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UNMASKING SAMANTHA COOKES

Alan Bradley is an award-winning Irish documentary director, actor and writer. In 2024 he won the Young Director Award for Documentary in Cannes and has directed multiple critically acclaimed documentaries for RTÉ, BBC and VMTV, including Patrick: A Young Traveller Lost, which won the Radharc Award. This is his debut book.

UNMASKING SAMANTHA COOKES

The Many Lives of a Serial Fraudster

ALAN BRADLEY

First published in 2026 by Merrion Press

10 George’s Street

Newbridge Co. Kildare

Ireland

www.merrionpress.ie

978 1 78537 593 4 (Paper)

978 1 78537 597 2 (eBook)

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

Typeset in Calluna 12/18 pt

Cover design by Fiachra McCarthy

Front cover image courtesy of Ronan Kelly, RTÉ

Merrion Press is a member of Publishing Ireland.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Somestories are so extraordinary, involving an intricate mesh of deceit that entangles so many people, that the telling of them requires more than just a recording of the facts – it demands empathy and respect for those whose lives are forever changed. This is one of those stories.

For over a decade, Samantha Cookes moved under the radar, slipping through identities and lives across the UK and Ireland. Posing as a therapist, a nanny and even a terminally ill awardwinning author, she wove a tapestry of lies so intricate that many who crossed her path were left shattered and searching for answers. Yet, by her various acts of deception, she unknowingly forged a community of remarkable women, mothers, caregivers and survivors, each carrying their own burdens and some caring for children with profound needs, bound together by their shared pain and a growing resolve to stop Cookes from wreaking any further damage.

This book draws on extensive interviews with Samantha’s many victims and those who knew her best, as well as court records, multiple news sources, Samantha’s own discarded writings, documents and social media content, and the documentary Bad Nanny, produced by the author with Alleycats Films and commissioned by RTÉ and BBC Northern Ireland,

which illuminated Samantha’s decade-long trail of deceit. Through the voices of those she targeted, we uncover not only her manipulations, but also the fierce strength and solidarity of the women she thought she could break.

Due to the sensitive nature of the experiences shared here, some names and locations have been changed to protect the identities of individuals involved. The events remain undeniably vivid, and the impact of Samantha’s actions echoes far beyond these pages. For legal reasons the identities and genders of Samantha’s living children have been concealed.

As you read, you will enter a world where trust is weaponised and shattered, but also where resilience and courage rise, defying even the most skilful of predators.

PROLOGUE

Carrie Jade was dazzling. That was the image she had built and burnished, brick by brick. She was terminally ill. A disability activist. A fierce advocate for Huntington’s disease awareness. A guest voice on Newstalk radio, a featured profile in the Irish Independent. An award-winning author with a leading London literary agent and even a Financial Times essay award to her name. A groundbreaking entrepreneur with backing and funding from legitimate institutions like the Alzheimer’s Society UK. She spoke eloquently about life with Huntington’s disease, telling audiences that she was on borrowed time. She filmed TikTok videos about resilience, wrote online blogs about lifting others up, positioned herself as the heroic underdog elevated by intellect and courage.

Who could argue with this story? She was courageous, tragic, inspiring. The kind of figure people rallied behind without question. To thousands online, Carrie Jade Williams was a phoenix emerging proudly through the flames.

Then, one ordinary evening, she opened her TikTok app and the phoenix stumbled.

The screen was alive. The notification icon along the bottom bar was pulsing red with new activity. Hashtags blossomed like a rash.

At first, it was outrage, the story she’d told having done its work. She had claimed that guests staying at her home as part of an Airbnb let were suing her because her disability aids had ‘triggered’ them. TikTok fumed on Carrie Jade’s behalf, comments piling in, allies rallying to defend her:

@Mazxxxxxxxxx ‘What the hell? I am so shocked and sickened. How can this woman who is TERMINALLY ILL be treated so badly?!?! Shame on Air BnB!! ’

@PrimalEmpress ‘What the hell is wrong with the world? This woman has Huntington’s disease!! Can we all go and support her please?!’

Anger and outrage were Carrie Jade’s shield, her currency. Her hashtag, #thisworldcanbeaccessible, was trending across TikTok for all to see. For a heartbeat, she felt the familiar sweet burn of success. But then she saw them. The other comments.

‘Oh, it’s Lucy …’

‘Sophia?’

‘OMG that’s her, she’s back!’

‘Don’t you remember us Rebecca?’

