Police Life: The Experts podcast - Season 5 Episode 1: Chasing Samantha Azzopardi

Voiceover: This episode contains discussion about mental health, suicide, sexual assault and family violence themes, such as coercion and control. Listener discretion is advised. If this causes you difficulties after listening, or you are a victim of these crimes, help is at hand. You can call Lifeline on 13 11 14, 1800RESPECT on 1800 737 732 or visit your local police station. If you know someone who needs help, you can also call Crimestoppers on 1800 333 000. If life is in danger, call Triple Zero (000).

[Atmospheric music]

Family violence investigation units, also known as FVIUs, exist all across Victoria with detectives who specialise in investigating serious and complex family violence offences. But in 2023, a matter landed with the Reservoir FVIU in Melbourne’s northern suburbs that was nothing like they had ever seen but, at the same time, perfectly suited for their particular skills.

A report had come in from one of their local women’s refuges, which exist to help women fleeing family violence.

What would follow was a mind-boggling deep dive into the crimes of an internationally notorious con artist.

Detective Sergeant Jamie Cunningham: I'm Detective Sergeant Jamie Cunningham. Currently teaching out at the Police Academy at Detective Training School. And for this particular job, I was a detective sergeant out at Reservoir Family Violence Investigations Unit.

So late afternoon on Thursday, 21 September 2023, I'm packing up my desk, packing up the in tray, making sure everything's all squared away, thinking about packing up a caravan and taking it off to the Murray for a holiday. And this phone call comes in, one of my members is on the line to a refuge in the metro suburbs.

And the report is that two sisters from Belgium are staying at a refuge. They've got heavy accents, broken English. They've apparently fled their abusive stepfather’s address in Berwick. They had been forced to return to Australia about three months ago after leaving their mum behind in Belgium. They're supposedly 17, 18 years old, but look much, much older.

And the report is that they've been sex trafficked. And the sex trafficking is by their stepfather, which is the whole reason why we got the phone call. And the younger sister is supposedly pregnant with abdominal pain and I'm just listening to this going far out, this is not the type of phone call we'd normally be getting here. This sounds, this is obviously pretty serious stuff.

But at the same time, I'm also thinking, this is super familiar. Super, super familiar to a TV series, I literally just finished watching the night before. So going back a couple of weeks, sitting on the couch with my wife and literally just finished watching whatever TV series we'd finished watching and thinking, you know, you've got to go through that process of trying to find a new show to watch. It's always a pain in the bum.

And my wife's like, oh, there's this show on Channel 7 that's not long aired, that's meant to be pretty good. Some of her friends were talking about it and it was called Con Girl. I'm like, okay, that sounds all right. I don't mind some sort of deception, that type of thing. I always liked a good deception back at the CI. So yeah, no worries. Let’s watch that.

Con Girl trailer: She’s a gymnast with a Russian background. She had escaped a cult. Your parents are spies? The everyday Aussie girl who tricked the entire world. Con Girl, coming soon to 7 and 7 Plus.

Voiceover: The documentary series focused on the life and crimes of con woman Samantha Azzopardi. Over four episodes, Jamie and his wife watched how Azzopardi had spent years and years running countless elaborate cons in Australia and all over the world.

Many of her schemes involved her pretending to be a vulnerable or traumatised teenage girl who desperately needed help. As an adult, she had posed as an at-risk 13-year-old girl and spent months attending school. Often, she would trick other young women into unknowingly playing a role in her scams, sometimes for months.

Azzopardi became known globally in 2013 as ‘the GPO girl’.

Finding Samantha trailer: A vulnerable young girl found alone and unable to speak on the streets of Dublin. She’s a fascinating psychological study. Her lies and her deception were of an extraordinary magnitude. Who is the GPO girl? A new six-part series from RTE Documentary on One, this is Finding Samantha. I don’t need to be saved, I need to be found.

Voiceover: Irish police discovered her in a troubled state outside the Dublin GPO. She was claiming to be a 14-year-old girl who could not speak and who was the victim of sex trafficking. The police force there spent about €350,000 over the space of a month to help her and to try to identify her. They eventually discovered she was a 25-year-old girl from Sydney, Australia and she was deported.

Azzopardi has history with Victoria Police, too, with her most high-profile crime in this state occurring in 2019. While working as an au pair, or nanny, for a Melbourne couple, the then 31-year-old said she was taking their two young children to Geelong for a picnic. But she instead took them more than 150km away to a mental health unit in Bendigo, where she dressed up as a schoolgirl and claimed to be a 14-year-old who had been impregnated by her uncle. She was charged and convicted of child stealing and other offences and was sentenced to two years in prison.

Det Sgt Cunningham: This is the type of crazy stuff that she was doing. And it all kind of came back to that same thing, whether it's she's 14, 15, sex trafficked, European country to some sort of crazy backstory.

And so I literally finished watching the last episode. And I'm hearing this report from a women's refuge to our investigation unit and I'm thinking, this is so familiar, but at the same time, surely not. Like there's no way that this could be her. But at the same time, it's pretty uncanny, the type of info that's coming across. The other thing too, is that part of that report, they also said that they found this notebook and that there's these names in the notebook and they reeled off a couple of those names.

And Azzopardi, at that point in time, had 200 aliases. And the TV series touches on some of those aliases. And in that notebook were some different names. And some of those names were those aliases that they discussed in the TV series.

