April 13, 2022 • 35 mins
Liz Hickox works in financial services and volunteers for a breast cancer charity. At a bike ride for young survivors, she meets Sarah, who says she has stage 4 metastatic disease. Liz and her husband Brian welcome Sarah into their winter home in Florida and help her train for a triathlon– her single goal before she dies. After they discover the truth, they find other victims of Sarah’s scams and together vow to get her help, turning to an unlikely person: Dr. Phil.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Liz Hiccox lives in Newport, Rhode Island, in a postcard
perfect New England cottage by the water, with her husband Brian,
and a black lab named Salty. She's an athlete. On
any given weekend, you'll probably find her on her bike
training for her next Iron Man. She's been a runner
for decades, finishing the New York City Marathon a dozen times,
(00:24):
but she didn't get on a racing bike until two
thousand and fifteen, after she said she'd do this three
day charity ride for breast cancer survivors. I had a
very good friend who was a young survivor. She was
a mom of about thirty seven, two young kids, who
was diagnosed in her early thirties. And she would come
to me and asked for a donation. Every year she
would do this ride and I would write a check.
(00:46):
And then one year her friend couldn't participate, and I said, well,
when's the ride And she said some thirty days as well,
I'll do it. And she said you have a bike,
and I said no. She borrowed her friends, crashed at
the first stop side and I came to I had
no idea how to shift or anything. I remember riding
to a hill and found some guy in stretchy shorts
(01:08):
and said, could you please help me figure out to
shift this? I don't know how to do this. So
I went out and trained every day for thirty days.
She was hooked on both the bike and the organization.
She met women who said making the ride was the
goal that had gotten them through chemo. She saw how
they drew strength from this shared accomplishment, even if they
could only make it a few miles. The whole experience
(01:31):
was honestly life changing. And I said to Brian and said,
you've got to do this. This was a really important event.
And I couldn't feel more strongly that you know, you
need to take part in it. And then the next
year he did. In late September two thousen, a streak
of tendonitis sidelined her for the Breast Cancer Ride, so
she volunteered to help at the rest stops, where women
(01:52):
would take breaks for water and snacks. Everyone's patting each
on their backs, saying you got this. This is incredible.
People are singing and cheering, you know, saying, oh my gosh,
you know that was so hard or that was so easy.
As the day was winding down, another cyclist came up
to Liz and asked her a favor. There's a young
woman that's coming in and she's at the end of
(02:14):
the pack and she's missed all of the photographers and
it's her first ride, and we'd really like to get
her picture. Would you mind snapping a picture for her?
Can I remember? She said? She has a pink sock
and she has a green sock on. The woman said
the writer's name was Sarah, and she had recently been
diagnosed with stage four breast cancer and that she hadn't
(02:37):
even told her husband yet. Her husband was away overseas.
He was a pilot, and she had gotten the news
while he was away on this particular trip. During this event,
she had gotten the news that her cancer had progressed,
and she just didn't know how she was going to
tell him. Liz felt for Sarah. About twenty minutes later,
(02:58):
a woman with mis match box came riding by. She
had flown past me and gone into the rest stop,
and I said, oh my gosh, you must be Sarah.
I said, can you need me a favor? I said,
can you go back out, turn around and ride back
in because I had one job, and I was to
get your picture, and she laughed, and she did, and
she she came back in and I snapped her photo,
(03:20):
and I said, what's your number? I'm going to text
it to you. As the months passed, their friendship grew,
with message exchanges quickly ballooning from one a day to
sometimes a hundred or more. Sarah did have a way
of quickly turning a casual text feed into an emotional avalanche.
The following spring, Sarah told Liz there was a more
(03:42):
immediate threat to her life even than cancer, a stalker,
someone obsessed with her good looking husband. She said that
she was smitten with her husband and that she was
sending him messages saying that after Sarah was gone, they'd
be together, and she was saying to Sarah, You're not
pretty enough for him. This hit Liz hard. She had
(04:05):
told Sarah that when she was nineteen, a classmate of
hers had been killed by a stalker. Over the course
of the next forty eight hours or so, Sarah would
tell me, I'm at the gym. Oh my gosh, she's outside.
She's I can see her parked out there. She's looking
at me. She even sent Liz a video when she
was trying to dodge her. She's wearing a scarf wrapped
(04:27):
around her head and glistening with sweat while she's at
the gym. Sarah's out of breath, but her voice is confident,
even defiant. I'm not gonna let her take this away
from me. I'm bigger than that. So for forty eight hours,
she had me wrapped in this web of drama of
high intensity with this stalker who was now attacking my friend,
(04:50):
who I thought was already under attack of a terminal illness.
I couldn't breathe, my chest was heavy. The next day,
Sarah told Liz she wanted to face time with her.
As she walked out of a Walmart and she said, Liz,
she's there. I said, what do you mean? And says,
(05:10):
she's there between the cars by my car. What do
I do? I said, you need to run into the store.
And so she ran into the store and she said,
oh my god, she has a gun. The phone went
dead for more than a minute, with Liz frantic on
the other end. Then she got a text and she
(05:30):
said they got her. Seven people were shot. She said,
I took a bullet in the knee. Sarah told Liz.
She was in an ambulance. A couple of days later,
to get more details about the shooting, Liz's husband Brian
called up a friend in law enforcement, a guy named Tom,
And as I'm talking on the phone, I said, oh wait,
(05:52):
you know what, I've never actually googled Sarah's name. I
should probably do that. He typed Sarah de Lashman into
this search. Barn I said, Holy sh it, Tom, I'm
Laura Beale. You're listening to Sympathy Pains. This is episode
three Liz. Liz and Brian are one of those couples
(06:22):
who actually found true love in a bar, in the
biggest pickup bar you could ever meet, in Wellington, Florida.
It was April of two thousand five. Liz is an equestrian,
and she was in Florida competing at a horse show.
I was leaving to go home to Rhode Island the
next day, literally less than twelve hours later, and he
(06:43):
had just arrived in Florida. He was the only guy
there that you know, probably had a pickup truck and
a yellow lab and I was definitely the only girl
there in a baseball hat and jeans. He um vaguely
reminded me of Kenny Chesney, and that was a good
thing at that point in my life. She was a
New York City native who had left the city for
good after nine eleven. He was working in Florida for
(07:06):
Merrill Lynch. He came up for a couple of dates
in Newport and he said, you know what, I can
really live here. And then literally after three dates, I
said to him, you can. You can be my boyfriend
if you want, but you have to move here, and
he did. They married after dating for about a year
and a half and ended up founding a financial services
business together in Rhode Island. Every winter, they relocate to
(07:29):
a rented bungalow in Florida, just a mile from shore
on the Intercoastal Waterway. You pretty much wake up every
day and I love our life. Back in the fall
of two thousand and eighteen, after the bike ride where
she met Sarah, Liz started noticing Sarah's posts on the
(07:51):
organization's private Facebook group, pictures of herself sitting in what
looked like um hospital bed with tubes running and taped
her shirt, wearing a cancer scarf with you know, a
thumbs up or so. A lot of times She would
have headphones on and she would say, you know, getting
getting the juice today, looking for prayers and support, you know,
(08:13):
going in for a scan today, you know, wish me luck.
