Truth

how did you meet this girl? And then he said e harmony? And I was like, oh, okay, brother. But that skepticism disappeared when Sarah walked in the door one autumn day in two thousand and eight, she just had this right smile, just her eyes kind of gleam. She said she was working at a St. Louis hospital, at least for now. She wanted to work in the neo natal unit of Children's hospital. She wanted to work with

the premier babies. She also said that she was a camp counselor at the MSD Camp summer camp for kids with muscular dysgraphy as a teacher. Christine loved the way that Sarah was so dedicated to children, and I thought, wow, this is a nice girl. At the time, Sarah was twenty three years old, she was living back in her hometown but commuting to St. Louis and dating Zach. Christine thought that they were getting serious quickly, too quickly, but

she liked Sarah. Christine told us by the way that Zach preferred for his mom to tell this story, she got really close with me. We did shopping together, We did a lot of stuff together that you would do like with a daughter in law, you know, not maybe so much the girlfriend. And unlike what Sarah told Aaron Johnson that her parents were doctors or her college sweet mates that she had leukemia, the story she told Christine

seemed to be, at least at first, the truth. She said that she was really into skiing at Hidden Valley, but not heading to the Olympics. And she talked about her mom and dad. They got divorced when she was really young, and she did not ever want to be divorced. She made that clear. Her dad was a truck driver, so she never got to see him. Her dad was not in the picture much, but he did by her car. While they were dating, she didn't seem to have a

warm relationship with her mom. Zach didn't offer the greatest endorsement either. He described her as just cold. He used a bad word. She would say, that's why I love you, because you're so kind and you're just a total opposite of my mom. The holidays came, we were baking Christmas cuckys, and she were talking about her mom almost NonStop and about how I am the exact opposite of her mom. That December, she and Zack came over one evening and said they had some news. Everyone sat down in the

living room on the sofa. She showed me her hand with this ring and a big old smile. I believe she started crying. Zach was recently divorced, and Christine was glad her son had found someone who made him happy, and most importantly, Sarah really seemed to care about Zack's kid, who was just a year old at the time. Zach had a brief marriage that didn't last, but the little boy that came out of it was the light of his grandmother's life. For Sarah, marrying Zach would be like

instant motherhood. She really liked this little ready made family that she had was Zack. The even set for portraits Sarah, Zach and his son for Christmas, and that's what she gave. She gave everybody pictures. I said, wow, Sarah, you put a lot of time an effort and spent a lot of money, you know, for Christmas this year. And she goes, she goes, well, I haven't had a family for Christmas, and I just wanted it to be special. So everything is wonderful. New Year's Eve is when things start to

fall apart. New Year's Eve, Sarah told her fiance something about herself that she had been raped for reasons he couldn't quite articulate. To his mom, Zach was skeptical. Something about her story was just too implausible for him. He just said something seemed really off about it. And I don't know what it was, you know, he couldn't really tell me what exactly about it was off. I'm like, who lies about this? It has to be true. Nobody's

going to lie about something like that. And then I'm thinking, for Sarah was right? Do you know? And uh so he was like, I don't know. I said, oh, I basically told him, don't ruin it. You know she's a nice girl. The first week in January two thousand nine, he broke off the engagement. Everybody was mad at Zach, my dad, my mom, my brother, and my sister in law. It was a really bad time for him because we

were all like, how did you do this? And she's calling me and crying and I'm crying, and I'm like, I don't know what's wrong with him. I was team Sarah all the way, and so is my mom and my dad, and oh, everybody was like, how could you do this to her? I mean, I really felt bad for Zach. He held his ground. He said, I'm telling you there's something about her that's just not right. I'm Laura Beale. You're listening to Sympathy Pains. This is episode

five Truth. In February of two thousand nine, Christine was still stinging from her son's broken engagement. She had come to already think of Sarah like a daughter in law, and now she was out of her life. But Sarah wasn't going to stay out of her life, not by a long shot. Christine came home from work one afternoon and pulled a plain white envelope out of her mailbox. The return address was Sarah's, and I'm like, well, I

