Episode 5: The Wife

Pushkin. Hey, this is Jake. You're about to listen to episode five. And just a reminder, this is a six part series, so if you haven't heard all the previous episodes, I encourage you to go back and do that now before you listen to this. You'll get a lot more out of the whole series. Also, just so you know, you can hear more ad free episodes from this season of Deep Cover before they're released to the public. By

Previously on Deep Cover.

The chief of VA Police called me and said, hey, you know, I think we might have a problem with an employee.

What immediately occurred to me was that as soon as I told her I 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.

Do you realize that Sarah used to bill, one of your mother's bills from Dana Farber.

And I said, no, I didn't realize that.

I didn't know that.

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.

One detail that's often overlooked in this story, Sarah Cavanaugh was married. She had a wife, a woman named Nicole.

For us, Nicole was kind of the black box in this story, the person who might hold the key to understanding Sarah, because no matter who Sarah pretended to be in public, she was coming home to Nicole most nights, to the cozy little house they shared in East Granwitch Trode Island. It's a charming cape with a steep gabled roof and dormer windows and the flowering dogwood in the front yard.

And we wondered what went on in that home, what did Nicole know, when did she know it? And did she see a side of Sarah that the rest of the world didn't.

Nicole is an intensely private person. She never talked to the press or investigators, never made a statement, just kept quiet. We wrote her letter, and to our surprise, she called us and invited us to her house for an interview.

When we met, I did something I don't usually do. I just asked her, why did you agree to talk to us?

Yeah, I asked myself that question several times before I called you. I know a lot of people are curious, and I don't have an obligation to share, but I do think that it means something to me that the story is told in whole, in full, and not part way.

We're going to take a deep dive into Sarah and Nichole's house, the place where their lives converged, and the pats.

They both took to get there.

Sarah's path was fraught, complicated, and full of hidden struggles, struggles that would re emerge and eventually lead to the moment when Federal AI agents came knocking.

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 that it was that fast. I had nothing until I had that.

I'm Jake Halpern and I'm Jess mchughe and this is Deep Cover Season six, The Truth About Sarah, Episode five, The Wife.

Our interview with Nicole came with a disclaimer.

There's a lot of things that I, frankly, I just don't know if what I was told or what I know is even true. So I can definitely speak to my perspective on things of what I understood to be true at the time that I was living in but I have found out along the way that there are things that I thought were true that just aren't.

It struck me that she was basically questioning her own perception of reality, and this we came to learn is where Nicole's mind still is still spinning, still grasping for traction on the solid truth we told her.

We get it.

Let's start from the beginning.

Nicole grew up in New Mexico, but moved to New England in her late twenties. She's outdoors, just like Sarah, so when the two of them connected online, one of their first dates was a hike. They met at Lincoln Woods, a park with rugged hills, tree line trails and a tranquil pond.

I just remember it being falling, you know, the leaves here in the fall are gorgeous, and it was nice out that day, And she and I always just had really good conversation and connection. It was easy. She's very easy to talk to, you know, just made you feel like you're the only person there.

Nicole says, Sarah was just very in tune. Those were her words. Sarah presented herself to Nicole as a native New Englander with a brother and two divorced parents. All true. By the way. She said she worked as a mental health professional, also true.

So I understood that she was a basically a social worker at the VA.

Got it.

And at that point did she tell you that she was a veteran or No?

No, she never told me she was a veteran. Not ever.

Sarah and Nicole became close quickly, and after about a year or so, they bought a home together, that cozy little house I told you about in East Greenwich. Nicole says that moving in was a big deal and that Sarah had certain expectations.

One thing that she was big on was she didn't want to be roommates forever, which can happen to people, especially same sex couples. And she was like very adamant that she didn't want that kind of relationship. She wanted a committed love relationship, not roommate relationship.

So on their first night in their new home, Nicole had a little surprise waiting for Sarah.

I had her, like take a bath, and then I put out a bunch of candles leading to the back deck and roses. So when she got out of the bath, I let her downstairs. So she was all relaxed and comfy and proposed at the house on the first day that we moved in. So we didn't spend any night in that house that we weren't engaged.