They touched me because I knew of her as a
young mom whose husband was away, who was battling stage
four cancer, and I felt completely helpless. It's something that
spoke to me. For several weeks after the bike ride,
(08:36):
Liz would write messages of support under the photos. Christmas
time came. One day in December, Liz pulled a handful
of holiday envelopes out of her mailbox and found a
card from Sarah, a photo card of perhaps nine photos
a little girl with one of those giant bows on
(08:57):
her head, and she had little white socks on and
black Patton white or black Patent leather shoes, like little
girl shoes. And that was the Christmas card from Sarah
James and Bindy, her fourteen month old daughter. And I thought,
oh cute when I saved it. And shortly thereafter, probably
literally days later, Brian and I left for Florida for
(09:20):
the winter. We pack up our house, we head down south,
we take our office, we take our dog, and we
literally kind of move our work home life for a
couple of months during the winter. In January, Liz got
a message from Sarah through Facebook Messenger. It said her
cancer had progressed and she had tumors in her liver
(09:42):
and brain. After that, Liz and Sarah began exchanging notes
almost every day. As soon as someone messages me, I
feel like I have to get right back to them
where they're going to be insulted or hurt in some way,
so you know, I would respond, which would prompt another
response from her, And lots of conversations and dare's her
need to get more regular at this point, and we
were just talking about life and her chemo and her treatment.
(10:06):
Weeks of message exchanges drew them closer as Sarah underwent
grueling treatments. Liz wrote encouragement, you got this, and she
started calling Sarah's sister friend, trying to make her feel loved.
In February of two thousand nineteen, Sarah said she was
going to be in southern Florida that she worked as
(10:29):
a flight attendant, which allowed her easy travel. She wanted
to visit Liz and Brian, saying I'm going to take
a chance here and I'm going to drive up and
I'm going to see you. And part of me was like, wow,
you know she trust me enough. That's that's really great.
This woman who is, you know, fighting for her life
(10:49):
every day, values me and trusts me enough and us
to come visit us. And I was a little nervous
about that, excited and honestly honored, and at that point
it kind of became my duty to make sure she
had a wonderful experience. And I had to say to her.
(11:09):
I said, Sarah, you know, we have a very small
cottage here. It's just one bedroom. We don't even have
a couch. But Liz's mother, Maggie, a Florida retiree, lived nearby.
It was the main reason they headed south every year.
So she calls me up and I picked up the phone. Hello.
She asked me if she could have a friend of hers,
(11:30):
who she met on this spike ride, come and spend
the weekend with us, because after rule, she doesn't have
enough room in her place. She said, Mom, Sarah is
final stage cancer. And as soon as I heard that,
my heart dropped, my stomach left and it was like, Elizabeth, fine,
(11:52):
she can't come, Okay, no problem. So that's where Sarah stayed,
she wanted to do a try etheln and she wanted
to be like my daughter Elizabeth. We thought we were
going to give her a life changing experience in a weekend.
Liz hadn't seen Sarah in person since the bike ride
(12:13):
where they met. She arrived wearing a scarf around her
head and a wig. Brian, Liz, and Sarah spent the
next day cycling around Jupiter Island, a perfect Florida winter
day with a warm sun and an ocean breeze. Sarah
seemed to struggle but made the ride. We went back
(12:34):
to our house, the cottage, and she went back to
my parents house where she was going to go home,
you know, shower up, get ready for dinner. I think
she said she needed to take a nap and call
her husband, etcetera. By now, my mother is completely enchanted
with her, and I think at this point Sarah is
(12:56):
already calling her mom. My mother is one of the
kindest people on this earth and is getting up in
the morning before Sarah rides and making sure she has
a full breakfast. That evening, Brian and Liz stopped and
bought fresh fish. Brian made tacos for dinner. Afterwards, they
sat in their backyard at the water's edge, under the
(13:16):
shade of a bishop wood tree. It's a really peaceful place.
There's a hammock there, and Sarah sat in the hammock
and she said, this is now my happy place. Remember
giving her a margarite to thinking, oh my gosh, is
this okay? Can I do this? And candidly I needed
that margharita myself so much because this dress was so
great about you have someone's life in your hands. You know,
(13:39):
this woman is battling a terminal illness, and here I
am giving her a margharita. Is it okay? They sipped
their cocktails and talked about life and death. Remember, she
said to me, I don't want to be forgotten. I
was sitting in kind of beach chair and I looked
over at the one of the palm trees that's by
the water, and I thought, my goodness forgotten. Like just
(14:02):
imagine being a young mom, a wife and thinking two
years from now people might not remember me. That just
really got me. Monday morning came time for Sarah to leave.
Liz and Brian had to work. As Sarah left, they
stood in front of the house and pose for pictures,
the three of them and the dog. We all had
(14:24):
our arms around each other, you know, we literally hugged
her like we didn't know if we were going to
see her again. It was very emotional. I remember her tears. Yeah, Um,
she started to cry, and I mean, I know Lizzie did,
and I would have had a at least a tear drop.
(14:46):
Sarah got in her rented car and drove off. We
are just honestly exhausted from caring about her, from talking,
from crying, worrying, and we sat in the backyard and
oh my gosh, I'm just exhausted. And then around five
pm that evening we got a text, a text from
(15:09):
her saying, guess what, guys, my flight was canceled. I'm
coming back. We can have fish tacos again. And honestly,
at that moment, I looked at Brian and I was like,
oh my gosh, I don't know if if I can.
I don't find the energy, you know, but what we
have to do this. Sarah stayed the extra night. The
(15:29):
next weekend. Liz's mom was doing a triathlon that week.
Brian got a text from Sarah saying, Hey, I'd like
to come down this weekend to cheer on Mom. And
you know, I said, I fully understand. I mean, obviously
Mom has given you a lot to Sarah and and
I thought that was very nice. It was probably what
(15:51):
six o'clock or so in the morning on the day
of the race, and I knew that Sarah was on
her way, but he didn't mention anything to live or
her mom. He wanted Sarah's second visit to be a surprise.
I remember putting my mom's bike helmet on her, like
dropping it on her, and I just thought the irony,
like here I am putting my mom's bike helmet on,
(16:12):
like she's my kid, you know, she's seventy seven years old.
And someone topped me on the shoulder from behind me
and lo and behold, who's there but Sarah. Sarah had
flown in the night before, stayed in a hotel in
Fort Lauderdale, and drove up from Fort Laiderdale to Stewart
to be there at six o'clock in the morning to
(16:34):
be at my first triathlon. Elizabeth had made T shirts
for me, and on the back of the T shirt
it said te Meg's te for Team Meg's, m Ags
for Maggie and you know, who also had the same
(16:54):
T shirt Sarah. Maggie was touched. She must really adore
Elizabeth to do something like that, and she doesn't think
too badly of me either. Is just you know, hey,
I can't even get my husband to get up at
six in the morning to go to Marathon's with me.
