[gentle music playing]
[Paige] The best part about being a mom is watching my children figure
things out, put the pieces together.
It's pretty cool to see the gears turning.
Being a mom kind of feels all encompassing.
I know a lot of people kind of have an identity crisis.
So sometimes it's nice to take a break from mom-mode.
You know, getting away from real life
and kind of becoming somebody else.
So I could understand why Sarah did some of these things.
If Sarah had any shame, she wouldn't have done any of
the things she's done over the last 20 years.
I think she really wanted the things that she lied about.
There's something...
There's something not right in there.
This was a woman with no authentic identity.
I just remember I couldn't sleep that whole week.
[Bethany] I've never seen her walk.
I don't even really how tall she is.
[Elisabeth] I think she just idealized my life at the time and was
like, "This is what I want, and I'm gonna insert myself
in your life."
As things progressed, I found
out exactly how intricate the web was,
and it became almost a game.
She wasn't in it for the money, and so I became
intensely curious about what she was in it for.
That person does not exist.
That feeling of grief of, like, somebody had just died.
[Elisabeth] That's where it gets really, really crazy.
My head was just spinning.
I just don't want anybody to be hurt.
She better hope she never meets me.
[dramatic chord plays]
[main theme playing]
[pensive cello playing]
[Erin speaking]
[gentle music playing]
They become really good friends.
And you can imagine how special that was to Erin.
I know what it's like, 'cause I lived with two
disabled brothers. They just want friends.
They want someone to think they're special enough to spend
time with, right, and be a friend to.
So this meant a lot to Erin.
[Erin speaking]
So now Erin knows that Sarah understands Erin's life
because Sarah's living with a sister with special needs.
[Erin speaking]
[dramatic, suspenseful chord plays]
As Sarah and Erin got closer and started to talk all
the time, Sarah started to tell Erin about her husband Adam
and their multiple pregnancies, multiple miscarriages,
and even deaths of some babies.
[Erin speaking]
My name is Sarah Treleaven. I'm a journalist.
And I mostly write long-form magazine features.
I also make true-crime podcasts.
And I wrote about Sarah Delashmit
for ELLE magazine in 2021.
Almost immediately, I knew there was a huge story here.
Sarah and Erin had been friends for quite some time
when Erin gets an email from someone.
And it's a guy named Jeff who says he's seen Erin's
profile on a dating website,
and he thinks she's really pretty.
And he'd really like to get to know her.
So Erin is narrating this to Sarah while they're on
the phone, and Sarah says, "I cannot believe this,
"but I know Jeff.
He's my husband Adam's best friend."
This really feeds into this idea that it's Erin and Sarah
who are destined to be together.
[Sarah] You know, Erin, she's an adult who lives
with her parents and is very aware of her own limitations.
And so Jeff is sort of promising her this life
that they might have together.
And it's this fantasy that is immediately appealing.
Sarah also started to tell Erin about multiple illnesses,
including Guillain-Barré syndrome,
Ebola, and multiple cancers.
[Erin speaking]
[tense music playing]
[Sarah] What's amazing is that when Erin knew her, Sarah was
the one providing the care.
But when she showed up at Camp Summit years later,
she arrived as someone
who needed that same level of care.
That's where Bethany comes in.
[gentle, rhythmic music playing]
- You want to go outside? - [dog barks]
[Bethany] Come on. Don't pee right there.
Oh, my God.
Ruby's just, she's the guard dog, our safety net for so long.
My anxiety is up,
and I'm worried, can I protect us or anything like that?
And she's the little alarm.
Can I have a hug?
Thank you. Thank you.
Love you too.
And I got my makeup all over you.
Coming into meeting Sarah. My life was very hard.
There's a lot of pain there.
I grew up in a cult.
The situations I was put in in that cult
was very traumatizing.
Sorry, I'm trying to stop crying too.
So I saw a lot, I heard a lot, and I
watched girls be put in situations where judgment
and shame were kind of the narrative.
And so I left.
Anyone who leaves that community is not spoken well of,
and so I did not have a community.
And in order to build that, I was volunteering
with nonprofits.
I worked for AmeriCorps for a year, and then I taught
English in the Dominican Republic.
And then I was working as a camp counselor
at Camp Summit, an outdoor camp for adults with disabilities.
And that's where I met Sarah.
