June 2, 2025 • 40 mins
One overlooked detail in Sarah’s story: she was married. Her wife, Nicole, never spoke to the press or the feds. She remained a mystery—until now.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. Hey, this is Jake. You're about to listen to
episode five. And just a reminder, this is a six
part series, so if you haven't heard all the previous episodes,
I encourage you to go back and do that now
before you listen to this. You'll get a lot more
out of the whole series. Also, just so you know,
(00:37):
you can hear more ad free episodes from this season
of Deep Cover before they're released to the public. By
signing up for Pushkin Plus. You'll also get bonus episodes,
full audio books, and binges from your favorite Pushkin hosts
and authors. Find Pushkin Plus on the deep Cover show
page on Apple Podcasts or at pushkin dot fm, slash plus. Okay,
(01:02):
let's get into it. Heads up. In this episode, there
are references to suicidal ideation and so actual abuse.
Speaker 2 (01:12):
Previously on Deep Cover.
Speaker 3 (01:15):
The chief of VA Police called me and said, hey,
you know, I think we might have a problem with
an employee.
Speaker 4 (01:25):
What immediately occurred to me was that as soon as
I told her I cancer, even though she was telling
me it was okay, in the back of her mind
she was thinking I can take advantage of this.
Speaker 5 (01:37):
Do you realize that Sarah used to bill, one of
your mother's bills from Dana Farber.
Speaker 2 (01:45):
And I said, no, I didn't realize that.
Speaker 4 (01:46):
I didn't know that.
Speaker 5 (01:49):
I was so afraid, right, I was so so afraid.
Not because I thought it was illegal, not because I'm
thinking I'm going to go to prison, but because I'm like,
they are not going to be my friends anymore.
Speaker 2 (02:01):
I'm not going to have.
Speaker 5 (02:02):
These people in my life.
Speaker 1 (02:06):
One detail that's often overlooked in this story, Sarah Cavanaugh
was married. She had a wife, a woman named Nicole.
Speaker 6 (02:16):
For us, Nicole was kind of the black box in
this story, the person who might hold the key to
understanding Sarah, because no matter who Sarah pretended to be
in public, she was coming home to Nicole most nights,
to the cozy little house they shared in East Granwitch
Trode Island. It's a charming cape with a steep gabled
(02:39):
roof and dormer windows and the flowering dogwood in the
front yard.
Speaker 1 (02:46):
And we wondered what went on in that home, what
did Nicole know, when did she know it? And did
she see a side of Sarah that the rest of
the world didn't.
Speaker 6 (02:59):
Nicole is an intensely private person. She never talked to
the press or investigators, never made a statement, just kept quiet.
We wrote her letter, and to our surprise, she called
us and invited us to her house for an interview.
Speaker 1 (03:17):
When we met, I did something I don't usually do.
I just asked her, why did you agree to talk
to us?
Speaker 7 (03:27):
Yeah, I asked myself that question several times before I
called you. I know a lot of people are curious,
and I don't have an obligation to share, but I
do think that it means something to me that the
story is told in whole, in full, and not part way.
Speaker 6 (03:46):
We're going to take a deep dive into Sarah and
Nichole's house, the place where their lives converged, and the pats.
Speaker 2 (03:53):
They both took to get there.
Speaker 6 (03:56):
Sarah's path was fraught, complicated, and full of hidden struggles,
struggles that would re emerge and eventually lead to the
moment when Federal AI agents came knocking.
Speaker 7 (04:12):
Picked up the phone just to check my messages, and
that she said, you need to come home. The FBI
is here. That's when I knew that it was that fast.
I had nothing until I had that.
Speaker 1 (04:37):
I'm Jake Halpern and I'm Jess mchughe and this is
Deep Cover Season six, The Truth About Sarah, Episode five,
(05:04):
The Wife.
Speaker 6 (05:12):
Our interview with Nicole came with a disclaimer.
Speaker 7 (05:16):
There's a lot of things that I, frankly, I just
don't know if what I was told or what I
know is even true. So I can definitely speak to
my perspective on things of what I understood to be
true at the time that I was living in but
I have found out along the way that there are
(05:37):
things that I thought were true that just aren't.
Speaker 6 (05:41):
It struck me that she was basically questioning her own
perception of reality, and this we came to learn is
where Nicole's mind still is still spinning, still grasping for
traction on the solid truth we told her.
Speaker 2 (05:58):
We get it.
Speaker 6 (06:00):
Let's start from the beginning.
Speaker 1 (06:03):
Nicole grew up in New Mexico, but moved to New
England in her late twenties. She's outdoors, just like Sarah,
so when the two of them connected online, one of
their first dates was a hike. They met at Lincoln Woods,
a park with rugged hills, tree line trails and a
tranquil pond.
Speaker 7 (06:24):
I just remember it being falling, you know, the leaves
here in the fall are gorgeous, and it was nice
out that day, And she and I always just had
really good conversation and connection. It was easy. She's very
easy to talk to, you know, just made you feel
like you're the only person there.
Speaker 1 (06:43):
Nicole says, Sarah was just very in tune. Those were
her words. Sarah presented herself to Nicole as a native
New Englander with a brother and two divorced parents. All true.
By the way. She said she worked as a mental
health professional, also true.
Speaker 7 (07:00):
So I understood that she was a basically a social
worker at the VA.
Speaker 5 (07:05):
Got it.
Speaker 6 (07:05):
And at that point did she tell you that she
was a veteran or No?
Speaker 7 (07:09):
No, she never told me she was a veteran. Not ever.
Speaker 6 (07:13):
Sarah and Nicole became close quickly, and after about a
year or so, they bought a home together, that cozy
little house I told you about in East Greenwich. Nicole
says that moving in was a big deal and that
Sarah had certain expectations.
Speaker 7 (07:30):
One thing that she was big on was she didn't
want to be roommates forever, which can happen to people,
especially same sex couples. And she was like very adamant
that she didn't want that kind of relationship. She wanted
a committed love relationship, not roommate relationship.
Speaker 6 (07:48):
So on their first night in their new home, Nicole
had a little surprise waiting for Sarah.
Speaker 7 (07:55):
I had her, like take a bath, and then I
put out a bunch of candles leading to the back
deck and roses. So when she got out of the bath,
I let her downstairs. So she was all relaxed and
comfy and proposed at the house on the first day
that we moved in. So we didn't spend any night
in that house that we weren't engaged.
Speaker 6 (08:16):
A year later, they got married in Vermont. You may
recall Sarah's Jim Buddies helped arrange the wedding. Red barn birch,
pergola flowers and maple syrup buckets, the whole Eddie Bauer vibe.
Speaker 1 (08:30):
The pictures from that day are radiant. Nicole in her
crisp white dress, looks lovingly at Sarah and her soft
ivory gown. In one shot, they wave at the camera playfully.
In another, they sway together on the dance floor, arms
around each other, with the warmth of summer light casting
soft shadows. Sarah and Nicole were now a married couple,
(09:04):
but according to Nicole, they continued to live independent lives.
They had different hobbies and different friend groups. Nicole was
into softball and was in a serious travel league, off
and away on the weekends, and Sarah was working for
veteran organizations and had to travel for that. At least
(09:25):
that's what she told Nicole, and yet living independent lives
seemed to work for them. This doesn't seem totally weird
to me, by the way. I've been together with my
wife for twenty eight years, and one of the main
reasons our marriage still works is that we know how
to give each other space. We have our own interests,
(09:46):
our own realms. But let's face it, marriages are rarely
as tidy as we imagine. They're messy by nature, and
no one stays perfectly within their own lanes, especially when
children enter the picture. And for Sarah and Nicole, it
was precisely this issue children that forced some very hard choices.