(17:15):
So there was another Sarah weekend the bike's Hammock Tacos.
We just took her out solely on the boat to
see the flying Fish that Saturday night. Sitting on the
couch with Maggie's Chihuahua Pedro in her lap, Sarah calmly
talked about a stalker that was after her. He felt
sorry for this girl with the stalk rafter and dying
(17:38):
a cancer and with the wig and this and all that,
and all she was trying to do was do a
triathlon before she died. Sensing that Sarah was working her
way deeper into the family, Brian made it clear to
Sarah that she absolutely could not come for a third
(17:58):
weekend in a row. My father was coming in for
a visit with his his girlfriend at the time, and
next weekend, just you can't, you can't come, you know,
not that we've been making plans for it, but just
like we can't have a a surprise, but this was Sarah.
Sarah was full of surprises. The last weekend in February
(18:20):
two thou nineteen was a family gathering for Liz and Brian.
Brian's dad was visiting. They went fishing in the boat
that anchors just off their backyard. They caught a tuna
and came back to the dock. I just put the
fish down, and that's when she walked in the backyard
and I'll just never forget the hi guys. And I
(18:42):
looked up and I sare and I did not say
a word. I just kind of walked past her. I
walked to the house and I took a moment, and
Lizzie came in a minute or so later, and she
kind of yelled at me, and she said, you you
can't be rude like that, and I said, I'll be fine.
I just I just need a minute. She was not
(19:02):
welcome for the weekend, but I'm not gonna say anything.
And so she spent the weekend you know, with me
and my father and us, and she crashed our family
reunion in every way. But they made the best of it.
And by this time she's gotten to be one of
the family. Pago looks for a When Sarah pulled up
to the house, Maggie noticed something different about her rental car.
(19:26):
It had a bike rack and strapped to it. It
was a beautiful bike. It looked like it was brand new.
I think it was maroon, and they're not cheap, these
marathon bikes. Brian and Liz made it clear in the
starkest of terms that she could not come back for
yet another weekend, telling her as much as I would
(19:49):
love to see you next weekend, I really need to focus.
I haven't seen any of my friends or family. I
haven't been able to do any work. I have my
own races. I needed trade for next weekend. I need
just to catch up. I've been the worst friend. I
haven't seen my parents alone. They told Sarah they had
(20:10):
plans a good friend was getting married. I've missed all
of the bridal things that my dear friend needs me
to do. I need this weekend to myself. But Sarah
burrowed into Lizz's life anyway. It was early March two
thousand nineteen when Liz first started getting messages about her stalker.
(20:31):
Sarah wrote, I'm hiding in the bathtub. I cam afraid
to leave my house. And then from Sarah's husband James,
messaging me when she's not saying she's having a panic attack.
You're the only person that can talk to her. She'll
only listen to you. For two days, Liz was sucked
into the vortex of Sarah in trouble, culminating with the
(20:54):
shooting at an Illinois Walmart. I'm absolutely exhausted because been
forty eight hours of the stalker chasing her, following her,
threatening her, and now you know, chasing her down to
the walmart and showing up with a gun after her
and there's shots fired. I'm exhausted. I just can't even
(21:16):
believe what just happened. But something about it struck Brian
as off. We are starting to, of course, look for
any record of a shooting at at a Walmart in
you know, in Illinois, where seven people are shy like
you're going to see something in the news, and nothing
was in the news, and we found that to be strange.
(21:37):
Sarah had an explanation. She said the FBI was trying
to keep it quiet that they had told her to
go to the store to lure the stalker out. What
she didn't know was that Liz and Brian had a
friend with FBI connections. Their friend Tom, our friend, openly laughed.
He's like, that's not how it works. He made a
(21:58):
quick call to the local station there and they said, no,
there's there hasn't been a shooting here, you know, maybe
maybe not ever. And that is when Brian began to
ask a question, a question that many people had asked
before him and would ask later. Who is Sarah Delashman.
(22:26):
It was March seventh, two. Brian Hickocks was on his
phone in the backyard pacing. After learning from his law
enforcement friend that there had been no Walmart shooting, Brian
googled Sarah's name on his phone. He clicked on the
first hit. The first article that came up was that
(22:46):
there's a record of Sarah losing her nursing license in
the state of Virginia. The document was from almost five
years earlier, dated July two, fourteen. Sarah was living in Virginia.
That's where she met Naomi, the college student who tried
to support her through miscarriages and an abusive boyfriend. The
(23:07):
Virginian Nursing Board was pulling Sara's license because they learned
that she had lost her license in the state of
Oklahoma earlier that year. Document said that Sara was working
as a nurse in the neonatal Intensive Care unit at
Oklahoma University Medical Center in the fall of two thousand twelve.
During that time, over a period of about four months,
(23:28):
she started stuffing pillows under her clothes so she would
look pregnant. She showed her co workers copies of an
ultrasound of twins, and then at some point she said
she had delivered the twins prematurely and they had died.
The report also said it was the second time she
had faked a pregnancy as a nurse. In her testimony
(23:50):
to the nursing board, she said she pretended to be
pregnant to make friends, that she had seen how much
support women got when they lost a baby. Faced with
the discipline that could result from a formal hearing, she
surrendered her Oklahoma nursing license on May two, fourteen. If
she wanted to get her license back, the board recommended
(24:12):
a psychiatric evaluation. Standing under the bishop Wood tree, staring
at his phone, Brian was astonished. I walked back into
the house and I said, Lizzie do not contact her again.
I don't know really what's up. But she's not who
she says she is, and we don't need to be
communicating with her. I don't believe that the shooting actually happened.
(24:34):
I don't think that you know, anything happened. She looked
at him with a confused stare that said, what are
you talking about? It was not really even even to
process it. I was still literally in shock for probably
forty eight hours after that. I mean I was on empty.
I had had, you know, four days of really heavy,
(24:57):
exhausting emotion. Then Brian remembered the text with James, Sarah's
supposed husband. They had been corresponding since Sarah's second visit.
But I had already been thinking that James was not real.
You know, it was three weekends in a row that
she was coming down to Florida like that. You know,
you want to leave a legacy for your daughter. You
(25:18):
wouldn't be wanting to leave your daughter first. He tried
an oblique approach. Sarah had told Liz and Brian that
her husband was an mm A fighter, So Brian sent
a message to James, Hey, I'm a big fan of UFC.
How do I find your fights. When that didn't get
a response, he just said out right, I said, hey, man,
I need you to give me a call right now.
(25:40):
James of course never answered. James was Sarah, Sarah was James.
Nothing was real. They realized they needed to break the
news to Liz's mom. It was certainly a hard call
to have to make. You need to make sure that
the security guards take her off the list. I was like,
(26:02):
oh my god, we'd better change the code or in
a garage. I thought that maybe she just might try
to break in the house and do something. At this point,
it's like, who's not to say, she's going to open
the door and walk in and kill us. Snippets of
conversations that once seemed benign, at least in the context
of her stalker, now took on new importance, like how
(26:26):
to cut break lines, how to make a death look
like an accident, how to hide a body. Those are
not things that normally come to someone's thoughts. So the
fact that she had these thoughts and shared them with us, like, wow,
these are things that are on her mind. She told
us one day when she was claiming to have a daughter,
that she dropped off a childcare at the y. She said,
you know, it's to be so easy for anyone to
(26:48):
steal a toddler. Here she goes, I show up and
I pick up my daughter, and you know, the sixteen
year old girl doesn't even look up from her iPad.