haven't heard from her a while. I wonder, you know, I had never received a piece of mail from her before. There was no note, but something was tucked inside, a picture of an ultrasound. Christine stared at the image in shock. Sarah was pregnant, and even if Sarah wasn't going to be your daughter in law, it didn't change the fact that this was her grand baby. I immediately go to Zach, what what's going on? What is this? He says, I

don't think it's real. She's just upset that I broke up with her, and I was like, oh my gosh, you better marry her. He was adamant. He didn't believe her anymore about anything. She's just trying to use this, so we get back together again. He goes, I don't think it's real. For the next few months, Chris Dean

and Sarah talked from time to time that summer. Sarah said she was on vacation in southern California and she went into a labor early and the baby was born as a PREMI I was heartbroken that this baby was born prematurely and is sitting there fighting for life. Sarah named the newborn Isabella, the name Zach had picked out if his son had been a girl, Isabella Christine. Her middle name was after Zack's mom, and Sarah started a blog to post updates on the baby. And I'm looking

at the blog all the time. There's pictures, and there's like narratives that she wrote daily, like long narratives. I was hanging onto every word. Christine's parents and friends were glued to the blog too. The one person who wasn't it was Zack. He wasn't even convinced there was a baby at all. Actually, he told his mom that he thought the snapshots were of different infants. I'm like, how can you say that. Being so far away was tearing

Christine apart. She was my baby granddaughter, and I wanted to see her. I knew I probably couldn't hold her, but I wanted to see her and I wanted to be there with her. She called Sarah. I just said I'm leaving early in the morning, um and driving, And I said I'll drive twenty four hours straight through. Later that same night, Sarah called her back and says, I have some horrible news for you. Isabella died in my arms tonight. She just couldn't fight any longer. It was

like a bomb had just dropped on my head. I was devastated. Christine mourned for months. She couldn't even attend the funeral for little Isabella Christine because there wasn't one. She spent months grieving the granddaughter she never met. Christmas came around and Christine found a card from Sarah in her mailbox and something else, pictures of a baby, maybe six months old, and it says Merry Christmas from Sarah,

Adam and Isabella. Another bomb hits me. She tried to reach Sarah in agony, but she didn't answer her messages. Was this her Isabella? So then fast forward the next Christmas, I get another Christmas collage and it is a little girl and it says again, Merry Christmas from Sarah, Adam and Isabella. Uh. Christine of course had no idea that. In two thousand and seven, the year before Zack even met Sarah, she had started a blog with a profile

picture of herself looking hugely pregnant. She said she was a student nurse married to the most wonderful man in the world named Adam. Staring at the picture on the Christmas card, Christine thought that the baby girl looks strikingly like her grandson. I'm like, oh my god, that is my granddaughter. She called Sarah again. This time she answered, I'm like, what is going on? I thought you said

the baby died. Sarah told her that the baby hadn't died, but she didn't want her to be raised by parents who weren't together like she'd been, that she had met and married a guy who completed their family. I just, I begged her. I said, I don't have to be grandma. Can we meet at a park and just like I could just be your friend, you know, I just want to be in her life. It was sad, it was horrible. I mean, I'm almost crying now. Sarah never sent another card.

It was like, your heart is out there somewhere, like part of your heart is out there somewhere, and you have no idea. A few more years went by. In late summer two thousand seventeen, Sarah started texting Christine again. The year before, in a parallel Sarah universe, she had risen from her power chair at Camp Summit, ridden off in a van when Christine got the text from Sarah. She was sitting at a Mexican restaurant with her grandson and a couple of his friends. Just the four of

us were there. We were waiting for our food. I just I remember, she just starts texting me. You know, how are you back? I mean, there was some small talk before that, and she was like, are you still teaching? And then of course I said, yes, I'm still teaching. I'm fine. So how is Adam and Isabella? She said, well, I have some bad news, and then she texted that Isabella was killed in a car accident. Christine sat at

