Serial con artist Samantha Cookes - who posed as a wholesome, smiling nanny - has been jailed for fraud. But if you thought you knew the full extent of her deception, this new book reveals she had more victims and lies than previously known about

Published: 23:12, 10 June 2026 | Updated: 23:12, 10 June 2026 One year on from the airing of the jaw-dropping, two-part documentary Bad Nanny, its director Alan Bradley is back on the case again with a new book about serial con artist and master manipulator Samantha Cookes. In truth, it’s a subject he hasn’t left behind since first becoming involved in laying bare the shocking extent of her fraud and the emotional havoc she wreaked during her decade-long scam. Unmasking Samantha Cookes is a ‘more comprehensive version’ of the RTÉ/BBC NI co-production’, he explains, with new victims revealed, further cons uncovered and additional aliases brought to light. Cookes may be in jail, serving time for multiple charges of theft and social welfare fraud, but the ramifications of her actions still impact the people she tricked.  And they have lasting consequences for those who got closest to her, including the father of her two children, who was left devastated when they were removed from him as a direct result of her actions. For over ten years, 38-year-old Gloucester-born Cookes used a revolving door of false identities to inveigle her way into the lives of vulnerable families and communities, both in person and online.  She masqueraded as a surrogate mother, a nanny, a child therapist, a writer, an occupational therapist, and a health and safety consultant.  In undoubtedly her most shocking scam, she reinvented herself as Carrie Jade Williams, a supposedly terminally ill, award-winning author. Cookes was prosecuted for a surrogacy scam in England and given a nine-month suspended sentence, moving to Ireland a few years later, where her cons became increasingly audacious.  But with the help of TikTok sleuths and many of her victims, who came together to expose her, she was eventually caught and convicted. For Bradley, being given access to some of her paperwork allowed him to dig deeper and plug any gaps in the previous narrative. ‘It’s the craziest story imaginable,’ says Bradley, an award-winning director and actor, whose documentaries include Patrick: A Young Traveller Lost, Stalked and Anorexia, My Family And Me. ‘To be on the inside telling it was just like peeling an onion, layer after layer. I’d think, surely this is it now, but no, there’d be a whole new host of victims, a whole other type of scam, a whole other strange angle. ‘What happened after the documentary aired is that more people came forward with stories and filled in different parts of the timeline. Samatha Cookes in Gloucester in 2006 ‘Then a source came to me with two boxes of her musings, her journals and her documents that provided me with an insight into what was going on with her world, her thinking at the time. ‘All that combined into one big, colossal timeline, so for me, the story wasn’t finished yet. Every time I thought it was, I’d find something else.’ Bradley says that before writing the book, he presumed the gaps in Cookes’s timeline in Ireland were downtimes from her cons, that she’d been found out, exposed and forced to move on to take stock and quietly prepare for her next scam.  He thought she’d been keeping herself under the radar in those periods but was shocked to discover that this wasn’t the case. Filling in the holes in her timeline, he could see she was still at her work, popping up in new towns and villages, conniving and convincing her way into new lives and communities to start all over again. ‘What struck me is that when you talk to every person who met her, they’d say she was full of energy, full of joie de vivre, full of life. Yet she’d just fled a scenario where she had been outed,’ says Bradley. ‘The next day she’d be back out there again, full of beans and full of new stories. It’s incredible really, to have all that energy to do that,’ he adds.  At the Circuit Criminal Court in Tralee, Co. Kerry, last March, Cookes was sentenced to four years in jail, with the final 12 months suspended  ‘She’d do things that required her to know a lot. The way she was posing as someone with Huntington’s disease, that’s a complex enough condition, there’s a lot to it, yet she knew all the lingo, all the symptoms. ‘In her documents I found long articles she’d printed off about neurology in the brain. She was researching all this stuff in great depth so she could just rattle it off like it was second nature to her. ‘She didn’t pick the easiest things, she made her world quite nuanced and complicated, but I guess that’s what made her so believable as well.’ Most of Cookes’s victims were introduced to her under a variety of different guises – Carrie Jade Williams, Jade O’Sullivan, Lucy Fitzwilliams, Lucy Hart, Rebecca Fitzgerald among them. But Bradley discovered more. In Galway in 2019, she posed as au pair Samantha Black, fabricating a fake engagement and adoption backstory. She worked as an au pair for a mother of four and spread malicious rumours that her employer was neglectful.  The mother didn’t sleep alone in her home until Cookes was sent to jail in Limerick in March 2025. In Wexford in 2023, she adopted the alias Jane Harris, after being exposed in Kerry while posing as writer Carrie Jade Williams with Huntington’s disease.  On leaving, she threatened legal action against her elderly landlord, demanding that he pay her compensation. Her fraudulent claims didn’t end there. She threatened action against a St Vincent de Paul volunteer, demanding compensation over a boiler she had received from the charity, filed Workplace Relations Commission complaints against Eir, alleging disability discrimination and attempted to obtain state-funded accessible housing.  In 2024, Cookes embedded herself in a family in Celbridge as Sadie Harris but by this stage, her deeds were catching up with her.  When a local woman recognised her from a podcast about Carrie Jade Williams, Cookes fled during the night after being confronted by her host family. At the Circuit Criminal Court in Tralee, Co Kerry, last March, Cookes was sentenced to four years in jail, with the final 12 months suspended.  