Jess and Jake speak with Sarah and learn about her past life. As a social worker, she really knew how to listen to people. But when Jake and Jess interview two of Sarah's former friends, a darker picture emerges. Get early, ad-free access to more episodes of Deep Cover: The Truth About Sarah by subscribing to Pushkin+ on Apple Podcasts or Pushkin.fm. Access ad-free episodes, exclusive binges, full audiobooks, and bonus content for all Pushkin shows with Pushkin+.Subscribe on Apple: apple.co/pushkinSubscribe on Pushkin: pushkin.com/plusSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Chapter 1: What is the backstory of Sarah Cavanaugh?
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Previously on Deep Cover. She explained to me that, um, She just got out of the Marine Corps and she needed help with some car payments because she was waiting for VA disability to kick in.
She was very likable. She was very charismatic. And then on top of it, she was a veteran and badass and had these injuries. We would kind of quietly make sure that when she was in our environment at the gym, she was protected.
I call up a records keeper and I say, hey, I need a copy of her DD form 214. He said, oh, she just left my house two hours ago. She came here to the house to come get it. That's when I start thinking something's not right here.
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Chapter 2: How did Sarah manipulate her relationships?
So, like here, right, when I get up in the morning, I make it a point to go outside.
This is Sarah Cavanaugh. She's the person you've been hearing about for the past two episodes.
And, like, step outside by myself, see the sunrise, look at the view, because the view behind overlooks the mountains, and really enjoy that and just let that be the start of my day versus... some of the intrusive thoughts about the past that would come up before and I would let that dictate my day.
So I've really changed how I let the past affect my moods so I don't become just a continuous repetition of them.
Jess and I spent the better part of several days interviewing Sarah. We talked about her past and her life now and a great many other things too.
How we found her. Where we found her. We'll get there. You're going to hear from her throughout the rest of the season. But for now, we just want you to hear some of the very first things that she said to us in person. So that you get a read on her. Just like we did. We started with small talk. Like, read any good books lately?
Right now, I am reading The Secret History by Donna Tartt. Which is interesting. I had read... Goldfinch? The Goldfinch, and I loved it. So now I'm reading this one, and I'm really enjoying it so far.
This was just a few minutes into our first conversation. At this point, I knew a fair amount about Sarah Kavanaugh and what she'd done, about all the people she'd deceived and hurt. I had a pretty good picture in my head of who she was. And this? This was not it.
This woman, well, she sounded more like a high school guidance counselor or the type of person you'd hope would be taking care of your grandma at the senior citizen home. In fact, she told us, working with seniors, that was her first job.
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Chapter 3: What role did Sarah play as a social worker?
Yeah.
As I sat there listening to her, I noticed Sarah was doing this a lot. Ending a sentence by saying, right? It's kind of subtle. She doesn't yank you through her version of events. It's more like she was feeling around for things that we might have in common. And if we nodded along, she'd say, right?
A lot of people don't like older people. I remember a lot of people I worked with who were like, she's grouchy or she's this or she's that. And... I thought, well, they've had 50 years to practice, right? Type thing. And also, like, I always think about our moods as a product of something else, right? I know that personally.
And so I just think there was an appreciation there for me, but I didn't really know where that was going to go. I think I thought I was going to be like an activities director or something like that.
But instead, she got her master's and became a social worker. Eventually, she got a job at the local VA in Providence, Rhode Island. That was her job, helping veterans in some pretty tough situations. And this is 100% true, by the way. Many of these people coming to Sarah for help, they showed up maybe on a Saturday, kind of reluctantly, and it was Sarah's job to put them at ease.
I would just say, hey, how are you? Like, it's Saturday. You know, how do you feel about this? How do you feel about being here? And if they were like, I really don't want to be here. I had to get up early and I had to drive to Providence. And I'd be like, yeah, I understand.
When her clients did open up, Sarah took this approach.
When someone said something like, you know, I'm struggling with, I might be homeless or my wife and I are fighting or something like that, I wouldn't respond with surprise. I would just be like, yeah, those things happen. Those things happen. And okay, what do you think you need right now because of that?
What she never wanted to do was send veterans elsewhere to some other program, you know, push them off on someone else.
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Chapter 4: How did Sarah build trust with her friends?
When she talked about her old life as a social worker, I got this strange sense that I was seeing the Sarah Kavanaugh that won over everybody's hearts. Because let's be clear, the people we interviewed for this story, once upon a time, they all loved Sarah. And listening to her talk, I started to understand why. She knew, in her own words, how to be present in a way that silently says, I get it.