the table waiting for her food to arrive. Stunned. She went through the rest of the meal in a daze. She had lost her only granddaughter. Again, I said, can I see some pictures of her, you know, before the accident, and so she sent lots of pictures. A day or two later, Sarah came over to Christine's house. She went straight to the couch and then we just started hugging each other and crying. She told me all of out, and we boo hooed like her and I were hugging

each other, just bawling, bawling. A couple more years past with Christine carrying around a granddaughter's sized hole in her heart. Then in the spring of two tho, she got a text from her son, You're not going to believe this, but Sarah was on the Dr Phil show. I just watched it. Told you guys, nobody believed me. That night, after work, Christine called up the links on YouTube. My like jaw was dropped the whole show. I could not

be leave what I was hearing. She was in my house telling me that my grand baby died two times, and it was the first time time I believed that I did not have a granddaughter. Christine was livid, wounded. She took my trust and people. At the same time, she felt like Sarah needed therapy. At the end of the show, it said that she was given a chance to go to some place to go get some help. But even as Christine was watching the video on YouTube,

Sarah had already left treatment and was back home. If Sarah wasn't going to stop on her own, there were now plenty of other people who were going to try to make or see the truth. Chris Conrad is a stocky, middle aged man with glasses and a high forehead. Today. He's the city manager in Highland, Illinois. We talked one day in his office on the first floor of city Hall, a building with the kind of gingerbread trim that looks more like a chalet seeing the Alps, and not a

small town in the Mississippi Valley. Highland was founded by Swiss immigrants. They are pretty proud of their Swiss heritage. Searcy, Switzerland is our sister city. Not a ton of controversy in Highland. The day we spoke, Chris was getting ready for the upcoming charity pie auction in the town square. Before he was city manager, he was police chief, and if you go all the way back to two thousand six, he was a beat cup. That was the year he got a call from the local FBI office about a

woman and a stolen quilt. They asked that we reached out to her and find out what was going on. Was there a part of you that that the FBI has contacted me about a quilt? Well, you know, at this point I had been an officer for six years, and so I understood death by deception. Was he went by her house and learned that she was away at college. Had wait till the weekend when she was home, but then ended up bringing her bringing her in to talking

to her about the issue. She seemed nervous. I remember that seemed like any other college student that would be talking to an officer, so I didn't necessarily think that was out of line. Sitting at the police station, she said this originally started as doing research for a school project on s M A, and that she was a nursing student that in doing that research, she started pretending to have it and then created another persona on the chat room that she was the parent of a child

that had it. She didn't really have, didn't really have an excuse as to why she did it. She was embarrassed that she had done it, seemed to acknowledge that had gone too far. I remember thinking as I was talking to her that she was a little socially awkward and not a psychologist. But I remember thinking to myself that it was probably she enjoyed the attention that came from it. They didn't press charges, but he told her he was going to call the college and tell them

she needed a referral for counseling. That day, he sent an email to Andrea Smith, the computer whiz who had found out that Sarah was lying. He told Andrea that he had called a former teacher of hers and it learned. As he wrote to Andrea, Sarah was always slightly different and never really fit in with any particular crowd, just had a lot of problems socially. He also said he was going to speak with Sarah's mom about, as he

called it, issues that needed to be addressed professionally. I don't know if this was the first time someone said Sarah needed treatment, but it certainly wouldn't be the last. And I don't know how her mom reacted to the advice. Mental health issues come with such stigma that people are often afraid to acknowledge a problem exists, even to themselves, especially in a small town where you can't easily fade

into anonymity. Even when people do seek therapy, they often face a shortage of providers or insurance that views mental health coverage as some kind of luxury. The fact that Sarah didn't get treatment right then and there isn't all that surprising. In a given year, more than half of adults experiencing mental illness won't receive care for it. Back in South Carolina, Andrea was thrilled to get the quilt back.

