"Con Girl," now streaming on Paramount +, explores the fascinating case of Samantha Azzopardi, a serial fraudster who pretended to be a non-verbal young woman in distress at Dublin's General Post Office (GPO) in 2013.
Azzopardi is featured in an episode of the four-part true-crime documentary after she became a national talking point in Ireland when she was discovered disheveled and distressed outside the GPO in 2013.
Using only primitive sign language, the woman indicated to gardaí that she was just 14 years old, sparking a nationwide media frenzy, with many assuming that she had been trafficked to Ireland from Eastern Europe.
"She didn’t speak ... didn’t verbally communicate," Detective Superintendent David Gallagher told the documentary.
Gallagher, who was the lead investigator in the case, added that the girl "clearly presented as distressed ... adopted a position of hair over her face‚ scrunched in a protective pose. She wasn’t speaking."
However, when a member of An Garda Síochána took a photograph of the girl and posted it online in an attempt to identify her, the story took an unexpected twist.
It transpired that the girl was not a 14-year-old Eastern European girl in distress, but a 25-year-old serial fraudster from Australia named Samantha Azzopardi.
Azzopardi had more than 70 aliases, including that of a teenage Russian gymnast whose entire family had died in a tragic murder-suicide.
Superintendent David Taylor told the four-part documentary that Azzopardi's "whole demeanor was an elaborate ruse".
"None of it was real. It was a complete scam," he told the documentary.
"She was good. Anybody that could pull that off for a month while being in hospital, being tended to, being cared for, and could maintain this demeanor... is very good at what they do. I’ve never seen anything like it before or since."
The new documentary features interviews with a number of people connected with the case, including experts and eye-witnesses, although Azzopardi does not feature. The four-part series also features a number of re-enactments and pivots between Ireland and Azzopardi's native Australia.
Comments