CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews last night's TV: Will we ever know the truth about ALL this serial scammer's evil lies?
As the true-crime documentary Bad Nanny unfolded, chilling parallels with another highly plausible but evil criminal emerged.
For anyone who finds it impossible to believe in killer nurse Lucy Letby 's guilt, this two-part report, which concludes tonight, should be required viewing.
None of the charges against Cookes, a 37-year-old serial scammer, is as appalling as Letby's murder of at least seven babies on a neonatal ward — though there are disturbing circumstances around the death of Cookes's own infant daughter in 2008.
Letby operated by befriending the people whose babies she murdered. Gloucester-born Cookes has a record of defrauding friends with scams of exceptional callousness.
In 2012, for instance, she posed as a willing surrogate for a Yorkshire couple desperate to have a baby. She took thousands of pounds from them, and then disappeared.
Turning up in Ireland under another name, she sought out mothers with disabled children and weaselled her way into their lives, before taking their money.
In 2022, at the height of the TikTok craze, she launched her most brazen fraud — masquerading as a terminally ill patient facing death with inspirational courage.
Social media is so overpopulated with people seeking attention for their diseases, real or imaginary, that a word has been coined for them: 'sickfluencers'.
But Cookes, now calling herself Carrie Jade Williams, took her pretence to extreme levels, by claiming that she was being sued by an American couple who had rented her home on Airbnb.
These paying guests, she said, had been traumatised by her illness, and were now demanding £450,000 in compensation.
Stated so baldly, it's all an obvious lie, but Cookes is a highly convincing liar. Money poured in to help her.
She has been diagnosed with a psychological condition called 'pseudologica fantastica', or pathological lying.
But that doesn't explain her obsession with targeting mothers of young, often fragile children.
Cookes was eventually arrested for benefits fraud and is serving a four-year sentence. The whole complex saga was recounted by a dozen or more of her victims, but the fraudster herself refused to comment, so we never fully understood what drove her to invent such vicious lies — just as no one really knows what goes on in Letby's head.
On at least two occasions, when she fled a neighbourhood overnight, she left sheafs of incriminating notes — similar to the confessions scrawled on Post-its that helped to convict Letby.
'I stand shoulder to shoulder with the coroner that I did not murder my daughter,' read one. Her baby, Martha, was found suffocated in her cot, hours before she was due to be handed over to social workers from an adoption agency.
A verdict of accidental death was recorded. Whether that or anything else in Cookes's life can be taken as true, we'll never know.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Independent
23 minutes ago
- The Independent
Someone bought all the rights for Fyre Festival on eBay
Billy McFarland, convicted of fraud for the original Fyre Festival, has sold the brand rights for the event on Ebay for just $245,300. An undisclosed buyer acquired the intellectual property, brand trademarks, and all social media assets pertaining to Fyre Festival after a week-long auction. McFarland expressed disappointment during a livestream as the bidding reached $240,000, commenting, 'Damn. This sucks, it's so low.' The sale follows the indefinite postponement of Fyre Festival 2 earlier this year, with ticket-holders informed they had been issued refunds. McFarland, who served four years for his fraud conviction, still owes $26 million in restitution from the original disastrous event.
Reuters
24 minutes ago
- Reuters
Britain's Moore handed four-year ban after CAS upholds ITIA appeal
July 15 (Reuters) - Britain's Tara Moore, who was previously cleared of an anti-doping rule violation, was handed a four-year ban on Tuesday after the Court of Arbitration for Sport upheld an appeal filed by the International Tennis Integrity Agency. Moore, Britain's former number one-ranked doubles player, was provisionally suspended in June 2022 due to the presence of prohibited anabolic steroids Nandrolone and boldenone. Moore said she had never knowingly taken a banned substance in her career and an independent tribunal determined that contaminated meat consumed by her in the days before sample collection was the source of the prohibited substance. Moore lost 19 months in the process before she was cleared of the ADRV but CAS upheld the ITIA's appeal against the first instance "No Fault or Negligence" ruling with respect to nandrolone. "After reviewing the scientific and legal evidence, the majority of the CAS Panel considered that the player did not succeed in proving that the concentration of nandrolone in her sample was consistent with the ingestion of contaminated meat," CAS said in a statement. "The panel concluded that Ms Moore failed to establish that the ADRV was not intentional. The appeal by the ITIA is therefore upheld and the decision rendered by the Independent Tribunal is set aside." Moore had previously said how she saw her reputation, ranking and livelihood "slowly trickling away" for 19 months during her initial suspension. The 32-year-old had also filed a cross-appeal at CAS "seeking to dismiss the ITIA appeal, dismiss the nandrolone result in the ADRV or alternatively confirm that she bears no fault or negligence". However, CAS said the cross-appeal was declared inadmissible and her four-year period of ineligibility would start from July 15, with credit for any provisional suspension that has already been served. "Our bar for appealing a first instance decision is high, and the decision is not taken lightly," ITIA CEO Karen Moorhouse said in a statement. "In this case, our independent scientific advice was that the player did not adequately explain the high level of nandrolone present in their sample. Today's ruling is consistent with this position."
