Overview

She seemed like the perfect nanny. Until she vanished - and the truth emerged. Unmasking Samantha Cookes is a chilling true-crime account of a master manipulator who spent more than a decade reinventing herself across the UK and Ireland with an arsenal of false identities. From au pair and nanny to therapist, teacher, psychologist, even terminally ill author and influencer, she slipped into families’ homes and lives with devastating ease. Behind the charm lay a trail of fraud, deception and fear. A surrogacy scam. Vulnerable families exploited. Communities left shattered. And at the heart of the story, a baby who died in mysterious circumstances - a death that would haunt Samantha as she fled across borders and changed identities to evade scrutiny. Each reinvention brought new victims, until her most audacious lie, a fabricated terminal illness broadcast on radio and TikTok, triggered an online reckoning that finally joined the dots. Drawing on new and revelatory material, including firsthand testimony from those deceived, Unmasking Samantha Cookes exposes how systemic failures in childcare, professional regulation and social support allowed a con artist to thrive. It is a visceral portrait of psychological manipulation with an unsettling question at its core: how well do we really know the people we trust with our children?

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9781785375934

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Alan Bradley is an award-winning Irish director, actor and writer working across documentary, television drama and ads. He won the Young Director Award for Documentary at Cannes 2024 and is the youngest director to hold a prime-time RTÉ One documentary slot. Named a Broadcast Hotshot 2025, he has directed critically acclaimed films including Patrick: A Young Traveller Lost, Anorexia: My Family and Me and the hit RTÉ/BBC series Bad Nanny.

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