‘She’s a scammer. BEWARE!’

The words sprawled across her carefully curated identity like graffiti on a shrine. She scrolled, numb, breath held.

These messengers weren’t supposed to know. They weren’t supposed to find her here. Carrie hit delete, delete, delete, delete, in frantic repetition, her screen a battlefield she could no longer control. When more appeared, she shut off the comments altogether. Silence.

But silence wasn’t enough. You can’t kill the past by flicking a switch. It had found her.

Cold panic rolled up her spine, that familiar shiver that always came when the mask began to slip. She knew this feeling all too well. The sensation of walls closing in. Of stories unravelling. It was happening again.

She wasn’t really Carrie Jade. Just as she hadn’t really been Rebecca, or Lucy, or Claudia, or Sophia before that. She was Samantha. Samantha Jade Cookes. Behind the awards and interviews and carefully lit TikTok videos, she remained the same restless figure she had always been, a fraud constructed from borrowed names and stolen narratives.

And so, Samantha once more pulled the move that she had perfected over a decade of reinvention. She packed only the essentials into a holdall and closed the front door on her latest life. Under the cover of darkness, she disappeared. Somewhere out there was the next place, the next identity, the next set of victims waiting for the latest version of herself she hadn’t yet created. But this time the Garda Síochána was hot on her heels.

1

THE MAKING OF A LIAR

In a discarded journal, Samantha Cookes left behind a revealing statement: ‘Lies? Yes, everyone lies. I’ve lied ever since I could remember. It’s the only thing I do well, and I think we should all play to our strengths, don’t you?’

Despite becoming a prolific scam artist, Cookes was not born a master manipulator. She grew into it, layer by deceitful layer, honing her craft slowly, until the lies she wrapped around herself were like a second skin. By the time people knew her as Carrie Jade Williams, she could spin a story so convincingly that even the wary would lean in to listen. In the very beginning, however, her lies were too obvious, too loud, betraying their maker.

Samantha Jade Cookes was born on 7 November 1988, in Gloucester Maternity Hospital, to Janice and Leslie Cookes. Three years later, her younger brother, Adam, was born. A picture-perfect family, the Cookes children grew up in the lower-middle-class suburb of Watson Grove in Abbeymead, Gloucester. Samantha’s childhood was set against a backdrop of modest semi-detached houses and a close-knit community, where families lived stable, orderly lives. The streets were lined

with tidy gardens and, in the quiet, tree-lined avenues of Watson Grove, there was a steady, unhurried rhythm to daily life. While Abbeymead was not overly affluent, it was a place where children could roam the streets safely and neighbours knew each other by name. Yet, behind the façade of calm suburban streets and tidy gardens, where childhood innocence and routine prevailed, something complex was taking root within young Samantha.

Samantha’s mother described her as a quiet child, one who found refuge in the pages of books, a world where stories unfolded with comforting order and certainty. But as Samantha grew, those stories began to take on a different shape. She didn’t just read about other lives and adventures; she created them, weaving intricate fantasies. What had started as harmless daydreaming now carried a malignant undertone, a whisper of the darker craft to come, where truth became as malleable as the tales she told. The young Samantha – Sam to friends – quickly earned a reputation not for brilliance or scandal, but for the sheer audacity of her stories. They were outlandish, sprawling things, impossible to prove yet told with such conviction that they left listeners momentarily spellbound.

Though she later claimed to have attended a bohemian Steiner school, the truth was far more polished. Samantha was educated at the prestigious Denmark Road High School for Girls in Gloucester. Denmark Road, a high-achieving grammar school, became to her a sanctuary, stage and audience rolled into one. She thrived there, initially at least. Classmates recall how charming she could be, how easily she disarmed you with a glance or a laugh. She had the kind of presence that made you listen when she spoke, hungry for whatever came next.

One girl, plagued by relentless bullying, still remembers

Samantha with a kind of awe and gratitude. Samantha was among the few pupils who showed her kindness, a glimmer of warmth amidst the cruelty of school corridors. That, too, was Samantha –a friend you thought you needed.

But alongside this warmth came fabrication, and the stories spilled into lesson breaks and lunch hours like small performances. She once declared she had a sewing machine she intended to bring into school, only later to spin a ludicrous tale of falling down the stairs, the contraption miraculously flying out of her hands and through the window on impact. At first, girls gasped, wide-eyed at the slapstick horror of it. Then, after a string of such melodramas, the gasps turned into glances, the glances into smirks.

