I always prefer to take it slow and to just say, hey, let's get to know each other. Let me tell you what it is that I'm interested in. And then you can kind of make up your mind. So it was probably a good three months of us talking on the phone, going back and forth on CoreLinks, which is the online prison service. Because, yeah, you know, there's no, we're very limited internet access in federal prisons. So she can't even just Google who I am and kind of see what I've done. So there was that kind of aspect of getting to know each other as well. Okay, so then Tom Schumann, which this is where we're going to start with our tape that hasn't been heard all of it. Tom Schumann is the person who founded P.P. Abate, the retreat in Montana, and that hosts Sarah. And we go there in the first episode. Tell us about Tom. How did you connect with him? Yeah, so we're both big fans of Tom. I think I might have actually even spoken to him before I spoke to Sarah because he had been, I think, featured in a couple news articles since PB Abate was one of the organizations that was stolen from. And he's just such a likable guy. He's a Marine. He's had this like very heroic past, but he also can quote, very deep cuts of Shakespeare from memory, which I think is very cool as a comparative literature major. So yeah, we just really hit it off and got to talking and yeah, and he founded Pibiabate in 2021. So it's a relatively recent organization. And as you said, it's this place for veterans of all stripes to kind of rest, recharge and refuel. Cool. We're actually going to let you hear Tom describe what it's like as you drive up the road heading towards a pipi abate there is something that will stir in your soul from the moment that you land at missoula and they have a big grizzly bear at the the luggage carousel to to getting to our base every time you turn a river bend you think well this is the most beautiful thing i've ever seen and then you turn the next river bend and you're like oh no this is actually the most beautiful thing i've seen and uh so you do that for an hour 45 minutes and then you then you go vertical up the side of the mountain you drive up to our base, which is a 60-acre ranch surrounded by 250,000 acres of forest service land. So there's a reason that Tom has picked out this idyllic piece of the Northwest for veterans to come together. You want to tell us about this? Yeah. So the backstory of PB Abate is also a really kind of touching story, which is that unfortunately, one of Tom's comrades was killed in action, this guy named Matthew Abate, who was a Navy Cross recipient. And so it's named in his honor. And we have a, you know, he had this idea for this place that's a little bit different than a lot of the other kind of veterans charities that are out there. So I think we have a clip of him talking about where this idea for PB Abate really started. I lost more Marines on the home front than I had lost on the battlefield. And I just thought, you know, you would do anything to keep your Marines alive in combat. what are you doing to keep them alive at home? And just for context there, he's talking about veterans that have committed suicide. And, um, you know, one of the things, so I actually interviewed him for the podcast. It was kind of a crazy setup. I showed up at the Quantico Marine Base on his instructions at 8 PM. We went out to his garage. It was like 32 degrees and we did a three-hour interview, and he's like a tough dude, so I'm trying to like, you know, not- Also be a tough dude. Yeah, right, not shiver. I'm like sitting between the weightlifting area and the gun vault. And finally, he brings out a bottle of whiskey. It was a funny setup, but the subject was quite serious. And what he said was, combat veterans, when they come back to the States, have a suicide rate that is 41% higher than the civilian population. And this was the really surprising thing he said. He said non-combat veterans have a suicide rate of 61% higher than their civilian counterparts. And this whole idea for this retreat up in the mountains in Montana was born out of this feeling of necessity that he felt that there had to be something that he was doing to try to change this. That's right. And one of the things that he had said to me early on was that there was this 30-day period where he lost three different people to suicide over the course of just 30 days. And this was really the moment where he said to himself, I got to do something about this. And a lot of the, what he said also is that a lot of the charities that are set up are dealt for like Navy SEALs or combat vets. And it actually, the doors aren't open for other veterans. That was his perception. I'll let you, him explain this tape. What I discovered is nearly every one of these organizations had a barrier to entry, had a box to check, had some kind of obstacle. and they would say, you're not damaged enough. You're not broken enough. You're not disordered enough. You're not special forces enough. You didn't leave a limb on the battlefield enough. The majority of the veteran population has not been in combat. The majority of the veteran population has not lost their limb. The majority of the veteran population was not special forces. Yeah. And he actually, he had a hard time or a challenge convincing some of the veterans that he was approaching saying like, I want to help you. And they would kind of push back. Well, is this, am I almost worthy of it? Right. People will say like, who me? Well, I was just an airman. I was just a sailor. It's like, yep, actually airman, sailor, soldier. This is actually your base. We built this place for you. Oh, well, how much is it? Free of cost. And this of course is where Sarah shows up. And this is the opening episode, you remember of the podcast. She shows up, she befriends Natalie and Dex, these two other Marines. But the place itself, I