Episode 4: The Suspect

Pushkin. Hey, this is Jake. Just a quick note. You're about to listen to episode four. But this is a six part series, so if you haven't heard the earlier episodes, I encourage you hit pause, go back and listen to them. You'll get a lot more out of the whole story. Also, you can hear more ad free episodes from this season of deep Cover before they're released to the public. By signing up for Pushkin Plus. You also get bonus episodes, full audio books, and binges from your favorite Pushkin hosts

Ideation previously on deep Cover.

Veterans look out for each other. And I'm not going to sit here and let a fellow what I thought at the time was a fellow veteran die from lack of treatment.

I was like, oh my god, you basically stole money. And I said to I, go, you're going to go to jail, Sarah, And she's like, you think.

Dave told me, Like, hey, she's fake, She's not a veteran, and I'm just in shock and trying to just like wrap my brain around it.

I don't think it's ever going to be easy to think about the people I hurt, and because these are people that even before they knew I heard them right, I was hurting them right because I was lying to them.

If there was one single person who really puts Sarah on the map in a very public way, well it'd be this woman right here.

So my name is Kate Manion, and I am a co host of a podcast at Barstool Sports called zero Blog thirty Barstool Sports where I work. We're a media company, and I say this with love. We're probably the lowest brow media company. If you're coming to us for your exact factoids and opinions on stuff, you might be wrong.

Kate is one of the very first people we reached out to when we started reporting this season. I sent her a message using my work email from the university where I teach.

I'm like, oh, a Yale email address. What could My mind was blobed, like, what could this possibly be about?

For me?

It's got to be something to do with like butts or something.

I because that's more the beat I cover Jake asking the deep question.

That's amazing, that's your beat is like the Buttex beat.

But way before she got busy on the buttocks beat. Kate had served in the military.

I was a senior in college with a one point eight GPA going into winter break. Just didn't show up for any of my finals. The school was like, you're done. You got to get out of here. And I was like, oh crap, my parents are going to be pissed and I needed a plan b. I was like a recruiter's dream. I walked into the recruiting office and I knew I wanted the hardest branch. I was like, I need the biggest kick in the ass ever walked into the Marine Corps.

Kate served about five years, including two tours in Afghanistan. After getting out, she found her way into podcasting at Barstool Sports. She hosted that show called zero Blog thirty, all about life in the military.

Basically, we go over what's happening in the military, spill the tea, a little bit about some gossip, and try to support each other.

If you've listened to her show, you've heard Kate and her co hosts trying to help other veterans. However, they can often plugging veteran charities. Kate's a big supporter of a charity called Hunter seven.

You might remember Sarah's friend Dex had actually submitted Sarah to Hunter seven to get help paying her medical bills. This Hunter seven connection, this is how Kate first learns about Sarah's story.

I am scrolling through the Hunter seven social media and I see them post about this marine veteran, Sarah Cavanaugh.

Hunter seven has something called an Immediate Needs program. It's for veterans who struggle to pay medical bills and have illnesses connected to their service. They or someone on their behalf can submit a request, and that's what Decks had done for Sarah. Submitted her application, and now Hunter seven was publicizing Sarah's tragic story online.

They were sharing her story of her diagnosis, and I remember like sobbing as I read her story. I was so blown away by it. It was like eight pages long on their Instagram story, and she gave them details like there was a five centimeter long nodule, it's in her femur, her rips, her scapulo thoracic spine and now there's lesions on her brain. Like the medical lingo that went into this was so detailed.

The post also mentioned that Sarah's CT scan showed metallic particles in her lungs, something often linked to ied blasts.

And I was like, oh my god, this cancer is related directly to her time in service, to so many things that myself and my friends were exposed to things like this, And so I guess you see yourself mirrored in somebody and you see them going through a nightmare scenario, like, holy shit, that could be me. How can I help?

Kate does everything she can to spread the word. She donates herself, but she also posts on her social media account trying to rally as many people as she can to help Sarah. And then at some point she gets a call from the woman who's the director of Hunter seven.

When she reached out to me, it was like, I have some crazy news for you.

That's when Kate learned that all of those details about Sarah's medical condition, like the five centimeter long nodule in her lungs, appeared to be made up or stolen, and that Sarah wasn't who she claimed to be.

I remember the heartbreak I felt, and I just like my heart dropped into my butt. It was like I couldn't to put it eloquently. I could not believe it, and I didn't want it to be true.