Speaker 6 (10:10):
Nicole told us that she and Sarah had been planning
to have kids, but then about two years after their wedding,
things took a turn. Sarah came home and told Nicole
she had brain cancer, which is horrible, right, catastrophic, but
initially it wasn't. Actually the doctor said it was treatable.
(10:33):
Nicole heard all of this, by the way, secondhand from Sarah.
She didn't attend any of the oncology appointments since Sarah
had been diagnosed during COVID, when patients were generally going
to the hospital alone. Nicole says that Sarah tried to
keep things upbeat. They nicknamed the tumor her brain buddy,
(10:53):
and apparently the buddy didn't seem to be getting any bigger.
So despite the bad news, they pressed ahead with their
plans to have a baby.
Speaker 7 (11:02):
We were gonna like do in vitro fertilization and I
was going to carry. I had been to the doctor
several times. I've been through some procedures. They're checking out,
you know, my my system here to make sure that
we were good to go. So I had a doctor's
appointment that I was going to go to, which would
(11:22):
have been the final like sign off before the actual event.
So I remember the day before the appointment, she said,
I think you should pause on the appointment because I
have this doctor's appointment and I don't know if it's
going to go well. And I was like, okay, what's
going on. She made it sound like that we need
to wait because this might be really serious.
Speaker 6 (11:46):
Soon after this, Sarah tells Nicole that the cancer has
gotten much worse, possibly terminal, which changed everything.
Speaker 7 (11:56):
It flips into you know, you take care of your
significant other. Like now, I'm just like that's on pause
and okay, we can pick that up later. What's going
on with you?
Speaker 6 (12:05):
Their plans to expand their family were put on whole.
Nicole pursued a promotion at work, thinking the extra money
would help as the medical bills piled up. Meanwhile, Sarah
arranged for in home support from a specialist trained to
work with people with traumatic brain injuries, someone who came
(12:26):
multiple times a week. What Nicole didn't know was that
the Wounded Warrior Project was paying for this. I interviewed
that person, the specialist she helped Sarah for years, thinking
Sarah had a brain injury while also battling cancer.
Speaker 2 (12:44):
But even while taking.
Speaker 6 (12:45):
This help, she still kept her wife Nicole at a distance.
Speaker 7 (12:50):
She didn't involve me, Like, she wouldn't involve me, she
wouldn't lean on me. She was like, I do this
on my own. I don't want you to worry about it.
Anytime I tried to talk with her about it, She's
just like, I can't, I don't want to talk about it.
So it was very It was something that separated us.
She didn't lean in to me. She leaned away.
Speaker 6 (13:11):
When it came time for Sarah's doctor's appointments. Even after
COVID restrictions were lifted, Sarah was explicit she didn't want
Nicole to be there. Nicole says she was hurt, but
she didn't really feel like she had the right to
express her frustration.
Speaker 7 (13:30):
Are you going to blame the spouse with cancer? Like,
what do you you know is she's having a hard
time coping with it and is choosing to withdraw, Then
you know that's it's kind I chopped it up to that, like,
when she's ready for me to support her, she'll allow
me to support her, and I'm just going to keep
(13:50):
being here until she's ready. That's how I rationalized it.
Speaker 1 (13:57):
What Nicole didn't know at the time was that, of course,
Sarah was living a double life. When she traveled for
veteran events. She was sometimes attending all expense paid retreats
posing as a war hero. When she was out with
her veteran buddies. She was playing the role of the
VFW commander, and when she went away on her own
(14:19):
sometimes she was actually with Sam, the physical therapist whom
she'd become romantically involved with. The whole thing was bound
to unravel, and then one day it did. When Nicole
(14:50):
got the call, the call that the FBI was at
her house, she hopped in her car and rushed home.
Speaker 7 (14:58):
There was a ton of black SUVs and an ambulance
and cop cauars and all kinds of vehicles road, so
I like, park down the street. You have to do
like a walk of shame to get to my house.
Everybody's like looking, and I'm like, I don't know, guys,
I don't know what's happening.
Speaker 6 (15:18):
Nicole arrived home to find an FBI agent standing on
her doorstep. The agent explained that Sarah had threatened to
harm herself and needed to be taken to the hospital,
but Sarah had refused to go without Nicole, so Nicole
hopped back in her car and followed the ambulance to
the hospital.
Speaker 7 (15:38):
It doesn't matter what else is happening in that moment.
I don't really know, but I'll get the facts. Whatever
I'll get home later and we'll figure it out. You
just go into like take care of your significant other mode.
The most important thing is, like she's getting into an ambulance.
Speaker 5 (15:53):
I'm gonna go.
Speaker 6 (15:55):
After a long way to the hospital. They cleared Sarah,
determining she wasn't an immediate danger to herself. Sarah was
allowed to leave the coal and the two returned home
together in Nicole's car.
Speaker 7 (16:11):
It was silent. It was just silent. I said, what's
going on? It was quiet for a long time. I
just waited for her to answer. I don't have answers.
I'll wait until you answer.
Speaker 6 (16:26):
Eventually, Sarah vaguely admitted to lying about some things mentioned
she might be in trouble understatement of the century. By
the way, Nicole's head was spinning.
Speaker 7 (16:39):
I'm trying to be gentle in the way of you
have somebody who's struggling with some mental health stuff in
this moment right now. But I also need to know
what's going on, and I need her to talk to me.
I said directly to her, do you have cancer? And
she said yes, And I was like okay.
Speaker 1 (17:06):
When they arrived back home, the cop car are all gone.
The neighbors are back in their homes and their quiet
New England Street is once again a quiet New England Street.
Speaker 7 (17:20):
We walk in the house and the house as a disaster.
The drawers are all pulled out and things are knocked
over and things like that. They didn't break anything, but
it's a mess, and we didn't keep our house messy.
So it's like was startling.
Speaker 1 (17:35):
As they're picking up the mess, Nicole's mind keeps returning
to the cancer, because if there's one thing that she
needs to be true, it's that It's why she took
the promotion, worked the extra hours, built up their savings,
and it was the cancer that in a way helped
explain why Sarah had been struggling so much, why she'd
(17:57):
been so distant, and most of all, it was the
cancer that prompted them to postpone their plans to have kids.
And so as they're cleaning up, she asks Sarah again
about the cancer, and once more Sarah insists, yes, it's true.
But Nicole, she can't let it go, this question. It
(18:21):
plays on her exhausted mind.
Speaker 7 (18:23):
So then we laid down to sleep that night and
in the dark, lay laying in bed in the dark,
kind of like pillow talkue. I asked her one more time,
do you have cancer?
Speaker 1 (18:39):
And then she just waited, somehow sensing that maybe under
the cover of darkness, the truth might finally emerge.
Speaker 6 (18:55):
One of the many questions that we had was how
did Sarah get to this moment lying in her bed
in the dark, next to her spouse being asked this
terrifyingly simple question, have you been lying to me about
having cancer? In order to understand how she got here
(19:17):
to this moment, we actually have to go back to
much earlier in Sarah's story, because the way Sarah sees it,
her double life wasn't initially Sarah the social worker and
Sarah the war hero. Her first double life began as
a little girl.
Speaker 5 (19:36):
I think this feeling of like always wanting a different
life had been really persistent for me for some time,
or for most of my life.