think is like what I found moving about it was this idea that when veterans came out of the service, that they were no longer a part of anything. But Tom had this idea that if you create this beautiful experience where you have physical challenges, where you kind of rekindled the camaraderie that we once felt, that you won't feel that isolation that is the slippery slope into the desperate place that, that, that proceeds, you know, thinking about taking your own life. That's right. And I think it also speaks to the value of some of the things that Sarah stole, right? Because the loss amount, the dollar amount, doesn't encapsulate this. The loss amount for PB Abate doesn't sound like that much. But when you think about it, there was some Marine or some airman who couldn't experience this kind of thing that so many people we interviewed, like Dex, like Natalie, said it really changed their life and kept them from a pretty dark and really dangerous place, to be honest. Yeah. So I would just say for those in the audience and for those listening at home, This is like an amazing place and it's worthy of our support. And these scam stories are hard sometimes, but this is like a light. So one of the weird things or unusual things about the story is that after Jess brought it to me, we kind of figured out who we were going to interview. Some folks we interviewed together, like the member, the detective from the VA, we set up all the mics, but there were times where we had to break up and one of them was Justin. I was interviewing him and one day I know Alan and you were interviewing Sam, was it? Yeah, it was this weird coincidence where two of these super important stories, Justin, you know, Sarah had stolen his information and had also was taking his money. And Sam, who was her girlfriend and physical therapist, both said to us, we are only free at this date and this time. And Jake and I said, well, actually, this is a really good use of having two people. Yeah. So we split. And the, um, so just a word about Justin, because I'm the one that interviewed him. he was the one who was basically had terminal cancer and had been giving money out of pocket to help support Sarah out of the belief that she too was terminally sick with cancer. And she had taken his medical records unbeknownst to him, which is just a double whammy. And so when Justin and I were first talking about reporting the story, we felt like we really had to reach out to Justin and at least have his blessing that he was all right with doing it. And maybe he'd be willing to talk to us And it took a while because I think the hard thing and Jess you can talk about this with scam stories is that people are reluctant to talk because of the shame that they feel of being scammed And this came up time and time again Yeah, we really did see it a lot of times where people said, well, listeners are going to think I'm stupid. They're going to judge me. And I've always felt like I've interviewed a lot of people on both sides of the sort of scam equation. And the people that I've spoken to who have been scammed are never stupid. They're never greedy. They're often people who are like the people that we spoke to for this series, salt of the earth folks who really want to help. And that unfortunately puts them in a vulnerable place, but it's not to be shamed. And I haven't heard that reaction from anyone who's listened to the series. But it's tricky, right? Because you can't tell people participate and you're going to look good, or there won't be moments where you feel, I don't know, you're not dredging stuff up. It's funny. You have to make your pitch to hope they participate. But in the end, they have to make the decision because they have to own it. And you don't want to feel responsible for coercing them into talking. So you play this. That's why I respected, honestly, that Jess spent nine months or whatever it was talking to Sarah before we interviewed her. Because by the time that that interview occurred, there had been a long runway of communication and consent. And anyway, so with Justin, he agreed to talk. he said a lot of things, but one of the things that we didn't get a chance to get into in the podcast was what his experience of being a service member, how it impacted his wife's life. And it's a little bit of a tangent, but it's powerful and I want to share it with you. So maybe we can just play that first clip from Justin. They always say that it's not just a service member that serves, it's the family. It's really true. I don't know if my wife will appreciate me saying this, but my wife got pretty sick. She had a bad reaction to some medication, was very ill. And our neighbors, our squadron mates came together and totally helped out, took care of the kids while she was in the hospital, while she was in in bed at home. And I can't say how much I appreciated that. You know, just for context here, when his wife is sick like this, Justin is out of the picture because he's serving in Iraq. He's like half a world away. And as you're going to hear in a second, he doesn't fully understand what's going on with her. But during this time, it's Christmas time. And I'll let him tell you what happens next. For Christmas, she put together, she was a teacher at the time, she and her students put together these little care packages for every single one of my sailors with their name on it and sent them sent them to us um she did all this while being sick and she didn't she didn't tell me until she was after the fact that she said look i like i almost died but she didn't want me to worry while I was deployed. So she just kind of sat on it. Wow. Yeah. The thing about this that moves me is you think about what Justin did for Sarah. You think about the way that he didn't hesitate to reach into his own pocket and pay her medical expenses. And that choice, which in and of itself was