So I'm thinking two sisters from Belgium, 17 and 18 year olds, but they look much, much older, broken English, sex trafficked, book with different names in it, and then TV series that talks about European girls, 14 to kind of 16 year old, when they're in their 20s. Sex trafficking always gets reported as well. Surely it can't be the same person, and then the same aliases are getting used.

So I said to the investigator, look, I hear what you're saying, treat it as is, but, you're not going to believe it, this is what I literally just finished watching last night, surely it's not her, but just keep that in your back of your mind as well. Who knows, it could lead to that, but we've got to take it on face value and investigate it accordingly.

Voiceover: Jamie then took his caravan and family up to the Murray River for their week-long holiday, while Detective Sergeant Leonie Klein and other detectives from his office started looking into the report.

Det Sgt Cunningham: I mean, look, I was hanging to get up to the Murray, don't get me wrong. Absolutely hanging to get up there. But I think every second day I was on the phone, back to the office going, [sounds of telephone ringing], “What's going on? Have you found anything? Is it her? What's the latest? Keep me in the loop”.

I was at the Murray for a week. It was fantastic. But at the same time, in the back of my mind, I'm also thinking, "Geez, are we on the trail of Samantha Azzopardi here? Or we've got two pretty significant victims here that well and truly need our help”.

I get back to work and straight away I'm asking, what is the latest?

[Atmospheric music]

Voiceover: Jamie’s colleagues had done all they could to look into the matter without speaking to the supposed 17 and 18-year-old victims. It was time to meet up with them, but the staff at the women’s refuge were reluctant to allow the police to do so. Jamie and the rest of the Reservoir FVIU have an incredibly close working relationship with the women’s refuges in their patch. So, they needed to lean on that sense of trust to discover if the refuge was being conned.

Det Sgt Cunningham: The people that work in these organisations, they'll go above and beyond to help every single person that walks through their doors. So yeah, they are very special people in that they're well and truly needed.

And when you've got these women's refuges, they are 100 per cent committed to, this is 17 and 18-year-old Belgium girls that are sex trafficked. They couldn't possibly be anyone else.

They're saying that the girls aren't wanting to talk to police, so they're kind of telling us “Hey, you need to know about this, but we don't want you to talk to the girls yet”. And so, we're sitting there going, okay, well, if it's true, we need to speak to the girls. But we've also got in the back of our mind, this might also not be the case and this could be a great big con. So, we're battling that and trying to win them over.

So, we say, “Okay well, if we can't see them yet, we're going to have to at some stage to take this report on. What do they look like at least? What are their names? What do they look like?” So, we got Hattie Lee, that's a 17-year-old, and we got Amanda Lee, and that's the 18-year-old.

So. we said, “All right, well, we need to see them”. And so. they sent over a CCTV still from them walking into their premises.

So. Hattie Lee, a 17-year-old, would always avoid looking at CCTV. She'd make sure she's standing out of view, she's always got her head down. She'll never look at even the social workers in the eye. She's always wearing a surgical mask as well. Both the girls are wearing surgical masks all the time.

So, I'm looking at this footage. She's the right height, the right body shape, blonde hair, complexion’s spot on, everything about her looks like Azzopardi.

Then couple that with avoiding cameras, not looking at you in the face. That's exactly what the TV show says about her. And that's what obviously all our dossier says about her as well. Like, look her up, and that's exactly what she does.

Voiceover: But that wasn’t the only CCTV footage they found.

[Atmospheric music]

The Reservoir FVIU detectives discovered Azzopardi was a suspect in a similar incident in another Australian state just a few months prior.

In that interstate investigation, two unknown females claimed they were teenage sisters from the Netherlands who had to flee their abusive home where they were being sex trafficked.

Det Sgt Cunningham: We end up getting some footage from that particular job and had a look at that.

And when you marry that footage up with the footage that we just got from the refuge, it's almost bang on. Like even to the clothing, it's always 100 per cent bang on and we're thinking, “All right, this pretty much, 95 per cent sure this is Samantha Azzopardi. No idea who the other person is in this point in time, but we’ve got Azzopardi”. So, we're now moving well away from these school-aged or teenage victims of sex trafficking from their stepfather. We're kind of moving well way from that to now this is Azzopardi committing another con with an unknown female.

Admittedly, though, the refuge, they're not going to have a bar of that. So, we're going to have to continue with dealing with them as though they're victims.

So, we still went down the lines of it's time to meet.

Eventually, it was decided that, “Yes, now's a good opportunity. Hattie Lee's meeting with her social worker, and they're going to be meeting near the Northcote Town Hall”. And I said, “All right, great, we want to be part of that meeting. This is our opportunity to meet her”. They’re like, “Okay, yeah, no worries, that'll work”.

And they said, “Well, Amanda's not going to be there. We don't know where she is, but it's just going to be Hattie, Hattie meeting the social worker”. I’m like, “Okay, well, what do they look like?” And so, Hattie was described as wearing a greenish cap, a green puffer jacket, jeans and a face mask, which is pretty much what she was wearing every single day and married up to what was in that CCTV footage.

[Atmospheric music]

Voiceover: It was October 10, 2023 and Jamie gathered together a crew of detectives in multiple cars ready to arrest Azzopardi. They knew they’d have to set up a cordon around the meeting point in case Azzopardi tried to run.

But Jamie also needed to assign a new lead detective on the case, because the main investigator so far was unable to be part of the arrest on the day. His mind immediately went to Detective Senior Constable Trent Oehme.