She had muscular dystrophy, and she was in a wheelchair.
[Sarah] So Sarah was originally someone who was taking care
of people with disabilities.
And now she's the one in a wheelchair.
What are the odds of that?
[suspenseful music ends]
[Bethany] So, 2015, I was in my mid-20s,
working as a camp counselor at Camp Summit.
Camp Summit is an outdoor camp for adults with disabilities.
So, there's bonfires, we do cookouts,
um, there's horseback riding.
Um, they have a pool now, which is really great.
So, everything is just meant to be outside.
Camp counselors there are kind of a dual role.
Counselor, live-in caretaker in the cabins.
First time I saw Sarah was on move-in day.
And Sarah came in in her power wheelchair.
She was wearing kind of like a light pink T-shirt.
Had a big smile on her face and had just kind of this very
gentle first impression.
I'm Kerry. I worked at Camp Summit
the fall of 2015. I was Sarah's unit leader,
so the lead counselor for
the cabin that Sarah was in for the week.
I worked directly with her, was a caregiver throughout
the time, would transfer her to the restroom and bathe her,
and also supported with feeding and then also with all
the activities throughout the day.
Sarah was super friendly.
She really engaged with all the counselors and we all
became friendly with her throughout the week.
Her mobility at that point was just her wrist.
This is all I ever saw.
She could do enough to kind of control the wheelchair.
You know, obviously anything else that she needed was on us.
One of the things that's super interesting about Sarah is
people are really drawn to her positive energy and they
genuinely like her and they want to
develop this intimacy with her.
She's somebody who only creates relationships under false
pretenses and then blows them up.
And this happens over and over and over again for 20 years.
It's important to tap into your intuition
and beware of your surroundings.
And I'm not saying that that necessarily applies here,
but have you ever been in a situation where you,
you know, you like someone, but you start wondering,
wait a minute, something's a little off here?
Like, something's just not right.
It's like, it's your intuition.
It's your gut calling what you want.
[gentle music playing]
We supported her with getting into a hammock and things like
that and we just made sure she had the best time possible.
[Bethany] Sarah really wanted to go on the zip line during activities,
and we obviously really wanted to make that happen for her,
so there was several counselors
that had to get involved for that.
So, she went across pretty quick and then got onto
the platform on the other side where other caregivers were
there waiting, and I remember they lowered her down,
and she laid on the platform, and she just sobbed.
Like, "That was the best experience.
"Thank you for doing this for me."
Like, "I've never been able to do anything like that before."
And we were all just around her, like, cheering, like,
"I'm glad you had fun."
You know, this is why we're here.
I'm so glad that you get to experience this.
And horseback riding was the same thing.
She really liked the horses too.
I remember that.
But it seemed like the zip line was, like, the very emotional
experience for her.
And I felt good about helping her have such a big,
monumental experience.
And so that helped me work
through my own trauma from that cult.
Because I'm trying to find a community.
I've been trying, you know, to...
find myself.
And I have realized this is literally my cheat-sheet
on how I can heal from it.
[classical music playing]
[Bethany] For her, morning would start out with helping her
transition onto her wheelchair.
♪
[Bethany] And then we would've brushed her hair,
help her with her teeth,
get her ready for the day, and then be out the door.
She told us pretty early on when she first arrived that
she was on her period, so she had come prepared
with pads for the week.
There was one time we woke up in the middle of the night
and was calling for help. It was, like, 4:00 AM
to put her CPAP mask on,
and I was over there, like, on top of the bed
just trying to help support her.
[sighs]
She had to use the restroom a lot that week.
At one point, it was north of 10 in a day
because she needed pads changed
and her wheelchair was huge, and it was very hard
to maneuver at 90-degree angles
where we needed to get it around the toilet.
It would take at least two people to transfer
her onto a toilet.
So, I'm trying to get her up, turn her at a 45-degree angle,
and then the girl behind the toilet would have to grab
her from behind, and carefully, like, set her down,
'cause, again, dead weight.
Like, you don't wanna just
drop somebody like that on a toilet.
I have never been so sore in my life.
With that level of intimacy, of the care that Bethany gave
Sarah-- changing her menstrual products and washing her
and wiping her after she went to the bathroom and brushing
her hair and all this, I mean, that brought them close.
