April 13, 2022 • 30 mins
Sarah shows up at a Texas camp for people with disabilities in the fall of 2015 in a power wheelchair, seemingly unable to move her body. During the week of camp, counselor Bethany Turner takes care of Sarah’s every need, bathing her, and even changing her menstrual pads. After camp is over, they speak almost daily. Then one day, Bethany gets a shocking call from the camp.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
At Southern Illinois University in the small city of Carbondale.
Three light brown towers our campus landmarks their high rise dorms.
A sophomore named Emily has moved into one of them.
I lived actually on the fifteenth floor, and the view
from up inside the towers that high up was just amazing.
(00:22):
I just always loved it, and of course at night
you could see all the lights from the city. It's
the fall of two thousand three. Emily is not her
real name, which she didn't want used. Emily and her
roommate share a bathroom with two freshmen. The four girls
are sweet mates, and as the semester goes on, they
(00:44):
get to know each other. One of the freshman sweet
mates is named Sarah, Sarah Delashman. She's from Highland, a
small town almost two hours north. She's here as a
pre med student. Sarah has short brown hair. It was
kind of dirty blonde or close to brown, and it
(01:05):
kind of looked a little bit feathered. She had glasses embraces.
If she owned makeup, I didn't know it because I
don't think I ever saw her wear makeup before at all.
My previous two sweet mates the year before they were
nowhere nearest, friendly, and so Sarah kind of seemed a
little bit like a beam of sunshine. I guess you
(01:26):
could say Sarah doesn't talk about her family all that much.
I never saw it her dad. I think her dad
was not in a picture, and I don't remember if
he had passed away or it was, you know, like
a divorce situation. I never saw her mom ever, which
is kind of interesting because she lived about maybe an
(01:48):
hour and a half, maybe closer to two hours. Her
cousin had brought her newborn baby, and that's the only
time I think that I remember she had any family
that came and visited him. Not long into the semester,
Sarah walks into Emily's room. I think it was about
(02:12):
maybe October or so when she came and told us that,
you know, that she had leukemia. Leukemia. No one takes
the news of Sarah's cancer harder than her roommate, the
other freshman of the bunch. She was one of those
friends that if you were crossing the street and she
saw that the bus was about to hit you, she
(02:33):
would have jumped in the way to save her friend.
She was going to support her no matter what she
was That close with Sarah. The semester goes on. They
come and go from class, and Sarah makes sure that
nobody forgets about her cancer. One day, Sarah talks about
how she's starting to lose her hair and maybe she
(02:54):
should just go ahead and cut it all off. They
all gather in Emily's room with hers, roll back the rug,
and get ready to give Sarah a haircut. At the
last minute, though she backs out. She never says why,
but you know who doesn't back out, her roommate. She
chops off her hair and a show of support. One day,
(03:16):
Sarah suggests they watch a movie called A Walk to Remember.
It's a teen romance and the lead female character is
dying from cancer. It's the kind of cancer story that
you might see on the Hallmark channel. I'm sick, I'm sick. Aprkemia.
(03:39):
Emily isn't so sure this is a good idea. You know,
we were told by Sarah and her roommate that it
was fine, that they were going to be okay, they
were going to hold themselves together, and it was completely
the opposite. By the time the movie was over, the
room was dark except for the light of the TV
(04:00):
and off in the corner. The movie ended with Sarah
and her roommate crumpled on the floor, hugging each other,
crying together. It was a bad idea not to intervene.
The school year ends, everyone scatters for the summer. Emily
and Sarah decide to room together when they come back
(04:20):
in the fall. One evening in July, Emily is at
a wedding, and then during the reception, I get a
call from Sarah that she's been in a car accident,
and a bad one at that. She said that she
was going to have to have her back fused. If
I could almost paraphrase how she said, you know, I've
(04:41):
been in a car accident and I'm in a wheelchair,
and I don't know if I'm gonna be able to
walk again. Emily doesn't see Sarah until the start of
the new fall term. They agree on a move in time,
but when Emily gets there and opens the door, she
discovers that Sarah has surprised her by moving in early.
(05:04):
Here the door start to open and she's in a wheelchair.
And not only is she a wheelchair, she's a She's
an emmanual wheelchair and not an electric wheelchair. She also
had this heavy plastic, medical looking back brace that kind
of fit around her almost like a corset would. After
(05:26):
school starts, Sarah isn't around all that much. She just
kind of disappeared for a day, or disappear for two days,
and I barely saw her. But then one day she
started talking to me, and she was laying on her bed,
and I turned around in my chair um to face
her in the window, and I looked back at her,
(05:49):
and she was smiling, talking, But the way that she
was laying on the bed looked really strange, because she
was laying like you were laying on your stomach, propping
your your elbows up like you were flipping through a magazine,
and like you had your feet kind of flipped up
towards the ceiling. And I just remember looking at her,
(06:12):
watching her smiling and with his fused back of hers.
I thought, I don't know how she's this comfortable laying
on the bed like she is. But that was the
turning point that something is off. Emily and Sarah start
to not get along, typical roommates not clicking. Emily moves out,
(06:36):
leaving Sarah to fend for herself and the wheelchair in
the back brace a few weeks later, Emily walks through
the double doors of a dining hall, and there she is.
I see Sarah at the top of the stairs, and
she is not in a wheelchair, she is not in
a back brace. She's in jeans and a T shirt.
(06:58):
Students scurry two and throw all around them, But for
Emily and Sarah time stops. Everything else around me just
seems to disappear just as I step into the dining hall,
looking up at her. And I looked at her, and
(07:18):
she saw me, and she looked at me kind of
with a blank stare. It wasn't a sad thing, it
wasn't a mean face or anything. It was just kind
of blank, and it seemed like everything else faded away,
and that was like the only thing that was going
on was just the two of us kind of staring
at each other. Emily walks up the stairs past Sarah,
(07:39):
neither of them saying a word. And I turned the
corner to head to where the mailboxes were, and curiosity
got the better of me, and I turned back to
look at her. And she hadn't moved, you, like her
feet or anything, but she had still turned and looked
at me with that's aim look, it was game over,
(08:07):
but her game was far from over. The worst part
is I found out much, much, much, much later that
it morphed into something so sinister and hurtful than I
never imagined. We were warm up, you know, we were practiced.
