In October 2013, two police officers came across a young girl near the General Post Office (GPO) in Dublin’s city centre. The girl seemed distressed. She was non-verbal but indicated with her fingers that she was 14 years old.
The girl didn’t have any identification on her. Or any money. Or even a bag. There was no indication of who she was, where she came from, or how she ended up in front of the GPO.
The officers took the girl to Temple Street Children’s Hospital. Soon, Detective Superintendent Dave Gallagher was assigned as the lead officer on the case. Upon meeting the girl for the first time, he noticed three things: she appeared to be around 14 to 19 years of age; she wore braces, and she was actively trying to conceal her identity from the officers by covering her face with her hair.
“She wasn’t in a ward with children, but in a private room,” he told the new podcast, Finding Samantha. “She seemed to be in good health, albeit a little thin for her age, emaciated. She appeared pleasant but didn’t communicate and didn’t want to speak. No eye contact. She kept the hair down over her face and she would recoil from any physical interactions.
It was unclear if something bad had happened to this girl. There may be a very rational reason behind not being willing to cooperate, or that could also be a sign of somebody very traumatised, or the victim of a very, very serious incident.”
Watch: There are 40 aliases of Samantha Azzopardi, making her an international con artist. Post continues after video.
Sue Hyland was at the Temple Street Children’s Hospital with her nephew the day the girl was brought in. Although Sue only caught a glimpse of the distraught young woman, she couldn’t get her out of her mind.
“I remember just automatically thinking, Oh, god, my heart is breaking, even looking at her like, and I only saw a glimpse of her. I can still remember how frail she looked,” she told the podcast.
The authorities became even more concerned when the girl was encouraged to draw some doodles and she drew an image of a gun, a cross, and an aeroplane. They began to suspect the girl may have been a victim of sex trafficking and put her under constant police supervision.
A task force was set up called Operation Shepherd. Fifteen detectives were assigned to the case, and they trawled through the city’s CCTV footage looking for leads. They interviewed people on the street, checked accommodation providers, and looked at plane logs, hoping to identify the girl and where she came from.
The media got wind of the story and soon the ‘GPO Girl’ was leading every news bulletin. Like Sue Hyland, people all around Ireland became invested in her story and prayed for a happy ending.
With no real leads, the police went to the High Court to get permission to release a grainy photo taken of the girl without her consent. Permission was granted and soon the photo was on the front page of every newspaper and on TV screens across the globe.
“You’d have to be living under a rock not to be aware of it and you’d still be aware of it,” Ali Bracken, a crime reporter from Ireland’s Sunday Independent, told The Telegraph. “Everybody loves intrigue, and this had that in spades.”
The photo showed the girl side-on. Her hair was scraped into a messy bun and she was nervously chewing on her finger. The leads began rolling in. But it was when the Southern Hemisphere woke up that everything changed.
“We started getting some calls in from Australia, from police stations and police officers, all saying the same name Samantha Azzopardi,” Gallagher explained in the Paramount Plus documentary, Con Girl.
The ‘GPO Girl’ wasn’t an endangered teenager after all. She was a 24-year-old Australian woman named Samantha Azzopardi. She had been staying with an extended family in Ireland before coming across the police’s radar in front of the GPO. Azzopardi was sent back to Australia on a flight paid for by Irish taxpayers. Operation Shepherd ended up costing 2000 hours of police time and around $250,000.
That incident in Dublin is just the tip of the iceberg in Azzopardi’s long history of conning innocent strangers.
Azzopardi first came to the attention of the Australian authorities in 2007 in Rockhampton, Queensland, when she claimed to be the American actress Dakota Johnson. She was 19 years old at the time. In 2010, she attempted to enrol in two schools in Brisbane, posing as a student.
According to the Sydney Morning Herald, in September 2014, when she was 26, Azzopardi walked into a health centre in Calgary, Canada, and claimed she had been the victim of an abduction and sexual assault. She said she was 14 years old and her name was Aurora Hepburn. An estimated US$150,000 was spent trying to solve her ‘case’.
In 2016, Azzopardi enrolled in the Good Shepherd School in Marrickville in Sydney’s inner west. She claimed to be a 13-year-old named Harper Hart.
In October 2018, claiming to be an 18-year-old called Sakah, Azzopardi moved into a German couple’s home in Melbourne and became an au pair to their two children. A month later, she walked into a mental health unit in Bendigo with the two children and claimed she was a 14-year-old who had been abused by her uncle.
She was charged with child stealing, theft, and property deception, which she pleaded guilty to in May 2021, and received a two-year sentence.
During the trial it was revealed that Azzopardi had undergone multiple assessments and had been diagnosed with borderline personality disorder and pseudologia fantastica, a rare disorder which manifests in compulsive lying. She has since re-offended.
The new podcast, Finding Samantha, deep dives into her story and attempts to answer the question: why would someone keep going to such extreme lengths to become somebody else?
Feature Image: Facebook.