A year later, they got married in Vermont. You may recall Sarah's Jim Buddies helped arrange the wedding. Red barn birch, pergola flowers and maple syrup buckets, the whole Eddie Bauer vibe.

The pictures from that day are radiant. Nicole in her crisp white dress, looks lovingly at Sarah and her soft ivory gown. In one shot, they wave at the camera playfully. In another, they sway together on the dance floor, arms around each other, with the warmth of summer light casting soft shadows. Sarah and Nicole were now a married couple, but according to Nicole, they continued to live independent lives.

Nicole told us that she and Sarah had been planning to have kids, but then about two years after their wedding, things took a turn. Sarah came home and told Nicole she had brain cancer, which is horrible, right, catastrophic, but initially it wasn't. Actually the doctor said it was treatable. Nicole heard all of this, by the way, secondhand from Sarah. She didn't attend any of the oncology appointments since Sarah had been diagnosed during COVID, when patients were generally going

We were gonna like do in vitro fertilization and I was going to carry. I had been to the doctor several times. I've been through some procedures. They're checking out, you know, my my system here to make sure that we were good to go. So I had a doctor's appointment that I was going to go to, which would have been the final like sign off before the actual event.

Soon after this, Sarah tells Nicole that the cancer has gotten much worse, possibly terminal, which changed everything.

It flips into you know, you take care of your significant other. Like now, I'm just like that's on pause and okay, we can pick that up later. What's going on with you?

Their plans to expand their family were put on whole. Nicole pursued a promotion at work, thinking the extra money would help as the medical bills piled up. Meanwhile, Sarah arranged for in home support from a specialist trained to work with people with traumatic brain injuries, someone who came multiple times a week. What Nicole didn't know was that

But even while taking.

This help, she still kept her wife Nicole at a distance.

She didn't involve me, Like, she wouldn't involve me, she wouldn't lean on me. She was like, I do this on my own. I don't want you to worry about it. Anytime I tried to talk with her about it, She's just like, I can't, I don't want to talk about it. So it was very It was something that separated us. She didn't lean in to me. She leaned away.

When it came time for Sarah's doctor's appointments. Even after COVID restrictions were lifted, Sarah was explicit she didn't want Nicole to be there. Nicole says she was hurt, but she didn't really feel like she had the right to express her frustration.

Are you going to blame the spouse with cancer? Like, what do you you know is she's having a hard time coping with it and is choosing to withdraw, Then you know that's it's kind I chopped it up to that, like, when she's ready for me to support her, she'll allow me to support her, and I'm just going to keep being here until she's ready. That's how I rationalized it.

What Nicole didn't know at the time was that, of course, Sarah was living a double life. When she traveled for veteran events. She was sometimes attending all expense paid retreats posing as a war hero. When she was out with her veteran buddies. She was playing the role of the VFW commander, and when she went away on her own sometimes she was actually with Sam, the physical therapist whom she'd become romantically involved with. The whole thing was bound

There was a ton of black SUVs and an ambulance and cop cauars and all kinds of vehicles road, so I like, park down the street. You have to do like a walk of shame to get to my house. Everybody's like looking, and I'm like, I don't know, guys, I don't know what's happening.

Nicole arrived home to find an FBI agent standing on her doorstep. The agent explained that Sarah had threatened to harm herself and needed to be taken to the hospital, but Sarah had refused to go without Nicole, so Nicole hopped back in her car and followed the ambulance to the hospital.

It doesn't matter what else is happening in that moment. I don't really know, but I'll get the facts. Whatever I'll get home later and we'll figure it out. You just go into like take care of your significant other mode. The most important thing is, like she's getting into an ambulance.

I'm gonna go.

After a long way to the hospital. They cleared Sarah, determining she wasn't an immediate danger to herself. Sarah was allowed to leave the coal and the two returned home together in Nicole's car.

It was silent. It was just silent. I said, what's going on? It was quiet for a long time. I just waited for her to answer. I don't have answers. I'll wait until you answer.

Eventually, Sarah vaguely admitted to lying about some things mentioned she might be in trouble understatement of the century. By the way, Nicole's head was spinning.

