Dakota. Emily. Aurora. Lindsay. Who’s that girl? Harper. Marley. Sakah. Samantha.

She has pretended to be a Russian gymnast, a human trafficking victim and a Swedish princess, but serial imposter Samantha Azzopardi’s latest con as a teenage nanny has exposed the tragic motive behind her decade of lies.

When to Chris Nunes hired a new waitress for her busy pancake restaurant in 2011, she knew she was taking a risk. There was something peculiar about “Sammy”, but she seemed like “a lovely girl”, and Chris wanted

give her a chance. Pancakes on the Rocks in Campbelltown, in south-west Sydney, was a bustling restaurant where families would pile into big, orange booths to eat pancakes with smiley faces drawn on in whipped cream. The new waitress, however, “didn’t fit in”. More concerningly, she sometimes failed to turn up and Chris realised she needed to dismiss her. When she did, the young waitress made the strange comment that she was going to “travel the world to donate a kidney”.

“I just said ‘that’s nice’. I knew she had issues – that’s why we let her go,” Chris said two years later, in an interview with the Irish Independent newspaper. “She was a lovely girl. There was nothing I could say that she was a horrible person or anything – that’s why I gave her the opportunity.”

Chris relayed these observations after Sammy made headlines as the centre of a police investigation into a suspected international sex trafficking ring. Police had found her in an agitated state on a main street in Dublin’s CBD one chilly autumn afternoon in 2013 and had launched a global appeal for information. Chris saw Sammy’s face on the news and recognised her. “I called my sister and said, ‘That’s Sammy’,” she told the Independent.

At this point, members of Ireland’s police force had spent more than 2000 hours going door-to-door around the area where the then-unnamed girl was found. She had barely spoken since they’d helped her off the street, but because of her slight build and recently fitted braces, the authorities had deduced she was 13 or 14 years old, and child protection protocols had

snapped into place. She was appointed a guardian, Orla Ryan, who said she was “extremely concerned about the welfare circumstances of this young person”.

The general opinion was that the girl was Eastern European. She communicated a little via stick-figure drawings that indicated she’d been brought to Ireland by plane. In another drawing she showed herself in a bed surrounded by men. Running out of options, the Irish police (the Garda) took the extraordinary measure of applying to the High Court to release an image of the young woman, in the hope someone would recognise her.

“She was put in a children’s hospital, not eating or talking. It wasn’t fun,” Detective Superintendent David Gallagher told the BBC. After her image was released, the police received information from Interpol. The girl had more than 40 aliases, but her real name was Samantha Lyndell Azzopardi, and she was a 25-year-old Australian.

“When the truth of her situation and age became known, this divided opinion,” Det Supt Gallagher told the BBC. “There were calls from some to move to a criminal investigation for wasting police time by making a false report, while others, including myself, felt that in a legal sense she in fact never made any statement or false report as she had never spoken. The matter should be treated as a mental health and welfare issue.”

Samantha was deported but in the coming years her notoriety grew as she was caught in far-flung places, telling strange, untrue stories: that she was a kidnapped Swedish royal, or a Russian gymnast whose family had been murdered.

This May, she turned up in court in Melbourne. She’d convinced two families in Australia that she was a teenage au pair so they’d hire her as a live-in nanny. She was simultaneously masquerading as a talent agent, “mentoring” another family’s 12-yearold daughter via a series of strange, guerrilla-style acting tasks.

But when Magistrate Johanna Metcalf was presented with the

A life of fantasy

psychological analysis of

Samantha’s fantastical stories, she found herself facing the same question

Irish police had asked eight years ago. Did Samantha Azzopardi need to be punished, or helped?

Samantha was born in Campbelltown in south-western Sydney in 1988. Like so much about her, the exact truth of Samantha’s childhood is hard to nail down. She is reported to have grown up with one brother, and to have attended Mount Annan High School, where she had the sort of intelligence that made her stand out to her classmates as one of the smart kids.

But she’d also earned a reputation for telling outlandish tales. In a 2016 interview, Samantha’s high school friend Juanita Levi said Samantha once tried to persuade her classmates she was Lindsay Lohan, dyeing her hair red to support the story.

Another time she called the police to say she had found a dead cat, but there was no dead cat. “She was a really smart student,” Juanita said. “She always did her work and was conscientious. I guess she was a bit of an attention-seeker. She would walk out of the classroom sometimes and the teacher would have to go after her. I never met anyone from her family. I found it strange because we would always hang out. She would always say, ‘My dad is in America’.”

She wasn’t long out of high school when she first came to the attention of authorities. In 2010, when she was in her early 20s, she was fined for using fraudulent documents to enrol in a Brisbane high school under the

name of American actress Dakota Johnson. The following year, a Perth couple nearly adopted her, believing her to be Emily, a 16-year-old gymnast.

In 2012, Samantha attracted the attention of the Major Fraud Squad in WA after enrolling in a Perth school as a Year 11 student, and the following year, she made headlines as a result of the Irish incident. But she didn’t stop. In fact, her stories became far darker.

On September 16, 2014, Samantha, then 26, walked into a medical clinic in Calgary, Canada, and said her name was Aurora Hepburn, and she was a 14-year-old victim of abduction and sexual assault. The medical staff took her to hospital and called Child Protection Services.

Investigators and health care workers spent hours with “Aurora”, trying to establish the extent of her abuse and aid her recovery. Aurora told investigators she’d endured “years of violent sexual abuse and torture”, Alberta Police said. As was the case in Dublin, many of those working closely with her were deeply affected by her ordeal.

Calgary Police eventually heard from the Irish Garda and established that Aurora Hepburn was Samantha Azzopardi. She was charged with public mischief and spent two months in prison in Canada before being deported to Australia.

She wasn’t home long before she enrolled in the Good Shepherd school in Sydney’s inner west as Harper Hart, 13, using a birth certificate from San Francisco. Again, she claimed to be a victim of human trafficking and sex abuse. However, when Family and Community Services looked at the abuse claims, her story raised suspicions. Detectives finger-printed one of Harper’s school assignments and discovered a match with Samantha Azzopardi, who by now was 28.

Samantha was charged with obtaining financial advantage by deception and jailed for a year. Her mother spoke with local media outside the Sydney court, saying her daughter’s situation was “heartbreaking”. Growing up, Samantha was a “sweet, adventurous and independent” child, said her mother, who asked not to be identified.

The ruse is up

In June 2018, former Perth Wildcats basketballer Thomas Jervis and his wife, Jazze, received a private message on Facebook regarding their search for an au pair. The man said he had someone he could recommend to care for their toddler. Her name was Harper Hernandes and she was 17 years old.

Thomas and Jazze hired Harper and moved her into their Brisbane home. Harper was given parental control over their daughter and paid $250 per week on top of her room and board. When the Jervis family relocated to Melbourne in December 2018, Harper came with them, and continued to work for them until June 2019, when Jazze became suspicious of Harper and told her she was ending her employment. Five days later, Jazze noticed her driver’s licence was missing and an iPad had disappeared.

Samantha once tried to persuade her classmates she was Lindsay Lohan, dyeing her hair red to support the story.