Any of these children could be stolen at a moment's notice.
That was really a ring. They call the police, not
really knowing who else to call. They grew more fearful.
Officers warned us to be you know, you can get
(27:09):
a level of protection so that we will know if
she leaves the state. Again, no one knew at that point,
no one knew. I was terrified. Brian began frantically scouring
the internet, trying to find out as much as he could,
And that's when Brian got really busy, just messaging everyone
he can possibly fine. Brian began turning up multiple Facebook
(27:30):
profiles with variations on her name and different photos. He
hunted through the comments and tags for people who knew her.
One of them turned out to be her aunt. Brian
sent her a message. She responded to my my messenger
my message saying yes, I'm I'm her aunt and I'd
like to know what she's up to. It was definitely
(27:51):
a what she's up to? Here we go again. This
is not the first time. Liz gave Sarah's aunt a call.
She was really distraught actually to hear the news. Said
that she'd been at it for years and that the
family was really torn apart about it. She told us
(28:12):
about Aaron in California and that was really upsetting. She
told them Sarah didn't have cancer, never had cancer, and
she didn't have a child either, and it was also
very concerning. You know, the pictures of the baby, it's
the same baby in different situations, different you know, different poses,
definitely different environments. The baby is a mystery and it
(28:35):
seems to be the same baby in every picture. Sarah's
aunt told them what had happened in Texas at Camp Summit.
I called the camp as well, and the girl that
answered the phone um again. I said, my name is
you know, Brian, and this is what's going on. It
might sound a little bit strange, and she actually laughed
to herself. She said that we were just in training
(28:57):
on this yesterday. And as Brian and searched for more
information on Camp Summit, he found one other person tagged
in Sarah's pictures Bethany Turner. He sent Bethany a message
over Facebook saying, here's what's been going on in our lives,
and this is what we've been told and we understand
it not to be true, and you know what has
(29:19):
your experience been. The next morning Bethany saw the message.
She recoiled at the sight of Sarah's dame. I was
brushing my daughter's teeth and looked down and saw something
on my phone and I threw the phone down on
the counter and I was like, nope, not doing that.
She thought it was Sarah herself. I wasn't sure if
it was her trying to catfish me, and I finally
(29:40):
landed on you know what, maybe I just need to
google this guy and see who he is, because if
it's not Sarah, then it's someone that Sarah's hurt. It
was early in the morning, I remember that, maybe five
thirty or so where I I heard the messager go
off and then normally I might sleep through that kind
of thing, but not at that one time. And she
(30:01):
said something not dismissive, but maybe questioning who I was
or or you know what happened, And it didn't take
more than a couple of minutes, I guess for her
to say, okay, you know, I'd be up for a
for a phone call. That call would be the first
of many. Brian and Liz soon learned that Sarah was
(30:24):
back in Florida. They had helped her train for a
triathlon and she was actually going to do it. The
event was just a couple of miles away, and at
that moment, I was never more scared. Do you remember
Alf Hitchcock movies where your hair standing on the head, Because,
oh my god, that woman is going to open the doorway.
You're in the bathtub, in the shower, and she's got
(30:45):
a knife. She's liable to do anything. If she could
do what she did. Liz and Brian couldn't believe she
was back in Florida, almost in their backyard. They decided
to go to the race, putting on hoodies and sunglasses
and ducking behind palm trees waiting for her to go by.
Once they saw her, their jaws dropped. She was wearing
(31:05):
all new gear, new helmets, new sunglasses, new shoes, everything,
everything that's identical to mine, everything, And I was so
unbelievably freaked out. It was really creepy, and you know,
everything right down to the sunglasses and the way she
did her hair. There were so many facets to the
emotions that we had. You know, one is, you know,
(31:28):
you're piste off, as Brian said, you know we've just
been completely taken advantage of. One is humiliated, and you know,
one is fearful, you know, fearful for our safety because
we didn't know you know, where she draws the line.
And then over the course of a few days, we
also developed a compassion. How can we turn this into
(31:52):
something productive? How can we make our horrible experience have
a good ending, you know, for her right if she
really is sick and unable to get help, certainly for
all the potential victims, all the former victims. You know,
how can we just fix this? The police had told
them there was nothing law enforcement could do. It's not
(32:13):
a crime to fake cancer. Like we feel terrible about
what happened to you, but what she's doing isn't a crime,
and that just didn't sit with us. Liz also felt
for Sarah's aunt. She was very kind. She told me
the family was just you know, at wits end. This
is you know, wrecked them in so many ways. I thought,
(32:34):
if there were mandated help treatment that might help in
some way, and that was our thoughts was that if
the family can't afford to do it, we've got to
find a way to get this done. They didn't want
to go to her employer because then, you know, her
aunt had told me if she lost her job that
the family will lose the house. I couldn't afford to
pay for any kind of extended treatment for her, but
(32:55):
I knew that this television personality offered people help, and
I thought, wow, I'll just call Dr Phil Dr Phil
today on an all new Dr Phil that Dr Phil.
I went his website and it says do you want
(33:17):
to be on the show, and it said tell us
your story. You know, if we're interested, will give you
a call. So I wrote a pretty pretty detailed story
about what was going on, and they asked Bethany if
she would join them. I don't think I'd ever watched
a Dr Phil episode in my life, but she didn't
want Sarah to hurt anyone else. Ever, since she had
learned about Sarah walking out of Camp Summit, I knew
(33:37):
that at some point it was going to resurface, because
I knew she was doing it other places. If I
can google her and find trails of her from Oklahoma
to Texas to Illinois to out east. I mean, there
was no way she was going to stop. I just
didn't have the capacity at that point to deal with it.
I told them, I said, we've got to get this
out on a broader scale. This needs to be a
(33:58):
viral story, because otherwise is We're just going to end
up chasing Sarah from town to town from nonprofit and nonprofit.
Bethany agreed that national television might be the only way
that they could get help for Sarah and maybe keep
her from hurting anyone else. And along the way they
found one more woman who was ready to join them.
(34:19):
I said, hey, how do you know her? And she said,
I've been tracking her for twenty years, And eventually they
found the one person who could finally stop Sarah. I
think my reaction was probably the same as as most
people that first hear about this case. There's just kind
of disbelief about what happened. That's on the next episode
(34:42):
of Sympathy Pains. Sympathy Pains is a production 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 or editor is Katherine st. Louis. Associate
(35:02):
producer is Rufaro Mazzarua. Our executive producer is Jonathan Hirsch.
Samantha Allison is our production manager. Fact checker is Jacqueline Colletti.
Jesse Perlstein composed the theme song and music heard throughout
the series. Additional tracks are by Blue Dot Sessions and
Epidemic Sound. Scott Somerville is our engineer and sound designer.