It's weird to say, but I found her really likable. By the time we met in person, I'd been talking to her over the phone for nearly a year. And I'd been hearing about all the terrible things she'd done for just as long. Sarah, she seems pretty aware of her effect on people, then and now. Of all the ways, big and small, said and unsaid, that people come to trust each other. To trust her.
I've always been told I'm a really good listener, right? And I maximized that while I was lying, right? People, when you create space, people fill that space. And I had always been really, I had always been able to kind of keep my mouth shut and be quiet and not share anything. I'd really learned that really well.
Sarah went on from there, talking about her old job and who she once was, because, as you might have guessed, she's no longer a social worker. She has another life now, very different life, one in which she has a great deal of time to think about what she did and the people she hurt most.
I don't think it's ever going to be easy to think about the people I hurt. And because these are people that even before they knew I hurt them, right, I was hurting them, right, because I was lying to them. And they were people I called every day, that I spent most of my weekends with, that they were my friends, some of them my best friends. And I think about that now, and that's really hard.
When Sarah says this, she's really talking about two people who trusted her deeply. In this episode, we're going to hear from both of them. And these aren't just stories about friendship. They're about what happens when you meet someone, a confidant, who seems to get you and understand what you're going through. Someone who listens quietly with what seems like empathy. But herein lies the danger.
What if that very person takes your most personal struggles and uses them to their advantage, sees them as an opportunity? Then the line between empathy and manipulation is thinner than we'd care to admit. And sometimes the people who know us best are the ones we should fear the most. I'm Jake Halpern.
And I'm Jess McHugh.
And this is Deep Cover Season 6, The Truth About Sarah. Episode 3, The Confidant.
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Chapter 5: What lies did Sarah tell to maintain her facade?
Sam is in her 50s with short blonde hair. She's a physical therapist. And for years, she was Sarah's physical therapist.
She was really kind. She definitely knew me and she knew, I think, what I wanted to talk about type thing, if that makes sense.
What was it that drew you to her, especially in those early days?
It definitely was her intelligence. I mean, her intelligence just sparked something in me.
Sarah and Sam first met in the fall of 2018, just a few months after Sarah's wedding to Nicole, the wedding attended by all her VFW friends. By this point, Sarah was fully immersed in this veteran role. Sam told me about the moment when Sarah first came in for a consultation.
She was really quiet and reserved. You know, she answered questions, but very kind of matter-of-fact. Definitely seemed like things she was uncomfortable with, like she didn't want me to look at her hip.
This was the Sarah who, in her own words, had always been able to, quote, keep her mouth shut and be quiet and not share anything. Someone who let the silences do the talking. But Sarah did say she had been injured in Iraq.
She said they hit an IED, and she got hit with a door that got blown in and hit her in the hip. She wasn't really limping, because this wasn't a brand-new injury. This is something that had happened a long time ago, so it was more like a chronic thing.
Sam had worked with trauma patients before, so when Sarah didn't want to show Sam her scar, she didn't push. Plus, she already knew a little about Sarah's supposed military past because one of Sarah's gym buddies had connected them. Sarah got into a routine of twice-weekly PT with Sam. And eventually, the Wounded Warrior Project started paying for it. Sarah was part of their independence program.
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Chapter 6: How did Sarah's relationship with Sam develop?
Sam was recently divorced, and Sarah told her, in that way she does so well, I get it. My marriage isn't working out either. Yeah, that's right. Sarah told Sam that she was also getting divorced.
It was less than a year after they got married that she said that just the marriage wasn't working out and that they were separated. But she also said they did have an open marriage.
None of this was true, at least not according to Sarah's wife, Nicole. At the time, they were still living together, still married, and not in an open marriage. That's not what she told Sam. This, by the way, is also classic Sarah, as we've learned. And it's a pattern I've seen with women scammers in general.
They often find emotional common ground with victims, even when that shared trauma is totally made up. And it worked.
I think, like anything, basically, you just... You spend more time with someone and then you just appreciate who that person is. And then you find yourself wanting to spend more and more time. We just like enjoyed our time together. And then it just turned into more.
And by more, Sam means Sam and Sarah went from having a professional relationship to a friendship to a love affair. One that was really romantic. They started going on a ton of trips together.
Um, let's see. We went to Florida. We went to Vail. We went to the Bahamas. Yeah. Oh, we went to California. And then like, you know, little driving around New England type stuff.