I sent an email out to the s M a support chat and asked everybody to write a little thank you note to Officer Conrad and send pictures of the kids send them to me, and I put together a big box and sent it to him. So in two thousand nineteen, when Andrea teamed up with Liz and Bethany, she knew who she was going to call. By then, Officer Conrad had been promoted to Chief Conrad. He referred Andrea to a member of his force, the Tromon. David

Brin's with the Highland Police Department. Tall and friendly, He's been a policeman for about thirteen years. Came down to this area for college and like the area so just happened to stay. He was named Officer of the Year once by the local Optimists Club. By the time he talked to Andrea, David Brines already knew about Sarah had

been getting calls from Liz and Bethany. To investigate. He obtained records from the Young Survival Coalition, the breast cancer charity that had sponsored the bike ride where she met Liz. I found out that the bike had been donated to her. So at that point we realized that we did have a fraud, but the crime was out of state, out of his local jurisdiction. So in the summer of two thousand nineteen, he called the FBI investigators discovered another stolen bike.

Sarah had ordered a bicycle off of the eBay and I said, those were several thousand dollars. It was sent through the postal service after she ordered it in February, but she told the seller it never arrived and got her money back. In doing so, she committed mail fraud. At that point we had a federal crime. The case was now in the hands of a federal prosecutor. Lukeweisler I am an assistant United States Attorney in the Southern District of Illinois. I've been in this office for about

two years. Before that, I was in private practice for about six years. Luke is a young guy, late thirties who coaches the basketball and soccer teams of his three young boys. He grew up in Springfield, Missouri, the youngest of four, where his dad was a pharmacist and his mother was a teacher. He himself taught middle school math for two years in the Rio Grand Valley before he went to law school. It was in law school that he heard a federal prosecutor talk about how his job

protects people. It inspired him. Every day here, I am pushed to do the right thing for the right reasons, and so you know, this is a job where I feel like I can really make a difference, and that's that's why I'm here. He specializes in white collar crimes, corruption, money laundering, identity theft. Now that I've been to this job for a little while, I am more keenly aware of just the amount of fraud that that takes place

in the world. Being a part of the way to confront that and the way to to resolve it for people is a really big deal because it it is something that has a tremendous impact on people's lives. But he had never heard of a case quite like the one that landed on his desk. In July of two thousand nine, the head of the fraud unit came into his office and said, you know, there's there's a new case that I want you to handle. There's a woman who has faked breast cancer and muscular dystrophe, has most

likely defrauded some nonprofits. You mentioned that that she had largely confessed to the conduct on national television. I think my reaction was probably the same as as most people that first hear about this case. There's just kind of disbelief about what happened. He started looking into the evidence

that FBI agents and postal inspectors had gathered. When you really think about what it takes to commit that fraud, that she actually went to a camp, actually allowed counselors at that camp to bathe her, to feed her, I mean to to for those counselors to learn after the fact that she was capable of doing all those things on her own, that is just devastating. It went from a case that I guess, on its face just had some bizarre details into a case that was really worth pursuing.

He had seen his share of medicare scams and fake go fund me accounts. This was different. I don't believe that her her primary or soul objective anyway, was just to obtain money. In most of our cases, that is the soul objective, and it's the soul objective. Unusually a pretty grand scale, hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars are usually at stake. This was not the case here, you know, based purely on dollars, it almost wouldn't be

a federal case. The law says that you can't physically hurt another person and you can't take their money, but you can take their trust, their love, their faith and people and crush it. Luke saw that Sarah seemed to choose communities and people who were the most vulnerable and the most giving. They're not going to question if somebody's in a wheelchair whether or not that person can walk.

You know, if somebody is going to have the appearance of having gone through chemotherapy, they're not going to question that. And she exploited that empathy that they have the emotional harm here dwarfed what the financial harm was. Something else nagged at him too. He walked me through her biggest crime in the eyes of the law, stealing the bike she ordered off eBay. It was worth more than four thousand dollars, so she used her mom's credit card to

order it. She received that bicycle and then claimed that she didn't so she disputed the transaction when when she actually did receive the bike and was ultimately reimbursed for that money. What really bothered him more than what she did was when she did it. She was on Dr Phil in April of two thousand. May of two thousand and nineteen is when that dispute occurred on the credit card.