Det Sgt Cunningham: The job, I mean, we didn't know what it was going to turn into at that point in time, but knowing about what was in these TV series, the chances are it was probably going to be elaborate, there was probably going to be detail, there's going be a lot of stuff to filter through.

So, I needed someone with a keen eye who could drill down to that fine grain detail. Also, Trent at the time was thinking about Interpol and possible career changes down that Interpol path. And I thought, “Well, this Azzopardi’s got links with Interpol and everything. So, this could work well for him as well. Could be a good case study for him”.

Voiceover: Fresh in Jamie’s mind was a family violence investigation Trent had run where he uncovered more offending than was first thought possible. It was all due to Trent’s detailed approach and ability to earn the trust of the female victim, who was terrified of a male, even though she had an intervention order against him and he was in prison.

Det Sgt Cunningham So one of the high-risk family violence offenders that we were managing at the time, that Trent was managing, a report was made to a rural police station about a minor breach of intervention order. Pretty standard stuff. We thought that if you're going to manage somebody, you manage them in their entirety and take everything on no matter how small it is, in a family violence context obviously. Trent took on that small job.

But by winning her over and gaining her trust, because at the start, she didn't really want to speak to police. He spent a lot of time to win her over, gain her trust and in turn, it led to 150 phone calls getting reported, so calls from the prison whilst he was in custody. Nothing looks better on a remand app than saying that your victim's not even safe when he's locked up in prison. So, Trent had to go through every single one of those phone calls, document them.

Voiceover: The intimidating phone calls from the male had resulted in the woman withdrawing her original complaint that he seriously assaulted her.

Det Sgt Cunningham: And in the end, it led to a pervert the course of justice charge because she, in turn, did a statement of no complaint. All the original charges that got him locked up originally were withdrawn. Trent re-laid all those charges that were serious assault-related charges. And in end, if that job was just left with that one breach of intervention order, the reality is not much would have happened there. Highly doubt he would have gone to prison for it.

But in the end, he ended up doing almost three years in the bin for pervert the course of justice, all the serious assault charges. And that's just because Trent took that extra time with his victim to get the full story and the big picture.

Voiceover: But on the morning when Jamie tapped Trent on the shoulder for the Azzopardi job, Trent had only just returned to work after a honeymoon in Italy.

Detective Senior Constable Trent Oehme: I had a nice tan going because that's what you do in a European summer. You get some sun, have some fun. But when you come back to work, you're extremely jet lagged. And the jet lag is real, especially waking up at 6am for a 7am start at work.

So, I thought oh I'm only going to be in the office for a week I'll just get to catch up with my work colleagues and have some fun and get all the goss, like since I've been gone.

I wasn't expecting anything or investigations to be palmed off my way. I thought, oh, this will just be an easy week, but the 10th of October, everything changed. And my whole entire life has changed since that moment, essentially. And yeah, going back to the day, I remember talking to Jamie about this investigation, this female by the name of Samantha Azzopardi.

I’m like, all right let's go.

[Atmospheric music and sound of traffic]

Det Sgt Cunningham: So, I briefed him up on the way down there. It was myself, Trent, and Kleiney – Detective Sergeant Leonie Klein – in the car.

So, the three of us are going down there in our car, get down there, cordon the area off, knew she couldn't escape. The three of us are kind of standing there alongside the town hall, looking out for a greenish cap, green puffer jacket, jeans, and a face mask. And all of a sudden, I see this schoolgirl. And that was the other description too, she kind of always looks like a schoolgirl. And see this schoolgirl starting to walk our way. And she matched that description perfectly. Even the green cap. Thinking, “Oh, this is probably her”. Start walking towards her, literally about to put my hand on her shoulder. I'm like, “Oh no, that actually is a schoolgirl”. And turn around and walk back and go, no, it's definitely not her.

But then I think in the process of doing that, then in the corner of my eye, I see this girl start running. And so I look back over and sure enough, green cap, green puffer jacket, jeans, face mask, looked exactly like Azzopardi. She's running in front of the town hall about to run onto the road to a tram. And so, I just quickly go jump in front of her, grab her and have a look at her. She's wearing a face mask. I can tell it's her and just go, “Look, Samantha Azzopardi, you're under arrest”.

[Music and traffic sounds stop abruptly]

And yeah, and she straight away head down, could tell it was well and truly her. And we moved her over to in kind of confines of the town hall, kind of in this alfresco kind of area. So, you could get her off High Street just to get her into some privacy. And that's where Leonie really came into play being a female, obviously had to give her a search and so forth. And whilst doing so, Azzopardi then collapses to the ground and starts grabbing her heart and saying she can't breathe and all this kind of stuff.

I think it was, I'm pretty sure it was Leonie that said it, she kind of leans, bends down, looks at her and goes, “Samantha, we know you fake medical episodes during your arrest. It was on one of the TV episodes”. And straight away she just sat back up and didn't fake any other medical episode again. And I took off her face mask, and she's, “Oh no, no, I need that on, I need that on”. Because again, she doesn't like being photographed, because the more photographs of her, it ends up online, and then it's harder for her to do all the cons.

[Soft music begins]

Voiceover: The arrest proved to be a crushing realisation for the women’s refuge workers.

Det Sen Const Oehme: I think at that stage the workers were still convinced that the two females that they had at their refuge were Hattie and Amanda Lee. Up until that moment where she was actually put in her handcuffs, I've got the belief just from looking at them, that they still believed that these were who they were saying they were.