generous, didn't exist in a moment by itself. It was part of a greater connectivity to a spirit of generosity that here his wife is sick, like might even die and got all the stuff out for all the troops under him. And I just think it was one of the more, it was one of the more beautiful parts of the story that it's not a story about a scam entirely. It's also a story about like a deep felt belief in the generosity of the human spirit and the way that there's a through line of when people do things for us that we repay them. Absolutely. And I, we were kind of struck by that at so many different moments. And I think Justin is a really potent example. You can hear the emotion in his voice and it's, you know, he's sacrificing for his family, for his country, and his family is trying to kind of make that same sacrifice for him. It's just, it's really touching. We'll be right back. Hi, everyone. I'm investigative journalist and park enthusiast Delia D'Ambra. And every week on my podcast, Park Predators, I take you into the heart of our world's most stunning locations to uncover what sinister crimes have unfolded in these serene settings. From unsolved murders to chilling disappearances, each Tuesday we dive deep into the details of cases that will leave you knowing sometimes the most beautiful places hide the darkest secrets. Listen to Park Predators now wherever you listen to podcasts. Let's talk about, you did this interview and Michelle really spoke so beautifully about the kind of dynamics of betrayal and forgiveness and all that. Give us some context on who Michelle was again. Yeah, so Michelle is a fitness instructor. She's one of the kind of Rhode Island set of people that we hear from in this story. And she actually met Sarah at the gym and they became really close friends. They ended up, you know, going out to lunch almost every week. And as she says, both kind of when she testifies in court and in the series, she was Sarah's primary shoe tire. Right. Because ostensibly Sarah couldn't tie her own shoes. Yeah. That's right. So that's Michelle. And not only did she kind of sacrifice a lot for Sarah in terms of her time, in terms of her care, But also she gave her her money. I think it was like twenty five hundred dollars thinking that it was for a surgery. So Michelle, safe to say, felt this very kind of deep and intimate betrayal. And and she has some kind of interesting reflections on what she takes away from that. Well, there was no violence. People will be like, well, it wasn't a violent crime, but it was a it was a crime of I don't even know what you call it. opportunity, but it was that deception of trust. When you break down that circle of trust, society can't function. You need to be able to trust what people are saying for the most part in your day-to-day life to make those social connections and to have that or society as a whole fail. Yeah. Talk about that last bit. Cause I know you have thoughts on that. Yeah. I have a lot of thoughts because I spend, I've spent so much of the past few years thinking about scams, about cons. And I often come back to the idea that con artist comes from the term confidence. It's about a confidence trick. Do you trust me to do this? Basically, is how it all started. Do you trust me to hold onto your watch for you? And what she gets at is so true is that trust is the essence of society in ways big and small. I think people miss or really underestimate how often they're forced to trust in day-to-day life. Like something as simple as every aspect of commerce, you buy something online, you pay for it before it comes and you trust that it's going to get to you. Even you pay for a cup of coffee. It's not a standoff in which they're handing you a coffee at the instant that you give your money. And so, you know, I think there's this idea that we don't really need to trust each other or that's some sort of naivete. But in fact, if we don't function that way, literally all of our society will collapse. Yeah. And, you know, you look outside, maybe in other parts of the world, you don't. Like I can think of my in-laws who would say growing up in communist Poland, there was minimal trust in any aspect of society. But like in America, a lot of times we glide through life on this kind of current of trust that things are going to be what they should be. So that's one part of this. But the other part of this is that what do you do when someone who's not just the person that's selling you something online, you expect the goods are going to arrive, but your friend, the person who you're like kneeling down and tying their shoelaces and going on a walk in the woods with them and telling them about your kids and taking them to the ballet and someone who you know intimately, where all of that is not what it seems. And like, how does that derail and your, your kind of your sense of yourself and all that? And there's, we'll play some tape from Michelle on that. When you're hurt, everybody handles that hurt differently. So some people dig in and try to help. I cut off at the knees. I need no new friends. I actually texted all my friends. I'm like, you are who you say you are, right? I love that. Yeah. She's like joking, but you kind of, maybe she's not joking. I'm also sort of a cut him off at the knees type. So I relate to Michelle. Ooh, I better not cross you, Jess. Watch out, Jake. But the thing that I find so interesting and also so sad in what she's really, the heart of what she's saying is that I think the risk with scams is not just that you mistrust a person or that you lose faith in an institution, but you fundamentally come to fear your sense of reality. I think in these most profound scams where what she's really saying is, is what I see and experience in the world true? Are my other friends pretending to be someone entirely else? It's so scary. Right. And actually it's, do I trust