(08:27):
There's a reason why Emily doesn't want us to use
her name. She's hoping Sarah has forgotten it. She doesn't
want Sarah to ever find her. You're telling a story
about someone who's such a masterminded lying, and you're like,
no one's going to believe this story. I mean, it
just sounds crazy to even think of, Like some of
(08:47):
the stuff that had happened. Emily never saw Sarah again.
But over the years, Sarah got better and better at
insinuating herself into online support groups for people with illnesses
or charities that help patients should find a way into
people's hearts and lives. She obviously kept many, many, many
stories straight for a very very long time. She did
(09:10):
a good job of fooling a lot of people for
a really long time, until the day she told one
lie too many. This was a case that victims were
very passionate about. You know, Sarah can go to prison,
someone can lock her up for a crime, but where
is the law? The law doesn't account for the trauma.
(09:33):
This is a story told by the victims of what
may seem like a victimless crime. Sarah delash Miant wasn't
really after money or power. She needed something far more complicated,
and what she stole from everyone who trusted her and
believed her in the end was far more valuable than money.
(09:56):
I'm Laura Beale. You're listening to Sympathy Pains. This is
episode one. Bethany. I've been a medical journalist for a
really long time, so long that there are times when
I think that nothing is really going to surprise me anymore.
(10:16):
Until it does. Until you pull a string and just
keep pulling and pulling, trying to make sense of things,
and in the end you're left in a place that
you didn't expect to be. This is one of those stories.
Bethany Turner lives in Indianapolis with her young daughter. She
has a round face and soft brown eyes. She's thirty
(10:39):
one years old. She grew up here in a tight
knit religious family, pretty sheltered until she went to college
in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Bethany is one of those people who
not only recognizes pain and injustice. She feels it down
to her bones. She's drawn to people in need, people
who live in the invisible margins of society. You're helping
(11:02):
yourself along the way to because every one of those
situations I walked out of I felt like I gained
more than I was giving. It's it's an environment where
you get to learn from each other, but feel like
you're bettering a community too. In two thousand and fifteen,
she was looking for the next place she could serve.
I just finished up a term with AmeriCorps. I had
(11:22):
done a year with them working with children in South Florida.
I had traveled abroad and done some um teaching. I
was searching for the kindness. I was searching for the humanity.
I was searching for the community. Scrolling through the Internet,
she started reading about a place in Texas called Camp Summit. Today,
(11:42):
it spans out of our almost five acres, near a
town called No Joke Paradise. It's been around in some
form since the nineteen forties. It's a place where adults
with disabilities can spend a week soaking in the outdoors,
doing the kind of stuff that society usually makes hard
for them, like swimming or putting on a talent show.
(12:04):
This resonated with Bethany. She had had an uncle who
was disabled and a friend in college who was too.
That friend especially gave Bethany a whole new perspective. She
encouraged her to not be afraid of being bold. She
just really challenged me to be better and try different
things and not make excuses. The moment Bethany drove through
(12:27):
the gates of Camp Summit and onto the gravel driveway,
she knew this is where she needed to be. You
come in and there everything in campus surrounded by trees.
There's um some little walkways back in there where we
would take hikes into the woods a little bit, and
they had some areas that were set up for bonfires.
The boys camp is on the right, so there's five
(12:48):
or six, I'd say five, maybe cabins, just a typical
old school camp house. Campers could ride horses, shoot arrows,
even go down a zip line. A lot of them
told me it was their vacation, which hadn't really occurred
to me until they said that out loud. That you know,
they live in assisted living homes, or they live with
(13:09):
caregivers or they've lived with family their whole life, and
this is there one or two times a year where
they can take a week to go be with friends
and and it be a completely accessible experience. For many
of the campers, it's the best week of their lives. Yeah,
it's the best week of anybody's life that gets to go.
(13:31):
To be honest with you, I mean, the staff loves
it just as much, if not more, than the campers do.
I think it's a very sacred community. Sacred community. I've
heard this phrase a lot while working on this story.
You passed that gate and everybody's just kind of their
own chaotic mess, laughing and hugging, and I have have
never experienced so many hugs and so much laughter in
(13:52):
my life. And the lasting friendships that came out of
just those few weeks of being there, I think are
going to be lifelong. The new camp burs arrived on Sundays.
During one session in the fall of two thousand fifteen,
Bethany and the other counselors were roaming through the cabin,
which was bustling with the chatter and activity of unpacking.
(14:12):
One of the campers was in a power wheelchair in
the middle of the room. Yeah, I remember her wearing
a lot of like soft pink and soft clothes. She
told the counselor she had muscular dystrophee. She could hold
herself upright, but could barely move from the neck down.
Just a little bit of arm control enough to work
(14:33):
the toggle on her chair was all she could manage.
Her name was Sarah. She was thirty years old. She
said she had her nursing license and lived with her
mom in southern Illinois, in a town not far from St. Louis.
She kind of came across with someone who hadn't experienced
a lot outside of her small town in Illinois. Bethany
(14:54):
drifted from camper to camper, helping organize their bedding and clothes.
So of the caregivers was already helping her unpack everything
because she was basically just kind of pointing where she
wanted things and organized. And she had she brought a
c pat machine, so that she was talking to her
about how to set that up. And she pointed over
at the separate suitcase and she said, open that one.
It has some other things in there. For the cabin.
(15:16):
She had a bunch of crafts and things that we
could do. I think she had maybe even some snacks
for us. Of course, then everyone else in the cabinet
is immediately drawn to her and want to see what
was in there. The treats were a draw, but so
was she. She seemed like a very good friend to everyone.
I mean she showed up day one with crafts and
things ready to go. I mean, I'm definitely not that
(15:37):
friend most days that I come prepared with, you know,
thoughtful gifts and things. And so she just she set
this aura in the camp. Because of Sarah's circumstances, the
counselors had to do everything for her, dress her, cut
her food into bite sized pieces, even change her feminine
hygiene products. They bathed her two and she liked to
(16:00):
shower every evening. I'm five one two, and she was
significantly bigger and taller than me and the other two caregivers.