Daily Mail
30 minutes ago
- Daily Mail
EXCLUSIVE Baby killer Constance Marten set to appeal using legal aid, despite case already costing taxpayers £2.8m
Aristocrat Constance Marten is set to appeal her conviction for killing her baby in a case which has already cost taxpayers over £2.8million. The 38-year-old former socialite, who has a £2.4million fortune, plans to claim yet more legal aid to challenge the jury's verdict in her retrial, despite the Court of Appeal rejecting an earlier bid to clear her name. In an extraordinary farce, Marten is expected to appeal on the basis that the trial judge did not warn the jury quickly enough to ignore her own words after she blurted out that her lover Mark Gordon, 51, was a convicted rapist. The Mail understands that her lawyers will contend that the Recorder of London 's handling of Marten's bombshell admission unfairly prejudiced the jury. Gordon is set to follow suit, despite praising the fairness of Judge Mark Lucraft during the trial and promising he would 'waive' his right to appeal. The Old Bailey retrial almost collapsed when Marten revealed that Gordon had spent 22 years in prison for a knifepoint rape in Florida. Judge Lucraft had previously imposed reporting restrictions on Gordon's convictions as a teenager for armed kidnapping, four sexual assaults, armed burglary and aggravated battery. But Marten ignored the ban, claiming that police were out to get them when officers launched a national manhunt to find the couple after they went on the run with their fifth baby Victoria, causing her death in a freezing tent in 2023. Marten told jurors their four older children had already been taken into care, adding: 'Mark has a violent rape conviction and spent 22 years in prison so my fear is they'd immediately scapegoat him which is what they usually do.' The judge condemned Marten's 'deliberate attempt to sabotage the trial', but he decided to continue with the case after Gordon insisted 'I'm not worried about prejudice' and promised not to appeal on the matter. In a ruling which was never made public, Judge Lucraft said: 'Many questions arise. Amongst them I raised the question of what would happen down the line on an appeal if there was a conviction of the first defendant (Gordon) in these circumstances? 'At this point Mr Gordon said he wished to address the Court. 'When he did so he said he would waive any point on any appeal and was quite satisfied that any direction to the jury would be fair and that he wished the trial to continue. 'Mr Gordon spoke about the delay and the cost to the public of another trial.' Yet just moments after being convicted, Gordon went back on his word, vowing that he would appeal the verdict and yelling: 'I'm not surprised by the verdict. It was faulty, it was unlawful. This is not over, it has just begun.' Marten shouted: 'It's a scam', before walking out of the court in fury. The case has already cost taxpayers more than £2.8million, including the £1.2million investigation and £1.6million estimated legal costs. In February, the Court of Appeal rejected the couple's bid to challenge their child cruelty conviction in the first trial, which ended last year with jurors unable to reach a verdict on manslaughter. On Monday, the couple were finally convicted of manslaughter in a retrial and will be sentenced on September 15. The unprecedented case is now the subject of a national child safeguarding review to consider whether new laws should be brought in to protect unborn children. Detective Superintendent Lewis Basford, who led the case, believes that lives could be saved if officers had the power to bring in protection and family contact orders before a baby is born to parents considered at high risk of harming their children. He said: 'At the moment police are powerless to protect that child until a baby draws their first breath. 'If there was a change in the law, we could put contact orders in place to monitor the pregnancy and protection orders could be in place before that child is born so they could immediately be taken into care. 'If you look at cases like Baby P [a 17-month-old British boy who died in London in 2007 after suffering over 50 injuries] this could save lives.' Yesterday a Department for Education spokesman said the review would look at what more could be done to help prevent future tragedies. She said: 'Victoria's life was cut devastatingly short by those who should have been caring for her - and it is right that justice has now been served.'