myself? Right. Because on some level we think that we're good judges of character. We think I know who a friend is. I know a friend isn't. And then what happens when your digital detector that you rely on in your head is way off, fundamentally off. Like, how do you, you know, that's what you have her saying. Like, you know, are you my friend? Are you my friend? And then if you feel that like, wow, my wiring was faulty on that, how do you come to trust yourself and your own judgment again? It's like, what else is wrong? What else is real? Right. Okay. So I think there's some pieces of tape that when you hear, you know, it's like tape that feels that somehow it speaks to a culmination of the ideas that you've discussed. And you kind of put that in a bucket and you sit on that tape. And this bit from Dex falls into that. But now that I had that big preamble, tell us who Dex is. Remind us who she is in this story. And it's funny, too, that we immediately were like, this is going to be the end of the show because she was actually the first interview that we did for the series. Amy, our producer, and I went up to upstate New York to Dex's home. and Dex herself was a Marine and she was part of the military police. Also young, you know, we're all about the same age and same age as Sarah. And she had this really, really ancient dog named Luigi. So we go into her house. It was all, she's obsessed with Christmas. And so it was around Thanksgiving time, but she already had the full holiday decor. And she also let us, we had just met her. We were like, hi, I'm Jess. hi, I'm Amy. Can we unplug your fridge? Can we move your whole apartment around? Can we put your dog on my lap? And can we talk about the most painful moment in your recent life? Yeah, right. And she just was game from the start and really kind of led us into her world and into her life. And she is one of the people who met Sarah out in Montana at PB Abate. If you recall, Dex is the one who said, I'm at Arlington National Cemetery. And she had remembered that Sarah's brother supposedly been buried there. And she called up Sarah and she went to a plot and laid a wreath at this plot, which turned out to be a kind of random plot. Right. So there's a lot to this, but you asked Dex, I think in this moment, like, how do you, how do you work through a betrayal of this magnitude? And yeah, okay. Here's what, here's what she says. I think we struggle with forgiveness because you have to eat the cost. There's no closure before you get to forgive somebody. If something requires you to forgive another person, you have to fully eat the cost. Whatever wrong they did to you, you have to expect no repayment. You can't expect it to be made whole. You have to be okay with it not being whole. People wrong you, and if you're really going to forgive somebody, You have to be okay with fixing it yourself. So I've thought about that a lot. You have to eat the cost. And I'm still, I don't feel like entirely certain. I understand all the depths of what it means. But what do you take that to mean when she says you have to eat the cost? It kind of hits me like a gut punch every time I hear it. And I've heard it a lot of times. And I'm someone who has a really hard time with forgiveness. Like I'm a grudge holder. I get my Irish up, so to speak. And so when she first said it to me, I think I did say to her like, what do you mean by that? And what she said was something to the effect of like the money that you gave this person or the time or the love, you're not getting that back. And even if they wanted to give it back to you, they can't because it's gone. And so the way that I interpret that is forgiveness means not waiting around for someone to say, I'm so sorry that I did that to you that was wrong It saying you know what That was really messed up and I choosing to make whatever I going to make of it Maybe I learn a lesson from it Maybe I don but I not going to sit around and wait for someone else to make it right And there's like, there's grief in there and there's loss in there, right? Like she lost things. She lost time that she could have put into other friendships. She lost heart that she could have given to people in her family. And I think that like, it's almost like she's saying, you have to recognize that like, that is gone and you have to be at peace with that. And if you're not at peace with that, you know, there's nothing else. And I, it's funny because I feel like on its face, this story is so outlandish. It's so crazy. It's like, who does this ever happen to? But there are moments when we're talking, when you were talking to Dex or Justin, which we're going to play next, where you feel like, by God, I've been in some version of that moment, a lesser version, a less dramatic version, but who in this room has not felt betrayal by a friend or a loved one where there's that moment of like, how am I going to get through this? And I felt like there was aspects of this where I would think about Dex and think about Justin and think like, it's a pretty massive betrayal that they somehow worked through. I should find a way to try to channel some small bit of that because your hill is much smaller than theirs. Absolutely. And I think that's what, if I may say, what kind of drew both of us to this story was that there's so much heart in it and there's so much kind of pathos in it. And I think, you know, true crime when it's done poorly is so sorted and just not worthwhile. But there's an aspect often, I think, in crime stories that just brings out the best and worst of humanity. And you see just such a range of what human animals are capable of and for the better with a lot of these veterans. And that's, I think, why I love that quote and why I love talking to people like Dex and like Justin. Yeah. Let's play this last clip from Justin. It was a similar moment to the moment that Jess had with Dex where