So whoever was lifting her from the front, it's really
hard to describe, but essentially it's, you know, kind of
a dead lift to get the weight off of your back.
But the way she would land, because of her height
and her weight and her inability to help at all,
(16:22):
our spines were going the wrong direction, and just the
weight on the top of our shoulders. But they did it.
It's why they were there. And as time went on,
Bethany and Sarah drew closer and closer, until their lives
became interwoven in unexpected ways. Bethany gave everything she had
(16:44):
to make sure that Sarah had the kind of vacation
she came for. It was just a really empowering week
for a lot of reasons. She got to participate in
some camp traditions and things. I remember all of the
conversations of what she didn't have. She didn't have the
abilitlity to move out on her own and you know,
have roommates. She wanted to experience freedom, and she really
(17:07):
wanted to go down the zip line. It's maybe a
ten second ride. It assumed really fast, but we would
put her power wheelchair underneath the zip line. There was
kind of a sack. It has four points with some
carabineers on it. To be able to lift her with
some rope out of the power wheelchair and onto the
zip line. Getting her onto the zip line took a
(17:31):
lot of staff and delayed activities for other campers. She
just kept throwing her neck back. There was a lot
of concern on letting her do this, because she was
not giving us any assistance. But she finally did it
and went across and they lowered her down onto the
deck to unhook the carabineers. And remember her just laying
there and just sobbing. It felt like such a big
(17:52):
moment for her. Through it all, Bethany was there for
the triumphs and the fireside hard hearts. Sara seemed to
make a point of having one on one time with
the staff. She was very intentional with her friendships from
the get go, and I think I just am drawn
to deep conversation anyway. And so I mean, she told
(18:15):
me about her home life and things like that and
college friends and feels like you're packing all these things
into one week, and so it felt much more heartfelt.
And then when you all parted at the end of
the week, what was that goodbye? Like very tearful. We
were all really sad to see that weekend. Um, we've
seen a lot of bonding and new relationships formed and things.
(18:37):
And so I remember Sarah leaving. She was telling one
of the other campers that she was going to fly
back to St. Louis, that she had to leave early
that day, to catch a flight. The goodbye would not
last for long, as autumn wound down and the weather
turned cooler. Camp ended, The cow Stlors packed up and dispersed.
(19:02):
One group made plans to head up to Colorado to
work at the resorts for the upcoming ski season. We
were going to kind of do that for a season
and figure out what we wanted to do in the spring.
Sarah was calling and texting and sending gifts to all
of us. I think I was the one that was
probably communicating with her the most frequently. Thanksgiving week, Bethany
(19:22):
and her family were on a road trip. Bethany realized
that they'd be passing close to Sarah's home in Illinois.
We met her at a cracker barrel at the outskirts
of her town. She was already waiting at the restaurant
when they arrived. My family introduced themselves, and uh we
sat down at a table, and I remember she ordered
like a thing. It was like a fried chicken or something,
(19:44):
and so I cut everything up for you know, gave
her the straw. It was like camp all over again,
and we sat there in giggled. I remember she was
in a great mood, super friendly, and bubbly with my family.
We got ready to leave, and her story was that
her mom had dropped her off and her mom had
to take her nephews to their Saturday basketball game, and
then when she got done with that, her mom was
(20:06):
gonna come pick her up. But that was why she
wanted to drop her off at Cracker Barrel, because at
least Sarah could stay somewhere kind of in a lobby
area and hang out. I hugged her, took a couple
of pictures, and then my family and I got on
the road. She said she had talked to her mom
and her mom was gonna be there in a few
minutes and I was just running late. Shortly after Bethany
arrived in Colorado, her life changed dramatically. I found out
(20:27):
I was pregnant, so I got a plane ticket back
to Chattanooga to kind of figure that out. And that
was really when my friendship with her took off. Was
her calling and texting all the time, checking on me
and the baby and asking about things that were going on.
Bethany was preparing for life as a single mom. I
was in such a raw, vulnerable place in my life,
(20:49):
and I felt like she was offering to be a
new foundation and a new friend. I cried to her
a lot about different hiccups that were happening about the
pregnancy and different things that were just really hard situations,
and she would always cry with me, is what I
remember now, like looking back on all those conversations, Like
(21:10):
if I was happy and I was doing well, then
so was she. You know. If I was happy with
work and I had a really good day, then so
did she. But if if we got on the phone
and she asked about something that was a little sore
for me at the moment and I started crying, then
she'd start crying. For a long distance friendship, it quickly
moved to unvarnished emotion. Sarah talked about how lonely she
(21:32):
was because she didn't have friends out there, and how
the friends that she did have, you know, didn't want
to invite her to go do things because they wanted
to go out to the bars, for example, and they
didn't know where they wanted to go to a restaurant,
but they didn't know how to transfer Sarah if Sarah
had to go to the restroom. Bethany was also on
her own preparing for the day when she would suddenly
(21:55):
not be I just remember there being a lot of
days where between, you know, trying to figure out how
am I going to financially support this child. I need
to find a place to live, I need to find
a better steady income and figure out how to get
her and you know, some sort of childcare so that
I could, Like there were all of the emotions that
are attached to anything that deals with any of that.
(22:16):
It was a lot of stress and anxiety and sleepless
nights and crying, and at every point of that, Sarah
tried to involve herself and cry with me and reflect
the same emotions as if she understood. I started to
feel an obligation to my friendship with her because of
the tears and because of what she was asking for
from me, just at an emotional level, and I knew
(22:39):
that she was also doing that for me. It felt
like they were two women, each providing a stabilizing force
during a time of uncertainty. There was one weird thing, though,
something that wouldn't make sense to Bethany until years later.
I remember her asking several times for my ultrasounds, and
(23:00):
I was always driving when she asked me, and I go, yeah, yeah,
when I park, you know, when I get to where
I'm going, I'll send it. I always forgot to send it.