Speaker 1 (19:44):
Sarah admits she lied a lot growing up about all
kinds of things. At first, some of the lies we
heard about seemed to us like they'd fall in the
category of just stuff that kids do. She'd tell her
parents she was at school when she wasn't. Sometimes she'd
lie to other kids. We spoke to her best friend
(20:05):
her name is Ariel. They met as teenagers and the
two of them remained very close. Ariol gave us a
window into Sarah's world back in high school. Ariol remembers
Sarah spinning wise that didn't even really make sense, like
when Sarah would tell people that she was adopted. According
(20:26):
to Ariel, Sarah's mom called her out on this, saying
stop it, You're not adopted, but Sarah would keep on
saying it. Ariol always found this strange and never quite
understood why Sarah did it.
Speaker 6 (20:40):
But as we dug deeper into Sarah's story, we uncovered
another set of lies that she told as a teenager
that did seem out of the ordinary. We tracked down
a few other people who knew Sarah back then. They
told us that they knew Sarah not as a new Englander,
(21:03):
but as a Southern girl, and more specifically as a
victim of Hurricane Katrina.
Speaker 2 (21:09):
This was just after that.
Speaker 6 (21:11):
Hurricane, so it was still really fresh in people's minds.
Sympathy for Katrina victims was running high. Our sources said
that Sarah talked in detail about the ordeal of surviving Katrina.
Speaker 2 (21:26):
Told people she.
Speaker 6 (21:27):
Was rescued from the roof of her house just barely
made it out alive. Apparently, Sarah told some people that
her father died during the flooding. These lies earned her
sympathy and friendship.
Speaker 2 (21:45):
To me, it seems like a test.
Speaker 6 (21:47):
Run of what she'd do with veterans, and it happened
ten years prior. I asked Sarah about all this, by
the way, and she denied it. Told me I never
told people that. I don't know why they think that.
Speaker 1 (22:09):
Sarah told us that things happened to her as a
child that made her want to live a different life,
be someone else, lie escape.
Speaker 5 (22:20):
When you live two separate lives for so long, it
feels normal, right. I had to be someone else in
front of other people when I was a child, and
that was normal.
Speaker 1 (22:32):
Sarah says that there was a man who sexually abused
her for years when she was a girl. Her mother
attested to this in official documents. Nicole also confirmed us
that this abuse was something that Sarah had shared with her.
Speaker 6 (22:48):
According to Sarah, this abuse kind of split her life
in two.
Speaker 5 (22:53):
When I go to school, I'm able to just like
excel and act like everything is fine, and play a
sport and play an instrument and do all of these things,
and no one knew anything was going on for a
very long time.
Speaker 6 (23:08):
That included her high school friend Ariel, who he told
you about. Ariel says she had no idea that Sarah
had been sexually abused. To Ariel, Sarah came across as
funny and friendly, always up for an adventure. She played
on the high school's basketball team. She was openly gay,
(23:28):
and she even helped Ariol come out of the closet herself.
She seemed so confident, but Sarah says, the truth is
she was unraveling.
Speaker 5 (23:40):
It began to drink really young. I was like thirteen
when I started drinking. I definitely overused alcohol right and
when I started to get into therapy finally, when I
was like fourteen, fifteen sixteen, my symptoms were really really
(24:00):
like I could barely get through school certain days, or
I would just leave.
Speaker 6 (24:07):
At first, things seemed to get somewhat better. When Sarah
got to college. She was stable enough that she was
able to help others. Her best friend Ariol had ended
up homeless, and Sarah was the one to say, come
live with me. She even let Ariol sleep on her
couch for a whole year to this day, Ariel is
(24:29):
deeply grateful and loyal to Sarah, and sure Sarah was
still drinking a lot, but wasn't everyone in college.
Speaker 5 (24:39):
I thought I pretty much had it under control. Where
I was going to school, I had an apartment. Things
felt okay, so to speak.
Speaker 6 (24:45):
But then in her senior year of undergrad her mental
health took a turn.
Speaker 5 (24:51):
I was hospitalized for a suicide attempt and then I
was referred to like this outpatient program at one of
the local hospitals.
Speaker 1 (25:01):
Sarah started taking medications for her anxiety after this, and
she says she really even doubt but then her her
insurance stop covering her medical provider, so she went off
her meds. It was a rough time. She says that
she tried to take her own life on multiple occasions.
All of this is to say, Sarah told us she
(25:24):
faced some pretty difficult moments in her life from a
young age.
Speaker 6 (25:29):
Then in twenty sixteen, when Sarah was twenty five, two
things happened, two really important things. The first was that
she met Nicole, who would eventually become her wife. The
second was that in this same year, she joined the VFW,
(25:50):
where she found a community of veterans.
Speaker 1 (25:54):
These two things. Her wife and her veteran buddies would
become Sarah's pillars, her support, but they were also destined
to push against one another and create tension in a
way that would ultimately bring everything rushing down.
Speaker 6 (26:12):
The community that Sarah found at the VFW seemed to
be so meaningful to her, She says, everyone there seemed
to get that she was working through a trauma from her.
Speaker 5 (26:23):
Past, Like you don't have to hide like that you're
uncomfortable or that like people talking loudly or yelling makes
you feel like triggering, Like you don't have to hide
those things. Those are like socially acceptable for veterans. And
like I remember being out of work thing once in
like a colleague, like a male colleague, like coming in
for a hug and be like oh my gosh, and
like awkwardly like turning and like my somebody I worked
(26:48):
with at the time, like being like are you okay
and being like, oh my god. That never happens to veterans.
It's like the socially accepted thing, Like we're not going
to question them. They have a good reason to be there.
Speaker 1 (27:00):
What Sarah is describing here are symptoms of PTSD, which
she says stemmed from her trauma, the sexual abuse from
her past, and she says that veterans seem to understand
this kind of trauma innately, almost like it was part
of their shared memory and their unspoken language. She told
(27:20):
us she felt safe with them, like for once, no
one was judging her because they understood.
Speaker 5 (27:29):
I think that I had kept a lot of secrets
in my life from my childhood, and so I don't
think I had ever let anybody really know who I was.
Speaker 8 (27:43):
Out of.
Speaker 5 (27:46):
I don't know, maybe that selfishness, right, but also maybe
that's for protection.
Speaker 1 (27:51):
Sarah told us she always felt different, but when she
was posing as a veteran, she felt like she belonged.
Speaker 5 (27:59):
I didn't always think like I'm going to go out
and lives. I'm just going to go out and drink
with my friends and try to feel better and like
be around people I care about.
Speaker 1 (28:07):
Around the people that she cared about. And that right
there was the problem because these people, the people she
cared about, were the same people that she was deceiving
and manipulating and taking money from. Sarah says that what
she did stem from a deep need and some seriously
(28:29):
flawed thinking.
Speaker 2 (28:31):
I just think like.
Speaker 5 (28:34):
When you feel inadequate for so long that it manifests
in irrational ways. Right, and lying to that extent was irrational, right,
it was deliberate. I deliberately lied, right. No one can
say that someone forced me to tell those lies. No
(28:56):
one did, but they were absolutely irrational.
Speaker 6 (29:01):
Sarah says she used the lies that she'd constructed about herself,
the whole tragic war hero story, to distract herself from
her real problems. But of course what she was doing
by lying and taking money that wasn't going to fix anything.
It was only going to cause more problems, more damage,
(29:26):
not just for her, but also for those close to her,
like Nicole.