I was asking him, like, how do you emerge from this? You had your medical records stolen, you'd given out of pocket for this. Like, where do you, how do you make your way back to trying to be some version of who you used to be? I did a lot of introspection and said, well, what gives me energy? And that's what gives me energy is to help people, especially fellow veterans. And so, you know, if I lose that, you know, what do I have? It's interesting because it's like his use of the word losing it. And it makes me think of the loss. Like what is Dex? She has to eat the cost, right? But then there's a cost at not doing that. Like if she doesn't work through that, the cost is you're carrying this freaking thing around with you. And like for Justin, it's about working his way back to that moment where he can give something himself again. Because if he gives that up, then as he says like so beautifully, then who is he or what is he? Yeah, absolutely. And I think that's what everyone we interviewed and was working through and people who are victims of scams in general have to decide what, if anything, am I going to take forward from this experience into my other relationships with friends, strangers, etc. because I think you don't want to give people undue suspicion. Sometimes I, especially while we were reporting this story, I would meet strangers in non-journalistic contexts and be thinking like, hmm, did they really go to be you like they told me they did? And I was like, this person doesn't deserve that. There's no reason that they would be lying to me and I'm not experiencing the level of betrayal that these people experienced. So I think they all, which I also found interesting, were thinking of it really consciously of how do I want to show up in the world. Right, right. Okay, well, we can get more into that with questions, but we want to share one final clip, which is Jessen, my favorite clip from the cutting room floor. And as part of this, we're going to ask our amazing producer, Amy Gaines McQuaid, to come up on stage. Let's give a round of applause for Amy. She did an incredible job. Okay, so I'm a few minutes away from Mark and Kate's house. And now that I'm here, this is a part of Vermont that is referred to as the Northeast Kingdom. It's pretty remote. Whoa! Whoa! Okay, that's Amy's car going... That's a live car crash you just heard. that's amy's car going off the road into the snow in on a vermont road so and this is really funny for anyone old npr reporters like there's this thing we always say like and here we are in the north she's doing exactly what the good audio journal history of this region there's so many reasons i love this clip but one of them amy is like it is such the metaphor for you in the crisis because if it had been my car going off the road i would have been dropping the f-bomb as my sons who are in the front row can attest to. And you're like, oh dear. And you are just always so calm under pressure. I try, you know. You can see the snow caked in your fender. But with all seriousness, we are like so fortunate. Amy is that rare person who just brings such a level of passion and integrity to this show. And it would not exist. And I would not do it if you weren't doing it with us. So just huge thank you. Thank you, Jake. Yeah. And just to give a little context for this clip, because I live in Paris. And so I came back and reported a lot of this on the ground with Jake. But then there were a lot of things that we did remotely. And so Amy volunteered, should I say? Sure, we can say volunteered. to drive from Boston all the way up to a very northernmost part of Vermont in the winter so that I could zoom in to interview Mark and Kate Feudy, who were also gym friends of Sarah's. And this is how I almost sent Amy to an icy death. Yeah. No, it was OK. I'm here, right? The show came out. Mark and Kate's interview was great. It was great. If it had been a bad interview, I would have been really pissed. Absolutely. But no, I mean, thank you guys so much for having me up for this part of the show. And, you know, just to kind of get right into questions, we have a bunch of them. But related to Mark and Kate and Justin and Sam and Michelle, you know, why do you think all of these people talked to you? Why do you think that they were comfortable inviting you into their homes, in some cases, to talk about really painful things that happened to them? I'm curious, Jess, why you think people said yes? I think, you know, it really varied person to person. But the overarching thing that I saw time and time again was that these are the kind of people who are helpers and they really opened their arms and their homes to Sarah for many years. And I felt like we were receiving kind of an extension of that sort of generosity of spirit where people were game to talk about what was a really, really difficult experience and also let us in to their houses, which is not always easy to have a journalist in your space. And then the other aspect was that there were a couple people who the public had assumed were complicit in some way and were kind of unfortunately smeared alongside Sarah. I'm thinking of her ex-girlfriend and her ex-wife who, from what we could tell, really had no idea what was going on. But the media and the public treated them as if, of course, they knew and, of course, they were also profiting. And so I think that must have been really, really hard, especially living in these small towns. And I think they wanted to clear their names in a certain way. Yeah. What about you, Jake? Yeah. I mean, I think that I agree with everything that Jess said. I think you can hear in those moments, like when Justin is talking, the kind of tremor in his voice and you feel like this is a guy who's still working through this, who's still trying to figure out what this all means. And I think that like, that's hopefully what