She kept pestering me about the ultrasound, and I started
to get to a point where I felt bad because
it was just pregnancy brain. I just kept forgetting to
send it to her, but she asked multiple times. During
their conversations. Sarah was making plans to return to Camp
(23:24):
Summit for the spring session. We talked a lot the
two prior weeks before she went to camp, but she
was anxious about it because it wasn't going to be
the same staff, and so I think Sarah was really
nervous about whether or not they were going to have
the same level of expertise with the care, if it
was going to be as smooth as it was In
the spring of two thousand sixteen, Sarah went back to
(23:45):
Camp Summit just after lunchtime sometime early afternoon. I was
driving to my job and I got a call from
a Texas number that I didn't have saved. It was
the assistant director at the time, and she said, Hey,
I'm so sorry to call you like this. She said,
yours was the hardest call to make. Bethany had just
(24:06):
pulled into the parking lot. She stopped the car and
braced herself. There's a staff alumni page for the camp,
and it's very very frequently that they'll post something about
former campers who have passed. So I thought that was
where the conversation was going. I had no idea, she said, Bethany,
I'm so sorry that I have to be the one
to tell you this. She said, Sarah was here this week,
(24:29):
and uh, I said, yeah, I know. We've we've kept
in contact. She told Bethany that they had been contacted
by a pastor from Illinois a few weeks earlier. He
was inquiring about Sarah's relationship with camp and just wanted
to know if she was going to be down there
during certain weeks as a volunteer. And so some of
the staff had gotten involved in this conversation and said, well,
(24:52):
know she's here as she's coming as a camper. And
this pastor said, well, I am a pastor of some
of her relatives, and she's been caught in a lot
of lies before and we've tried to catch her and
she's always been able to sneak her way out. He
even had proof to back up what he was claiming.
Here's examples of her social media posts. Here's a picture
(25:13):
of her skiing in Colorado with her mom. Bethany gripped
the phone tighter, almost unable to breathe. She stared out
of the windshield. Everything was going blurry. What the camp
had agreed to do because the pastor and a couple
of family members said, can you please just let us
come and confront her at camp, because we've tried and
tried to get her help, and we've tried to confront
(25:35):
her in the lies, and we know that things like
this have been going on, and so what camp agreed
to do was to facilitate an interaction between them during
an activity where none of the other campers would see,
which was extremely extremely important to the staff. The pastor
told the camp employees when they would be coming. As
(25:56):
the staff waited in the office, they saw a van
come down the drive and stop. They radioed for Sarah
to come to the office. A couple of family members
in her pastor got out of the van. Sarah pulled
up in her wheelchair, saw who it was, and camp
staff told me. She got up out of the chair,
got in the van, shut the door, and they drove off.
(26:19):
There wasn't an apology. There wasn't There wasn't even anything
from the family as far as we'll follow up with
you once we get home. Nobody heard from him. She
drives off, and they're just sitting there, stunned, having to
figure out how to deal with the fallout of that,
how to explain to other campers why she's gone. Sitting
in her car talking to the camp assistant director, Bethany erupted,
(26:42):
I remember screaming at her for probably about ten seconds,
and that's not my nature at all. And I stopped
and I apologized and I said, I'm so sorry. All
of that was out of line. And she goes, Bethany,
I totally get it, because I did the same thing
to my boss. She said, none of us know how
to deal with this, like we don't know what to
(27:03):
believe anymore, what we're supposed to do. A couple of
days later, Sarah called in the middle of the night.
Bethany didn't answer. Her emotional well had dried up. For
the next few days and weeks, Bethany was in a daze,
and then things got creepy. After she was exposed. I
(27:27):
started getting random phone calls from an unknown number, and
I would answer it and it would be someone breathing
heavy on the on the other end of the line
or cackling. And that happened for several weeks um and
then I started getting screenshots of my current location sent
from like a like a Yahoo phone number. I mean,
(27:48):
I don't know that it was her. I was also,
you know, a pregnant, about to be single mom. There
could have been multiple reasons, and I just don't know
the answer. Bethany was haunted by the betrayal of her rust.
One day, she called a friend from the camp, someone
who had been her mentor. I remember sitting in a
Chick fil A drive through and calling her and having
(28:11):
to pull over after I got my chicken nuggets, and
I was just kind of unloading on her, like it.
I think it just had hit me because I had
googled Sarah and I had seen the photos of her
skiing in Colorado right around the same times when I
had been up there working. Every time I googled something
about her, I would find something new and a new blog,
a new email address. I mean, I was digging deep
(28:31):
at that point trying to find where does this end?
Bethany didn't even know the half of it. For more
than a decade, Sarah had built friendship after friendship on
a foundation of lies, and even after Camp Summit, she
(28:53):
wasn't done. I knew of her as a young mom
whose husband was away, who was battling stage four cancer.
She was my friend, I loved her, she was bregnant,
she was myrself. So to find out that she miss
scared that, you know, it mess with me. The story
really is unbelievable that someone could get away with all
(29:16):
the things that she did for all those years, for
so long. Who is Sarah? I don't even think she knows.
Sarah makes herself up as she goes along. Sarah is
an empty shell. Sarah. I don't know what happened to her.
(29:37):
Maybe Sarah doesn't even know herself. But her victims know
exactly what Sarah did to them, and they were faced
with a problem. How do you find justice when no
law has been broken, but on the inside you are.
That's this season Unsympathy Pains. Sympathy Paines is a production
(30:02):
of Neon hum Media and I Heart Radio. I'm Your host.
Laura Beale I wrote and reported the episodes. Natalie Wrinn
is the lead producer. Our editor is Katherine St. Louis.
Associate producer is Rufaro Mazzarua. Our executive producer is Jonathan Hirsch.
Samantha Allison is our production manager. Fact checking by Jacqueline Colletti.
(30:26):
Jesse Pearlstein composed the theme song and music heard throughout
this series. Additional tracks are by Blue Dot Sessions and
Epidemic Sound. Scott Somerville is our engineer and sound designer.
