The Truth About Sarah Revisited (LIVE at WBUR)

Guarantee Human.

“Thanks for listening to Deep Cover The Family Man.”

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Alexa, play the podcast Deep Cover on Amazon Music. Also with Amazon Music Unlimited, you can now listen to your favorite music, podcasts, and audio books, all in the Amazon Music app. 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, Alley Ward's. 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. In this conversation, well, it reminded me a lot of the victims of Sarah Cavanagh.

And we talked about the parallels there. Today, I want to bring you back to Sarah's story. Into 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 McYou, my co-host for Season 6, The Truth About Sarah. For Deep Covers, Second Ever, Live Event.

We met up at WBUR Cityspace 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 of Bought Day. 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 of Bought Day, there's a link in the episode description. I really encourage you to do that. This is the charity of choice for the helper and 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, onto 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 of Bought Day, 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 help 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 McYou, 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 working on this new book that I was trying to pitch and I was scanning around for kind of character 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 wound in 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.

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 a 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 correlinks, which is the online prison service. Because yes, you know, there's no, we're very limited internet access and 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 Schumman, which this is where we're going to start with our tape that hasn't been heard or all of it.

Tom Schumman is the person who founded P.P. about day that 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.”

And P.P. Abatte 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 P.P. Abatte in 2021, so it's a relatively recent organization.

And as he said, it's this place for veterans of all stripes to kind of rest, recharge and re-fuel. Cool, we're actually going to let you hear Tom describe what it's like as you drive up the road heading towards a P.P. Abatte. There is something that will stir in your soul from the moment that you land at Missoula and have a big grizzly bear at the luggage carousel to getting to our base. Every time you turn a riverbent, you think, well, this is the most beautiful thing I've ever seen. And then you turn the next riverbent, and you're like, oh, no, this is actually the most beautiful thing I've seen.

And so you do that for an hour, 45 minutes, and 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 the Tom has picked out this idyllic piece of the Northwest for veterans to come together, and you want to tell us about this. Yeah, so the backstory of P.V. Abatte 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 Abatte, 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 P.V. Abatte really started.”

I lost more Marines on the home front than I had lost on the battlefield. And I, 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, you know, one of the things, so I actually interviewed him for the, for the podcast, it was, it was a kind of a crazy setup.

I showed up at the Quantico Marine Base at on his instructions at 8 p.m. 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 so we had to do it. Yeah, right, not shiver. I'm like sitting between the, the weightlifting area and the gun vault.

And finally, he brings out a bottle of whiskey.

It was a, 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 the necessity that he felt that there had to be something that he was doing to try to, to try to change this.

That's right. And I, 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, I'm explaining 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.

The majority of the veteran population has 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, 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 there 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 precedes, 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, 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 the kind of amazing place and it's worthy of our support.

And these scam stories are hard sometimes, but this is like a light. So absolutely. So one of the weird things about our unusual things about the stories 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 in one day in a row and you were interviewing Sam was it?”

Yeah, it was this weird coincidence. We're 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 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 being scammed and this, yeah, this came about 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.

The people that I've spoken to 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 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 live good or there won't be moments where you feel, I don't know, we were not dreading stuff out.

“People have, it's funny, you have to make your pitch to hope they participate, but at the end they have to make the decision because they have to own it and you don't want to feel responsible for coursing them into talking.”

So you play this, it's that's why I respect it, honestly, the Jess spent nine months or whatever it was talking to Sarah before we interviewed her, because by the time that we 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, 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 it's powerful and I want to share it with you.

They always say that it's not just a service member that services, it's the family, it's really, 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 my.”

Our neighbors, our squadron mates came together and totally helped out to care the kids, while she was in hospital, while she was 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. Is there 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. She sent them to us, 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, she just kind of sat on it. Well, yeah, the thing about this that 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 our 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. 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. I've been hearing for decades that the markets can solve climate change.

Today, we have more incentives for market solutions than ever, and emissions are rising.

On this season of drilled, carbon caboys, the story of three market solutions, colliding in one multinational boom. We've got to get pushes, we're guys trying to, there were four kids, they don't care about it. Listen, anywhere you get podcasts and hear episodes early and add free with a push can plus subscription head to the drilled show page on apple podcasts or pushkin.fm/plus to sign up. Thanks for supporting this show. Let's talk about the 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 and 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. She ended up going out to lunch almost every week and as she says, both kind of when she testifies an court and in the series, she was Sarah's primary shoe tire. Right, because a ostensibly Sarah couldn't tire on shoes.

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 $2,500 thinking that it was for surgery. So Michelle, say to say, felt this very kind of deep and intimate betrayal 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 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, I have a lot of thoughts, because 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 of big and small. I think people 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 stand-off 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 naïve a day. But in fact, if we don't function that way, literally all of our society will collapse.