I'm trying to be gentle in the way of you have somebody who's struggling with some mental health stuff in this moment right now. But I also need to know what's going on, and I need her to talk to me. I said directly to her, do you have cancer? And she said yes, And I was like okay.

When they arrived back home, the cop car are all gone. The neighbors are back in their homes and their quiet New England Street is once again a quiet New England Street.

We walk in the house and the house as a disaster. The drawers are all pulled out and things are knocked over and things like that. They didn't break anything, but it's a mess, and we didn't keep our house messy. So it's like was startling.

As they're picking up the mess, Nicole's mind keeps returning to the cancer, because if there's one thing that she needs to be true, it's that It's why she took the promotion, worked the extra hours, built up their savings, and it was the cancer that in a way helped explain why Sarah had been struggling so much, why she'd been so distant, and most of all, it was the cancer that prompted them to postpone their plans to have kids.

So then we laid down to sleep that night and in the dark, lay laying in bed in the dark, kind of like pillow talkue. I asked her one more time, do you have cancer?

And then she just waited, somehow sensing that maybe under the cover of darkness, the truth might finally emerge.

One of the many questions that we had was how did Sarah get to this moment lying in her bed in the dark, next to her spouse being asked this terrifyingly simple question, have you been lying to me about having cancer? In order to understand how she got here to this moment, we actually have to go back to much earlier in Sarah's story, because the way Sarah sees it, her double life wasn't initially Sarah the social worker and Sarah the war hero. Her first double life began as a little girl.

I think this feeling of like always wanting a different life had been really persistent for me for some time, or for most of my life.

Sarah admits she lied a lot growing up about all kinds of things. At first, some of the lies we heard about seemed to us like they'd fall in the category of just stuff that kids do. She'd tell her parents she was at school when she wasn't. Sometimes she'd lie to other kids. We spoke to her best friend her name is Ariel. They met as teenagers and the two of them remained very close. Ariol gave us a

But as we dug deeper into Sarah's story, we uncovered another set of lies that she told as a teenager that did seem out of the ordinary. We tracked down a few other people who knew Sarah back then. They told us that they knew Sarah not as a new Englander, but as a Southern girl, and more specifically as a victim of Hurricane Katrina.

This was just after that.

Hurricane, so it was still really fresh in people's minds. Sympathy for Katrina victims was running high. Our sources said that Sarah talked in detail about the ordeal of surviving Katrina.

Told people she.

Was rescued from the roof of her house just barely made it out alive. Apparently, Sarah told some people that her father died during the flooding. These lies earned her sympathy and friendship.

To me, it seems like a test.

Run of what she'd do with veterans, and it happened ten years prior. I asked Sarah about all this, by the way, and she denied it. Told me I never told people that. I don't know why they think that.

Sarah told us that things happened to her as a child that made her want to live a different life, be someone else, lie escape.

When you live two separate lives for so long, it feels normal, right. I had to be someone else in front of other people when I was a child, and that was normal.

Sarah says that there was a man who sexually abused her for years when she was a girl. Her mother attested to this in official documents. Nicole also confirmed us that this abuse was something that Sarah had shared with her.

According to Sarah, this abuse kind of split her life in two.

When I go to school, I'm able to just like excel and act like everything is fine, and play a sport and play an instrument and do all of these things, and no one knew anything was going on for a very long time.

That included her high school friend Ariel, who he told you about. Ariel says she had no idea that Sarah had been sexually abused. To Ariel, Sarah came across as funny and friendly, always up for an adventure. She played on the high school's basketball team. She was openly gay, and she even helped Ariol come out of the closet herself. She seemed so confident, but Sarah says, the truth is she was unraveling.

It began to drink really young. I was like thirteen when I started drinking. I definitely overused alcohol right and when I started to get into therapy finally, when I was like fourteen, fifteen sixteen, my symptoms were really really like I could barely get through school certain days, or I would just leave.