Special thanks to Stephanie Serrano from I Heart Radio. Special
thanks to Carrie Lieberman and Bethan Macaluso. Executive producer at
(30:47):
I Heart Radio is Dylan Fagen.
At Southern Illinois University in the small city of Carbondale.
Three light brown towers our campus landmarks their high rise dorms.
A sophomore named Emily has moved into one of them.
I lived actually on the fifteenth floor, and the view
from up inside the towers that high up was just amazing.
(00:22):
I just always loved it, and of course at night
you could see all the lights from the city. It's
the fall of two thousand three. Emily is not her
real name, which she didn't want used. Emily and her
roommate share a bathroom with two freshmen. The four girls
are sweet mates, and as the semester goes on, they
(00:44):
get to know each other. One of the freshman sweet
mates is named Sarah, Sarah Delashman. She's from Highland, a
small town almost two hours north. She's here as a
pre med student. Sarah has short brown hair. It was
kind of dirty blonde or close to brown, and it
(01:05):
kind of looked a little bit feathered. She had glasses embraces.
If she owned makeup, I didn't know it because I
don't think I ever saw her wear makeup before at all.
My previous two sweet mates the year before they were
nowhere nearest, friendly, and so Sarah kind of seemed a
little bit like a beam of sunshine. I guess you
(01:26):
could say Sarah doesn't talk about her family all that much.
I never saw it her dad. I think her dad
was not in a picture, and I don't remember if
he had passed away or it was, you know, like
a divorce situation. I never saw her mom ever, which
is kind of interesting because she lived about maybe an
(01:48):
hour and a half, maybe closer to two hours. Her
cousin had brought her newborn baby, and that's the only
time I think that I remember she had any family
that came and visited him. Not long into the semester,
Sarah walks into Emily's room. I think it was about
(02:12):
maybe October or so when she came and told us that,
you know, that she had leukemia. Leukemia. No one takes
the news of Sarah's cancer harder than her roommate, the
other freshman of the bunch. She was one of those
friends that if you were crossing the street and she
saw that the bus was about to hit you, she
(02:33):
would have jumped in the way to save her friend.
She was going to support her no matter what she
was That close with Sarah. The semester goes on. They
come and go from class, and Sarah makes sure that
nobody forgets about her cancer. One day, Sarah talks about
how she's starting to lose her hair and maybe she
(02:54):
should just go ahead and cut it all off. They
all gather in Emily's room with hers, roll back the rug,
and get ready to give Sarah a haircut. At the
last minute, though she backs out. She never says why,
but you know who doesn't back out, her roommate. She
chops off her hair and a show of support. One day,
(03:16):
Sarah suggests they watch a movie called A Walk to Remember.
It's a teen romance and the lead female character is
dying from cancer. It's the kind of cancer story that
you might see on the Hallmark channel. I'm sick, I'm sick. Aprkemia.
(03:39):
Emily isn't so sure this is a good idea. You know,
we were told by Sarah and her roommate that it
was fine, that they were going to be okay, they
were going to hold themselves together, and it was completely
the opposite. By the time the movie was over, the
room was dark except for the light of the TV
(04:00):
and off in the corner. The movie ended with Sarah
and her roommate crumpled on the floor, hugging each other,
crying together. It was a bad idea not to intervene.
The school year ends, everyone scatters for the summer. Emily
and Sarah decide to room together when they come back
(04:20):
in the fall. One evening in July, Emily is at
a wedding, and then during the reception, I get a
call from Sarah that she's been in a car accident,
and a bad one at that. She said that she
was going to have to have her back fused. If
I could almost paraphrase how she said, you know, I've
(04:41):
been in a car accident and I'm in a wheelchair,
and I don't know if I'm gonna be able to
walk again. Emily doesn't see Sarah until the start of
the new fall term. They agree on a move in time,
but when Emily gets there and opens the door, she
discovers that Sarah has surprised her by moving in early.
(05:04):
Here the door start to open and she's in a wheelchair.
And not only is she a wheelchair, she's a She's
an emmanual wheelchair and not an electric wheelchair. She also
had this heavy plastic, medical looking back brace that kind
of fit around her almost like a corset would. After
(05:26):
school starts, Sarah isn't around all that much. She just
kind of disappeared for a day, or disappear for two days,
and I barely saw her. But then one day she
started talking to me, and she was laying on her bed,
and I turned around in my chair um to face
her in the window, and I looked back at her,
(05:49):
and she was smiling, talking, But the way that she
was laying on the bed looked really strange, because she
was laying like you were laying on your stomach, propping
your your elbows up like you were flipping through a magazine,
and like you had your feet kind of flipped up
towards the ceiling. And I just remember looking at her,
(06:12):
watching her smiling and with his fused back of hers.
I thought, I don't know how she's this comfortable laying
on the bed like she is. But that was the
turning point that something is off. Emily and Sarah start
to not get along, typical roommates not clicking. Emily moves out,
(06:36):
leaving Sarah to fend for herself and the wheelchair in
the back brace a few weeks later, Emily walks through
the double doors of a dining hall, and there she is.
I see Sarah at the top of the stairs, and
she is not in a wheelchair, she is not in
a back brace. She's in jeans and a T shirt.
(06:58):
Students scurry two and throw all around them, But for
Emily and Sarah time stops. Everything else around me just
seems to disappear just as I step into the dining hall,
looking up at her. And I looked at her, and
(07:18):
she saw me, and she looked at me kind of
with a blank stare. It wasn't a sad thing, it
wasn't a mean face or anything. It was just kind
of blank, and it seemed like everything else faded away,
and that was like the only thing that was going
on was just the two of us kind of staring
at each other. Emily walks up the stairs past Sarah,
(07:39):
neither of them saying a word. And I turned the
corner to head to where the mailboxes were, and curiosity
got the better of me, and I turned back to
look at her. And she hadn't moved, you, like her
feet or anything, but she had still turned and looked
at me with that's aim look, it was game over,
(08:07):
but her game was far from over. The worst part
is I found out much, much, much, much later that
it morphed into something so sinister and hurtful than I
never imagined. We were warm up, you know, we were practiced.