(35:25):
Special thanks to Stephanie Serrano from I Heart Radio. Special
thanks to Carrie Lieberman and Bethan Macaluso. Executive producer at
I Heart Radio is Dylan Fagan
Liz Hiccox lives in Newport, Rhode Island, in a postcard
perfect New England cottage by the water, with her husband Brian,
and a black lab named Salty. She's an athlete. On
any given weekend, you'll probably find her on her bike
training for her next Iron Man. She's been a runner
for decades, finishing the New York City Marathon a dozen times,
(00:24):
but she didn't get on a racing bike until two
thousand and fifteen, after she said she'd do this three
day charity ride for breast cancer survivors. I had a
very good friend who was a young survivor. She was
a mom of about thirty seven, two young kids, who
was diagnosed in her early thirties. And she would come
to me and asked for a donation. Every year she
would do this ride and I would write a check.
(00:46):
And then one year her friend couldn't participate, and I said, well,
when's the ride And she said some thirty days as well,
I'll do it. And she said you have a bike,
and I said no. She borrowed her friends, crashed at
the first stop side and I came to I had
no idea how to shift or anything. I remember riding
to a hill and found some guy in stretchy shorts
(01:08):
and said, could you please help me figure out to
shift this? I don't know how to do this. So
I went out and trained every day for thirty days.
She was hooked on both the bike and the organization.
She met women who said making the ride was the
goal that had gotten them through chemo. She saw how
they drew strength from this shared accomplishment, even if they
could only make it a few miles. The whole experience
(01:31):
was honestly life changing. And I said to Brian and said,
you've got to do this. This was a really important event.
And I couldn't feel more strongly that you know, you
need to take part in it. And then the next
year he did. In late September two thousen, a streak
of tendonitis sidelined her for the Breast Cancer Ride, so
she volunteered to help at the rest stops, where women
(01:52):
would take breaks for water and snacks. Everyone's patting each
on their backs, saying you got this. This is incredible.
People are singing and cheering, you know, saying, oh my gosh,
you know that was so hard or that was so easy.
As the day was winding down, another cyclist came up
to Liz and asked her a favor. There's a young
woman that's coming in and she's at the end of
(02:14):
the pack and she's missed all of the photographers and
it's her first ride, and we'd really like to get
her picture. Would you mind snapping a picture for her?
Can I remember? She said? She has a pink sock
and she has a green sock on. The woman said
the writer's name was Sarah, and she had recently been
diagnosed with stage four breast cancer and that she hadn't
(02:37):
even told her husband yet. Her husband was away overseas.
He was a pilot, and she had gotten the news
while he was away on this particular trip. During this event,
she had gotten the news that her cancer had progressed,
and she just didn't know how she was going to
tell him. Liz felt for Sarah. About twenty minutes later,
(02:58):
a woman with mis match box came riding by. She
had flown past me and gone into the rest stop,
and I said, oh my gosh, you must be Sarah.
I said, can you need me a favor? I said,
can you go back out, turn around and ride back
in because I had one job, and I was to
get your picture, and she laughed, and she did, and
she she came back in and I snapped her photo,
(03:20):
and I said, what's your number? I'm going to text
it to you. As the months passed, their friendship grew,
with message exchanges quickly ballooning from one a day to
sometimes a hundred or more. Sarah did have a way
of quickly turning a casual text feed into an emotional avalanche.
The following spring, Sarah told Liz there was a more
(03:42):
immediate threat to her life even than cancer, a stalker,
someone obsessed with her good looking husband. She said that
she was smitten with her husband and that she was
sending him messages saying that after Sarah was gone, they'd
be together, and she was saying to Sarah, You're not
pretty enough for him. This hit Liz hard. She had
(04:05):
told Sarah that when she was nineteen, a classmate of
hers had been killed by a stalker. Over the course
of the next forty eight hours or so, Sarah would
tell me, I'm at the gym. Oh my gosh, she's outside.
She's I can see her parked out there. She's looking
at me. She even sent Liz a video when she
was trying to dodge her. She's wearing a scarf wrapped
(04:27):
around her head and glistening with sweat while she's at
the gym. Sarah's out of breath, but her voice is confident,
even defiant. I'm not gonna let her take this away
from me. I'm bigger than that. So for forty eight hours,
she had me wrapped in this web of drama of
high intensity with this stalker who was now attacking my friend,
(04:50):
who I thought was already under attack of a terminal illness.
I couldn't breathe, my chest was heavy. The next day,
Sarah told Liz she wanted to face time with her.
As she walked out of a Walmart and she said, Liz,
she's there. I said, what do you mean? And says,
(05:10):
she's there between the cars by my car. What do
I do? I said, you need to run into the store.
And so she ran into the store and she said,
oh my god, she has a gun. The phone went
dead for more than a minute, with Liz frantic on
the other end. Then she got a text and she
(05:30):
said they got her. Seven people were shot. She said,
I took a bullet in the knee. Sarah told Liz.
She was in an ambulance. A couple of days later,
to get more details about the shooting, Liz's husband Brian
called up a friend in law enforcement, a guy named Tom,
And as I'm talking on the phone, I said, oh wait,
(05:52):
you know what, I've never actually googled Sarah's name. I
should probably do that. He typed Sarah de Lashman into
this search. Barn I said, Holy sh it, Tom, I'm
Laura Beale. You're listening to Sympathy Pains. This is episode
three Liz. Liz and Brian are one of those couples
(06:22):
who actually found true love in a bar, in the
biggest pickup bar you could ever meet, in Wellington, Florida.
It was April of two thousand five. Liz is an equestrian,
and she was in Florida competing at a horse show.
I was leaving to go home to Rhode Island the
next day, literally less than twelve hours later, and he
(06:43):
had just arrived in Florida. He was the only guy
there that you know, probably had a pickup truck and
a yellow lab and I was definitely the only girl
there in a baseball hat and jeans. He um vaguely
reminded me of Kenny Chesney, and that was a good
thing at that point in my life. She was a
New York City native who had left the city for
good after nine eleven. He was working in Florida for
(07:06):
Merrill Lynch. He came up for a couple of dates
in Newport and he said, you know what, I can
really live here. And then literally after three dates, I
said to him, you can. You can be my boyfriend
if you want, but you have to move here, and
he did. They married after dating for about a year
and a half and ended up founding a financial services
business together in Rhode Island. Every winter, they relocate to
(07:29):
a rented bungalow in Florida, just a mile from shore
on the Intercoastal Waterway. You pretty much wake up every
day and I love our life. Back in the fall
of two thousand and eighteen, after the bike ride where
she met Sarah, Liz started noticing Sarah's posts on the
(07:51):
organization's private Facebook group, pictures of herself sitting in what
looked like um hospital bed with tubes running and taped
her shirt, wearing a cancer scarf with you know, a
thumbs up or so. A lot of times She would
have headphones on and she would say, you know, getting
getting the juice today, looking for prayers and support, you know,
(08:13):
going in for a scan today, you know, wish me luck.