And the look on, I'm not too sure which social worker's face I saw, but it was just of a broken person, it was almost like the blood had drained out of their face, like, pale and just almost like somebody, like a precursor to someone about to cry.

Voiceover: With Azzopardi now arrested, it was time for Trent’s skills to come to the fore.

Det Sen Const Oehme: I guess, from an investigator's point of view, as the informant with what Jamie's told what my responsibilities are as the informant, he doesn't need to tell me what that is, I know what that means and that is building a rapport with the person I'm about to interview and that starts at the first time I lock eyes onto that person. That's where the rapport builds. And the reason why it starts off there is that I'm going to have to interview this person and I'm trying to get as much out of that person, as much as possible.

So, this is going through all my head in the car ride on the way back to the Reservoir Police Station. And she was very shy and just not wanting to talk or maintain eye contact, very, very quiet.

So, I thought, I’m not going to push it, because, sometimes if you push it too hard, then people clam up and think that you are trying to elicit ungenuine rapport from them.

Recording of police interview with Samantha Azzopardi: This is a recorded interview between Detective Senior Constable Trent Oehme 41682 and Samantha Azzopardi of no fixed place of abode. This interview is conducted at the Reservoir Police Station on Tuesday, the 10th of October 2023.”

Det Sen Const Oehme: And it was a very, very bizarre interview in the sense that she put a blanket over her head and she turned around and wasn't facing us. And I'd never seen it before. Normally people will just sit there and say no comment if they don't want to participate or just remain mute. But I've never seen someone go on to the lengths of requesting a blanket, covering their whole entire face and turn around and just completely ignoring me.

Recording of police interview with Samantha Azzopardi:

Det Sen Const Oehme: Samantha, what’s your full name and address?

Azzopardi: (silence)

Det Sen Const Oehme: Can you hear me, Samantha?

Azzopardi: (grunt)

Det Sen Const Oehme: What is your full name?

Azzopardi: (mumbling)

Det Sen Const Oehme: You’re not going to what, sorry?

Azzopardi: (mumbling)

Det Sen Const Oehme: So, I'm like, all right. I'll ask the questions. Let's see what we got. And throughout the interview process, I tried multiple different avenues of getting anything out of Samantha, and the only thing that I got was a few grunts. And I think those grunts would have been information that she was led to believe wasn't true, and that she was upset that they were the allegations. But asking for clarification was absolutely impossible.

We didn't really get anything from the interview, in terms of admissions from her and what not.

Det Sgt Cunningham: I knew it was going to be hard though with Azzopardi. I think even the best interviewer Vic Pol has, I dare say she would still not talk and nothing would have changed. She was never going to talk to us and that's probably the reality.

Voiceover: While Trent was in with Azzopardi, Jamie and the rest of the crew were taking statements from the workers from the refuge, who were both stunned and distraught to find out they had been conned.

The detectives found out that the northern suburbs refuge was the second of two refuges in Melbourne to have taken in Hattie Lee and Amanda Lee, aka Azzopardi and the other unknown female.

They had been staying at another women’s refuge in Melbourne’s outer south-east, where they claimed to again be teens fleeing sex trafficking. The workers at that refuge sent them to the northern suburbs refuge in an attempt to keep them safe from their abusive stepfather, who they claimed lived in the south-east.

The investigators found that, across both refuges, Azzopardi and the other female had been given free accommodation, food vouchers, new phones, clothing and other emergency items family violence victim survivors need in order to start a new life. The total value of those items was more than $18,000 at the northern suburbs refuge and more than $2000 at the south-eastern refuge.

Det Sgt Cunningham: And whilst $18,000-odd doesn't sound like much as far as a fraud and deception is concerned, but it's also, that money should have gone to an actual victim of family violence. So, she's taken that away from someone who actually did need it.

Det Sen Const Oehme: I can't help but feel for the workers in that same situation. They’re legends at what they do and they're the right people to be the people taking people off the street and to help them and to be treated like that I can I can really empathise with that and I would have felt the same way. Because, when we go to the lengths that they presented at the refuge, you think, “Gee, who does this?”

Voiceover: Among the items found on Azzopardi when she was arrested were numerous phones, vouchers, paperwork and about $900 in cash. The cash in particular would lead to the only moment where Azzopardi would allow a crack in her facade.

Det Sgt Cunningham: She was arrested and we got her in the car and trying to build a bit of rapport to her and you know, the three of us, Leonie, myself and Trent, we're talking to her, trying to just get conversations, talking a little bit, like even asking her, “Where are you living at the moment? What have you been doing?” You know, “Seen the series about you”. You know, trying to win her over and she's saying little bits but really are just one, two-word answers and that's it.

And never looking at you in the face. The whole time on the way home, she's head looking out the window, did not look at us. Coming into the police station, head down, avoiding all our CCTV cameras, refused photos, and would not, like, very astute in terms of quick looks out of the corner of her eye to where the cameras are, and then head down and avoiding it at all cost. And again, any conversation with you, was not looking at you, it was looking away from you.

Voiceover: Jamie had tried suggesting to her that, to operate all the schemes she had in the past, Azzopardi must have been particularly intelligent.

Det Sgt Cunningham: She goes “No, no, I'm not smart enough for that, I am just not clever”. She goes, “No, no truly, I'm not that smart. I don't know numbers above two digits”. I’m thinking, “Okay, that's a weird thing to say, but no worries”. Kind of just left that there. Got her talking and I remembered that during her arrest she had $900 cash on her.