Speaker 1 (29:44):
The odd part about all of this is that Sarah
did have this other life, with a pretty home and
a caring spouse, a life that seemed pretty good. Even now,
when Sarah talks about Nicole, you can hear a tenderness
in her voice. She calls her Nicky, and as far
as we can tell, Nicky was a lifeline for Sarah.
(30:08):
It was Nicky who took Sarah and walks and Lincoln Woods.
It was Nicky who lay rose petals through their house
to show Sarah just how much she cared it was
Nicky who wouldn't let Sarah spend one single night at
their new house without the promise of a wedding. Even now,
Sarah gets really emotional when she talks about what it
(30:30):
meant when Nicole came into her life.
Speaker 5 (30:34):
She really stabilized me. She brought so much to my life,
and she really saw me for who I was, and
I didn't have to like be ashamed of where I
came from, or who my parents were, or anything that
(30:56):
had happened.
Speaker 2 (30:58):
And I was okay.
Speaker 5 (30:59):
I was stable.
Speaker 2 (31:01):
But that stability was short lived.
Speaker 6 (31:04):
As Sarah went deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole
posing as a veteran, she pulled further and further away
from Nicole.
Speaker 2 (31:12):
Sarah says that.
Speaker 6 (31:13):
After work she'd walk the dogs and then race off
to various meetings or events with veteran groups. Sometimes she'd
tell Nicole she was seeing Dave or the VFW guys,
and other times she just invents something else entirely. As
she went through the motions, she was constantly preparing for
the next round of deception, just trying to keep her
(31:35):
story straight, and when she was at home, she was
often emotionally unavailable.
Speaker 5 (31:42):
My relationship with Nicole had disintegrated so much because of
my lies as a veteran, and because I was involved
in all of these events and things like that.
Speaker 2 (31:54):
Even so, Nicole was not ready to give up on her.
Speaker 5 (31:58):
She really wanted to reconnect and wanted us to get
through this moment and was really trying to kind of
pull me back. And I did not respond. I put
no effort. I did not return those emotions. I was
consumed with what I was doing right with my lie
(32:19):
and how I was feeling, and she was so unhappy,
and I was so unhappy because we were just like
strangers in the night for so long at our house. Right.
Speaker 6 (32:42):
I always thought there must be a true version of Sarah,
Sarah without masks, living out there somewhere, showing her true
face to someone. And for a while I thought that
person was Nicole, that we would find a true version
of Sarah in their house, like an artifact we could excavate.
Speaker 2 (33:04):
But that just wasn't the case.
Speaker 6 (33:07):
Maybe because there's an unknowability about Sarah, an invisible wall
she puts between herself and the world.
Speaker 1 (33:23):
For Sarah and Nicole, the weight of their marriage and
the years of secrets and lies came to a head
in February of twenty twenty two. After they returned from
the hospital and cleaned up the mess from the search,
they went to their bedroom and with the lights out,
they lay silently side by side. The room itself had
(33:45):
once been their inner sanctum, the cocoon of their intimacy.
Nicole had always seen this home as the start of something.
Years before, she had carefully scattered rose petals and glowing candles,
creating a trail that led Sarah towards the future that
they'd imagined. But now there was no light, just darkness
(34:08):
and quiet. Until Nicole finally spoke.
Speaker 7 (34:12):
I asked her a one more time, do you have cancer?
And she said no, I don't. I think she needed
the darkness, like the anonymity of that space. I don't
think she could honestly, I don't think she could have
looked me in the eye and say it. I think
she needed to be in the dark kind of I
(34:35):
guess hidden, I would say.
Speaker 1 (34:38):
For Nicole, this moment sliced through everything.
Speaker 7 (34:43):
She can lie to me about that straight to my face.
For how long we've been doing this, I mean that
lie was over and over and over as we worked
through and built upon. You know, there's layers to that lie,
and it if she could build that lie to me directly,
I didn't feel like I could be, you know, connected
with this person ever again. I left the next day
(35:09):
and I never lived in that house again.
Speaker 1 (35:18):
Our interview with Nicole it happened in a new place
where she lives, a tidy townhouse at the edge of
a busy commercial strip. We had to turn off the
heat for the interview so our mike wouldn't pick up
any extra noise. The point is it had gotten kind
of cold in the room and dark too. The sun
had gone down, and for a moment we just kind
(35:42):
of sat there, and then Nicole said this.
Speaker 7 (35:47):
The hardest thing to reconcile for me personally was finding
out your perception of reality isn't true and accepting that
I won't know. I won't know from this point on
forever what was real and what wasn't real as it
relates to your spouse right. Making peace with that was
(36:10):
the journey for me following all of the aftermath.
Speaker 6 (36:16):
And there are things that Nicole is still figuring out
without realizing it. We were the ones who broke the
news to her about Sarah having an affair with Sam.
We didn't even mean to do this. We just mentioned
Sam and then realized that Nicole still didn't know, so
we turned off the tape recorder and explained seemed like
(36:39):
the right thing to do. Things like this kept happening as.
Speaker 2 (36:43):
We reported this story.
Speaker 6 (36:45):
There were a bunch of times when the people we
were interviewing kind of turned the tables and started asking
us questions like what did we know about Sarah?
Speaker 2 (36:56):
Was this true?
Speaker 6 (36:57):
Or was that true? And in a way, the whole
thing that Nicole said to us about not trusting her
perception of reality, it kind of pertained to almost everyone
in this story. Everyone was and is grasping for answers.
Speaker 1 (37:18):
For Sarah, the aftermath was something else entirely. She was
now in the house alone, with hardly anyone to rely on.
She'd been outed, The media was buzzing with stories of
her lies. The authorities had seized many of her personal possessions.
She had no phone, no wife, no heroic backstory to
(37:39):
fall back upon. Whether she realized it or not, there
was nothing left to do but wait for the arrest
and a much more public reckoning. Next time. On the
finale of Deep Cover The Truth About Sarah.
Speaker 8 (37:57):
I didn't necessarily have many second thoughts about representing missus
Galana and anything. It is more of intrigue as to
how she ended up in the situation that she was in.
Speaker 1 (38:13):
Every defendant comes before court having had some sort of loss.
Speaker 2 (38:18):
Or trauma in their life. Every human has such things,
but not every human goes out and mixed crime.
Speaker 4 (38:25):
She came in like behind me, Like I turned around
and she was there, and that was kind of it
was almost like getting hit by lightning, kind of like
just kind of like this fight or flight response.
Speaker 5 (38:40):
I knew his last name, I knew he was enrolled
in care there. Those aren't excuses, that's not right, but
those are facts that I knew, which made it reliable
to go to that document.
Speaker 1 (39:08):
Deep Covered the Truth About Sarah was produced by Amy
Gaines McQuaid and Tally Emlin, additional production support by Sonya Gerwitd.
Speaker 2 (39:18):
Our show is edited by Karen Shakerjee.
Speaker 6 (39:20):
Our executive producer is Jacob Smith, mastering by Jake Gorsky.
Speaker 1 (39:25):
Original scoring in our theme were composed by Luis Gara.
Our show art was designed by Sean Carney. Fact checking
by Anica Robbins.
Speaker 6 (39:36):
Special thanks to Sarah Nix, Izzy Carter, Daphne Chen, Jake Flanagan,
and Greta Cohne.
Speaker 2 (39:43):
Additional thanks to Vicky Merrick.