Shortly after this, Kate goes public on her podcast. Here's a clip from that episode where she's talking to her co hosts about what happened.

The feeling was so gross, Like I didn't donate a ton of money, but I donated it was like one hundred bucks. But I like my emotions, my time, like posting all this stuff. I was genuinely moved by her story.

Kate goes on like this, venting about the mess Sarah's caused. She says that this whole scandal will only scare people away from donating to veterans' charities, leaving less help for those who really need it. She told her co hosts this would just make it way harder for real women combat vets to get the respect they deserve, which really pissed Kate off.

Holy shit, this story is Yeah, I'm sure more is going to come out about it. I'm interested to see. But anyway, ncis FBI VIA like all these different organizations now are coming after her.

Kate was more right than she knew. Law enforcement officials had already started investigating Eric Kavanaugh on the down low, trying to keep it quiet, and now Kate's podcast would put pressure on investigators to go into overdrive. Over many years, Sarah had built a house of lies. The people she deceived lived in separate, shuttered rooms, hidden from one another. But now the foundation was cracking, as were the walls, and the truth was seeping in, piercing in its brightness,

We have to talk about this Instagram post for a second, the one that Hunter seven shared about Sarah Kavanaugh. This is the post that Kate saw, the one that brought her to tears. This post had all the details of Sarah's supposed injuries and a photo of her in her uniform. Well, a lot of people saw and shared this post, and as it made the rounds, people started commenting saying something

VA Police in Rhode Island, called me and said, Hey, you know, I think we might have a problem with an employee.

That's Donnelly. He's an investigator with the Department of Veterans Affairs. Basically, he's an in house detective for the VA's Office of Inspector General, looking into fraud and other sketchy business, which is why he was the one to get this call about Sarah Kavanaugh, a VIA social worker who had apparently gone rogue.

Now Donnelly is looking at more than just a scammer. He's got someone working the system from the inside, like a mole in his own ranks. So he opens an investigation and he's just a few days into it when Kate's podcast comes out on barstool.

So our concern is that we don't know the extent of it yet, like we don't know all the evidence that there is, which opens the avenue for her to potentially destroy evidence or cover tracks a little bit, or try to talk to witnesses and get them to not cooperate.

But here is the good news for Donnelly. Right from the start, he had some incriminating evidence, an important set of documents. These documents, they all came from Hunter seven, the charity. They were actually documents that Sarah herself had submitted to bolster her lies to support her false claims of being a veteran and a cancer patient. These records would help Donnelly do two really important things. First, they'd

Agencies NCIS, I think, FBI, and VA investigators all all. I sat down with them all at the same time. They were extremely sympathetic. First of all, I mean they were visibly upset, but they just kind of laid it out and they said, look, you know, like this is what we think she did.

They explained how they'd put together the pieces. One of Donnelly's colleagues had noticed something interesting about Sarah's medical records from Hunter seven.

There's this rare procedure in the medical notes. It's got a date on it. The Providence via only did that procedure to one person on that day.

And that person was Justin. When investigators compared the two sets of medical records, Sarah's and Justin's looked pretty much identical. Justin's doctor had even made a few typos, and those exact same typos were in Sarah's records. It was a cut and pace job.

What immediately was that as soon as I told her I'd cancer, even though she was telling me it was okay, in the back of her mind she was thinking, I can take advantage of this.

You might recall from our last episode, Justin had given Sarah money, supposedly so she could pay for her own cancer treatment. Sarah had taken this money under false pretenses, but as Donnelly had discovered, she'd also done something far more devious. Using her privileges as a social worker at the Providence VA, Sarah had accessed Justin's medical records. She had stolen them, doctored them, and passed them off as her own.

I just couldn't brought my head around what kind of person would do that to another person that was especially that was you knew was sick, that was getting treatment, that was you know, dying, and and you're going to take advantage of that person with no reservations whatsoever. I thought about it for a very long time after that, just like it. Just I couldn't stop thinking about how how much I was violated by that.

Justin laid out his side of the story for investigators, how he'd given Sarah thousands of dollars for her treatment. Justin was able to provide them with very specific evidence, dates, amounts, and transaction records for every electronic transfer, all of which would be helpful to Donnelley's investigation.