At first, things seemed to get somewhat better. When Sarah got to college. She was stable enough that she was able to help others. Her best friend Ariol had ended up homeless, and Sarah was the one to say, come live with me. She even let Ariol sleep on her couch for a whole year to this day, Ariel is deeply grateful and loyal to Sarah, and sure Sarah was still drinking a lot, but wasn't everyone in college.

I thought I pretty much had it under control. Where I was going to school, I had an apartment. Things felt okay, so to speak.

But then in her senior year of undergrad her mental health took a turn.

I was hospitalized for a suicide attempt and then I was referred to like this outpatient program at one of the local hospitals.

Sarah started taking medications for her anxiety after this, and she says she really even doubt but then her her insurance stop covering her medical provider, so she went off her meds. It was a rough time. She says that she tried to take her own life on multiple occasions. All of this is to say, Sarah told us she faced some pretty difficult moments in her life from a young age.

Then in twenty sixteen, when Sarah was twenty five, two things happened, two really important things. The first was that she met Nicole, who would eventually become her wife. The second was that in this same year, she joined the VFW, where she found a community of veterans.

These two things. Her wife and her veteran buddies would become Sarah's pillars, her support, but they were also destined to push against one another and create tension in a way that would ultimately bring everything rushing down.

The community that Sarah found at the VFW seemed to be so meaningful to her, She says, everyone there seemed to get that she was working through a trauma from her.

Past, Like you don't have to hide like that you're uncomfortable or that like people talking loudly or yelling makes you feel like triggering, Like you don't have to hide those things. Those are like socially acceptable for veterans. And like I remember being out of work thing once in like a colleague, like a male colleague, like coming in for a hug and be like oh my gosh, and like awkwardly like turning and like my somebody I worked with at the time, like being like are you okay

What Sarah is describing here are symptoms of PTSD, which she says stemmed from her trauma, the sexual abuse from her past, and she says that veterans seem to understand this kind of trauma innately, almost like it was part of their shared memory and their unspoken language. She told us she felt safe with them, like for once, no one was judging her because they understood.

I think that I had kept a lot of secrets in my life from my childhood, and so I don't think I had ever let anybody really know who I was.

Out of.

I don't know, maybe that selfishness, right, but also maybe that's for protection.

Sarah told us she always felt different, but when she was posing as a veteran, she felt like she belonged.

I didn't always think like I'm going to go out and lives. I'm just going to go out and drink with my friends and try to feel better and like be around people I care about.

Around the people that she cared about. And that right there was the problem because these people, the people she cared about, were the same people that she was deceiving and manipulating and taking money from. Sarah says that what she did stem from a deep need and some seriously flawed thinking.

I just think like.

When you feel inadequate for so long that it manifests in irrational ways. Right, and lying to that extent was irrational, right, it was deliberate. I deliberately lied, right. No one can say that someone forced me to tell those lies. No one did, but they were absolutely irrational.

Sarah says she used the lies that she'd constructed about herself, the whole tragic war hero story, to distract herself from her real problems. But of course what she was doing by lying and taking money that wasn't going to fix anything. It was only going to cause more problems, more damage, not just for her, but also for those close to her, like Nicole.

The odd part about all of this is that Sarah did have this other life, with a pretty home and a caring spouse, a life that seemed pretty good. Even now, when Sarah talks about Nicole, you can hear a tenderness in her voice. She calls her Nicky, and as far as we can tell, Nicky was a lifeline for Sarah. It was Nicky who took Sarah and walks and Lincoln Woods.

She really stabilized me. She brought so much to my life, and she really saw me for who I was, and I didn't have to like be ashamed of where I came from, or who my parents were, or anything that had happened.

And I was okay.

I was stable.

But that stability was short lived.

As Sarah went deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole posing as a veteran, she pulled further and further away from Nicole.

Sarah says that.

After work she'd walk the dogs and then race off to various meetings or events with veteran groups. Sometimes she'd tell Nicole she was seeing Dave or the VFW guys, and other times she just invents something else entirely. As she went through the motions, she was constantly preparing for the next round of deception, just trying to keep her story straight, and when she was at home, she was often emotionally unavailable.

My relationship with Nicole had disintegrated so much because of my lies as a veteran, and because I was involved in all of these events and things like that.