For weeks, Samantha wore gloves inside the classroom, murmuring about a terrible skin condition that left her hands raw and unsightly. No one saw so much as a blemish. Then, just as suddenly, the gloves vanished, never to return, as though the condition had healed overnight. Her tall tales always came with expiry dates, never polished enough to last, never planned beyond the moment. It wasn’t long before her schoolmates began to see through them, recognising how quickly the seams came undone. The wary girls learned to take what Samantha Cookes said with a pinch of salt.

There was no real need for the theatrics. These girls lived surrounded by comfort, by friends, by stability, yet Samantha seemed compelled to continue. She began carrying around small notebooks into which she scribbled constantly, as though she needed a written ledger of her inventions, a record to stop one lie colliding too dangerously with another, something she would continue fastidiously in later years as her cons developed. It was during these school years that the patterns were laid for

Samantha’s instinct to embroider the truth, to cut and stitch reality into what she wished it to be. Lies became less a tactic for seeking attention and more a habit, as natural and necessary as breathing. If one collapsed under scrutiny, another was ready to replace it, more elaborate, more alluring. She had learned, even then, that drama drew people close, that sympathy and intrigue were currencies as valuable as charm or pedigree.

Her first boyfriend, Mark (not his real name), remembers a girl whose lying ran so deep it felt like compulsion. So entrenched was her deceit that, on the day they finally broke up, he set up a Google alert for the name ‘Samantha Cookes’. Mark was certain, utterly certain, that one day his first love would resurface, not in his life, but in the headlines.

The two met in 2005, when Samantha was seventeen. To the shy, bookish teenager that Mark was, she seemed to be everything a girl should be: blonde hair falling effortlessly about her shoulders, striking blue eyes, wit as sharp as it was playful, funny, confident and dazzlingly quick. Mark was hooked instantly. Their relationship unfurled with the intoxicating recklessness of first love. To him, it was perfection.

Samantha painted herself as a girl with a heart for others, working a part-time job at the high-end Laura Ashley store in town and volunteering on weekends at a local school for blind children. Between her beauty, her charm and her apparent selflessness, she seemed too good to be true. And she was.

The cracks first appeared in small, awkward slips, details that didn’t quite add up, inconsistencies that at first Mark told himself were misunderstandings. But one lie crumbled after another, and soon her entire backstory dissolved. She wasn’t employed by Laura Ashley. Instead, she clocked in for shifts behind the counter at

Marks & Spencer in central Gloucester. Why lie about such a thing? Mark wondered. The volunteering with blind children? Nothing more than another fabrication. Mark’s head was spinning. This was his first serious romance and he was in love, so in love that he tried to explain it away. When he did confront her, Samantha crumbled, collapsing into floods of tears. He comforted her, convincing himself it was insecurity, a misguided way of trying to impress him, and swallowed his doubts.

Mark recalls how Samantha would daydream about the future constantly, doodling in notebooks, picking out names for their future children, picking out fantasy careers for them to follow as young parents-to-be. She would often ask him to ‘put a baby in her’, a request he found odd and off-putting at his age, when dreams of fatherhood were far from his mind.

Then came a meeting with her mother, Janice. Mark still remembers the line she delivered with frightening bluntness: ‘You can’t believe a word she [Samantha] says. Be careful.’ He laughed nervously, unsettled by the idea of a mother warning a boyfriend against her own daughter. In the weeks that followed, the stories Samantha concocted took on a less benign tone. One night she claimed that Janice had cancer, an aggressive form. She spoke of her mother’s hair falling out in clumps, of hospital visits and whispered prognoses. Mark believed her because what sort of person would invent such a thing? Weeks later, arriving at the Cookes’ family home, he found Janice entirely healthy, hair thick and intact. The lie was so grotesque, so brazen, that it left him disturbed and confused. He confronted Samantha only to be met with tears and hysterics, making him wary of broaching his suspicions going forward.

No honest acknowledgement of any wrongdoing came from

Samantha. To explain away the lies, she invented further fabrications with which to distract, muddy the waters and garner sympathy. Then, one day, Mark received a handwritten letter from her:

Dear Mark,

I’m trying to decide what to say. I thought about just handing you my medical records and the photographs of me when I was sick and waiting for your response, but I wanted you to know what happened in my own words. I don’t expect you to understand my anorexia, I suffered from it and I don’t really understand! Instead I just want you to be aware of it. We both come with a history and I just hope you realise that I’m not that person any more. I was young, impressionable, confused and hurting; that’s not an excuse, just a fact. I’m telling you this because I didn’t want there to be any secrets. I can’t open up to people, not even you, the way you’ve been able to, but after you’ve read this I am prepared to discuss it.