One of the other documents that Donnelly had gotten from Hunter seven was a set of medical bills. These bills were from Dana Farber, a cancer hospital in Boston. The bills looked real, so if they weren't Sarah's, who's were they. Donnelly and his colleagues slowly pieced together where the bills had come from, and this trail of clues would eventually lead them to a physical therapy clinic outside of Providence, and that clinic it belonged to Sam. Sam was Sarah's

And I was like, well, where do you want to have this meeting. I will not have it in my practice because I had no private room. I said, I will not have it at my home. And they what about a cafe. I said no, I was not going to cafe. I was like, everyone knows me in this town. Absolutely not. So we basically had the interview in their car.

The fence started talking about Sam's mom asked if she was in treatment for cancer.

And I said yeah, and I went into this whole story that she was going to Rhode Island wasn't getting really the care that she needed, so she went to Dana Farber.

So there's Sam in the car in the parking lot at her work, cramped between a bunch of federal agents, wondering what all this could possibly have to do with her mom. That's when investigators asked her.

Do you realize that Sarah used a bill, one of your mother's bills from Dana Farber? And I said no, I didn't realize that. I didn't know that. And I said, that's really disappointing. And that's when I got upset and I started crying.

Just a few weeks earlier, Sam had learned that Sarah had been lying to her for years about nearly everything. But this was different. These documents from Hunter seven. They would be key to Donnelly's investigation because even before he sat down with Justin and Sam, they gave him ample evidence of a crime. Those documents would allow him to do something really crucial yet a warrant search Sarah's house.

So we got the got the paperwork signed, figure out how we're going to approach the house. We all pile into our cars and we drive down a Rhode Island.

Donnelly had a couple of his own agents with him, a couple agents from the FBI.

So we get there and you know, it's snowing, and everyone like surrounds the house. Everyone's got their tactical plate carrier vests on, everyone's all dressed up for the occasion, and we form, you know, a stack of agents to go up and knock on the door. So requirement of a normal search warning is that you knock, you announce, you know, police search warrant, and then you give a reasonable amount of time for somebody inside to answer the door.

So this crowd of agents is standing there in Sarah's front yard debating whether they should break in the door, and it's snowing, freezing cold. So what does Donnelly do. Turns out He's got Sarah's cell phone number. He's never actually spoken to her, but he figures, hey, maybe before I bust this door down, I should, you know, give her a ring. Very considerate. You never see that in the police movies, right, detective gives suspect a courtesy call,

And I said like, hey, we are at your house. It's the police. Are you in the house. We need you to come to the door, and she says no, I went out.

Sarah had slipped out of the house without anyone knowing. Donallly is not quite sure how.

Oh she ducked surrounds And it wasn't that she was trying to avoid surveillance. I think she was trying to avoid the news, but it had the side effect of avoiding the surveillance. I said, all right, you said you're fifteen minutes away. You've got exactly fifteen minutes to come back, and if you don't come back, then at that point we're going to have to force away into your house.

While they're all waiting on Sarah, an agent notices there's a back window that's unlocked, so he shimmeys through it and opens the front door for the rest of the agents. By the time Sarah pulled up, the search was in full swing.

The whole street was blocked off. There was a dozen cars cars, there's agents everywhere, evidence bags, evidence tapes.

And Donnelly laid eyes on Sarah for the first time.

So she pulled up. Maybe bewildered is the word I would use, just because there's all these people milling about.

The FBI.

People are wearing their play carriers that say FBI and big letters on them.

So Donnalie tells her, Look, you can't be in the house while we search. You can go wait at a friend's or get a coffee at Duncan, but you can't go in the house. Sarah decides to wait outside all right.

Thursday, February third, three, twenty three pm.

Video walkthrough as we leave the residence. We got footage of the search through a Freedom of Information Act request.

This video was taken by an officer as he walked through the house. They were looking for Sarah's work phone and any computers, checks from charities that uniform that she'd been photographed in, any evidence that would corroborate their case. Meanwhile, Sarah was watching agents come in and out of the house. Sarah didn't say much. She just looked dazed.

In Donaldi's words, maybe like if you've ever seen someone immediately like after a car accident, where they're still trying to process exactly what just happened kind of thing. Because it was a big turnout.

According to Sarah, by the time the FEDS searched her house, she was already in rough shape, mentally exhausted by the stress of all her lies.

I lost a ton of weight. I began to drink extremely heavily, and I kind of lost interest in most other things. I began to just kind of go through the motions of these lies. Okay, just keep going. Something's going to happen. It will end.

For Sarah. The day of the search was kind of surreal.

