Gaslighting, fake illnesses, real pregnancies – and a trail of deception leading from Yorkshire to Kenmare. The first episode of the excellent two-part documentary Bad Nanny (RTÉ One, Monday) takes off like a true crime podcast on rocket boots as it tells the incredible story of Carrie Jade Williams, aka Samantha Cookes – a serial fraudster who posed as a terminally ill author when she moved to Kenmare, Co Kerry.
Seemingly sweet and harmless, the chirpy Englishwoman was in her element in small-town Ireland. “If I met her today, I’d still like her. She has that personality,” says one former acquaintance. “She’s very likable. She’s a people person. You would go, ‘she’s lovely’.” Those qualities allowed her to deceive her neighbours, her landlord – even RTÉ’s Documentary On One, which greenlit a radio doc about her trip to Los Angeles for experimental surgery for her terminal Huntington’s disease, her regular updates about her health having made her a minor star on TikTok.
But Carrie Jade Williams was not terminally ill – and her backstory was a tissue of fraud extended to university and earlier. In Shrewsbury in England, an old college friend recalled how bubbly and friendly his pal “Sam” had been. Until, that is, he asked for his money back after she claimed to have booked tickets for a weekend away.
Confronted by her friend, the mask fell away. “She went from the bubbly girl to being really horrible.” When a tutor advised the friend to dig deeper, he discovered she had been convicted of defrauding a couple by posing as their surrogate parent.
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One twist follows another. Cookes’s first child had been removed from her by social services in the UK and entrusted to the care of the father. Then she became pregnant again. She turned up pregnant in Edenderry, Co Offaly, where she ran a camp for kids and hoodwinked locals into paying for a non-existent weekend in Disneyland.
However, the most disturbing aspect of the documentary concerns her work as a nanny in Tullamore, Co Offaly, where she bonded with Layla and her daughter, Charlie. “I was 10 turning 11,” says Charlie. “She was genuinely a big ball of fun, everything up my alley.” Once again, lie followed lie, and after “Lucy”, as the family knew her, faked a fainting fit in Tesco in Maynooth, Co Kildare, Layla’s mother went through the nanny’s belongings.
“There was a little index card notebook and I just started to read,” Layla recalls. I just went, ‘Who have we had looking after our children?’”
This horribly gripping case has also been the subject of an RTÉ podcast. But the unsettling story translates readily to the screen and Bad Nanny skilfully weaves together Cookes’s many deceptions to tell the hard-to-believe tale of a woman whose forked tongue allows her to move freely around Ireland and Britain and whose ultimate superpower was her ability to be nice to strangers.