They touched me because I knew of her as a
young mom whose husband was away, who was battling stage
four cancer, and I felt completely helpless. It's something that
spoke to me. For several weeks after the bike ride,
(08:36):
Liz would write messages of support under the photos. Christmas
time came. One day in December, Liz pulled a handful
of holiday envelopes out of her mailbox and found a
card from Sarah, a photo card of perhaps nine photos
a little girl with one of those giant bows on
(08:57):
her head, and she had little white socks on and
black Patton white or black Patent leather shoes, like little
girl shoes. And that was the Christmas card from Sarah
James and Bindy, her fourteen month old daughter. And I thought,
oh cute when I saved it. And shortly thereafter, probably
literally days later, Brian and I left for Florida for
(09:20):
the winter. We pack up our house, we head down south,
we take our office, we take our dog, and we
literally kind of move our work home life for a
couple of months during the winter. In January, Liz got
a message from Sarah through Facebook Messenger. It said her
cancer had progressed and she had tumors in her liver
(09:42):
and brain. After that, Liz and Sarah began exchanging notes
almost every day. As soon as someone messages me, I
feel like I have to get right back to them
where they're going to be insulted or hurt in some way,
so you know, I would respond, which would prompt another
response from her, And lots of conversations and dare's her
need to get more regular at this point, and we
were just talking about life and her chemo and her treatment.
(10:06):
Weeks of message exchanges drew them closer as Sarah underwent
grueling treatments. Liz wrote encouragement, you got this, and she
started calling Sarah's sister friend, trying to make her feel loved.
In February of two thousand nineteen, Sarah said she was
going to be in southern Florida that she worked as
(10:29):
a flight attendant, which allowed her easy travel. She wanted
to visit Liz and Brian, saying I'm going to take
a chance here and I'm going to drive up and
I'm going to see you. And part of me was like, wow,
you know she trust me enough. That's that's really great.
This woman who is, you know, fighting for her life
(10:49):
every day, values me and trusts me enough and us
to come visit us. And I was a little nervous
about that, excited and honestly honored, and at that point
it kind of became my duty to make sure she
had a wonderful experience. And I had to say to her.
(11:09):
I said, Sarah, you know, we have a very small
cottage here. It's just one bedroom. We don't even have
a couch. But Liz's mother, Maggie, a Florida retiree, lived nearby.
It was the main reason they headed south every year.
So she calls me up and I picked up the phone. Hello.
She asked me if she could have a friend of hers,
(11:30):
who she met on this spike ride, come and spend
the weekend with us, because after rule, she doesn't have
enough room in her place. She said, Mom, Sarah is
final stage cancer. And as soon as I heard that,
my heart dropped, my stomach left and it was like, Elizabeth, fine,
(11:52):
she can't come, Okay, no problem. So that's where Sarah stayed,
she wanted to do a try etheln and she wanted
to be like my daughter Elizabeth. We thought we were
going to give her a life changing experience in a weekend.
Liz hadn't seen Sarah in person since the bike ride
(12:13):
where they met. She arrived wearing a scarf around her
head and a wig. Brian, Liz, and Sarah spent the
next day cycling around Jupiter Island, a perfect Florida winter
day with a warm sun and an ocean breeze. Sarah
seemed to struggle but made the ride. We went back
(12:34):
to our house, the cottage, and she went back to
my parents house where she was going to go home,
you know, shower up, get ready for dinner. I think
she said she needed to take a nap and call
her husband, etcetera. By now, my mother is completely enchanted
with her, and I think at this point Sarah is
(12:56):
already calling her mom. My mother is one of the
kindest people on this earth and is getting up in
the morning before Sarah rides and making sure she has
a full breakfast. That evening, Brian and Liz stopped and
bought fresh fish. Brian made tacos for dinner. Afterwards, they
sat in their backyard at the water's edge, under the
(13:16):
shade of a bishop wood tree. It's a really peaceful place.
There's a hammock there, and Sarah sat in the hammock
and she said, this is now my happy place. Remember
giving her a margarite to thinking, oh my gosh, is
this okay? Can I do this? And candidly I needed
that margharita myself so much because this dress was so
great about you have someone's life in your hands. You know,
(13:39):
this woman is battling a terminal illness, and here I
am giving her a margharita. Is it okay? They sipped
their cocktails and talked about life and death. Remember, she
said to me, I don't want to be forgotten. I
was sitting in kind of beach chair and I looked
over at the one of the palm trees that's by
the water, and I thought, my goodness forgotten. Like just
(14:02):
imagine being a young mom, a wife and thinking two
years from now people might not remember me. That just
really got me. Monday morning came time for Sarah to leave.
Liz and Brian had to work. As Sarah left, they
stood in front of the house and pose for pictures,
the three of them and the dog. We all had
(14:24):
our arms around each other, you know, we literally hugged
her like we didn't know if we were going to
see her again. It was very emotional. I remember her tears. Yeah, Um,
she started to cry, and I mean, I know Lizzie did,
and I would have had a at least a tear drop.
(14:46):
Sarah got in her rented car and drove off. We
are just honestly exhausted from caring about her, from talking,
from crying, worrying, and we sat in the backyard and
oh my gosh, I'm just exhausted. And then around five
pm that evening we got a text, a text from
(15:09):
her saying, guess what, guys, my flight was canceled. I'm
coming back. We can have fish tacos again. And honestly,
at that moment, I looked at Brian and I was like,
oh my gosh, I don't know if if I can.
I don't find the energy, you know, but what we
have to do this. Sarah stayed the extra night. The
(15:29):
next weekend. Liz's mom was doing a triathlon that week.
Brian got a text from Sarah saying, Hey, I'd like
to come down this weekend to cheer on Mom. And
you know, I said, I fully understand. I mean, obviously
Mom has given you a lot to Sarah and and
I thought that was very nice. It was probably what
(15:51):
six o'clock or so in the morning on the day
of the race, and I knew that Sarah was on
her way, but he didn't mention anything to live or
her mom. He wanted Sarah's second visit to be a surprise.
I remember putting my mom's bike helmet on her, like
dropping it on her, and I just thought the irony,
like here I am putting my mom's bike helmet on,
(16:12):
like she's my kid, you know, she's seventy seven years old.
And someone topped me on the shoulder from behind me
and lo and behold, who's there but Sarah. Sarah had
flown in the night before, stayed in a hotel in
Fort Lauderdale, and drove up from Fort Laiderdale to Stewart
to be there at six o'clock in the morning to
(16:34):
be at my first triathlon. Elizabeth had made T shirts
for me, and on the back of the T shirt
it said te Meg's te for Team Meg's, m Ags
for Maggie and you know, who also had the same
(16:54):
T shirt Sarah. Maggie was touched. She must really adore
Elizabeth to do something like that, and she doesn't think
too badly of me either. Is just you know, hey,
I can't even get my husband to get up at
six in the morning to go to Marathon's with me.
(17:15):
So there was another Sarah weekend the bike's Hammock Tacos.