Speaker 1 (39:45):
I'm Jess mceugh and I'm Jake Halpern. Hey it's Jake,
(40:05):
and look, I got a little favor to ask. If
you like the show, please just take one minute and
review us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Honestly, it really
helps new listeners find the show, which in turn helps
us continue making these stories for you. Thanks a lot,
Pushkin. Hey, this is Jake. You're about to listen to
episode five. And just a reminder, this is a six
part series, so if you haven't heard all the previous episodes,
I encourage you to go back and do that now
before you listen to this. You'll get a lot more
out of the whole series. Also, just so you know,
(00:37):
you can hear more ad free episodes from this season
of Deep Cover before they're released to the public. By
signing up for Pushkin Plus. You'll also get bonus episodes,
full audio books, and binges from your favorite Pushkin hosts
and authors. Find Pushkin Plus on the deep Cover show
page on Apple Podcasts or at pushkin dot fm, slash plus. Okay,
(01:02):
let's get into it. Heads up. In this episode, there
are references to suicidal ideation and so actual abuse.
Speaker 2 (01:12):
Previously on Deep Cover.
Speaker 3 (01:15):
The chief of VA Police called me and said, hey,
you know, I think we might have a problem with
an employee.
Speaker 4 (01:25):
What immediately occurred to me was that as soon as
I told her I cancer, even though she was telling
me it was okay, in the back of her mind
she was thinking I can take advantage of this.
Speaker 5 (01:37):
Do you realize that Sarah used to bill, one of
your mother's bills from Dana Farber.
Speaker 2 (01:45):
And I said, no, I didn't realize that.
Speaker 4 (01:46):
I didn't know that.
Speaker 5 (01:49):
I was so afraid, right, I was so so afraid.
Not because I thought it was illegal, not because I'm
thinking I'm going to go to prison, but because I'm like,
they are not going to be my friends anymore.
Speaker 2 (02:01):
I'm not going to have.
Speaker 5 (02:02):
These people in my life.
Speaker 1 (02:06):
One detail that's often overlooked in this story, Sarah Cavanaugh
was married. She had a wife, a woman named Nicole.
Speaker 6 (02:16):
For us, Nicole was kind of the black box in
this story, the person who might hold the key to
understanding Sarah, because no matter who Sarah pretended to be
in public, she was coming home to Nicole most nights,
to the cozy little house they shared in East Granwitch
Trode Island. It's a charming cape with a steep gabled
(02:39):
roof and dormer windows and the flowering dogwood in the
front yard.
Speaker 1 (02:46):
And we wondered what went on in that home, what
did Nicole know, when did she know it? And did
she see a side of Sarah that the rest of
the world didn't.
Speaker 6 (02:59):
Nicole is an intensely private person. She never talked to
the press or investigators, never made a statement, just kept quiet.
We wrote her letter, and to our surprise, she called
us and invited us to her house for an interview.
Speaker 1 (03:17):
When we met, I did something I don't usually do.
I just asked her, why did you agree to talk
to us?
Speaker 7 (03:27):
Yeah, I asked myself that question several times before I
called you. I know a lot of people are curious,
and I don't have an obligation to share, but I
do think that it means something to me that the
story is told in whole, in full, and not part way.
Speaker 6 (03:46):
We're going to take a deep dive into Sarah and
Nichole's house, the place where their lives converged, and the pats.
Speaker 2 (03:53):
They both took to get there.
Speaker 6 (03:56):
Sarah's path was fraught, complicated, and full of hidden struggles,
struggles that would re emerge and eventually lead to the
moment when Federal AI agents came knocking.
Speaker 7 (04:12):
Picked up the phone just to check my messages, and
that she said, you need to come home. The FBI
is here. That's when I knew that it was that fast.
I had nothing until I had that.
Speaker 1 (04:37):
I'm Jake Halpern and I'm Jess mchughe and this is
Deep Cover Season six, The Truth About Sarah, Episode five,
(05:04):
The Wife.
Speaker 6 (05:12):
Our interview with Nicole came with a disclaimer.
Speaker 7 (05:16):
There's a lot of things that I, frankly, I just
don't know if what I was told or what I
know is even true. So I can definitely speak to
my perspective on things of what I understood to be
true at the time that I was living in but
I have found out along the way that there are
(05:37):
things that I thought were true that just aren't.
Speaker 6 (05:41):
It struck me that she was basically questioning her own
perception of reality, and this we came to learn is
where Nicole's mind still is still spinning, still grasping for
traction on the solid truth we told her.
Speaker 2 (05:58):
We get it.
Speaker 6 (06:00):
Let's start from the beginning.
Speaker 1 (06:03):
Nicole grew up in New Mexico, but moved to New
England in her late twenties. She's outdoors, just like Sarah,
so when the two of them connected online, one of
their first dates was a hike. They met at Lincoln Woods,
a park with rugged hills, tree line trails and a
tranquil pond.
Speaker 7 (06:24):
I just remember it being falling, you know, the leaves
here in the fall are gorgeous, and it was nice
out that day, And she and I always just had
really good conversation and connection. It was easy. She's very
easy to talk to, you know, just made you feel
like you're the only person there.
Speaker 1 (06:43):
Nicole says, Sarah was just very in tune. Those were
her words. Sarah presented herself to Nicole as a native
New Englander with a brother and two divorced parents. All true.
By the way. She said she worked as a mental
health professional, also true.
Speaker 7 (07:00):
So I understood that she was a basically a social
worker at the VA.
Speaker 5 (07:05):
Got it.
Speaker 6 (07:05):
And at that point did she tell you that she
was a veteran or No?
Speaker 7 (07:09):
No, she never told me she was a veteran. Not ever.
Speaker 6 (07:13):
Sarah and Nicole became close quickly, and after about a
year or so, they bought a home together, that cozy
little house I told you about in East Greenwich. Nicole
says that moving in was a big deal and that
Sarah had certain expectations.
Speaker 7 (07:30):
One thing that she was big on was she didn't
want to be roommates forever, which can happen to people,
especially same sex couples. And she was like very adamant
that she didn't want that kind of relationship. She wanted
a committed love relationship, not roommate relationship.
Speaker 6 (07:48):
So on their first night in their new home, Nicole
had a little surprise waiting for Sarah.
Speaker 7 (07:55):
I had her, like take a bath, and then I
put out a bunch of candles leading to the back
deck and roses. So when she got out of the bath,
I let her downstairs. So she was all relaxed and
comfy and proposed at the house on the first day
that we moved in. So we didn't spend any night
in that house that we weren't engaged.
Speaker 6 (08:16):
A year later, they got married in Vermont. You may
recall Sarah's Jim Buddies helped arrange the wedding. Red barn birch,
pergola flowers and maple syrup buckets, the whole Eddie Bauer vibe.
Speaker 1 (08:30):
The pictures from that day are radiant. Nicole in her
crisp white dress, looks lovingly at Sarah and her soft
ivory gown. In one shot, they wave at the camera playfully.
In another, they sway together on the dance floor, arms
around each other, with the warmth of summer light casting
soft shadows. Sarah and Nicole were now a married couple,
(09:04):
but according to Nicole, they continued to live independent lives.
They had different hobbies and different friend groups. Nicole was
into softball and was in a serious travel league, off
and away on the weekends, and Sarah was working for
veteran organizations and had to travel for that. At least
(09:25):
that's what she told Nicole, and yet living independent lives
seemed to work for them. This doesn't seem totally weird
to me, by the way. I've been together with my
wife for twenty eight years, and one of the main
reasons our marriage still works is that we know how
to give each other space. We have our own interests,
(09:46):
our own realms. But let's face it, marriages are rarely
as tidy as we imagine. They're messy by nature, and
no one stays perfectly within their own lanes, especially when
children enter the picture. And for Sarah and Nicole, it
was precisely this issue children that forced some very hard choices.