Even so, Nicole was not ready to give up on her.

She really wanted to reconnect and wanted us to get through this moment and was really trying to kind of pull me back. And I did not respond. I put no effort. I did not return those emotions. I was consumed with what I was doing right with my lie and how I was feeling, and she was so unhappy, and I was so unhappy because we were just like strangers in the night for so long at our house. Right.

I always thought there must be a true version of Sarah, Sarah without masks, living out there somewhere, showing her true face to someone. And for a while I thought that person was Nicole, that we would find a true version of Sarah in their house, like an artifact we could excavate.

But that just wasn't the case.

Maybe because there's an unknowability about Sarah, an invisible wall she puts between herself and the world.

For Sarah and Nicole, the weight of their marriage and the years of secrets and lies came to a head in February of twenty twenty two. After they returned from the hospital and cleaned up the mess from the search, they went to their bedroom and with the lights out, they lay silently side by side. The room itself had once been their inner sanctum, the cocoon of their intimacy. Nicole had always seen this home as the start of something.

I asked her a one more time, do you have cancer? And she said no, I don't. I think she needed the darkness, like the anonymity of that space. I don't think she could honestly, I don't think she could have looked me in the eye and say it. I think she needed to be in the dark kind of I guess hidden, I would say.

For Nicole, this moment sliced through everything.

She can lie to me about that straight to my face. For how long we've been doing this, I mean that lie was over and over and over as we worked through and built upon. You know, there's layers to that lie, and it if she could build that lie to me directly, I didn't feel like I could be, you know, connected with this person ever again. I left the next day and I never lived in that house again.

Our interview with Nicole it happened in a new place where she lives, a tidy townhouse at the edge of a busy commercial strip. We had to turn off the heat for the interview so our mike wouldn't pick up any extra noise. The point is it had gotten kind of cold in the room and dark too. The sun had gone down, and for a moment we just kind of sat there, and then Nicole said this.

The hardest thing to reconcile for me personally was finding out your perception of reality isn't true and accepting that I won't know. I won't know from this point on forever what was real and what wasn't real as it relates to your spouse right. Making peace with that was the journey for me following all of the aftermath.

And there are things that Nicole is still figuring out without realizing it. We were the ones who broke the news to her about Sarah having an affair with Sam. We didn't even mean to do this. We just mentioned Sam and then realized that Nicole still didn't know, so we turned off the tape recorder and explained seemed like the right thing to do. Things like this kept happening as.

We reported this story.

There were a bunch of times when the people we were interviewing kind of turned the tables and started asking us questions like what did we know about Sarah?

Was this true?

Or was that true? And in a way, the whole thing that Nicole said to us about not trusting her perception of reality, it kind of pertained to almost everyone in this story. Everyone was and is grasping for answers.

For Sarah, the aftermath was something else entirely. She was now in the house alone, with hardly anyone to rely on. She'd been outed, The media was buzzing with stories of her lies. The authorities had seized many of her personal possessions. She had no phone, no wife, no heroic backstory to fall back upon. Whether she realized it or not, there was nothing left to do but wait for the arrest and a much more public reckoning. Next time. On the finale of Deep Cover The Truth About Sarah.

I didn't necessarily have many second thoughts about representing missus Galana and anything. It is more of intrigue as to how she ended up in the situation that she was in.

Every defendant comes before court having had some sort of loss.

Or trauma in their life. Every human has such things, but not every human goes out and mixed crime.

She came in like behind me, Like I turned around and she was there, and that was kind of it was almost like getting hit by lightning, kind of like just kind of like this fight or flight response.

I knew his last name, I knew he was enrolled in care there. Those aren't excuses, that's not right, but those are facts that I knew, which made it reliable to go to that document.

Deep Covered the Truth About Sarah was produced by Amy Gaines McQuaid and Tally Emlin, additional production support by Sonya Gerwitd.

Our show is edited by Karen Shakerjee.

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, Izzy Carter, Daphne Chen, Jake Flanagan, and Greta Cohne.

Additional thanks to Vicky Merrick.

I'm Jess mceugh and I'm Jake Halpern. 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,