[Bethany] That week with her,
I felt like I was building a friendship 'cause she was
really good at asking questions and wanting to,
you know, be inquisitive, know more about me.
And I feel like she mirrored some of my behavior.
You know, if I was in tears,
she would be in tears about something.
Like, if I was having a bad day, she was having a bad day
and that kind of thing.
And so, it just felt like a very fast friendship
in that sense.
Sounds a little bit like Sarah's relationship
with Erin, right?
I mean, there's such a connection.
And Bethany's coming off her own trauma.
She's healing, and disconnected is part
of the healing for her.
[Bethany] At the end of the week, we had to say goodbye to Sarah,
but we all planned on going back to camp
for the spring session.
But then I found out I was pregnant in January,
so I let her know I wasn't going back for that session.
Sarah's interest in my pregnancy ran pretty deep
to the point where, you know, Sarah would just ask me
for my ultrasounds pretty frequently.
"You never sent me the ultrasounds."
I thought that was weird.
[suspenseful music playing]
[Bethany] When I knew she was gonna be down at Camp Summit that week,
I was back in Tennessee and got a call from the camp.
[suspenseful music builds]
[Bethany] It was the assistant camp director.
She said, "So Sarah's here at camp this week.
We wanted you to know about what happened."
Sarah's pastor and some family members traveled from Illinois
to Texas to go to the camp.
♪
[Bethany] They called over the walkie to ask for Sarah
to come up to the office where she saw the van, her family,
and the camp director.
She pulled up in the wheelchair
and stood up.
[dramatic, miraculous music playing]
[Bethany] Didn't say anything to anybody, just got in the van.
They closed the door and drove off.
She was able-bodied and was lying about all of this.
[Bethany] After I found out about Sarah lying about everything,
it was so emotionally triggering.
It physically caused pain
and just feeling like somebody had just died.
To think I was doing something good for someone
because they needed this,
and then to shift and realize, like, no, I was being violated,
just felt like such a huge punch in the gut.
[Beth] So when you look at Bethany, she was coming off
her own trauma, as somebody no longer a member of a cult.
I mean, this was part of her healing process,
and it probably set her back.
She stole her time. She stole her emotions.
She broke her heart. She stole her disease.
It's disgusting.
I grew up with brothers in wheelchairs, and they passed
away a long time ago.
To this day, when I am getting out of the subway...
and I'm looking up at the stairs and there's
no elevator, I think, and my brothers are named Joe
and Jon, and I think, I couldn't get them
up the stairs.
How would I get them up the stairs?
To this day, I still think about that.
[somber, suspenseful music playing]
[Bethany] I never heard from Sarah again,
but Sarah made a grave impact on my life,
'cause trust is completely out the window.
I was still processing everything, and then
I found out Sarah hurt other people.
♪
My name is Elisabeth Hickox.
I live in Newport, Rhode Island, and I was
a volunteer for the Young Survival Coalition Cycling.
Sarah told me she was a flight attendant who was
on leave for treatment.
She had a 14-month-old daughter,
and her name was Bindi.
And that during the course of the charity ride weekend,
she had gotten the information from her doctor that her cancer
had progressed to stage four,
and that she hadn't told her husband yet.
That really just grabbed at me.
[suspenseful piano plays]
Here we see Sarah emotionally targeting Lis, just the way
she did with Erin and with Bethany.
Here we go again.
From there, our relationship
really progressed.
It was at that time that she said she was going to fly
into Fort Lauderdale for the weekend
to come visit me with her bike.
♪
[Elisabeth] Sarah showed up at our house,
and she had a bike in a bike box.
One of the things that the Young Survival Coalition
does is if you don't have a bike, they would donate
nice bikes so you could participate.
So Sarah had applied for one of these donated bikes
and been given a bike.
When she took her bike out of the box, I said,
"Well, that's interesting.
"That's not the bike that our charity gave you.
Where did that bike come from?"
And she told me that
Southwest Airlines had lost that bike when she flew home
from the charity ride,
and they had given her an insurance claim,
and she went out and bought this bike,
which was a little bit nicer.
After that point, a Google search of her name
turned up the fact that she had lost her nursing license
in Oklahoma and Virginia was the official notice
from the nursing board saying
that she had faked pregnancies not once, but twice.
It became apparent that her cancer was fake.
Just when you think there could be nothing worse than cancer,
she created a situation to divert my attention to her,
and that became the stalker.