(08:27):
There's a reason why Emily doesn't want us to use
her name. She's hoping Sarah has forgotten it. She doesn't
want Sarah to ever find her. You're telling a story
about someone who's such a masterminded lying, and you're like,
no one's going to believe this story. I mean, it
just sounds crazy to even think of, Like some of
(08:47):
the stuff that had happened. Emily never saw Sarah again.
But over the years, Sarah got better and better at
insinuating herself into online support groups for people with illnesses
or charities that help patients should find a way into
people's hearts and lives. She obviously kept many, many, many
stories straight for a very very long time. She did
(09:10):
a good job of fooling a lot of people for
a really long time, until the day she told one
lie too many. This was a case that victims were
very passionate about. You know, Sarah can go to prison,
someone can lock her up for a crime, but where
is the law? The law doesn't account for the trauma.
(09:33):
This is a story told by the victims of what
may seem like a victimless crime. Sarah delash Miant wasn't
really after money or power. She needed something far more complicated,
and what she stole from everyone who trusted her and
believed her in the end was far more valuable than money.
(09:56):
I'm Laura Beale. You're listening to Sympathy Pains. This is
episode one. Bethany. I've been a medical journalist for a
really long time, so long that there are times when
I think that nothing is really going to surprise me anymore.
(10:16):
Until it does. Until you pull a string and just
keep pulling and pulling, trying to make sense of things,
and in the end you're left in a place that
you didn't expect to be. This is one of those stories.
Bethany Turner lives in Indianapolis with her young daughter. She
has a round face and soft brown eyes. She's thirty
(10:39):
one years old. She grew up here in a tight
knit religious family, pretty sheltered until she went to college
in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Bethany is one of those people who
not only recognizes pain and injustice. She feels it down
to her bones. She's drawn to people in need, people
who live in the invisible margins of society. You're helping
(11:02):
yourself along the way to because every one of those
situations I walked out of I felt like I gained
more than I was giving. It's it's an environment where
you get to learn from each other, but feel like
you're bettering a community too. In two thousand and fifteen,
she was looking for the next place she could serve.
I just finished up a term with AmeriCorps. I had
(11:22):
done a year with them working with children in South Florida.
I had traveled abroad and done some um teaching. I
was searching for the kindness. I was searching for the humanity.
I was searching for the community. Scrolling through the Internet,
she started reading about a place in Texas called Camp Summit. Today,
(11:42):
it spans out of our almost five acres, near a
town called No Joke Paradise. It's been around in some
form since the nineteen forties. It's a place where adults
with disabilities can spend a week soaking in the outdoors,
doing the kind of stuff that society usually makes hard
for them, like swimming or putting on a talent show.
(12:04):
This resonated with Bethany. She had had an uncle who
was disabled and a friend in college who was too.
That friend especially gave Bethany a whole new perspective. She
encouraged her to not be afraid of being bold. She
just really challenged me to be better and try different
things and not make excuses. The moment Bethany drove through
(12:27):
the gates of Camp Summit and onto the gravel driveway,
she knew this is where she needed to be. You
come in and there everything in campus surrounded by trees.
There's um some little walkways back in there where we
would take hikes into the woods a little bit, and
they had some areas that were set up for bonfires.
The boys camp is on the right, so there's five
(12:48):
or six, I'd say five, maybe cabins, just a typical
old school camp house. Campers could ride horses, shoot arrows,
even go down a zip line. A lot of them
told me it was their vacation, which hadn't really occurred
to me until they said that out loud. That you know,
they live in assisted living homes, or they live with
(13:09):
caregivers or they've lived with family their whole life, and
this is there one or two times a year where
they can take a week to go be with friends
and and it be a completely accessible experience. For many
of the campers, it's the best week of their lives. Yeah,
it's the best week of anybody's life that gets to go.
(13:31):
To be honest with you, I mean, the staff loves
it just as much, if not more, than the campers do.
I think it's a very sacred community. Sacred community. I've
heard this phrase a lot while working on this story.
You passed that gate and everybody's just kind of their
own chaotic mess, laughing and hugging, and I have have
never experienced so many hugs and so much laughter in
(13:52):
my life. And the lasting friendships that came out of
just those few weeks of being there, I think are
going to be lifelong. The new camp burs arrived on Sundays.
During one session in the fall of two thousand fifteen,
Bethany and the other counselors were roaming through the cabin,
which was bustling with the chatter and activity of unpacking.
(14:12):
One of the campers was in a power wheelchair in
the middle of the room. Yeah, I remember her wearing
a lot of like soft pink and soft clothes. She
told the counselor she had muscular dystrophee. She could hold
herself upright, but could barely move from the neck down.
Just a little bit of arm control enough to work
(14:33):
the toggle on her chair was all she could manage.
Her name was Sarah. She was thirty years old. She
said she had her nursing license and lived with her
mom in southern Illinois, in a town not far from St. Louis.
She kind of came across with someone who hadn't experienced
a lot outside of her small town in Illinois. Bethany
(14:54):
drifted from camper to camper, helping organize their bedding and clothes.
So of the caregivers was already helping her unpack everything
because she was basically just kind of pointing where she
wanted things and organized. And she had she brought a
c pat machine, so that she was talking to her
about how to set that up. And she pointed over
at the separate suitcase and she said, open that one.
It has some other things in there. For the cabin.
(15:16):
She had a bunch of crafts and things that we
could do. I think she had maybe even some snacks
for us. Of course, then everyone else in the cabinet
is immediately drawn to her and want to see what
was in there. The treats were a draw, but so
was she. She seemed like a very good friend to everyone.
I mean she showed up day one with crafts and
things ready to go. I mean, I'm definitely not that
(15:37):
friend most days that I come prepared with, you know,
thoughtful gifts and things. And so she just she set
this aura in the camp. Because of Sarah's circumstances, the
counselors had to do everything for her, dress her, cut
her food into bite sized pieces, even change her feminine
hygiene products. They bathed her two and she liked to
(16:00):
shower every evening. I'm five one two, and she was
significantly bigger and taller than me and the other two caregivers.