She pleaded guilty to 18 counts of deception and theft, having claimed over €60,000 from the Department of Social Protection in supplementary welfare and disability payments, by fraudulently alleging she was terminally ill. Bradley’s research for his book revealed that she had also enrolled in multiple universities in Ireland under false names, then filed disability and discrimination claims against them.  At Sligo IT, posing as Jade Williams, studying occupation safety and health, she filed a claim and the university settled, paying her a sum of compensation. As Carrie Jade Williams, she applied to the Alzheimer’s Society UK’s Accelerator Programme, proposing an innovative app designed to support those with neurological conditions to communicate more easily.  She was accepted on to the programme and granted over €9,000. The app never materialised. ‘The president of one of the universities wrote a letter to her, apologising,’ says Bradley. ‘She got herself a literary agent in London, a leading agent who believed her whole spiel about how she would deliver a manuscript. Of course, that never happened either. ‘She believed she could get away with anything, and she just got bigger and bolder. When she became Carrie Jade, she felt she was unstoppable at that point.’ Bradley believes there are several reasons why so many people fell victim to Cookes’s lies. Firstly, he cites her ‘genius’ when it came to dealing with loopholes and institutions and, secondly, her ability to play to people’s emotions. He also thinks the ‘wholesome’ image she portrayed made others feel safe and comfortable around her, though believes this wasn’t necessarily contrived, and admits he even began to feel sorry for her when he saw her in court. Author Alan Bradley believes there are several reasons why so many people fell victim to Cookes’s lies ‘Everything she told was built around emotion and empathy,’ says Bradley. ‘She claimed she was adopted from Bessborough Mother and Baby Home and was looking for her birth mother, she was terminally ill, her fiancé and baby had died in a car crash – all emotional stuff that you wouldn’t question. ‘When I watched her in court in Tralee, I found myself empathising with her, despite everything I knew about her. ‘There’s just something about how she looks. She looks so lovely and trustworthy, just like a primary school teacher, really wholesome, you know? I don’t think that’s even something she controls, she just looks wholesome, so you trust her.’ Any feelings of empathy he might have had for Cookes were shortlived when he discovered among her possessions, legal letters to her family in England claiming her share of her late father’s estate.  For some time, he’d been considering the possibility that Cookes had lost herself in her various aliases and genuinely believed she was multiple characters. But the letters to her family put paid to that theory. ‘I remember thinking, so there you are, apparently terminally ill as Carrie Jade, who can’t hold a pen, yet you’re writing legal letters as Samantha Cookes to your family, so you are 100 per cent in control of what you’re doing and you’re actively choosing this,’ he says. ‘You’re not lost in a fantasy that you can’t control. That really shocked me. A part of me hoped that a little bit of her couldn’t help it, but I think it’s a choice actually. ‘I always hope that there’s a bit of good in everyone. I was trying to see it but at the end of the day, I just couldn’t.’ Speaking to Joe (not his real name), the father of Cooke’s two children, also stunned Bradley. Cookes was pregnant when she came to Ireland in 2013, perhaps hoping the State here would help her financially and provide her with a home. Joe had secured custody of their first child in Britain, unaware that Cookes was expecting again. When their second baby was born, Joe was granted custody again.  But when it emerged he had gone to Ireland to see Cookes at her request and was still being manipulated by her, both children were taken from him, with the British courts ruling that he could not reliably keep the children safe from their mother. Joe ended up ‘broken, lost and alone’. Another aspect of the story which astounds Bradley is Cookes’s ability to latch on to a new identity so quickly and seamlessly, without looking back at the one she’s just left behind. ‘Seeing it in her journals was so interesting,’ he says.  ‘When she’s done, she’s done. She moves on from a community, a community she was intimately involved with, living among, involved in these children’s lives, yet she moves on and you never see reference to them again. It’s so weird.’ Bradley is full of admiration for the many people who shared their stories with him along the way and says Cookes’s victims, though still angry and in some cases, deeply traumatised, are determined to ensure this never happens again. He says they continue to raise awareness about the woman who left a trail of destruction and that they want to keep her face out there to warn other people, should she ever try and revisit her scams on her release from prison. New book Unmasking Samantha Cookes picks up where the two-part documentary left off It’s such a disturbing, fascinating story with so many twists and turns that Bradley believes it will ‘inevitably’ be made into a Netflix drama.  He can’t think of another scammer quite as prolific as Cookes nor as inventive in her identities.  He hopes the day will come when she puts her ‘obvious talents for writing’ into something positive, a fictional world where she can create without causing harm. Does he think the story ends here? ‘That very much depends on Samantha herself,’ Bradley replies.  ‘I think everyone deserves another chance to live a better life and when she’s served her time, I have to hope that she might go off and live a quiet life and just be Samantha Cookes and make something of herself. ‘But maybe she won’t and there’ll be more of this story to tell. We’ll just have to wait and see. ‘I’ll keep my interest there, and if she rears her head again, then we’ll be back at it again. I owe it to the victims, who trusted me with their stories.’ Unmasking Samantha Cookes by Alan Bradley is published by Merrion Press and is out now Sorry we are not currently accepting comments on this article.