She told me about the stalker
was texting her that she's in love with her husband
and they're gonna be together after Sarah's gone.
Sarah isn't pretty enough for him anyway.
She told me that the stalker knows how to cut the brakes
on a car and make a death look like an accident.
The FBI was involved.
They wanted to set up a trap for the stalker.
And they wanted Sarah to go to a store
in O'Fallon, Illinois,
and just shop to try to lure her out.
And would I FaceTime with her during that time
that she was gonna be bait walking around the store.
So she just looks like an average shopper.
And I said, "Yeah, OK, sure." And after about 45 minutes,
she went out into the parking lot.
She said, "Lis, I see her."
And at that moment, I said, "Sarah, run."
I was never more scared at that moment.
I don't know where to tell her to go.
She told me that shots had been fired,
and then the call dropped.
And maybe about five minutes go by, and she called back.
And she said, "They got her.
She's been apprehended."
She said, there were, you know, seven bullet shot,
you know, five people were injured
and that a bullet hit her in the knee.
Like, this-- this is crazy.
There was nothing in the media about it,
and that just struck me as odd.
Then a couple of calls made,
one to the Highland Police Department, saying, like,
"Hey, did this happen?"
And the Highland Police laughed.
He's like, "That never happened."
I felt taken advantage of. It was pissed off.
These are not the acts of someone who is sane.
I was very afraid of her. Terrified.
I think at that point, it was just all about getting
information, going down every rabbit hole.
Like, understanding what her past was like.
[Sarah] Sarah grew up in a suburb in Illinois called Highland.
Her parents divorced when she was a baby, and her dad
was a long-haul trucker,
so he wasn't around a whole lot.
In speaking to people close with Sarah, there is some
element of trauma that she's experienced in her past
that has
led her to think that lying is more comfortable
than the truth.
Her aunt told us about Camp Summit.
She told us how that ended with the pastor confronting her.
She said, "She'd been at it since high school,
you know, with a story of one kind or another."
So that opened up a whole other channel to meet other victims.
I got a phone call from Lis.
We were all definitely very fired up, like, "We have to do
"something because she's gonna go do this to other moms,
other women, other people's children."
[Elisabeth] I tried to wrap my head around, "This woman is not OK."
And she needs help.
And, you know, on a really crazy thought, I was like,
"You know what?" I'll just throw a call out to
Dr. Phil and see if he'll take this on himself.
[Bethany] Lis and I were already on stage.
Sarah starts walking down, and I almost looked at Dr. Phil
and said, "This isn't the same person."
I didn't mean to hurt you guys the way that I did.
Just such a compulsion that I couldn't control.
[Dr. Phil] Are you saying that your lying is an irresistible impulse?
I can't resist it.
No matter what I do, it just takes over my life.
Even when I tell myself I wanna choose to be honest,
I cannot be honest with myself or with people.
So you are a total sociopath.
[suspenseful music playing]
So at the end of the episode, she agreed to go to a mental
health treatment facility that Dr. Phil had set up.
And so she left the show and went straight to that
facility in Southern California.
And then to find out a few weeks later,
she left the facility and just went back home.
♪
I got a Facebook message from my friend Mary.
She sent me a clip to
the Dr. Phil show, and she said, "Oh, my God, doesn't this sound
like crazy Sarah?" So I watched it, and I said,
"[bleep] me, it's her."
I posted on the Dr. Phil Facebook.
I've been chasing her around since 2006.
Everybody beware Sarah Delashmit.
And because I used her last name,
Beth and Lis knew that I knew her.
And they Facebook messaged me and said,
"What do you mean 2006?"
And I said, "Oh, man, let me tell you a story."
[soft, heavenly music playing]
[Andrea] My friend has a personality theory that everybody
is a Winnie the Pooh character.
And I said, "Well, which one am I?"
He said, "Oh, you're Kanga, because everybody
"you care about, you adopt them,
"you put them in your pocket and hop around with them.
"You know, you're a very protective,
like, mother figure."
But the other thing about me is that I'm also very dangerous.
If you piss me off, I'm done with you.
I had myself drawn as a kangaroo,
but with a scorpion's tail.
I'm Andrea Smith.
♪
[Andrea] I was a stay-at-home mom in a little town outside
of Greenville, South Carolina.