We just took her out solely on the boat to
see the flying Fish that Saturday night. Sitting on the
couch with Maggie's Chihuahua Pedro in her lap, Sarah calmly
talked about a stalker that was after her. He felt
sorry for this girl with the stalk rafter and dying
(17:38):
a cancer and with the wig and this and all that,
and all she was trying to do was do a
triathlon before she died. Sensing that Sarah was working her
way deeper into the family, Brian made it clear to
Sarah that she absolutely could not come for a third
(17:58):
weekend in a row. My father was coming in for
a visit with his his girlfriend at the time, and
next weekend, just you can't, you can't come, you know,
not that we've been making plans for it, but just
like we can't have a a surprise, but this was Sarah.
Sarah was full of surprises. The last weekend in February
(18:20):
two thou nineteen was a family gathering for Liz and Brian.
Brian's dad was visiting. They went fishing in the boat
that anchors just off their backyard. They caught a tuna
and came back to the dock. I just put the
fish down, and that's when she walked in the backyard
and I'll just never forget the hi guys. And I
(18:42):
looked up and I sare and I did not say
a word. I just kind of walked past her. I
walked to the house and I took a moment, and
Lizzie came in a minute or so later, and she
kind of yelled at me, and she said, you you
can't be rude like that, and I said, I'll be fine.
I just I just need a minute. She was not
(19:02):
welcome for the weekend, but I'm not gonna say anything.
And so she spent the weekend you know, with me
and my father and us, and she crashed our family
reunion in every way. But they made the best of it.
And by this time she's gotten to be one of
the family. Pago looks for a When Sarah pulled up
to the house, Maggie noticed something different about her rental car.
(19:26):
It had a bike rack and strapped to it. It
was a beautiful bike. It looked like it was brand new.
I think it was maroon, and they're not cheap, these
marathon bikes. Brian and Liz made it clear in the
starkest of terms that she could not come back for
yet another weekend, telling her as much as I would
(19:49):
love to see you next weekend, I really need to focus.
I haven't seen any of my friends or family. I
haven't been able to do any work. I have my
own races. I needed trade for next weekend. I need
just to catch up. I've been the worst friend. I
haven't seen my parents alone. They told Sarah they had
(20:10):
plans a good friend was getting married. I've missed all
of the bridal things that my dear friend needs me
to do. I need this weekend to myself. But Sarah
burrowed into Lizz's life anyway. It was early March two
thousand nineteen when Liz first started getting messages about her stalker.
(20:31):
Sarah wrote, I'm hiding in the bathtub. I cam afraid
to leave my house. And then from Sarah's husband James,
messaging me when she's not saying she's having a panic attack.
You're the only person that can talk to her. She'll
only listen to you. For two days, Liz was sucked
into the vortex of Sarah in trouble, culminating with the
(20:54):
shooting at an Illinois Walmart. I'm absolutely exhausted because been
forty eight hours of the stalker chasing her, following her,
threatening her, and now you know, chasing her down to
the walmart and showing up with a gun after her
and there's shots fired. I'm exhausted. I just can't even
(21:16):
believe what just happened. But something about it struck Brian
as off. We are starting to, of course, look for
any record of a shooting at at a Walmart in
you know, in Illinois, where seven people are shy like
you're going to see something in the news, and nothing
was in the news, and we found that to be strange.
(21:37):
Sarah had an explanation. She said the FBI was trying
to keep it quiet that they had told her to
go to the store to lure the stalker out. What
she didn't know was that Liz and Brian had a
friend with FBI connections. Their friend Tom, our friend, openly laughed.
He's like, that's not how it works. He made a
(21:58):
quick call to the local station there and they said, no,
there's there hasn't been a shooting here, you know, maybe
maybe not ever. And that is when Brian began to
ask a question, a question that many people had asked
before him and would ask later. Who is Sarah Delashman.
(22:26):
It was March seventh, two. Brian Hickocks was on his
phone in the backyard pacing. After learning from his law
enforcement friend that there had been no Walmart shooting, Brian
googled Sarah's name on his phone. He clicked on the
first hit. The first article that came up was that
(22:46):
there's a record of Sarah losing her nursing license in
the state of Virginia. The document was from almost five
years earlier, dated July two, fourteen. Sarah was living in Virginia.
That's where she met Naomi, the college student who tried
to support her through miscarriages and an abusive boyfriend. The
(23:07):
Virginian Nursing Board was pulling Sara's license because they learned
that she had lost her license in the state of
Oklahoma earlier that year. Document said that Sara was working
as a nurse in the neonatal Intensive Care unit at
Oklahoma University Medical Center in the fall of two thousand twelve.
During that time, over a period of about four months,
(23:28):
she started stuffing pillows under her clothes so she would
look pregnant. She showed her co workers copies of an
ultrasound of twins, and then at some point she said
she had delivered the twins prematurely and they had died.
The report also said it was the second time she
had faked a pregnancy as a nurse. In her testimony
(23:50):
to the nursing board, she said she pretended to be
pregnant to make friends, that she had seen how much
support women got when they lost a baby. Faced with
the discipline that could result from a formal hearing, she
surrendered her Oklahoma nursing license on May two, fourteen. If
she wanted to get her license back, the board recommended
(24:12):
a psychiatric evaluation. Standing under the bishop Wood tree, staring
at his phone, Brian was astonished. I walked back into
the house and I said, Lizzie do not contact her again.
I don't know really what's up. But she's not who
she says she is, and we don't need to be
communicating with her. I don't believe that the shooting actually happened.
(24:34):
I don't think that you know, anything happened. She looked
at him with a confused stare that said, what are
you talking about? It was not really even even to
process it. I was still literally in shock for probably
forty eight hours after that. I mean I was on empty.
I had had, you know, four days of really heavy,
(24:57):
exhausting emotion. Then Brian remembered the text with James, Sarah's
supposed husband. They had been corresponding since Sarah's second visit.
But I had already been thinking that James was not real.
You know, it was three weekends in a row that
she was coming down to Florida like that. You know,
you want to leave a legacy for your daughter. You
(25:18):
wouldn't be wanting to leave your daughter first. He tried
an oblique approach. Sarah had told Liz and Brian that
her husband was an mm A fighter, So Brian sent
a message to James, Hey, I'm a big fan of UFC.
How do I find your fights. When that didn't get
a response, he just said out right, I said, hey, man,
I need you to give me a call right now.
(25:40):
James of course never answered. James was Sarah, Sarah was James.
Nothing was real. They realized they needed to break the
news to Liz's mom. It was certainly a hard call
to have to make. You need to make sure that
the security guards take her off the list. I was like,
(26:02):
oh my god, we'd better change the code or in
a garage. I thought that maybe she just might try
to break in the house and do something. At this point,
it's like, who's not to say, she's going to open
the door and walk in and kill us. Snippets of
conversations that once seemed benign, at least in the context
of her stalker, now took on new importance, like how
(26:26):
to cut break lines, how to make a death look
like an accident, how to hide a body. Those are
not things that normally come to someone's thoughts. So the
fact that she had these thoughts and shared them with us, like, wow,
these are things that are on her mind. She told
us one day when she was claiming to have a daughter,
that she dropped off a childcare at the y. She said,
you know, it's to be so easy for anyone to
(26:48):
steal a toddler. Here she goes, I show up and
I pick up my daughter, and you know, the sixteen
year old girl doesn't even look up from her iPad.