After she was on Dr Phil, vowing to do whatever it took to change her life, she stole a bicycle and after Dr Phil she signed up for a charity swim event, putting her back in the midst of the kind of people she had a history of lying to. Luke couldn't force Sarah to get help, but he could

do something to protect more people from getting hurt. This was something that she wasn't going to be deterred from doing without some sort of intervention beyond what had been done to that point, and what had been done at that point was significant. She was somebody that that wasn't going to be deterred without prosecution. By December of two thousand nineteen, I had already met Liz and Bethany. I knew the FEDS were investigating, so I sent Sarah a text and asked her if she would speak with me.

She answered, I'm not interested in doing a story. I've been working to put this behind me. The next day, I asked her if she would reconsider telling her I wanted to hear her context, explanation, regrets, anything that would help me understand what she had done. She wrote back, It's in the past and nothing positive will come from rehashing the past. For over a year, I've reached out to Sarah, Sarah's former classmates and members of her family. Few of them responded, and none would go on tape.

One former friend told me she felt bad for Sarah's family and didn't want to seem like she was piling on. Highland is a small town people talk. I flipped through old yearbooks from Highland High School, hoping images of the teenage Sarah might offer hints to the adults she would become. As a junior, she joined a health promotion group called Life Savers and was cast in a production of The

Wizard of Oz. The last page of her senior yearbook shows a photo of her walking across the age of graduation, grinning, shaking hands with a school board member. She looks like any other graduate and a cap and gown, ready to go into the world. Zoom in on the photo and you can see that her right ankle is strapped into a fracture boot all of us are products of where we come from, but from the outside, it's hard to

know what goes on inside of family. Sarah's aunt, the one who spoke with Liz and Brian Hickock's exchange polite text messages with me, but didn't want to speak on the phone. She told me Sarah's not a mean person, just a young woman who wanted to be loved and accepted. She wrote that Sarah didn't have enough self worth to believe that she could make friends by just being herself. What Sarah really needed, her aunt said, was family. She

wanted what her cousins had. She wrote, families to have fun and spend time together, care for one another, travel together, and build dreams. Reading this reminded me that in Sarah's make believe personas, she often seemed to borrow the names of her cousins and her cousin's children as if they had something she did not. If her family wouldn't help me understand Sarah, I turned to someone else who might well. I see people with mood disorders, and I also see

people who have factitious disorder. And factitious disorder is brought term to describe people who have much house and syndrome. Dr Stewart Eisendraft is on the psychiatry faculty at the University of California in San Francisco. Dr Eisendraff spoke with me with one big caveat. He wanted it to be clear that he hasn't examined or diagnosed Sarah, and that his comments are based on his three decades of experience

with something called Munchhausen syndrome. The description of Munchausen sounds familiar. That's basically where a person creates signs or symptoms of physical illness for purposes of being in the sick role. It isn't somebody who creates science or symptoms of illness in order to achieve some goals such as a monetary award. Rather, they do it because they want to be in the patient role and whatever benefits go along with that. He wasn't surprised to learn that Sarah had been a nurse.

In general, people with factitious disorder fifty or more have been involved with the health care system, but the most common thing is a nurse or nurse's aid. Our speculation is that the people can go into the health care fields because they want to help take care of other people. They want to get care for themselves as well. They oscillate often between being in a caregiving role and being a caregiving recipient. In doing so, they may be searching

for something they're not getting at home. They may recreate, say some family dynamics where they're getting a second family as it were. I don't want to oversimplify, but it's like they're seeking a sort of family nurturing relationship. Is that kind of what you're saying, Yes, that's exactly it. Or it can be a reaction to genuine medical trauma from the past. They might try to in a sense, recreated because this time they know they're in control of it,

when in the original episode they were. Whatever the reason behind the behavior, Dr Eisendraff says, there's one commonality, a disregard for its impact on others. There are often what we call sociopathic. They don't have any empathy for the people around them, so they may be quite cruel to the people around them, but they're not concerned about that. They're only concerned about what they're what they're getting from