we're trying to do in telling a story is to pull some meaning out of it that goes a tad deeper than the 500 words that they got in the post. I think that's the hope that they have. And then it's on us to try to honor that. And it was fresh too, to your point. Like, I think she was sentenced in 2023. I started reporting this in 2024, I want to say. Yeah. Maybe less than a year later. Yeah. And that has its challenge. And the one way it makes it more powerful because it's all fresh in their memory, but it also often means people don't want to talk. Why would you want to talk? I mean, I wouldn't want to talk to me a lot of the times. Oh, yes. You know, like let me into my house and my family and all these things that happen. And I think that like, just trying to remember that, that there was like some serious trust, you know, put in you. So, yeah. Yeah. So I just want to jump into the question that I think a lot of people in this room have that we've received. What is the latest with Sarah? What has happened since the podcast has been released? Can you share a little bit of detail with us, Jess? For sure. So in a very weird coincidence, shortly after the podcast was released, Sarah was released to a halfway house. So she came out of prison. Yeah. So she was out of prison. Just like the week that we, that we, the first episode was around that same time, which was a really weird coincidence. And within a few months, though, basically what happens, it's a little bit vague from the kind of court documents that I've seen, but she was basically accused of creating a hostile environment in her halfway house. And so she was sent back to federal prison because when you're in a halfway house, it's not like parole. You don't have to commit a crime to be considered essentially in violation. And she'll be out, I think, summer of next year. Okay. Yeah. Talking about Sarah for another moment, one of the questions that we got from the audience today was, Sarah's lies were so complex and multifaceted. How do you two think she kept all that straight? So Jake, I want to throw that to you first, maybe. I don't know. Thinking about the wedding in particular. Yeah, I mean, the wedding, it was interesting. So the reason that Amy got in that car wreck was that we were kind of obsessed with the wedding because at the wedding, there were people that knew she was a veteran and people that knew she wasn't a veteran. And they were hanging out and having drinks and dancing at a summer wedding. And it seemed mind-blowing to me, at least at first, that a lie could survive such a delicate moment in time. But lies are curiously stubborn and willful things and they can survive. and I think that sometimes we believe what we want to believe and even if we have information to the contrary and get dissonance about what we believe if we really want to believe it we find ways to uh to ignore it and I I am thinking of half a dozen times that that's happened to me and so I don't think that that she was some kind of mastermind who kept every single one of these half-truths straight, I think it speaks to human nature that we're all more easily deceived and more willingly deceived sometimes than we would care to admit. I also think it's that default to truth thing where we assume that other humans are telling us the truth. And it would have been so illogical to assume that someone who had never served had invented this vast kind of labyrinth of lies about her service record and about having cancer. It just is, would be so illogical to kind of figure that out. And then I think there were some practical things too. Like Michelle told me, you know, she had told a lot of people that she had a brain injury. And so if she would say, oh, I thought you were in Afghanistan at that time, you were actually in graduate school. She would chalk it up to the brain injury. Yeah. And would you really push back against someone that you thought had traumatic brain injury and said, you said two different things on two different occasions. Well, like, no kidding. About your traumatic service history. Yeah. Jess, one question I have for you. I mean, I know you to be this expert on con artists. Why do you think people are so wrapped by these stories? What draws us in? I think about that a lot. I think there are a lot of reasons. I think in general, there are just fewer women criminals. So anything that is an anomaly is, I think, interesting to people. But I also think Sarah's not a good example of this. I think there are other scammers that are more glamorous. Like I'm thinking of Anna Delvey, who was, you know, stealing from Manhattan's elite. I think there is this sort of urge, especially as a woman, you know, who may not be working a great job or who may not have the life that they wanted to have, seeing someone steal and get away with it. There's this sort of, you know, kind of frisson of something fun. another question for you jake yeah so you've hosted what now six seasons of deep cover season seven coming next year uh compared to the other seasons of deep cover was there anything uniquely challenging about this one yeah this reminded me of season three a little bit in that um there was someone at the center of it telling half truths and you were left to think about how you felt It like we said in the sixth episode, like I feel for Sarah, I feel pathos for it. Jess and I both did. Like it's hard to know because you have to take everything you hear she says with a grain of salt, but I think she went through some hard stuff. So how do you balance that against the kind of the pain that the other people felt in the story. And I think that, especially because, and Jess, we've talked about this, con artists prey on pathos. Like they prey on, I'm in trouble, help me. And that was an uncomfortable place that at least me personally, like lived in while working on this. Like who deserves my