Yeah, and you look outside, maybe in other parts of the world, you don't think 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. The 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 good is the good you're going to arrive. But your friend, the person who you're like kneeling down and tying the shoelaces and going on a walk in the woods with them and telling about your kids and taking to the ballet and someone you know intimately. Where all of that is not what it seems.

“And like, how does that derail and your kind of your sense of yourself and all that?”

And there's what we'll play some tape from Michelle and that. When you're hurt, you, everybody handles that hurt differently. So some people dig in and try to help. I cut off with the knees. I need no new friends.

I actually texted all my friends and like, you are who you say you are right. I love that. Yeah, she's like joking, but you kind of got maybe she's not joking. I'm also sort of a cut him off with the knees type. So I relate to Michelle.

Ooh, I've been in our class. Watch out, Jake. Yeah. 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?

Yeah. Because on some level, we think that we're good judges of character. Absolutely. We think I know who a friend is. I know a friend isn't.

And then what happens when your diligent actor that you rely on in your head is way off, fundamentally off. Like how do you, you know, that's where 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 judge 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 quality decor. And she also let us where, you know, we had just met her. We were like, hi, I'm just, hi, I'm Amy, can we unplug your fridge? Can we like move your whole apartment around? Can we put your dog on my lap?

And can we talk about the most painful moment in 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 P.B. Abate. If you recall, Dex is the one who said an at our international cemetery.

And she called up Sarah and she went to a plot and laid a reef at this plot,

which turned out to be a kind of random plot, right? That's right. 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? Okay, that'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 you have to fully eat the cost. Whatever wrong they did, 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 you, you know, 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 me 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 she's, 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's saying, you know what, that was really messed up and I'm choosing to make whatever I'm going to make of it. Maybe I learn a lesson from it, maybe I don't, but I'm 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 a piece with that. And if you're not a piece with that, you know, there's nothing else. And 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 do you feel like, I got, I've been in some version of that moment. A lesser version, a less dramatic version, but who in this room is 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's 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 work 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, I think that's what, if I might say, what kind of drew both of us to this story was that there's so much hard 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 why I love that quote and why I love talking to people like Dex and like Justin.

Yeah, let's, let's pay this last clip from Justin. It was a similar moment to the moment that Dex had with Dex where I was asking him, Like, how do you emerge from this? This is, you had your medical records stolen, you gave me a lot 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, what gives me energy and that's what gives me energy is to help. Help people, especially fellow veterans, and so, you know, if I lose that, you know, what do I have?

Interesting, because it's like it is his use of the word losing it and it makes me think it's a loss. Like, what, what is Dex? She has to eat the cost, right? But then there's a cost, it's 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,

Yeah, absolutely. And I think that's what everyone we interviewed and was working through and people and who are victims of scams and 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 know, 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. Like, 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 Justin, my favorite clip from the cutting room floor.

And as part of this, we're going to ask our amazing producer Amy Gaines McQuade to come up on stage.

Let's give her round 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 a pretty remote. Oh, wow. Okay, that's Amy's car. That's the live car crash you just heard. That's Amy's car going off the road into the snow in a univermott road.

So, and this is really funny for anyone that old MPR reporters, like there's this thing we always say.

And here we are in the north. She's doing exactly what the good audio story of this region. There's someone who is in love with this clip, but one of them Amy is like, it is such the metaphor for you and the crisis. Because if it had been in my car going off the road, I would have been dropping the F bomb as my sons who are in the front row can can attest to. And you're like, oh dear. And you are just always so calm under pressure.

You know, you can see the snow kicked 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 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 volunteer 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 Fudy, who were also Jim Friends of Sarah's. And this is how I sent almost sent Amy to an icy death. Yeah, no, it was okay. I'm here, right? The show came out.

Yeah. Mark and Kate's interview was great. It was great. If it had been a bad interview, I would have been really, 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 these people talk 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 do 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 open 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.

Yeah, I mean I think that I grew everything the just 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. And I think that like that's hopefully what we're trying to do and telling a story is to is to pull some meaning out of it that is that that goes a tad deeper than the five major words that they got in the post. I think that's the hope that they that they have and then it's on us to try 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, maybe less than a year later. Yeah, and that that has its child like in the one way, it's makes it more powerful because it's all fresh in their memory, but also often means people don't want to talk. Why would you want it? I mean, I wouldn't want to talk to me a lot of the times.

“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 and you know, put me so 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 just for sure. So in a very weird coincidence shortly after the podcast was released Sarah was released to a half way house. So she came out of prison. Yeah. So she was out of prison. Just like that we could do that we, that we. Yeah. And within a few months, though, basically what happens, it's a little bit vague from the kind of core documents that I've seen, but she was basically accused of creating a hostile environment in her half way house.

“And so she was sent back to to federal prison because when you're in a half way house, it's not like parole. You don't have to commit an 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 do think she kept all that straight? So Jacob, I want to throw that to you first, maybe.