So whoever was lifting her from the front, it's really
hard to describe, but essentially it's, you know, kind of
a dead lift to get the weight off of your back.
But the way she would land, because of her height
and her weight and her inability to help at all,
(16:22):
our spines were going the wrong direction, and just the
weight on the top of our shoulders. But they did it.
It's why they were there. And as time went on,
Bethany and Sarah drew closer and closer, until their lives
became interwoven in unexpected ways. Bethany gave everything she had
(16:44):
to make sure that Sarah had the kind of vacation
she came for. It was just a really empowering week
for a lot of reasons. She got to participate in
some camp traditions and things. I remember all of the
conversations of what she didn't have. She didn't have the
abilitlity to move out on her own and you know,
have roommates. She wanted to experience freedom, and she really
(17:07):
wanted to go down the zip line. It's maybe a
ten second ride. It assumed really fast, but we would
put her power wheelchair underneath the zip line. There was
kind of a sack. It has four points with some
carabineers on it. To be able to lift her with
some rope out of the power wheelchair and onto the
zip line. Getting her onto the zip line took a
(17:31):
lot of staff and delayed activities for other campers. She
just kept throwing her neck back. There was a lot
of concern on letting her do this, because she was
not giving us any assistance. But she finally did it
and went across and they lowered her down onto the
deck to unhook the carabineers. And remember her just laying
there and just sobbing. It felt like such a big
(17:52):
moment for her. Through it all, Bethany was there for
the triumphs and the fireside hard hearts. Sara seemed to
make a point of having one on one time with
the staff. She was very intentional with her friendships from
the get go, and I think I just am drawn
to deep conversation anyway. And so I mean, she told
(18:15):
me about her home life and things like that and
college friends and feels like you're packing all these things
into one week, and so it felt much more heartfelt.
And then when you all parted at the end of
the week, what was that goodbye? Like very tearful. We
were all really sad to see that weekend. Um, we've
seen a lot of bonding and new relationships formed and things.
(18:37):
And so I remember Sarah leaving. She was telling one
of the other campers that she was going to fly
back to St. Louis, that she had to leave early
that day, to catch a flight. The goodbye would not
last for long, as autumn wound down and the weather
turned cooler. Camp ended, The cow Stlors packed up and dispersed.
(19:02):
One group made plans to head up to Colorado to
work at the resorts for the upcoming ski season. We
were going to kind of do that for a season
and figure out what we wanted to do in the spring.
Sarah was calling and texting and sending gifts to all
of us. I think I was the one that was
probably communicating with her the most frequently. Thanksgiving week, Bethany
(19:22):
and her family were on a road trip. Bethany realized
that they'd be passing close to Sarah's home in Illinois.
We met her at a cracker barrel at the outskirts
of her town. She was already waiting at the restaurant
when they arrived. My family introduced themselves, and uh we
sat down at a table, and I remember she ordered
like a thing. It was like a fried chicken or something,
(19:44):
and so I cut everything up for you know, gave
her the straw. It was like camp all over again,
and we sat there in giggled. I remember she was
in a great mood, super friendly, and bubbly with my family.
We got ready to leave, and her story was that
her mom had dropped her off and her mom had
to take her nephews to their Saturday basketball game, and
then when she got done with that, her mom was
(20:06):
gonna come pick her up. But that was why she
wanted to drop her off at Cracker Barrel, because at
least Sarah could stay somewhere kind of in a lobby
area and hang out. I hugged her, took a couple
of pictures, and then my family and I got on
the road. She said she had talked to her mom
and her mom was gonna be there in a few
minutes and I was just running late. Shortly after Bethany
arrived in Colorado, her life changed dramatically. I found out
(20:27):
I was pregnant, so I got a plane ticket back
to Chattanooga to kind of figure that out. And that
was really when my friendship with her took off. Was
her calling and texting all the time, checking on me
and the baby and asking about things that were going on.
Bethany was preparing for life as a single mom. I
was in such a raw, vulnerable place in my life,
(20:49):
and I felt like she was offering to be a
new foundation and a new friend. I cried to her
a lot about different hiccups that were happening about the
pregnancy and different things that were just really hard situations,
and she would always cry with me, is what I
remember now, like looking back on all those conversations, Like
(21:10):
if I was happy and I was doing well, then
so was she. You know. If I was happy with
work and I had a really good day, then so
did she. But if if we got on the phone
and she asked about something that was a little sore
for me at the moment and I started crying, then
she'd start crying. For a long distance friendship, it quickly
moved to unvarnished emotion. Sarah talked about how lonely she
(21:32):
was because she didn't have friends out there, and how
the friends that she did have, you know, didn't want
to invite her to go do things because they wanted
to go out to the bars, for example, and they
didn't know where they wanted to go to a restaurant,
but they didn't know how to transfer Sarah if Sarah
had to go to the restroom. Bethany was also on
her own preparing for the day when she would suddenly
(21:55):
not be I just remember there being a lot of
days where between, you know, trying to figure out how
am I going to financially support this child. I need
to find a place to live, I need to find
a better steady income and figure out how to get
her and you know, some sort of childcare so that
I could, Like there were all of the emotions that
are attached to anything that deals with any of that.
(22:16):
It was a lot of stress and anxiety and sleepless
nights and crying, and at every point of that, Sarah
tried to involve herself and cry with me and reflect
the same emotions as if she understood. I started to
feel an obligation to my friendship with her because of
the tears and because of what she was asking for
from me, just at an emotional level, and I knew
(22:39):
that she was also doing that for me. It felt
like they were two women, each providing a stabilizing force
during a time of uncertainty. There was one weird thing, though,
something that wouldn't make sense to Bethany until years later.
I remember her asking several times for my ultrasounds, and
(23:00):
I was always driving when she asked me, and I go, yeah, yeah,
when I park, you know, when I get to where
I'm going, I'll send it. I always forgot to send it.