And it wasn't just a fling. Their lives became really entwined. Much of this I actually learned from other interviews. Sarah would talk about Sam as her partner so much that it got really confusing for us as we reported this. There were times I would talk to someone for this story and they'd mention Sarah's significant other. And I had to double check. Who did you think was Sarah's wife?
A woman named Sam or a woman named Nicole? Oftentimes people said Sam. Sarah was living a full-on double life with Sam. A second double life. Because she was still living with her actual wife at the time, Nicole. Still, Sarah found a way to spend lots of time with Sam. In fact, Sarah and Sam would socialize with Sarah's VFW pals. Sam met Sarah's mom and a brother.
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Chapter 7: What was the impact of Sarah's deception on her friends?
Wow.
Yeah. And she said that her dad was a two-star general.
Sarah would show Sam pictures of her five brothers with their wives and kids, Brody, Joel, Oliver. She'd tell her about their marriage spats or what they were dealing with at work, about their childhood growing up in Georgia. One brother in particular was worrying Sarah, Joel. She told Sam that he was also a vet who now did private military contracting.
He decided that he was going to do this mission because they would make a lot of money for these missions.
Sarah told Sam that while Joel was on this mission, he got shot and ended up in a coma and that her mom flew to the Middle East to bring him back to the U.S. But the doctors couldn't revive him. They told Sarah that he would never wake up. One day, Sarah tells Sam, I need to fly to Georgia now. I have to be the one to take him off of life support.
I said, I'll go with you. This is going to be a really hard thing. I'll go with you. You know, we can fly down there and, you know, I can support you. And she's like, no, no, it's fine. I'll do it. And she called me at two o'clock in the morning. I'll never freak. She called me at two o'clock in the morning and said that it's done. And he was gone.
Sam was devastated for Sarah. Here was this woman, dealing with all of these injuries, and now this? And just to zoom out for a second, because it can be easy to get lost in Sarah's world. The people in those photos that Sarah shared, they were real people with real lives of their own. They just weren't Sarah's brothers.
This version of Sarah, the person with the big military family from Georgia, it's someone only a few people saw. And my take is that maybe it's because she couldn't really let Sam into her family life because her whole family had watched her marry Nicole. They'd been to the home that she and Nicole still shared. But I think it's deeper than that.
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Chapter 8: What are the dangers of misplaced trust?
Sarah seems to have understood something fundamental. Tragedy brings us together. Whether it's a friendship or a romantic partnership, being vulnerable enough with another person to let them help you through a crisis, to stand by you at a funeral or a hospital bed. This is where real intimacy is created. And Sarah seems to have taken this idea and just run with it.
Sam, of course, didn't know any of this at the time. She continued bringing Sarah deeper into her world, her real world.
She was very, very meshed into my life. She knew my family intimately.
Sam's mother has been battling stage 3 ovarian cancer for years. So while Sam drove her mother up to Boston for treatment at Dana-Farber, Sarah would help out. She'd help Sam's kids with their homework, plan meals for the family, walk her mother's dog. And get this. While Sam was taking care of her mother's illness, holding her hand through chemo, She was also doing the same for Sarah.
Sarah had told her the cancer lie, too, said she had lung cancer. Sarah told Sam, I'm terrified, overwhelmed with medical results. I just can't take any more bad news. So Sam started receiving Sarah's test results, and then she would be the one to relay those results to Sarah. More than once, Sam remembers sitting anxiously in her PT practice, refreshing her email, waiting for results to come in.
I remember crying in my practice, getting bad news. But then I remember getting really, really great news and then being able to tell her and that kind of stuff. It was a big roller coaster. It was awful. It was awful. Yeah, there was a lot of emotional strife on my part, you know, a lot.
As both Sarah's partner and her caregiver, Sam was in Sarah's world twice over, totally enmeshed. Fast forward to January 2022, the moment when everything started to spiral out of control. News was getting around that Sarah may have lied about a great many things, including her service in the Marines, her medals, possibly even her claims of having cancer.
When the news first reached Sam, she was in total disbelief. She'd seen a pile of proof over the years. Her enrollment in the Wounded Warrior Independence Program. Years of blood work that she'd received directly from the VA. Sam was trying to wrap her head around this, so she hopped on the phone with one of Sarah's VFW buddies, a guy named Justin. They'd gotten to know each other over the years.
She wanted his perspective. Can you believe this? This is crazy. Someone's making this up. You know, like, why would they do this? Why would they make this up about her? This is insane.
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