Then I said to her, “Okay, what about that $900 cash that you got on you? What's that for?” And she goes, “Oh, it's rent money”. I go, “Oh, okay, so how much is rent?” “Oh, $340 a week”. And I said, “Oh okay. So how many weeks' rent do you have?”

She goes, “I've got two-and-a-bit weeks rent”. I said, “Okay, two-and-a-bit weeks’ rent. So how much do you need for two weeks?” “Oh, it was $680”. And I go, “Oh it's not bad for someone who only knows numbers not greater than two digits”. And I was going, “Look, Samantha, I think you're an incredibly intelligent person. To be able to pull off all these cons that you do simultaneously, you run multiple cons at a time that are all intertwined one way or another, that's incredibly complex stuff. I think you've got an amazing mind and that you're a fantastic actor”.

And then that's when she looked up at me, looked at me in the eyes and gave a smirk and then looked back down, and that was the only time she looked at anyone.

Det Sen Const Oehme: We finished off the interview and then we worked out, “Alright, what are we doing with Samantha Azzopardi?” So, the decision was made that due to her fleeing, if we let her go now, she could be on the other side of the world we’ll never be able to catch her ever again. So, we charged her with obtaining financial advantage by deception with the two refuges and presented it before the courts for remand on that afternoon. She was refused bail that afternoon I believe and then essentially from that time on, it was actually time to investigate.

So, from there then we start doing checks with the property seized and just like any other investigation checking with the bank and seeing where like little things that she had in her possession. Like, with Samantha, anything in her possession has a meaning.

As an investigator from experience, I don't think that's ever been the case when seizing property from an offender. Like, we wouldn't think a hairpin or a little note with three-digit code or some of that would have any significance whatsoever. But with her it did and it was all intertwined with other stuff and even stuff back from the TV series.

So, it was evident at the start that I was going to have to invest a lot of time into this. And it's just the old cliché that detectives do the long hours and you've got an image of your mind of a detective late at night having a cup of coffee and working on the case. And I thought, “This is probably going to be me because I'm not going to do this during business hours with all my other work”

And I absolutely loved it. It was so refreshing. It was just, anything uncovering would lead to the next thing and I would look at a Post-it note and then it would lead another thing and then I'll be telling Jamie, “Hey, this four-digit code, I think it leads to this”. And like, it was almost just like a refreshing exuberance like with discovering and unearthing things.

Credit to Jamie like he was the one that that caught her and all props should go to Jamie but he also gave me a lot of leeway with my investigation and that was super helpful with not having somebody standing over my shoulder too much and letting the magic happen so to say.

I would still ask him, I'd say, “Hey, what do you think about this? What do you about that? Like, am I losing it? Am I losing it? Am I way too deep? Like, because yeah, if you need to drag me out of it, out of Samantha Azzopardi land, please do because we're getting pretty deep.

[Slow atmospheric music in background]

Voiceover: As Trent fastidiously investigated every item and number written down in her possession, he began to share with Jamie a picture of potential offending by Azzopardi that went well beyond the two refuges they knew about, and well beyond just Melbourne.

Det Sgt Cunningham: And that opened up all sorts of doors in terms of, now there's all these other refuges that we've been made aware of.

Numerous other refuges up the whole east coast of Australia. And so, we're linking them into all of those. There's also medical costs that have been paid for. Remember she said she was pregnant? And what we learnt was you can have a false pregnancy positive test by using, what was it? Pepsi Max?

Det Sen Const Oehme: No, it's got to be full Coke or full Pepsi. It can't be a diet or no sugar, specifically.

Det Sgt Cunningham: So apparently you pour that on the pregnancy test and it shows a positive. So, she was doing that to get this positive reading for positive pregnancy test. She went to two different doctors for that because of the supposed abdominal pains and bruising and so forth, which was all makeup. And so that was all getting paid for by these refuges as well.

But whilst we're doing all this, we're also thinking in the back of the mind, “Well, who's Amanda Lee? And where is she? We don't know who she is yet. And is she a co-offender?

Or is she another, some sort of backpacker that's managed to get herself into whatever mess that she's in, not knowing that she is dealing with Samantha Azzopardi? So, we've got to try to figure out where she is. And treat her accordingly. So again, as a victim or as an offender, we don't know yet.

Voiceover. As Trent continued to dig into the fine grain detail, the job got bigger and more complex. And the crime theme also became less and less a job for an FVIU. So, discussions were had over whether it should be moved to a different investigation unit that would usually handle such fraud and deceptions.

But there was no way that Trent and Jamie were letting go of this investigation.

Det Sgt Cunningham: We kept the job because our, these service providers we deal with on a regular basis. And they're now our victims in this, so we feel we're best placed to help them.

Yes, we still get a lot of deceptions as well in a family violence context. We're dealing with all serious crime that's in a family violence context, albeit this isn't in a family violence context, but it's our service providers are the victims, so that's why we're keeping the job. And the way Samantha is, the way she makes people believe in her cons, is her coercive control that she has over people, which is exactly what a family violence perpetrator does to their loved one. So that's why we kept that job.

Voiceover: Although Trent had unearthed a lot, there were still so many questions about what Azzopardi had done in the months prior. Not to mention the question of why.

Tracking down this Amanda Lee was going to be central to the case. So, they sent word out to all police stations across Victoria to keep a lookout for her.