I don't know. I don't know about the wedding. Yeah. I mean, the wedding was interesting. So the reason that Amy got in their 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. And I'm thinking of half a dozen times that that's happened to me. And so I don't think 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 and we would care to admit. 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.

Because it would be so illogical to figure that out. And then I think there were some practical things to 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 talk it up to the brain injury. I really pushed back against someone that you thought had traumatic brain injury and said you said two different things and two different occasions will like no kidding about your traumatic service history.

Yeah, just one question I have for you. I mean, I know you to be this expert on con artist. Why do you think people are so wrapped by these stories? What draws us in? I think there are a lot of reasons. I think in general, there are just fewer women criminals. So anything that is in anomaly is I think interesting to people. 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 Delvie who was, you know, stealing from men's hat and delete. I think there's this sort of urge, especially as a woman, you know, who may not be working a great job, but 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 free song of something fun.

Yeah, this I reminded me of season three a little bit in that there was someone at the center of it telling half truths and you were left to think about how you felt.

“It's like we said in the sixth episode, like I feel for Sarah, I feel pathos for a just and I both did like it's hard to know because you have to take everything you hear she says with the 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. Because and just we've talked about this con artist's prey on pathos, like they prey on I'm in trouble help me and that was a 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 that 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. 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 but in eight like peppy's pizza afterwards and just not to knew haven't branch but we need to just kind of staring at each other like what just happened.”

More from our conversation in just a moment. I've been hearing for decades that the markets can solve climate change. Today we have more incentives for market solutions than ever and emissions are rising. On this season of drilled carbon caboys, the story of three market solutions colliding in one multinational boom. Listen, anywhere you get podcasts and hear episodes early and add free with a push can plus subscription.

Head to the drilled show page on apple podcasts or pushkin.fm/plus to sign up. Thanks for supporting this show. What did your collaboration look like day-to-day when building a season like this? How did you resolve disagreements.

“What were the kind of pros and cons of the collaboration?”

Yeah, it's funny. I would say this. 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 sure I trusted was just. 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 Alpern is working on it.

And the moments where I felt like we were struggling in some way to figure what direction to go 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, a bit long time 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 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.

And before we just, 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 see this up a little bit more, we had no idea about this. And then we went to interview and I believe that's the first moment though.”

Yeah, that's right. That came 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 please, 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 dying from cancer and from whom Sarah stole a bill of cancer bill as part of her roots to steal money from maturity.

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 it, our wonderful editor, Karen Shakurji, 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 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 lot more letters.

She claims she didn't know about it. 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. And in the next sentence, there was a big butt 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, 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 will 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 holy foreign. It's just was taken into 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 Iron Man 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 Iron Man hat. And I was like, I could explain to everyone 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, that's this space. No, eventually I'm like, I got a wife. She's the Iron Man. I can't swim, but 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 Iron Man. Correcting the record right now. 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?

as well as women, con artist of all stripes, so there'll be some more material on Sarah. The book is called "Big Barrow Scam" and it will be coming out in Fall, 2027. So put it on your calendars.

Congratulations.

“I'm very much looking forward to reading even more of your great reporting.”

Jake. Yes. I'm sorry you. Yes, I'm busy working on the next season of Deep Cover and actually I was in Dallas reporting in November. And I just got back from a week of reporting in the Ozarks.

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 today. I'm going to say the last question. I'm also Muslim.

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 UPSRFX number, but I was like, okay,”

mail them to my Yale address, because you're going to like the Youngest Department. And the mail service somehow between them and that the office, it like didn't show up. And I called and I called Yale Central Office and I called no one has seen this thing. It's not the university's fault. This is turned up. They're like call the post office.

So I was like, yeah, we're 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, my, the 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 found 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. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much for being here.

This was a wonderful evening. Thanks to our audience and happy holidays. Okay. Thanks for listening everybody.

“And remember, we're still raising money for patrol base about today.”

So if you'd like to contribute and really hope you do, you can do that through the link in the episode description. This episode was hosted by Jess McYou and me, Jake Halpern. It was produced by Amy Gaines McQuade and Isaac Carter, mastering by Eleanor Osborn.

Our executive producer is Jake of Smith. Thanks to Amy McDonald, Steven Davy, Candice Springer, Chris Barrios, Taylor Bedison, and Jeff Fishon from W.B.R. Cityspace for hosting. Special thanks to Jane Milliotis, Amy Hagridorne, Karen Shakurgi, Morgan Ratner, Eric Sandler, and Greta Cohen.

I'm Jake Halpern. I've been hearing for decades that the markets can solve climate change. Today, we have more incentives for market solutions than ever, and emissions are rising. On this season of Drilld, Carbon Caboys,

the story of three market solutions, colliding in one multinational boomed level. Listen, anywhere you get podcasts and hear episodes early and add free with a push can plus subscription. Head to the Drilld Show page on Apple Podcasts

or pushkin.fm/plus to sign up. Thanks for supporting this show.