And one day, an old friend had posted that they had just lost
their four-month-old daughter to SMA.
SMA stands for spinal muscular atrophy.
It's a progressive degenerative disease that causes muscle
weakness and wasting away.
It can be terminal at a very young age.
[Andrea] I started reading all these kids' stories.
And after a month, I was like, "I feel like I need to get
involved somehow." So I organized two gatherings.
In 2006, Andrea's a volunteer in the SMA community.
She's helping manage this chat. And a woman named Connie joins.
And she expresses extreme concern, devastation over
a recent diagnosis of her son, Drake.
[Andrea] There were pictures that she posted that said,
"This is Drake. Isn't he cute?"
A few weeks after Connie joined the chat,
Megan joined the chat. Megan was mom to a little girl.
And at some point, Connie and Megan were talking
to each other, but their grammar,
their terms of phrase were the same.
They both misspelled the same common word the same way.
"Tomarrow." T O M A R R O W.
From, you know, Drake and Connie.
And then,
"Oh, Lily is so beautiful. Have a great birthday."
Tomarrow.
T O M A R R O W, love Megan and Brooke.
And I'm like, "Oh my God,
this bitch is talking to herself."
[suspenseful music playing]
So I got one Connie email and I got one from Megan email.
I extended the headers and lo and behold, they were both
in the same IP address.
I felt really comfortable
saying Megan and Connie were the same person.
We were able to track the IP addresses to Sarah Delashmit
in Highland, Illinois.
So you need to understand that at this time, Sarah's actually
21 years old, living with her mother, whose name is
Connie, the same name that appears in this SMA chat room.
And this is at the same time she's met Erin
and told Erin that she has a sister named Gabby with SMA.
So she's carrying on this
deceptive SMA behavior in two different places,
one with Erin and one in the chat room.
[Andrea] And that's when we started looking at
the other chat boards, and we found her everywhere.
She had been active on the Muscular Dystrophy Association chat boards,
claiming she either had herself
or had children with various forms of muscular dystrophy.
There's something-- there's something not right in there.
And I didn't think about her for years after that,
until the Dr. Phil show.
I wasn't surprised at all that her behavior had escalated.
And it's gonna continue to get worse.
I think Sarah is a dangerous sociopath.
So I got in touch with Lis and Beth, and they said,
"Like, we don't know what to do to stop her."
And I said, "We need to call the cops."
What are the cops gonna do?
It's like, "Well, because of the bike that she got,
you know, maybe you can get her for a fraud."
♪
I'm Officer David Brines.
I've been with the Highland Police Department
approximately 17 years.
After the Dr. Phil show aired,
I received a call from a lady named--
Andrea Smith.
Andrea had stated that Sarah had received a bike donated
to her charity bike ride for the Young Survivors Coalition.
The value of that bike was approximately $650.
At this point, we called a local FBI agent.
♪
[Scott speaking]
My name is Scott Verseman.
I'm the chief of the Fraud and Corruption Section
for the United States Attorney's Office
for the Southern District of Illinois.
The harm that Sarah Delashmit caused was phenomenal.
What she stole went way beyond monetary value.
She stole and harmed the emotions of people,
a lot of very, very good people
who were trying to do very, very good things.
So the FBI is investigating how she obtained two bicycles.
One bicycle was donated to her with travel expenses
by the Young Survival Coalition.
They believe she's a cancer survivor.
The other bicycle she bought on EBay, it's about $4,500,
and she used her mother's credit card,
and then intentionally lied to the bank that it was
an unauthorized transaction, and she kept the bike.
[Scott] The FBI obtained a search warrant for
Sarah Delashmit's residence in Highland, Illinois.
The agents were able to recover the triathlon bicycle from
her house, so that was conclusive evidence that
that she had lied to the credit card company.
Grand jury returned an eight-count indictment,
four counts of wire fraud, one count of mail fraud,
and three counts of aggravated identity theft.
In October 2020, Sarah pled guilty and was sentenced
to 18 months in federal prison.
[Bethany] When Sarah pled guilty, I think we all kind of
crossed our fingers, hoping that that sentence would
make everything a little bit healthier.
[Sarah] Sarah was released from prison in 2022.
You know, she's got this, what should be,
personally, a devastating humiliation.
Instead of seemingly learning anything from it from that,
she moves on.