Det Sgt Cunningham: So, sure enough couple of week later, a girl goes into the Malvern Police Station and reports that she's lost some money out of her bank account. Some strange things have been happening to her. And she thinks that the person who she's been travelling around Australia with is in fact Samantha Azzopardi.

And sure enough, that person was Amanda Lee, or the person purporting to be Amanda Lee, who we'll call Emma. We want to keep her identity a secret.

Our whole office knew about the job and one of the members, he went out and took the statement from Emma. So, they were renting a house out that side of town, but because she was no longer in contact with Samantha and assumed that she'd returned back to Sydney on one of her projects, let's just call it, there was no money for rent, so she couldn't pay it and they were getting kicked out of the rental.

Voiceover: And much to Trent’s investigative delight, Emma also had a lot of Azzopardi’s property in her possession. Phones, gift cards, vouchers, notebooks and sticky notes with names and numbers galore.

Det Sen Const Oehme: When I saw the amount of property, I think my heart skipped a beat, thinking, all right, let's go, babe, let's go, baby. And funnily enough I forget who took the photos of the exhibit, but I'm forever thankful. He had individually photographed every single exhibit from the two bags of property handed in from Emma. And we're talking every pin, every little scrap bit of paper, her hair scrunchy and receipts.

So, in the property there was a Westpac debit, which went back to the TV series amongst other identities being in there from other unbeknownst victims and just credit cards and cheques and also amongst the property, there was also prescription medication. So, there was a prescription medication for Temazepam. So that's essentially kind of used to drug people.

But I guess the cream in terms of what we unearthed from the property was Samantha's phone. So, we got the mobile phone forensically downloaded by the Cybercrime Squad. Samantha Azzopardi's mobile phone is the most interesting mobile phone I've ever seen as a human being, as an investigator.

Her phone really gave me an insight into the mastermind that Samantha Azzopardi is – calculated, so she's quick to move on once she believes there's a bit of heat coming onto her. But nothing on there would suggest that she's got any interests socially in the sense that, like, whether it be bands or just anything. It was almost just a tool that she'll use to offend and create and regenerate new identities.

And even with the pregnancy tests, so I think the staff had been talking about getting her to do a pregnancy test at the refuge. And the timing of that interaction and timing on her phone, she starts Googling how to fake a pregnancy test.

Going through her phone and seeing that she had no personal interests, no human traits of just general research that human beings do in terms of day-to-day, like, it was almost machine-like in the sense that she was on autopilot, as in, this is her oxygen, this is, this is not her just doing it for fun, this is almost like a mechanism to appease herself, as in, there is nothing else that interests her. This is it. This is Samantha Azzopardi.

[Atmospheric music]

Voiceover: Azzopardi would go to extreme lengths to live out her con jobs. Trent even discovered communications in her phone that revealed she had gone to a Melbourne tattoo parlour to get permanent freckles tattooed on her face. She was prepared to do anything to trick people into thinking she was a teenage girl and not the late-30s woman that she truly was.

The statement Emma gave to police made it clear she was not a co-offender, but yet another victim swept up in Azzopardi’s ever-expanding web of deceit.

Emma was, in fact, a 21-year-old Danish backpacker who had been in Australia on a working visa since February that year. It was in June that Azzopardi first targeted Emma.

Det Sgt Cunningham: She was out in the Australian outback working, which was required as part of her working visa, and then she started responding to Facebook messages looking for other forms of employment. And she was contacted by a Talia Ekker, stating that she was working for a Village Roadshow company and offered her a job involving travelling on a low budget income, creating video diaries.

And Emma thought, yep, this sounds like a good idea, better than working on a cattle farm or whatever it was that she was on. And she signed disclosure agreements and all sorts of stuff through an encrypted application called Sessions. And again, she's 21-year-old, Danish, naive, didn't really know, hadn't really been outside of Denmark before, so didn't know any different.

And she was told she'd be working with an 18-year old Norwegian girl called Asta Hansen and that she should travel to the Newtown Shopping Centre in Sydney to meet up with Asta.

Asta said that her parents are movie directors, she'd been working in big movies in the past and yet we're going to have a lot of fun travelling Australia on a low budget, let's do this. So little did Emma know, Asta Hanson was in fact Samantha Azzopardi and that's where it all kicked off for her.

And from the very, very get-go, the very first thing that she was tasked to do through this Sessions app was to check into a hotel name under the name Patrice Matthews being an employee of this film and television company. And so, she thought that's normal. Um, she thought it was a bit strange that the hotel receptionist started going through all these domestic violence assessments with her.

So, obviously it wasn't a hotel, it was a family violence refuge. But 21-year-old Danish backpacker had never been in Australia before, just thought our receptionists were a bit weird. Pretty much. She's wondering, “This is odd, but okay, maybe they need to know these things here in Australia”. So, she kind of went with it. But the next day, she left and thought, no, this is just odd. And the firm called her back and said, “Where are you? Why are you not here? How come you've left? You need to link back up with Asta”. And so, she said, “OK. Look, at the end of the day, I need the money”. So, no worries. And they said, “All right, well, what you need to do is you need to go to the central train station lost and found and there's going to be a mobile phone and toiletries pack waiting for you in your name at the lost and found”. And so, we're kind of listening to this thinking, “Geez, this is like a Hollywood movie, just odd”. But she did that. She went there and sure enough, she picked up the phone and it rang. And it was Asta saying that she's with a social worker and “she's getting us new accommodation”.