the situation. They may be aware that it's antisocial or pathological, but they rationalize it saying that to themselves, this is what they need to do in order to get their needs met. Sometimes the motive is deliberate control of another person's feelings. One dynamic might be that the patient is trying to provoke anger in the people around him or her,

or humiliation. It may be humiliating because they that's the issue, that's the kind of traumatic situation that the patient is working around, that they were humiliated as a child or as a young adult, and that they recreate this situation with other people. I think I've just always assumed that the motive was to get attention and support. But what you're saying is we can't make that assumption. It's a common factor getting attention and support, but it's definitely not

the only factor. Does everyone who has this need psychotherapy to stop? Or can they just decide I don't want to live this way anymore and I'm not going to do it. But my experience, it's very unusual for somebody to stop on their own. And this psychotherapy is it lifelong? Is it something that you know you pretty much just have to keep treating it and keep treating it so it doesn't control your life. Yes, it's basically very long

term and requires rigorous attention over time. When you're dealing with Munchausen, they have a very severe condition that is like stage four cancer, and they deserve support not for what the person is portraying themselves as, but for the condition that causes them to portray it in the first place. So instead of feeling sorry for them for they have because they have cancer, it's really recognizing they have a

factitious disorder and they need treatment for that. Sarah thought she had to move through the world as someone else, someone who needed help, someone with a disability. The tragedy is she probably did have a disability, just an invisible one, not one that people can easily recognize and feel sympathy for, also one extraordinarily difficult for her and her family to face.

During one pH in conversation with Liz, she told me something surprising that she and Brian had driven halfway across the country from their home in Rhode Island to Illinois. I had to see her. I had to see who she was in her elements, and we found her address, and we drove around her town, and we went to her coffee shop, and we saw all the places where she would go and we sat in front her house. She came out of her house, and both of us

were just completely breathless at that moment. It was like our hearts stopped seeing her walk out of her house, getting her car with her license plates and her personal plates and go about her life. And we followed her for a bit. So you drove all the way from Rhode Island to Illinois just to lay eyes on her. We did. I mean, somebody listening to this might think, wow, that is just over the top. This was just kind of closure if you were and seeing her. Liz wanted

to see Sarah, the real Sarah at home. She felt like she couldn't put this behind her unless she figured out who Sarah really was. In some ways, I didn't blame her. I'd been wanting to understand Sarah too, looking for clues. My mind kept going back to something that Bethany told me, the one thing that I've never heard her lie about. She's lied about everything else, from cousin's,

nephew's husband's, you know, dead relatives, kids, whatever. Anytime I asked her about her father, she shut it down and she said, no, he left when I was little, and that was it. So I asked Officer Bryan's in Highland if he knew anything about Sarah's father. I did look for it, but I was I wasn't able to find anything of any sort of father figure for her, So even you couldn't find, like even a name of who he was. I kept looking, thinking her dad might provide

a clue to what her life was missing. I learned his name is Dave and he lives in a tiny town on Roots, less than an hour from Highland. Laura les over your letter about Sarah That's next on the final episode of Sympathy Pains. Sympathy Pains is a production of Neon Hum Media and I Heart Radio. I'm your host, Laura Beale I wrote and reported the episodes. Natalie Rinn is the lead producer. Our editor is Katherine st. Louis.

Associate producer is Rufaro Mazzarua. Our executive producer is Jonathan Hirsch. Samantha Allison is our production manager. Fact checker is Jacqueline Colletti. Jesse Perlstein composed the theme song and music heard throughout the series. Additional tracks are by Blue Dot Sessions and Epidemic Sound. Scott Somerville is our engineer and sound designer. Special thanks to Stephanie Serrano from I Heart Radio. Special thanks to Carrie Lieberman and Bethan Macaluso. Executive producer at

I Heeart Radio is Dylan Fagan. If you or someone you know is struggling with mental illness, you can call the National Alliance on Mental Illness at eight hundred nine five oh six two six four. That's eight hundred nine five O N A m I