Sarah is back in Highland, Illinois, where she lives
with her mother. And Sarah has a baby.
[Beth] So Sarah gets out of prison.
She goes back to Highland, Illinois, and moves in
with her mother. Has a baby of her own.
[Andrea] Some advice to whoever knocked her up.
Don't stick your [bleep] in the crazy.
But the question is, has Sarah Delashmit been rehabilitated?
Has prison deterred her from future conduct?
I don't think so, because she's
joined this mom's group in Highland, Illinois.
So here we go again.
♪
I'm Ansley.
I'm a producer on "The Curious Case of..."
and I've been investigating the Sarah Delashmit case.
I had been contacting Sarah Delashmit for a few weeks
with very limited response.
So I ended up going to Highland, Illinois myself
and knocking on her door.
Her mother answered and came to the door and brought
Sarah to me.
We spoke on her stoop for 30 minutes.
Yeah, it was just kind of instant panic from her and just
kind of saying that she just wants to move on with her life
and put this in the past. There were a lot of tears.
I did hug her to calm her down.
She just kind of repeated the same statements over
and over again, that she has changed, she's moved on,
she wants to move on, nobody's letting her move on.
I did get the impression that she wanted me to feel
for her in some way.
I think she wants this national story to go away, and she wants
to protect her current job that she has now.
[Ansley] And I do believe that Sarah is in some ways trying to continue
this behavior because I did identify, you know,
a couple mom groups or a Bible study across town that she had
started to infiltrate.
[woman singing opera]
This is the plaque that I got for being inducted into
the Music Hall of Fame in Valmeyer, Illinois.
That's right.
[fun music playing]
My name is Paige.
I have lived in Highland for about seven years.
I am in a group on social media that is for the moms
of Highland.
You know, they say it takes a village to raise a child,
and they're not kidding.
I met Sarah Delashmit in October, 2024.
She had her very small child.
Sarah was talking about how she's an older first time mom,
because she experienced 10 years of IVF treatments
and infertility, so she was
hoping to make some mom friends.
She told me that her husband was a pilot for UPS,
so he wasn't home very often.
[baby crying]
[Paige] So she spent a lot of time alone with the baby.
I told her she was a strong example
of what a mother can be.
Please don't show the world my boob.
That would be great. Thanks.
[baby coos]
[Paige] And then I noticed that when I would tell her something
about my experience as a mom, she would echo what I had said.
Like my breastfeeding journey.
I had a pretty significant oversupply.
So I would be nursing him
and still pumping about four times a day.
And she said that's what she was currently going
through, that she had this oversupply and
she was nursing her baby, but
then she was still having to pump
about four times a day.
Then she made a post in a breast milk group looking
for breast milk donations.
It's like, "Oh, that's not what a mom with an oversupply does."
And also, I had never seen her nurse, her child.
It was only bottles.
She was just taking pieces of my story and making them
her own, and I wasn't even sure if what she was telling me
was the truth.
I was noticing more inconsistencies.
Like, Sarah originally told me her husband was a UPS pilot,
and then I overheard her telling a completely
different story to somebody who was 20 feet away from me.
I honestly don't know if Sarah will ever stop lying
and just be happy with the way that her life is.
That's what I want for her, but I have no idea if that's
what she'll come around to.
[dark chords play]
Sarah needs people who want to help, places where there's
a wellspring of compassion.
Those are the places that she turned into hunting grounds.
I think that the people that she's come in contact with
recently just kind of like eyes wide shut, you know?
This kind of stuff doesn't happen in Highland, Illinois.
Well, yes, it does.
And it will happen again.
[Sarah] The victims in her wake feel very strongly about the things
that she has done to them. They keep tabs on her.
I think she should get locked up
away for the rest of her life.
Yeah, she's a danger to society.
I will never take my foot off her neck.
I will always know where she is
and what she's up to.
When it comes to Sarah, her documented history
of deceit, that's gonna follow her all her life.
So she may say she's changed, but the question is--
has she really changed or has
she just found another way to deceive someone?
[Andrea] I've been tracking this crazy broad
around the internet for 20 years
because the only way to stop her from doing something that's
going to eventually harm somebody, really harm somebody,
is being treated and or put in a box.
One of those two things.
And if she's not gonna get treated, I wanna make sure
that she's in that box.