sympathy in this story? Does everyone deserve my sympathy? And to what extent does she deserve 25 and so-and-so. And that calculus of it was kind of, you know, draining to say the least. And so that felt uniquely kind of challenging about the season. Yeah, I agree. I think the interviews with Sarah were some of the most challenging of my career because they were also very long. Like we were in the prison with her, just me, Jake, and her for hours. Like I think the first day was four hours and you do feel a lot of different emotions. As Jake said, there were moments we felt for her. There were moments where she felt really cold. There were moments where I couldn't tell what was true and what wasn't true. And I remember we got out of there and I think we went and ate like Pepe's pizza afterward. That's right. Not the New Haven branch, but we need to. Just kind of staring at each other like what just happened. More from our conversation in just a moment. Hi, everyone. I'm investigative journalist and park enthusiast Delia D'Ambra. And every week on my podcast, Park Predators, I take you into the heart of our world's most stunning locations to uncover what sinister crimes have unfolded in these serene settings. From unsolved murders to chilling disappearances, each Tuesday we dive deep into the details of cases that will leave you knowing sometimes the most beautiful places hide the darkest secrets. Listen to Park Predators now wherever you listen to podcasts. What did your collaboration look like day to day when building a season like this? How did you resolve disagreements about storytelling choices? We're really pulling back. So really, how did you work together? What were the kind of pros and cons of the collaboration? Yeah, it's funny. I would say this. This is all, this entire story, this season, everything, it's all about trust and distrust. And what I will just say is the one thing that I knew for certain I trusted was Jess. And so I think that part of trusting someone means that if there is disagreement and there needs to be disagreement, that you say, okay, let me think about this. Let me hit pause. And I think that one of the hardest things about being a storyteller sometimes is when you feel you're in it alone. And so there were definitely a bunch of times where I was like, this is my read on this. What do you think? And honestly, it made the whole thing doable to have another person to bounce it off. Yeah. So I would say, yeah, that underlying trust that I had for her judgment was really what kind of got us through this from my perspective. Thanks, Jake. I felt the same. Honestly, from the start, I really felt like this thing is going to be good because Jake Halpern is working on it. And the moments where I felt like we were struggling in some way to figure what direction to go, it was always because we felt like, how do we do justice to this story? How do we do justice to the people who have trusted us to tell it? And I think it's so, so good to have a collaborator. We're both, you know, have been longtime freelancers. I used to joke to Amy that I feel like I'm an outdoor cat. And so it was really nice to feel like having that support that you often don't have when you're working on a magazine piece or a book by yourself for years or months. There's one question from the audience that I want us to touch on. They said, I was feeling a tiny bit of empathy for Sarah until the bomb about the letters that we covered in the series. the question is, do you think she felt any remorse? And before we, and Jess, you can take first crack at this, but just for some context again, because it's been a minute, these letters that Amy is referring to are the letters submitted to the court at sentencing that were meant to elicit sympathy and mercy from the judge, saying basically like, this person has been through this, but they have these redeeming values, show mercy. I mean, just to tee this up a little bit more, we had no idea about this. And then we went to interview Sam. And I believe that's the first moment that. Yeah, that's right. That became clear. Basically, early on in the reporting, I had a great contact in the county clerk's office who said you should really request these letters before sentencing because there was no trial. And so people could send in these again, as Jake was saying, these sort of pleas for mercy. And there were two that really stuck out to me. one was written by sam who was sarah's then girlfriend and also physical therapist and another was written by sam's mother who was uh dying from cancer and from whom sarah stole a bill of a cancer bill as part of her ruse to steal money from a charity and i remember thinking like wow the just the absolute kind of magnanimity of these women to still be pleading on this woman's behalf. I just was so in awe of it. And I remember when we went to interview Sam, I asked her about it and she was like, what are you talking about? I never wrote a letter and I read it to her and she said, I didn't write that. And that letter was like part of what drew us into the story in the first place. Because I think like our wonderful editor, Karen Shikurji is always saying you need wrinkles of complexity in a story. If someone is a two dimensional character, they're not interesting. And these letters were super interesting because it was like these people were standing by her even after everything that she'd been through. And it kind of left us feeling like, wow, let's let's figure out what this is about. And then I remember you guys called and you're like, yeah, those letters. And I should say Sarah denies writing those. And Sam admitted that she had seen the letter. It was almost kind of like a group project, like you write it and I'll sign it. And so there's a mom's letter she claims she didn't know about. So it's tricky. I mean, that also was a moment for me where it