Speaker 6 (10:10):
Nicole told us that she and Sarah had been planning
to have kids, but then about two years after their wedding,
things took a turn. Sarah came home and told Nicole
she had brain cancer, which is horrible, right, catastrophic, but
initially it wasn't. Actually the doctor said it was treatable.
(10:33):
Nicole heard all of this, by the way, secondhand from Sarah.
She didn't attend any of the oncology appointments since Sarah
had been diagnosed during COVID, when patients were generally going
to the hospital alone. Nicole says that Sarah tried to
keep things upbeat. They nicknamed the tumor her brain buddy,
(10:53):
and apparently the buddy didn't seem to be getting any bigger.
So despite the bad news, they pressed ahead with their
plans to have a baby.
Speaker 7 (11:02):
We were gonna like do in vitro fertilization and I
was going to carry. I had been to the doctor
several times. I've been through some procedures. They're checking out,
you know, my my system here to make sure that
we were good to go. So I had a doctor's
appointment that I was going to go to, which would
(11:22):
have been the final like sign off before the actual event.
So I remember the day before the appointment, she said,
I think you should pause on the appointment because I
have this doctor's appointment and I don't know if it's
going to go well. And I was like, okay, what's
going on. She made it sound like that we need
to wait because this might be really serious.
Speaker 6 (11:46):
Soon after this, Sarah tells Nicole that the cancer has
gotten much worse, possibly terminal, which changed everything.
Speaker 7 (11:56):
It flips into you know, you take care of your
significant other. Like now, I'm just like that's on pause
and okay, we can pick that up later. What's going
on with you?
Speaker 6 (12:05):
Their plans to expand their family were put on whole.
Nicole pursued a promotion at work, thinking the extra money
would help as the medical bills piled up. Meanwhile, Sarah
arranged for in home support from a specialist trained to
work with people with traumatic brain injuries, someone who came
(12:26):
multiple times a week. What Nicole didn't know was that
the Wounded Warrior Project was paying for this. I interviewed
that person, the specialist she helped Sarah for years, thinking
Sarah had a brain injury while also battling cancer.
Speaker 2 (12:44):
But even while taking.
Speaker 6 (12:45):
This help, she still kept her wife Nicole at a distance.
Speaker 7 (12:50):
She didn't involve me, Like, she wouldn't involve me, she
wouldn't lean on me. She was like, I do this
on my own. I don't want you to worry about it.
Anytime I tried to talk with her about it, She's
just like, I can't, I don't want to talk about it.
So it was very It was something that separated us.
She didn't lean in to me. She leaned away.
Speaker 6 (13:11):
When it came time for Sarah's doctor's appointments. Even after
COVID restrictions were lifted, Sarah was explicit she didn't want
Nicole to be there. Nicole says she was hurt, but
she didn't really feel like she had the right to
express her frustration.
Speaker 7 (13:30):
Are you going to blame the spouse with cancer? Like,
what do you you know is she's having a hard
time coping with it and is choosing to withdraw, Then
you know that's it's kind I chopped it up to that, like,
when she's ready for me to support her, she'll allow
me to support her, and I'm just going to keep
(13:50):
being here until she's ready. That's how I rationalized it.
Speaker 1 (13:57):
What Nicole didn't know at the time was that, of course,
Sarah was living a double life. When she traveled for
veteran events. She was sometimes attending all expense paid retreats
posing as a war hero. When she was out with
her veteran buddies. She was playing the role of the
VFW commander, and when she went away on her own
(14:19):
sometimes she was actually with Sam, the physical therapist whom
she'd become romantically involved with. The whole thing was bound
to unravel, and then one day it did. When Nicole
(14:50):
got the call, the call that the FBI was at
her house, she hopped in her car and rushed home.
Speaker 7 (14:58):
There was a ton of black SUVs and an ambulance
and cop cauars and all kinds of vehicles road, so
I like, park down the street. You have to do
like a walk of shame to get to my house.
Everybody's like looking, and I'm like, I don't know, guys,
I don't know what's happening.
Speaker 6 (15:18):
Nicole arrived home to find an FBI agent standing on
her doorstep. The agent explained that Sarah had threatened to
harm herself and needed to be taken to the hospital,
but Sarah had refused to go without Nicole, so Nicole
hopped back in her car and followed the ambulance to
the hospital.
Speaker 7 (15:38):
It doesn't matter what else is happening in that moment.
I don't really know, but I'll get the facts. Whatever
I'll get home later and we'll figure it out. You
just go into like take care of your significant other mode.
The most important thing is, like she's getting into an ambulance.
Speaker 5 (15:53):
I'm gonna go.
Speaker 6 (15:55):
After a long way to the hospital. They cleared Sarah,
determining she wasn't an immediate danger to herself. Sarah was
allowed to leave the coal and the two returned home
together in Nicole's car.
Speaker 7 (16:11):
It was silent. It was just silent. I said, what's
going on? It was quiet for a long time. I
just waited for her to answer. I don't have answers.
I'll wait until you answer.
Speaker 6 (16:26):
Eventually, Sarah vaguely admitted to lying about some things mentioned
she might be in trouble understatement of the century. By
the way, Nicole's head was spinning.
Speaker 7 (16:39):
I'm trying to be gentle in the way of you
have somebody who's struggling with some mental health stuff in
this moment right now. But I also need to know
what's going on, and I need her to talk to me.
I said directly to her, do you have cancer? And
she said yes, And I was like okay.
Speaker 1 (17:06):
When they arrived back home, the cop car are all gone.
The neighbors are back in their homes and their quiet
New England Street is once again a quiet New England Street.
Speaker 7 (17:20):
We walk in the house and the house as a disaster.
The drawers are all pulled out and things are knocked
over and things like that. They didn't break anything, but
it's a mess, and we didn't keep our house messy.
So it's like was startling.
Speaker 1 (17:35):
As they're picking up the mess, Nicole's mind keeps returning
to the cancer, because if there's one thing that she
needs to be true, it's that It's why she took
the promotion, worked the extra hours, built up their savings,
and it was the cancer that in a way helped
explain why Sarah had been struggling so much, why she'd
(17:57):
been so distant, and most of all, it was the
cancer that prompted them to postpone their plans to have kids.
And so as they're cleaning up, she asks Sarah again
about the cancer, and once more Sarah insists, yes, it's true.
But Nicole, she can't let it go, this question. It
(18:21):
plays on her exhausted mind.
Speaker 7 (18:23):
So then we laid down to sleep that night and
in the dark, lay laying in bed in the dark,
kind of like pillow talkue. I asked her one more time,
do you have cancer?
Speaker 1 (18:39):
And then she just waited, somehow sensing that maybe under
the cover of darkness, the truth might finally emerge.
Speaker 6 (18:55):
One of the many questions that we had was how
did Sarah get to this moment lying in her bed
in the dark, next to her spouse being asked this
terrifyingly simple question, have you been lying to me about
having cancer? In order to understand how she got here
(19:17):
to this moment, we actually have to go back to
much earlier in Sarah's story, because the way Sarah sees it,
her double life wasn't initially Sarah the social worker and
Sarah the war hero. Her first double life began as
a little girl.
Speaker 5 (19:36):
I think this feeling of like always wanting a different
life had been really persistent for me for some time,
or for most of my life.