There’s no particular point when my eating disorder began; it would be easier if there was! If I could pinpoint the exact moment that it started, I’d be able to have a reason to show people why, but instead I woke up and found myself in the middle of it. I’m probably making no sense! I hope you don’t mind me writing this and I hope I’m not being too dull. I’m very ashamed, VERY ASHAMED of it and part of me really doesn’t want you to know, but the other part of me knows that if I don’t tell you, it could become an issue.

The first time I was hospitalised was a few weeks after my 12th birthday and was awful. I was fragile and hurting so much that nothing mattered. God, I was such a mess. You can’t make someone eat, nor can you make someone happy when they’re in such a state. I didn’t want to die, but I couldn’t eat, so when I got extremely ill I was hooked up to a feeding tube. Being force fed via a feeding tube is one of the most traumatic and undignified things I have ever been through, I hated it, but at the time it probably saved my life.

You probably think I’m a terribly selfish person. I probably was but I’ve worked really hard to try and prove to everyone that I’m not and that it was the anorexia.

Sure this was another fabrication, and fearful of how deep the deceit went, Mark broke things off. However, Samantha had one more twist reserved for him. Tearfully, she told him she was pregnant. For two weeks he reeled, caught between terror and guilt, until he discovered that the pregnancy too was a lie. As he permanently severed ties with her, he didn’t feel heartbroken so much as haunted. Who had he really been with during those months? What, if anything, had been real?

Mark suspects now that Samantha was honing her craft on him, that their relationship was less a romance and more a rehearsal. Years later, the doubt still lingers – the sense that he never truly knew his girlfriend at all, or what she was capable of becoming.

Leaving Mark reeling in her wake, Samantha wasted no time in moving on. By the summer after her A-levels, she had drawn another boy into her orbit, an eighteen-year-old named Peter (not his real name). Vulnerable, shy and already weathering a turbulent time, Peter was drifting, at odds with both home and school, uncertain of where he belonged when Samantha appeared.

She was everything he believed he wasn’t – beautiful, effervescent and effortlessly confident, the kind of girl who seemed to stride through the world while others stumbled. That she should notice him at all felt miraculous. ‘I just couldn’t believe a beautiful, confident girl like that would be interested in me,’ he later confessed. For Peter, life had suddenly swung in his favour. He was instantly smitten, convinced he had somehow stumbled into a dream he didn’t deserve. ‘Things moved pretty quickly; before I knew it, we were boyfriend and girlfriend. I was on cloud nine!’

Then a mutual friend pulled him aside during a night out, issuing the stark warning: ‘You can’t trust her, everything she says is a lie.’ Peter felt a knot tighten in his stomach, but he ignored it. The thought of losing Samantha, of severing this unlikely connection, was unbearable. He drowned out the doubt, rushing headlong into the relationship.

Once again, it didn’t take long for the cracks to show. There were inconsistencies, small at first, but strange enough to unsettle Peter. On one occasion, Samantha invited him to a barbecue for her vegan friends. In Gloucester, in the early 2000s, veganism was hardly a fashion, not really believable at all. It seemed odd, but Peter accepted it, wanting to please her. Then, without explanation, the barbecue was abruptly cancelled, vanishing as though it had never been planned. He never met her vegan friends – they too vanished. Other nights, she claimed to be out

partying with friends, painting vivid pictures of laughter and chaos, only for Peter to discover, when he turned up to the very same venues, that there was no trace of her. Her stories collapsed on inspection, leaving behind only a hollow feeling of absence. According to Peter, Samantha told her stories with the kind of casual ease that suggested a habit of spinning tales. Sometimes, she seemed to talk as if caught between reality and fantasy, embellishing details so effortlessly it was hard to tell where truth ended and invention began. Yet she never appeared to relish deception in the usual sense; rather, her stories seemed like a world she inhabited as much as created. Samantha’s brilliance was always in the moment, so when she was with him, Peter forgot his doubts. He remembered only that she made him feel seen, wanted, transformed. ‘She made me feel special, no one had ever made me feel like that before.’ It was intoxicating, the way she lit up his difficult life. And that intoxication was stronger, for a time, than truth itself.