did. It was hard to learn and it was hard to kind of reckon with. I still do have some empathy for Sarah, but that was not a moment where I felt very endeared to her. And I think I felt like I had a really hard time with it because it's after all of these crimes that she's committed and it feels like it's the moment for her to take some responsibility. And I think what was tricky and also interesting about her as a source was there were so many moments where she really did seem to take responsibility. But then in the next sentence, there was a big but or a I don't remember doing that. So she's very, very tricky to pin down. Do you feel like you got genuine remorse from her? I mean, you both sat down with her in prison. Did you feel like there were moments in those two days where you felt genuine remorse? I don't know. I don't know. Do you? Do you feel you can say? I feel like there were moments there were a lot of moments that I think were not real remorse uh but it's so hard to say and I think that's why part of why the series has resonated with so many people is that she is still really really hard to figure out it doesn't really I don't feel like we totally got to the bottom of her yeah the thing that I say too is that, you know, we all to much lesser extents have different versions of ourselves. So the idea of that kind of deception doesn't strike me as wholly foreign. It's just was taken to an extreme that that's kind of unfathomable, but the impulse feels actually very deeply human that we have these different aspects of ourselves that we lean into. I remember one day, my wife is a triathlete and I wore her Ironman hat because it was like lying around the house. And I went to the gym and I was like getting the looks because I was wearing the Ironman hat. And I was like, I could explain it to everyone in the gym right now that it's my wife's hat or I could just like let this go on a little longer, you know, and I just felt like that's this space. Now, eventually I'm like, I got a wife. She's the Ironman. I can't swim, like, you know, not really. But I think that this idea, there's aspects of this that I actually do feel like I could see how you could start down this path. It's just that there were no breaks and it just accelerated in this kind of hyperbolic way. Okay. So you heard it here. He's not an Ironman. We're correcting the record right now. That's it. So we're going to wrap up a little bit. I have one last question for each of you. For Jess, what have you been up to? What's next for you? So I'm really excited that my book is going to be published with Simon & Schuster. And it's a book about female scammers, women con artists of all stripes. So there'll be some more material on Sarah. The book is called Beg, Borrow, Scam. And it will be coming out in fall 2027. So put it on your calendars. Congratulations. A little ways away. Thank you. Very much looking forward to reading even more of your great reporting. Jake? Yes. um I'm for you yes I'm busy working on the next season of deep cover and um actually I was in Dallas reporting in November and I just got back from a week of reporting in the Ozarks um I have a little time I can't tell you much about it but I will I will tell you I know you've Amy's here but I'm gonna tell you this awesome story that my family doesn't even know yet which is that all these doc we found this treasure trove of documents and audio and the person that found them was like, I'm going to mail them to you. And this is just utter stupidity. I should have on the moment said like, no, no, no, no. I got you a UPS or a FedEx number. But I was like, okay, mail them to my Yale address. Cause figuring like the Yale English department and the mail service somehow between them and the office, it like didn't show up. And I called and I called Yale central office and I call, no one has seen this thing. It's not the university's fault, as it turns out. They're like, call the post office. So I was like, yeah, right. But I was like, I know I'm going to call. And he is a veteran and he's our mailman, Mitch. So I call Mitch. I call Mitch. They all know Mitch, my family here. And Mitch is like, brother, I am on it. He goes down. He goes down to the central New Haven post office. He founds out where it's scanned in and figures out the geo tracking on it. And he's like, I'm delivering the documents to your house tomorrow afternoon. Mitchell. Incredible. Thank you, Mitch. We love you. Let's give it up for Mitch. God bless you, Mitchell. We appreciate you. Great. Well, thank you so much for being here. This was a wonderful evening. Thanks to our audience and happy holidays. Thanks for everybody. Thanks for listening, everybody. And remember, we're still raising money for Patrol Bay Sabate. So if you'd like to contribute, and we really hope you do, you can do that through the link in the episode description. This episode was hosted by Jess McHugh and me, Jake Halpern. It was produced by Amy Gaines McQuaid and Isaac Carter. Mastering by Eleanor Osborne Our executive producer is Jacob Smith Thanks to Amy McDonald, Stephen Davey, Candice Springer, Chris Barrios, Taylor Bettison, and Jeff Vichon from WBUR Cityspace for hosting Special thanks to Jane Miliotis, Amy Hagedorn, Karen Shikurji, Morgan Ratner, Eric Sandler, and Greta Cohen I'm Jake Halpern Hi, everyone. I'm investigative journalist and park enthusiast Delia D'Ambra. And every week on my podcast, Park Predators, I take you into the heart of our world's most stunning locations to uncover what sinister crimes have unfolded in these serene settings. From unsolved murders to chilling disappearances, each Tuesday we dive deep into the details of cases that will leave you knowing sometimes the most beautiful places hide the darkest secrets. Listen to Park Predators now wherever you listen to podcasts. This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.