She kept pestering me about the ultrasound, and I started
to get to a point where I felt bad because
it was just pregnancy brain. I just kept forgetting to
send it to her, but she asked multiple times. During
their conversations. Sarah was making plans to return to Camp
(23:24):
Summit for the spring session. We talked a lot the
two prior weeks before she went to camp, but she
was anxious about it because it wasn't going to be
the same staff, and so I think Sarah was really
nervous about whether or not they were going to have
the same level of expertise with the care, if it
was going to be as smooth as it was In
the spring of two thousand sixteen, Sarah went back to
(23:45):
Camp Summit just after lunchtime sometime early afternoon. I was
driving to my job and I got a call from
a Texas number that I didn't have saved. It was
the assistant director at the time, and she said, Hey,
I'm so sorry to call you like this. She said,
yours was the hardest call to make. Bethany had just
(24:06):
pulled into the parking lot. She stopped the car and
braced herself. There's a staff alumni page for the camp,
and it's very very frequently that they'll post something about
former campers who have passed. So I thought that was
where the conversation was going. I had no idea, she said, Bethany,
I'm so sorry that I have to be the one
to tell you this. She said, Sarah was here this week,
(24:29):
and uh, I said, yeah, I know. We've we've kept
in contact. She told Bethany that they had been contacted
by a pastor from Illinois a few weeks earlier. He
was inquiring about Sarah's relationship with camp and just wanted
to know if she was going to be down there
during certain weeks as a volunteer. And so some of
the staff had gotten involved in this conversation and said, well,
(24:52):
know she's here as she's coming as a camper. And
this pastor said, well, I am a pastor of some
of her relatives, and she's been caught in a lot
of lies before and we've tried to catch her and
she's always been able to sneak her way out. He
even had proof to back up what he was claiming.
Here's examples of her social media posts. Here's a picture
(25:13):
of her skiing in Colorado with her mom. Bethany gripped
the phone tighter, almost unable to breathe. She stared out
of the windshield. Everything was going blurry. What the camp
had agreed to do because the pastor and a couple
of family members said, can you please just let us
come and confront her at camp, because we've tried and
tried to get her help, and we've tried to confront
(25:35):
her in the lies, and we know that things like
this have been going on, and so what camp agreed
to do was to facilitate an interaction between them during
an activity where none of the other campers would see,
which was extremely extremely important to the staff. The pastor
told the camp employees when they would be coming. As
(25:56):
the staff waited in the office, they saw a van
come down the drive and stop. They radioed for Sarah
to come to the office. A couple of family members
in her pastor got out of the van. Sarah pulled
up in her wheelchair, saw who it was, and camp
staff told me. She got up out of the chair,
got in the van, shut the door, and they drove off.
(26:19):
There wasn't an apology. There wasn't There wasn't even anything
from the family as far as we'll follow up with
you once we get home. Nobody heard from him. She
drives off, and they're just sitting there, stunned, having to
figure out how to deal with the fallout of that,
how to explain to other campers why she's gone. Sitting
in her car talking to the camp assistant director, Bethany erupted,
(26:42):
I remember screaming at her for probably about ten seconds,
and that's not my nature at all. And I stopped
and I apologized and I said, I'm so sorry. All
of that was out of line. And she goes, Bethany,
I totally get it, because I did the same thing
to my boss. She said, none of us know how
to deal with this, like we don't know what to
(27:03):
believe anymore, what we're supposed to do. A couple of
days later, Sarah called in the middle of the night.
Bethany didn't answer. Her emotional well had dried up. For
the next few days and weeks, Bethany was in a daze,
and then things got creepy. After she was exposed. I
(27:27):
started getting random phone calls from an unknown number, and
I would answer it and it would be someone breathing
heavy on the on the other end of the line
or cackling. And that happened for several weeks um and
then I started getting screenshots of my current location sent
from like a like a Yahoo phone number. I mean,
(27:48):
I don't know that it was her. I was also,
you know, a pregnant, about to be single mom. There
could have been multiple reasons, and I just don't know
the answer. Bethany was haunted by the betrayal of her rust.
One day, she called a friend from the camp, someone
who had been her mentor. I remember sitting in a
Chick fil A drive through and calling her and having
(28:11):
to pull over after I got my chicken nuggets, and
I was just kind of unloading on her, like it.
I think it just had hit me because I had
googled Sarah and I had seen the photos of her
skiing in Colorado right around the same times when I
had been up there working. Every time I googled something
about her, I would find something new and a new blog,
a new email address. I mean, I was digging deep
(28:31):
at that point trying to find where does this end?
Bethany didn't even know the half of it. For more
than a decade, Sarah had built friendship after friendship on
a foundation of lies, and even after Camp Summit, she
(28:53):
wasn't done. I knew of her as a young mom
whose husband was away, who was battling stage four cancer.
She was my friend, I loved her, she was bregnant,
she was myrself. So to find out that she miss
scared that, you know, it mess with me. The story
really is unbelievable that someone could get away with all
(29:16):
the things that she did for all those years, for
so long. Who is Sarah? I don't even think she knows.
Sarah makes herself up as she goes along. Sarah is
an empty shell. Sarah. I don't know what happened to her.
(29:37):
Maybe Sarah doesn't even know herself. But her victims know
exactly what Sarah did to them, and they were faced
with a problem. How do you find justice when no
law has been broken, but on the inside you are.
That's this season Unsympathy Pains. Sympathy Paines is a production
(30:02):
of Neon hum Media and I Heart Radio. I'm Your host.
Laura Beale I wrote and reported the episodes. Natalie Wrinn
is the lead producer. Our editor is Katherine St. Louis.
Associate producer is Rufaro Mazzarua. Our executive producer is Jonathan Hirsch.
Samantha Allison is our production manager. Fact checking by Jacqueline Colletti.
(30:26):
Jesse Pearlstein composed the theme song and music heard throughout
this series. Additional tracks are by Blue Dot Sessions and
Epidemic Sound. Scott Somerville is our engineer and sound designer.
Special thanks to Stephanie Serrano from I Heart Radio. Special
thanks to Carrie Lieberman and Bethan Macaluso. Executive producer at
(30:47):
I Heart Radio is Dylan Fagen.
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