Speaker 1 (19:44):
Sarah admits she lied a lot growing up about all
kinds of things. At first, some of the lies we
heard about seemed to us like they'd fall in the
category of just stuff that kids do. She'd tell her
parents she was at school when she wasn't. Sometimes she'd
lie to other kids. We spoke to her best friend
(20:05):
her name is Ariel. They met as teenagers and the
two of them remained very close. Ariol gave us a
window into Sarah's world back in high school. Ariol remembers
Sarah spinning wise that didn't even really make sense, like
when Sarah would tell people that she was adopted. According
(20:26):
to Ariel, Sarah's mom called her out on this, saying
stop it, You're not adopted, but Sarah would keep on
saying it. Ariol always found this strange and never quite
understood why Sarah did it.
Speaker 6 (20:40):
But as we dug deeper into Sarah's story, we uncovered
another set of lies that she told as a teenager
that did seem out of the ordinary. We tracked down
a few other people who knew Sarah back then. They
told us that they knew Sarah not as a new Englander,
(21:03):
but as a Southern girl, and more specifically as a
victim of Hurricane Katrina.
Speaker 2 (21:09):
This was just after that.
Speaker 6 (21:11):
Hurricane, so it was still really fresh in people's minds.
Sympathy for Katrina victims was running high. Our sources said
that Sarah talked in detail about the ordeal of surviving Katrina.
Speaker 2 (21:26):
Told people she.
Speaker 6 (21:27):
Was rescued from the roof of her house just barely
made it out alive. Apparently, Sarah told some people that
her father died during the flooding. These lies earned her
sympathy and friendship.
Speaker 2 (21:45):
To me, it seems like a test.
Speaker 6 (21:47):
Run of what she'd do with veterans, and it happened
ten years prior. I asked Sarah about all this, by
the way, and she denied it. Told me I never
told people that. I don't know why they think that.
Speaker 1 (22:09):
Sarah told us that things happened to her as a
child that made her want to live a different life,
be someone else, lie escape.
Speaker 5 (22:20):
When you live two separate lives for so long, it
feels normal, right. I had to be someone else in
front of other people when I was a child, and
that was normal.
Speaker 1 (22:32):
Sarah says that there was a man who sexually abused
her for years when she was a girl. Her mother
attested to this in official documents. Nicole also confirmed us
that this abuse was something that Sarah had shared with her.
Speaker 6 (22:48):
According to Sarah, this abuse kind of split her life
in two.
Speaker 5 (22:53):
When I go to school, I'm able to just like
excel and act like everything is fine, and play a
sport and play an instrument and do all of these things,
and no one knew anything was going on for a
very long time.
Speaker 6 (23:08):
That included her high school friend Ariel, who he told
you about. Ariel says she had no idea that Sarah
had been sexually abused. To Ariel, Sarah came across as
funny and friendly, always up for an adventure. She played
on the high school's basketball team. She was openly gay,
(23:28):
and she even helped Ariol come out of the closet herself.
She seemed so confident, but Sarah says, the truth is
she was unraveling.
Speaker 5 (23:40):
It began to drink really young. I was like thirteen
when I started drinking. I definitely overused alcohol right and
when I started to get into therapy finally, when I
was like fourteen, fifteen sixteen, my symptoms were really really
(24:00):
like I could barely get through school certain days, or
I would just leave.
Speaker 6 (24:07):
At first, things seemed to get somewhat better. When Sarah
got to college. She was stable enough that she was
able to help others. Her best friend Ariol had ended
up homeless, and Sarah was the one to say, come
live with me. She even let Ariol sleep on her
couch for a whole year to this day, Ariel is
(24:29):
deeply grateful and loyal to Sarah, and sure Sarah was
still drinking a lot, but wasn't everyone in college.
Speaker 5 (24:39):
I thought I pretty much had it under control. Where
I was going to school, I had an apartment. Things
felt okay, so to speak.
Speaker 6 (24:45):
But then in her senior year of undergrad her mental
health took a turn.
Speaker 5 (24:51):
I was hospitalized for a suicide attempt and then I
was referred to like this outpatient program at one of
the local hospitals.
Speaker 1 (25:01):
Sarah started taking medications for her anxiety after this, and
she says she really even doubt but then her her
insurance stop covering her medical provider, so she went off
her meds. It was a rough time. She says that
she tried to take her own life on multiple occasions.
All of this is to say, Sarah told us she
(25:24):
faced some pretty difficult moments in her life from a
young age.
Speaker 6 (25:29):
Then in twenty sixteen, when Sarah was twenty five, two
things happened, two really important things. The first was that
she met Nicole, who would eventually become her wife. The
second was that in this same year, she joined the VFW,
(25:50):
where she found a community of veterans.
Speaker 1 (25:54):
These two things. Her wife and her veteran buddies would
become Sarah's pillars, her support, but they were also destined
to push against one another and create tension in a
way that would ultimately bring everything rushing down.
Speaker 6 (26:12):
The community that Sarah found at the VFW seemed to
be so meaningful to her, She says, everyone there seemed
to get that she was working through a trauma from her.
Speaker 5 (26:23):
Past, Like you don't have to hide like that you're
uncomfortable or that like people talking loudly or yelling makes
you feel like triggering, Like you don't have to hide
those things. Those are like socially acceptable for veterans. And
like I remember being out of work thing once in
like a colleague, like a male colleague, like coming in
for a hug and be like oh my gosh, and
like awkwardly like turning and like my somebody I worked
(26:48):
with at the time, like being like are you okay
and being like, oh my god. That never happens to veterans.
It's like the socially accepted thing, Like we're not going
to question them. They have a good reason to be there.
Speaker 1 (27:00):
What Sarah is describing here are symptoms of PTSD, which
she says stemmed from her trauma, the sexual abuse from
her past, and she says that veterans seem to understand
this kind of trauma innately, almost like it was part
of their shared memory and their unspoken language. She told
(27:20):
us she felt safe with them, like for once, no
one was judging her because they understood.
Speaker 5 (27:29):
I think that I had kept a lot of secrets
in my life from my childhood, and so I don't
think I had ever let anybody really know who I was.
Speaker 8 (27:43):
Out of.
Speaker 5 (27:46):
I don't know, maybe that selfishness, right, but also maybe
that's for protection.
Speaker 1 (27:51):
Sarah told us she always felt different, but when she
was posing as a veteran, she felt like she belonged.
Speaker 5 (27:59):
I didn't always think like I'm going to go out
and lives. I'm just going to go out and drink
with my friends and try to feel better and like
be around people I care about.
Speaker 1 (28:07):
Around the people that she cared about. And that right
there was the problem because these people, the people she
cared about, were the same people that she was deceiving
and manipulating and taking money from. Sarah says that what
she did stem from a deep need and some seriously
(28:29):
flawed thinking.
Speaker 2 (28:31):
I just think like.
Speaker 5 (28:34):
When you feel inadequate for so long that it manifests
in irrational ways. Right, and lying to that extent was irrational, right,
it was deliberate. I deliberately lied, right. No one can
say that someone forced me to tell those lies. No
(28:56):
one did, but they were absolutely irrational.
Speaker 6 (29:01):
Sarah says she used the lies that she'd constructed about herself,
the whole tragic war hero story, to distract herself from
her real problems. But of course what she was doing
by lying and taking money that wasn't going to fix anything.
It was only going to cause more problems, more damage,
(29:26):
not just for her, but also for those close to her,
like Nicole.
Speaker 1 (29:44):
The odd part about all of this is that Sarah
did have this other life, with a pretty home and
a caring spouse, a life that seemed pretty good. Even now,
when Sarah talks about Nicole, you can hear a tenderness
in her voice. She calls her Nicky, and as far
as we can tell, Nicky was a lifeline for Sarah.