Peter recalls that Samantha often spoke, as though idly daydreaming, of a future filled with a quaint, perfect family life. She painted pictures of a house of her own, a devoted husband and a child she could cherish. It was the kind of idyll she returned to again and again, spoken about with such wistful sincerity that it caught Peter off guard. For all her wild stories and dizzying lies, there was something believable in that longing. It seemed to be what she wanted most – a family of her own. A place to belong, where she might anchor herself against the restlessness that hummed beneath her skin. For Peter, hearing her speak that way softened everything. It made the inconsistencies easier to overlook, the doubts easier to silence. What harm could there be, after all, in a girl who dreamed out loud about love and stability? By the time school drew to its inevitable close, Samantha’s

web of lies had left her increasingly isolated, ostracised by many of the friends she once had. So, rather than hanging out with Samantha’s friends, Peter found himself spending a lot of time with the Cookes family. They welcomed him with easy warmth. Janice was sociable and engaging, a stark contrast to Leslie, who guarded himself behind a quiet reserve. The family dynamics felt ordinary, even reassuring, to Peter. Little did he know just how quickly the ground beneath him would shift.

As summer faded, Samantha left for York University to study politics and law, carrying with her the bright promise of a future they both imagined. The couple attempted to hold together the fragile threads of their young relationship across the miles. Peter recalls visiting Samantha for the weekend at her university halls in October 2007. She was excited to see him, but he remembers that, strangely, she kept him separate from the new friends she had spoken about so often in the previous weeks. The couple spent the entire weekend squirrelled away in Samantha’s room, avoiding all others. Samantha assured Peter she was using contraception – the coil – so there was no need to use condoms as they always had done in the past. ‘It’s completely safe, don’t be such a worrier,’ she giggled. It was a moment Peter would later look back on with deep regret.

On the Sunday evening, as the October air cut thin and sharp, Peter caught the train from York to Birmingham and then onwards to Gloucester. With distance growing by the second between himself and his girlfriend, he knew in his heart that something wasn’t right about their relationship. Why had she hidden him away from her new friends? Did these people even exist? Did he want to be in a relationship with a girl who made him question such basic things? Peter made the decision there

and then to end things. By text. At the same time, he changed his Facebook status from ‘in a relationship’ to ‘single’ for the whole world to see. It is a moment he now recalls with shame.

What followed was relentless. There was a barrage of messages from Samantha, a storm of emotion and tactics, sometimes furious, shouting into the void, other times fragile, pleading for his return. Weeks passed and Peter attempted to move on with his life. Then, one night, out of the blue, his Nokia 3210 mobile phone buzzed in the quiet stillness of his small, cluttered room. It was a message from Samantha. He stared at the screen, hesitant, a pit growing in his stomach. Slowly, he unlocked it.

The words hit him like a blow.

‘I’m pregnant.’

For a heartbeat, nothing registered but the cold flush seeping through his veins.

Pregnant.

The word felt foreign, dangerous, too heavy for a boy still unsteady on the edge of adulthood. His mind recoiled, scrambling for reasons, for excuses. It had to be another story, a trick spun to trap him in her web. He thought back to that moment in Samantha’s bedroom in York University Halls. ‘I’m on birth control, I have the coil, there’s nothing to worry about.’ Was she lying to him? She had dreamt aloud so often of having a baby with him, could she have tricked him into it? Peter didn’t know what to think.

His fingers trembled as he reread the message, hoping somehow the weight of those two words would dissipate with time. What he didn’t know then, what he couldn’t know, was that Samantha was, this time, telling the truth. She was, in fact, pregnant. As Peter lay there, in that quiet hour, he felt the ground shift beneath him as his life began unravelling before him.

Over the coming weeks, as the news sank in, Peter told no one of the pregnancy – it was a secret he kept to himself. Sticking his head in the sand, he ignored further messages from Samantha, declining her phone calls. Young and terrified of the prospect of fatherhood with a woman he couldn’t trust, he fled. He booked a one-way ticket to New Zealand and cut off all contact from Samantha. He still sincerely doubted she was telling the truth about this baby, but he wasn’t going to hang around to find out for sure. This is a moment in his life that he looks back on with little pride. He left Samantha in the lurch, he knows that now. In quiet moments he often thinks how different things might have been for both of them if he had made a different decision. But that was not to be.

For Samantha, the pregnancy marked a fissure in her carefully built illusions, a turning point from which there was no retreat. It heralded a spiral into a world of fabricated identities, betrayals and deceptions that would fracture hundreds of lives across both the UK and Ireland for over a decade.