Any of these children could be stolen at a moment's notice.
That was really a ring. They call the police, not
really knowing who else to call. They grew more fearful.
Officers warned us to be you know, you can get
(27:09):
a level of protection so that we will know if
she leaves the state. Again, no one knew at that point,
no one knew. I was terrified. Brian began frantically scouring
the internet, trying to find out as much as he could,
And that's when Brian got really busy, just messaging everyone
he can possibly fine. Brian began turning up multiple Facebook
(27:30):
profiles with variations on her name and different photos. He
hunted through the comments and tags for people who knew her.
One of them turned out to be her aunt. Brian
sent her a message. She responded to my my messenger
my message saying yes, I'm I'm her aunt and I'd
like to know what she's up to. It was definitely
(27:51):
a what she's up to? Here we go again. This
is not the first time. Liz gave Sarah's aunt a call.
She was really distraught actually to hear the news. Said
that she'd been at it for years and that the
family was really torn apart about it. She told us
(28:12):
about Aaron in California and that was really upsetting. She
told them Sarah didn't have cancer, never had cancer, and
she didn't have a child either, and it was also
very concerning. You know, the pictures of the baby, it's
the same baby in different situations, different you know, different poses,
definitely different environments. The baby is a mystery and it
(28:35):
seems to be the same baby in every picture. Sarah's
aunt told them what had happened in Texas at Camp Summit.
I called the camp as well, and the girl that
answered the phone um again. I said, my name is
you know, Brian, and this is what's going on. It
might sound a little bit strange, and she actually laughed
to herself. She said that we were just in training
(28:57):
on this yesterday. And as Brian and searched for more
information on Camp Summit, he found one other person tagged
in Sarah's pictures Bethany Turner. He sent Bethany a message
over Facebook saying, here's what's been going on in our lives,
and this is what we've been told and we understand
it not to be true, and you know what has
(29:19):
your experience been. The next morning Bethany saw the message.
She recoiled at the sight of Sarah's dame. I was
brushing my daughter's teeth and looked down and saw something
on my phone and I threw the phone down on
the counter and I was like, nope, not doing that.
She thought it was Sarah herself. I wasn't sure if
it was her trying to catfish me, and I finally
(29:40):
landed on you know what, maybe I just need to
google this guy and see who he is, because if
it's not Sarah, then it's someone that Sarah's hurt. It
was early in the morning, I remember that, maybe five
thirty or so where I I heard the messager go
off and then normally I might sleep through that kind
of thing, but not at that one time. And she
(30:01):
said something not dismissive, but maybe questioning who I was
or or you know what happened, And it didn't take
more than a couple of minutes, I guess for her
to say, okay, you know, I'd be up for a
for a phone call. That call would be the first
of many. Brian and Liz soon learned that Sarah was
(30:24):
back in Florida. They had helped her train for a
triathlon and she was actually going to do it. The
event was just a couple of miles away, and at
that moment, I was never more scared. Do you remember
Alf Hitchcock movies where your hair standing on the head, Because,
oh my god, that woman is going to open the doorway.
You're in the bathtub, in the shower, and she's got
(30:45):
a knife. She's liable to do anything. If she could
do what she did. Liz and Brian couldn't believe she
was back in Florida, almost in their backyard. They decided
to go to the race, putting on hoodies and sunglasses
and ducking behind palm trees waiting for her to go by.
Once they saw her, their jaws dropped. She was wearing
(31:05):
all new gear, new helmets, new sunglasses, new shoes, everything,
everything that's identical to mine, everything, And I was so
unbelievably freaked out. It was really creepy, and you know,
everything right down to the sunglasses and the way she
did her hair. There were so many facets to the
emotions that we had. You know, one is, you know,
(31:28):
you're piste off, as Brian said, you know we've just
been completely taken advantage of. One is humiliated, and you know,
one is fearful, you know, fearful for our safety because
we didn't know you know, where she draws the line.
And then over the course of a few days, we
also developed a compassion. How can we turn this into
(31:52):
something productive? How can we make our horrible experience have
a good ending, you know, for her right if she
really is sick and unable to get help, certainly for
all the potential victims, all the former victims. You know,
how can we just fix this? The police had told
them there was nothing law enforcement could do. It's not
(32:13):
a crime to fake cancer. Like we feel terrible about
what happened to you, but what she's doing isn't a crime,
and that just didn't sit with us. Liz also felt
for Sarah's aunt. She was very kind. She told me
the family was just you know, at wits end. This
is you know, wrecked them in so many ways. I thought,
(32:34):
if there were mandated help treatment that might help in
some way, and that was our thoughts was that if
the family can't afford to do it, we've got to
find a way to get this done. They didn't want
to go to her employer because then, you know, her
aunt had told me if she lost her job that
the family will lose the house. I couldn't afford to
pay for any kind of extended treatment for her, but
(32:55):
I knew that this television personality offered people help, and
I thought, wow, I'll just call Dr Phil Dr Phil
today on an all new Dr Phil that Dr Phil.
I went his website and it says do you want
(33:17):
to be on the show, and it said tell us
your story. You know, if we're interested, will give you
a call. So I wrote a pretty pretty detailed story
about what was going on, and they asked Bethany if
she would join them. I don't think I'd ever watched
a Dr Phil episode in my life, but she didn't
want Sarah to hurt anyone else. Ever, since she had
learned about Sarah walking out of Camp Summit, I knew
(33:37):
that at some point it was going to resurface, because
I knew she was doing it other places. If I
can google her and find trails of her from Oklahoma
to Texas to Illinois to out east. I mean, there
was no way she was going to stop. I just
didn't have the capacity at that point to deal with it.
I told them, I said, we've got to get this
out on a broader scale. This needs to be a
(33:58):
viral story, because otherwise is We're just going to end
up chasing Sarah from town to town from nonprofit and nonprofit.
Bethany agreed that national television might be the only way
that they could get help for Sarah and maybe keep
her from hurting anyone else. And along the way they
found one more woman who was ready to join them.
(34:19):
I said, hey, how do you know her? And she said,
I've been tracking her for twenty years, And eventually they
found the one person who could finally stop Sarah. I
think my reaction was probably the same as as most
people that first hear about this case. There's just kind
of disbelief about what happened. That's on the next episode
(34:42):
of Sympathy Pains. Sympathy Pains is a production 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 or editor is Katherine st. Louis. Associate
(35:02):
producer is Rufaro Mazzarua. Our executive producer is Jonathan Hirsch.
Samantha Allison is our production manager. Fact checker is Jacqueline Colletti.
Jesse Perlstein composed the theme song and music heard throughout
the series. Additional tracks are by Blue Dot Sessions and
Epidemic Sound. Scott Somerville is our engineer and sound designer.
(35:25):
Special thanks to Stephanie Serrano from I Heart Radio. Special
thanks to Carrie Lieberman and Bethan Macaluso. Executive producer at
I Heart Radio is Dylan Fagan
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