(30:08):
It was Nicky who took Sarah and walks and Lincoln Woods.
It was Nicky who lay rose petals through their house
to show Sarah just how much she cared it was
Nicky who wouldn't let Sarah spend one single night at
their new house without the promise of a wedding. Even now,
Sarah gets really emotional when she talks about what it
(30:30):
meant when Nicole came into her life.
Speaker 5 (30:34):
She really stabilized me. She brought so much to my life,
and she really saw me for who I was, and
I didn't have to like be ashamed of where I
came from, or who my parents were, or anything that
(30:56):
had happened.
Speaker 2 (30:58):
And I was okay.
Speaker 5 (30:59):
I was stable.
Speaker 2 (31:01):
But that stability was short lived.
Speaker 6 (31:04):
As Sarah went deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole
posing as a veteran, she pulled further and further away
from Nicole.
Speaker 2 (31:12):
Sarah says that.
Speaker 6 (31:13):
After work she'd walk the dogs and then race off
to various meetings or events with veteran groups. Sometimes she'd
tell Nicole she was seeing Dave or the VFW guys,
and other times she just invents something else entirely. As
she went through the motions, she was constantly preparing for
the next round of deception, just trying to keep her
(31:35):
story straight, and when she was at home, she was
often emotionally unavailable.
Speaker 5 (31:42):
My relationship with Nicole had disintegrated so much because of
my lies as a veteran, and because I was involved
in all of these events and things like that.
Speaker 2 (31:54):
Even so, Nicole was not ready to give up on her.
Speaker 5 (31:58):
She really wanted to reconnect and wanted us to get
through this moment and was really trying to kind of
pull me back. And I did not respond. I put
no effort. I did not return those emotions. I was
consumed with what I was doing right with my lie
(32:19):
and how I was feeling, and she was so unhappy,
and I was so unhappy because we were just like
strangers in the night for so long at our house. Right.
Speaker 6 (32:42):
I always thought there must be a true version of Sarah,
Sarah without masks, living out there somewhere, showing her true
face to someone. And for a while I thought that
person was Nicole, that we would find a true version
of Sarah in their house, like an artifact we could excavate.
Speaker 2 (33:04):
But that just wasn't the case.
Speaker 6 (33:07):
Maybe because there's an unknowability about Sarah, an invisible wall
she puts between herself and the world.
Speaker 1 (33:23):
For Sarah and Nicole, the weight of their marriage and
the years of secrets and lies came to a head
in February of twenty twenty two. After they returned from
the hospital and cleaned up the mess from the search,
they went to their bedroom and with the lights out,
they lay silently side by side. The room itself had
(33:45):
once been their inner sanctum, the cocoon of their intimacy.
Nicole had always seen this home as the start of something.
Years before, she had carefully scattered rose petals and glowing candles,
creating a trail that led Sarah towards the future that
they'd imagined. But now there was no light, just darkness
(34:08):
and quiet. Until Nicole finally spoke.
Speaker 7 (34:12):
I asked her a one more time, do you have cancer?
And she said no, I don't. I think she needed
the darkness, like the anonymity of that space. I don't
think she could honestly, I don't think she could have
looked me in the eye and say it. I think
she needed to be in the dark kind of I
(34:35):
guess hidden, I would say.
Speaker 1 (34:38):
For Nicole, this moment sliced through everything.
Speaker 7 (34:43):
She can lie to me about that straight to my face.
For how long we've been doing this, I mean that
lie was over and over and over as we worked
through and built upon. You know, there's layers to that lie,
and it if she could build that lie to me directly,
I didn't feel like I could be, you know, connected
with this person ever again. I left the next day
(35:09):
and I never lived in that house again.
Speaker 1 (35:18):
Our interview with Nicole it happened in a new place
where she lives, a tidy townhouse at the edge of
a busy commercial strip. We had to turn off the
heat for the interview so our mike wouldn't pick up
any extra noise. The point is it had gotten kind
of cold in the room and dark too. The sun
had gone down, and for a moment we just kind
(35:42):
of sat there, and then Nicole said this.
Speaker 7 (35:47):
The hardest thing to reconcile for me personally was finding
out your perception of reality isn't true and accepting that
I won't know. I won't know from this point on
forever what was real and what wasn't real as it
relates to your spouse right. Making peace with that was
(36:10):
the journey for me following all of the aftermath.
Speaker 6 (36:16):
And there are things that Nicole is still figuring out
without realizing it. We were the ones who broke the
news to her about Sarah having an affair with Sam.
We didn't even mean to do this. We just mentioned
Sam and then realized that Nicole still didn't know, so
we turned off the tape recorder and explained seemed like
(36:39):
the right thing to do. Things like this kept happening as.
Speaker 2 (36:43):
We reported this story.
Speaker 6 (36:45):
There were a bunch of times when the people we
were interviewing kind of turned the tables and started asking
us questions like what did we know about Sarah?
Speaker 2 (36:56):
Was this true?
Speaker 6 (36:57):
Or was that true? And in a way, the whole
thing that Nicole said to us about not trusting her
perception of reality, it kind of pertained to almost everyone
in this story. Everyone was and is grasping for answers.
Speaker 1 (37:18):
For Sarah, the aftermath was something else entirely. She was
now in the house alone, with hardly anyone to rely on.
She'd been outed, The media was buzzing with stories of
her lies. The authorities had seized many of her personal possessions.
She had no phone, no wife, no heroic backstory to
(37:39):
fall back upon. Whether she realized it or not, there
was nothing left to do but wait for the arrest
and a much more public reckoning. Next time. On the
finale of Deep Cover The Truth About Sarah.
Speaker 8 (37:57):
I didn't necessarily have many second thoughts about representing missus
Galana and anything. It is more of intrigue as to
how she ended up in the situation that she was in.
Speaker 1 (38:13):
Every defendant comes before court having had some sort of loss.
Speaker 2 (38:18):
Or trauma in their life. Every human has such things,
but not every human goes out and mixed crime.
Speaker 4 (38:25):
She came in like behind me, Like I turned around
and she was there, and that was kind of it
was almost like getting hit by lightning, kind of like
just kind of like this fight or flight response.
Speaker 5 (38:40):
I knew his last name, I knew he was enrolled
in care there. Those aren't excuses, that's not right, but
those are facts that I knew, which made it reliable
to go to that document.
Speaker 1 (39:08):
Deep Covered the Truth About Sarah was produced by Amy
Gaines McQuaid and Tally Emlin, additional production support by Sonya Gerwitd.
Speaker 2 (39:18):
Our show is edited by Karen Shakerjee.
Speaker 6 (39:20):
Our executive producer is Jacob Smith, mastering by Jake Gorsky.
Speaker 1 (39:25):
Original scoring in our theme were composed by Luis Gara.
Our show art was designed by Sean Carney. Fact checking
by Anica Robbins.
Speaker 6 (39:36):
Special thanks to Sarah Nix, Izzy Carter, Daphne Chen, Jake Flanagan,
and Greta Cohne.
Speaker 2 (39:43):
Additional thanks to Vicky Merrick.
Speaker 1 (39:45):
I'm Jess mceugh and I'm Jake Halpern. Hey it's Jake,
(40:05):
and look, I got a little favor to ask. If
you like the show, please just take one minute and
review us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Honestly, it really
helps new listeners find the show, which in turn helps
us continue making these stories for you. Thanks a lot,
Host
Jake Halpern
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