Okay, so she went met up with Asta, and Asta said to her, “Look, we're now sisters. So, I've told the social worker that we're sisters, so you got to go with that, and that's how we're getting our next lot of accommodation”. And again, she's still thinking, “Well, this is all to do with this big television series”. And Asta, i.e. Azzopardi, sold it well to her. She's being doing it for a very, very, very long time.

So, over the next month or so, they've used aliases, Olivia and Mia Thomas, Julie and Heidi Moore, Lucy and Sophie Martin. And this is throughout the whole east coast of Australia before arriving in Victoria. So, what she's saying is that during the time making up all these stories, saying that they've been sexually assaulted, saying that their escaping stepfathers and family from overseas and all sorts of stuff, it's taken a toll on Emma.

And so, Emma's decided, “Look, enough is enough. This TV series is just getting too weird for me. I want out. And so, I want to go to overseas. It's time for me to book another holiday, go overseas. I've had enough of Australia now, it's time to go”. And so, she sent a message to the film company to essentially resign. She's giving her two weeks' notice and she's going to resign. And this is all happened when they arrived to Coffs Harbour in New South Wales.

And Emma told Asta that she's planning on leaving to Malaysia after arriving in Sydney. She's going to go to the airport and she's off to Malaysia now. So Asta, Azzopardi, said, “All right, well, we've got to kill a bit of time. Let's go into some, let's go watch a movie. Let's go into the cinemas”. So, okay, no worries. So, in she goes.

[Atmospheric music begins]

What Emma says happens next is she goes into the theatre, and then all of a sudden, she's feeling dizzy, light-headedness, doesn't know where she is, loses all sense of feeling and touch, and pretty much collapses and passes out. Can't remember anything. And then the next thing, you know, she wakes up. She's now in a Sydney hotel room, booked under the name of Asta's parents, the movie writers, and Asta is with her, and Emma's going, “I don't know what's going on, I don't remember anything. Where's my passport? I need to go, I need book these flights”.

Can't find her passport. No idea where her Danish passport is. She's logged on to a Westpac account, drained of all money. She doesn’t have any money left. She doesn't know what's going on, then she gets a phone call from someone pretending to be – sorry a message – from Coffs Harbour Police stating that they had CCTV footage of her pushing a lady down the stairs in the cinema, and that lady has suffered some serious injuries and that she now needs to be arrested.

And Emma’s thinking, “I don't remember any of this, and now the police are after me. I'm 21 years old in another country. I don't have a passport, don't have any money. The police are after me, what the hell's going on?” But it's okay, because Asta's there and Asta saves the day. Because Asta has a grandfather who's a Danish lawyer and they could help her.

So, the next thing you know, she's getting a phone call from someone purporting to be working for the grandfather saying, “Don't worry, I’ve been in contact with Coffs Harbour Police. I'm aware of what's going on. Yeah, it turns out you are in a fair bit of trouble. I think what you need to do is change your name and go on the run. Change your ID and you need to go on a run because they're after you and you'll get locked up and so forth”.

[Atmospheric music begins]

Voiceover: As they continue to move around Sydney and New South Wales, things get worse for Emma.

Det Sgt Cunningham: When they were in New South Wales, and Emma was really starting to spiral now. So, again she's got no money, she got no passport, she thinks that she's almost killed some old lady in the theatre. She's been lying to everyone about everything, about her name, about everything and she's really, her mental health's really deteriorating.

And unfortunately for her she also has mental health issues. And that's one of the whole reasons why she came to Australia as well, to have that gap year and, and kind of get away from all of that and reinvent herself and so forth.

So, she ends up going to the hospital, Liverpool hospital from memory. And that's something that Asta is saying, “Oh no, yeah, you should definitely do that and I'll get all your medical records”, and all this. Because again, in this whole time that they've been together, she's now seeing Asta as like a sister figure because they've being telling each other everything. Or so she thinks anyway.

She's been divulging her whole life to Asta and Asta's been divulging something to her, but in the end, it's been a whole heap of rubbish. But she doesn't know that because she thinks Asta is Asta. And again, that is that coercive control that's coming out. And she unfortunately tries to take her own life in the hospital, all sorts of horrible things happen until she eventually gets discharged.

[Atmospheric music]

Voiceover: Emma is still stuck in Azzopardi’s world of lies and, by mid-July, they had made their way to Melbourne, where they eventually ended up at the south-eastern women’s refuge by the end of August 2023.

Det Sgt Cunningham: And so, going back to Emma, she's now lost, think it was about four and a half grand was taken out of her bank account.

She's now wanting to go home. She's like, “I've had enough of Australia, I need to go but I can't, don't have a passport, don't have money”.

And she's trying to go to the bank to get to say, I've been defrauded, but what's the first thing the bank says when you call them? “All right, you'll have to answer your security questions”. They'd all been changed on her. All the security questions had been changed because of the relationship she had with Azzopardi, they shared everything. And so, she knew enough about her to be able to answer her security questions without her knowing. And so, she changed those security questions.

[Atmospheric music]

Voiceover: Jamie’s heart went out to Emma and he took it upon himself to contact her bank to set the record straight and also worked with the Danish Consulate to get her a new passport. He wasn’t obliged to do it as part of the investigation, but FVIU detectives are renowned for being all about their victims.

Det Sgt Cunningham: For her, I just felt that no one else is in her corner right now, because she's all alone in Australia. And so, who else can help her?