When they came to search my house. I had been like taking some pills to sleep or calm down because I would get up there in the night and I would walk around the house and check the windows. And this wasn't because I thought they were coming to my house or anything. I had no idea about the investigation, but it was just this sense of like knowing I was lying in the paranoia that comes from that.

Standing in the snow covered driveway, Donnelly tried to talk to Sarah.

I had just said, Hey, why are we here today, And she had started to tell me about who she borrowed the Marine Corps uniform from that she had worn. And then I think at that point it really sank in what was happening, because there's agents coming in and out of the house. And then she said she stopped her story about the uniform and she just said, I'm not I'm not going to talk to you.

I was so afraid, right, I was so so afraid. Not because I thought it was illegal, not because I'm thinking I'm going to go to prison, but because I'm like, they are not going to be my friends anymore. I'm not going to have these people in my life.

The team of agents went through the house methodically placing items in evidence bags.

There were VFW like donation bins in the basement, you know, like the five gallon buckets that they put out like when you're going to the grocery store or something. There was no money in them.

They also found her VFW membership card and VFW polo's mail from the Wounded Warrior Project. And inside a closet in her home office, Donnelly found something else, something very curious, a green colored notebook.

I used to work in counterintelligence investigations, and she had what, in my opinion, I would call a backstoped identity expand what you mean by that, anyone who was ever in the military or worked for the government knows the green record book. It's a notebook, it's ruled paper. Inside it's like this nineteen fifties seafoam green. The military has probably used them since World War Two. She had one of those, and she wrote a very detailed fake war diary.

That's right. He'd found what looked like a war diary. Sarah, by the way, doesn't remember this at all, but Donnelly told us it included detailed entries from Afghanistan.

And Donnelly found other clues for the character. Sarah had been playing other props for her double life. Her backstopped identity Sarah the Marine Sarah the Hero like a handmade vase with the Marine Corps insignia. He later discovered Sarah had made it as part of an art therapy trip for veterans. As Sarah waited, her mind went to dork places.

I had to sit outside on the fender of the car in the garage, and there were two officers standing on either side of me, and they were I think, playing good cops, so to speak, right, And there was this man and he was like an it guy, and he was thin, he had glasses, kind of like a boyish haircut, and he wasn't like as intense as the other agents, and he had a gun on his holster and I was like, I I could probably get to him fast enough that the other man on the other

Donnelly remembers this moment really clearly too.

She had said what would happen to me if I try to take your gun from you right now? To the agents that were kind of standing there like watching her, and they're like, wow, well, like why would you do that? And so at that point we were concerned, so we had the local police respond out and said, look, she's saying things that I think could be construed as self harm.

Sarah was taken to a local hospital for a psychiatric evaluation. Meanwhile, Donnelly dove into the mountain of evidence. The scope of Sarah Kavanaugh's fraud was beyond what he could have imagined. Over six years, Sarah defrauded ten different veterans' charities ten She also stole federal benefits, accepted donations from GoFundMe, and exploited five individuals, including Justin her Jim Buddy, Michelle, Sam,

Later that same day, after Sarah's psychiatric evaluation, she was cleared and released. Her wife, Nicole, was waiting for her at the hospital and drove her home. It's easy to forget that Sarah had a wife. This story is so twisted and complicated, but she did. They shared a home and a life together and her wife. She thought she knew who Sarah was until that day when the police searched their house for Nicole. That was the moment of truth.

Picked up the phone just to check my messages and that she said, you need to come home. The FBI is here. That's when I knew it was that fast. I had nothing until I had that. When you lived two separate lives for so long. It feels normal, right. I had to be someone else in front of others people when I was young and when I was a child, and that was normal.

Deep Cover The Truth About Sarah was produced by Amy Gaines McQuaid and Tally Emlin. Additional production support by Sonya Gerwood.

Our show is edited by Karen Chakerjee. Our executive producer is Jacob Smith, mastering by Jake Gorsky.

Original scoring in our theme were composed by Luis Gara. Our show art was designed by Sean Carney, fact checking by Anica Robbins.

Special thanks to Sarah Nix, Busy Carter, Daphne Chen, Jake Flanagan and Greta Cone. Additional thanks to Vicky Merrick.

I'm Jess McHugh, I'm Jake Halprin. Hey it's Jake, and look, I got a little favor to ask. If you like the show, please just take one minute and review us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Honestly, it really helps new listeners find the show, which in turn helps us continue making these stories for you. Thanks a lot