Over a year ago, now I got diagnosed with a terminal degenerative neurological illness called Huntington's. You were a chemical engineer. of neurological

illness or Huntington's. You were a chemical engineer? I was, yeah, so I'm a very boring

career pre-diagnosis. It had destroyed a large portion of my brain at that point and I was very very poorly. It was a very poorly girl and kind of ended up in intensive care.

Why was it like getting that news? It was a horrific diagnosis to receive. I'm adopted so I had no idea that the genetics

ran in my family, so it was a huge shock. Shark.

I'm Sue Perkins. And I'm Kat Denkinson.

You're listening to Carrie Jade does not exist.

A podcast about one woman who took on over six different identities,

infiltrated the lives of vulnerable people,

lied her way into gaining their trust,

and built up a picture perfect persona until she got tangled up in her own web of lies.

This is episode 5, The Fraud.

So we've spent the past few episodes exploring some of the different aliases Samantha Cooks took on.

But we haven't gone back to the one we started the story with yet, have we?

Carrie J Williams.

Yeah, so Carrie's the persona we met in the very first episode.

The final version perhaps that we have in plain view. The one that set off the domino effect that

revealed all the other personas like a

Matroshka doll and how beneath them all was a woman called Samantha Cook and how each of

Samantha's lies were connected.

At the start of 2020, Carrie J Williams burst onto the Irish literary scene after she won the Bodley-Haire Literary Prize Fund run by the

Financial Times. So first of all, tell me about the prize, why is it so important? So it's a

...