[Sound of a plane taking off]

As soon that passport came for her, she was out of the country, she was gone. Because she just felt embarrassed, betrayed, she just… The year away in Australia that was meant to be this self-finding mission in a way, it was just stripped from her because of everything that happened with Azzopardi.

Voiceover: By going deep into all that he found in Azzopardi’s seized property and speaking with women’s refuges and people up and down the east coast of Australia, Trent was able to link evidence to pretty much every part of Emma’s account of her four-month ordeal.

He laid 20 more charges on Azzopardi, including offences related to fraud, deception, theft, making false reports and more. But, in Jamie and Trent’s minds, the most important charge was a stalking charge.

Det Sgt Cunningham: We really wanted to ensure that there was going to be a good charge for our victim, Emma, as well, and everything that she endured. And so that was going to be the stalking offence. We felt that that was the best charge for her as a victim.

Voiceover: Trent put it all together in a comprehensive and compelling brief of evidence for the courts.

Det Sgt Cunningham: So, with the brief of evidence, whilst it was 45 pages long of just the actual summary itself, some people might think, “Well, surely that could have been culled. Surely you could have made that a lot smaller”.

But the thing is, with this job, it's all those little, tiny intertwining details that if you culled that detail, then it wouldn't make sense and you wouldn't be able to prove the charge. So, it was a hundred percent needed and that's why Trent was the best person for the job because he could portray that fine-grain detail in a way that anyone could understand it.

Having to portray and identify everything that happened along the east coast of Australia was so important for the stalking charge because you couldn't just start it off in Victoria because it wouldn't make sense. So, you needed all that detail to be able to identify exactly what's happened for the reader to understand and obviously for the court.

Voiceover: Azzopardi pleaded guilty and was sentenced to two years in prison with a non-parole period of 12 months. She was freed from prison earlier this year following the end of her sentence.

Azzopardi has never given a reason for her relentless con jobs, but during a court case in 2021 for one of Azzopardi’s previous crimes it was revealed that a forensic psychiatrist had diagnosed her with pseudologia fantastica. It’s a rare condition where extreme compulsive lying comes from an internal motivation to create fantasies, rather than for money, fame or power.

[Atmospheric music begins]

Whatever the reason, it is clear to Trent and Jamie the damage Azzopardi has caused, particularly at the women’s refuges, where workers tricked by her were left devastated.

Det Sen Const Oehme: Unfortunately, it took a toll on some employees that resigned. I'm not too sure what they're doing now but we certainly couldn't get a hold of them and I'd imagine it probably would have been too traumatising to even speak to them in an official capacity in terms of, “Tell us what's happened”.

But it's sad to see because they're very lovely people at the women's refuge and they've all got a similarity in the sense that they would give you a jumper off their back if you were cold, like they would be the people to hug you and help you in the case of need. For them to be affected in that way, it's quite sad. And I think it just goes to the nature of it. I don't think Samantha fully comprehends the trail of disaster that she leaves behind with the victims. And that goes from all the victims in the TV show to all the witnesses in our investigation.

The people working at the refuge are the right people to be working in those places and they shouldn't have to second-guess themselves about what's presented to them. But cases like this now would create doubt.

Det Sgt Cunningham: And that in effect creates further damage for the next victim that comes in to make a report because again these people, these victim survivors that are going into these refuges, they need to be believed because more often than not people around them, including loved ones, aren't believing them.

So, she needs that social worker, that refuge, to wholeheartedly believe what she has to say. And if that social worker’s now going to doubt that because of what Samantha Azzopardi did, well then that's now going to have a run on effect for that new victim that's coming in.

[Atmospheric music builds]

Voiceover: Although her crimes had nothing to do with family violence, her methods of offending and the particular victims she hounded meant that she could not have drawn the attention of any detectives better qualified than those at Reservoir FVIU.

Det Sen Const Oehme: I guess it might just be due to her, or her popularity, or whatever you might call it, but there's probably not a day that since October 10th, 2023, that her name doesn't get mentioned in an ordinary day at work. And that's whether it's coming from work colleagues, people that have watched the show or Victoria Police, worldwide, interstate, international, like it's, it's you know I don't know how it's changed me but I think it's made me a better person and it's probably made me a better investigator to think outside the norm, especially with the elaborate methods that Samantha has utilised throughout the years.

So, it hasn't just been this job, it's been all the other ones, so, and I just hope that it's been portrayed accurately, which I think we've tried our best, but who knows with Samantha. You always know there's always something a little bit more with her.

Voiceover: A reminder that if any of the themes in this episode have affected you, you can call Lifeline on 13 11 14, 1800RESPECT on 1800 737 732 or visit your local police station. If you know someone who needs help you can also call Crime Stoppers on 1800 333 000. If life is in danger, call Triple Zero (000).

Police Life: The Experts is a Victoria Police production.

Your host is Belinda Batty.

This episode was written by Jesse Wray-McCann.

It was produced by Jesse Wray-McCann and Nadine Lyford.

The senior producer was Cassandra Stanghi.

Audio production and original music by Mat Dwyer.

Con Girl trailer by the Seven Network and Finding Samantha trailer by RTE Documentary on One.

Theme song by Veaceslav Draganov.

Executive produced by Ros Jaguar.

This podcast was created by Media and Community Engagement at Victoria Police.

To learn more about the work of Victoria Police, go to police.vic.gov.au.