Highland woman convicted of fraud for faking breast cancer is subject of new podcast
The bizarre story of a Highland woman who defrauded charities and individuals by pretending she had breast cancer and other illnesses has been covered by publications all over the country.
Now it’s the subject of a podcast.
The first three episodes of “Sympathy Pains” will be available for download starting Wednesday, according to Laura Beil, a Texas-based freelance journalist who reported, wrote and hosted it for iHeartMedia.
Beil interviewed half a dozen people scammed by Sarah Delashmit, as well as medical experts and the assistant U.S. attorney who prosecuted her federal fraud case in East St. Louis.
“I had to walk a very difficult line,” Beil said. “You don’t want to make excuses for what she did. You don’t want to glorify what she did. You don’t want to exploit what she did, and you do want to hold her accountable. But you also have to recognize that there’s a complexity behind it.
“She wanted sympathy, because she wanted people to think she had a disability. But the sad irony is, she did have a disability, really. It’s just not one that you could see. I tried to be sensitive to that.”
Delashmit managed many of her scams through social-media and email accounts using fictitious names. Some but not all resulted in her getting money, benefits or donated items.
Beil interviewed Erin Johnson, a California woman with muscular dystrophy who submitted a statement at Delashmit’s sentencing hearing in 2021. Johnson had maintained an 11-year friendship with her, based on lies about a fake family, life and shared disability.
Another victim, Bethany Turner, described caring for Delashmit in 2015 at Camp Summit, a Texas camp for people with disabilities, where she pretended to be debilitated by muscular dystrophy.
Turner bathed, dressed and fed Delashmit, brushed her teeth, took care of her feminine-hygiene needs, helped her to use the bathroom, pushed her around in a wheelchair and took extraordinary steps to enable her to go horseback-riding and zip-lining and participate in other outdoor activities.
“She was really good at convincing people that she was someone else,” Beil said. “And keeping all these different stories straight that were running concurrently, I don’t know how she did that.”
Delashmit, 37, served 11 months of an 18-month sentence in the medium-security Federal Correctional Institution in Greenville. She was released on March 4, Federal Bureau of Prisons records show.
Delashmit now is serving three years of probation. She couldn’t be reached for comment this week.
‘She will do this again’
Delashmit is a graduate of Highland High School and a former nurse who lost her license after pretending to be pregnant on the job, stuffing pillows under her clothes, and later claiming that she lost the babies.
Delashmit pleaded guilty on Oct. 13, 2020, to five felonies related to three scams in U.S. District Court of the Southern District of Illinois. Three aggravated identity theft charges were dropped.
Judge Staci Yandle went beyond the eight months recommended by Assistant U.S. Attorney Luke Weissler and defense attorney David Brengle as part of a plea agreement and handed down an 18-month sentence on Jan. 19, 2021.
In that case, Delashmit was accused of faking breast cancer and genetic disorders to get money, benefits and donated items from two nonprofit organizations, including Camp Summit, and making false statements to a credit-card company and internet retailer to obtain a $4,500 triathlon bike.
“Those are just the ones that fell within the statue of limitations,” said Liz Hickox, 56, a financial adviser in Newport, Rhode Island, another victim who was interviewed for the podcast.
Liz and her husband, Brian Hickox, developed a friendship with Delashmit in 2018. She visited them three times at their Florida vacation home after meeting them at a benefit bike ride in New York and falsely telling them she had Stage 4 breast cancer, a husband, a baby daughter and a job as a flight attendant.
The couple learned the truth in 2019, after an over-the-top phone charade in which Delashmit pretended to be shot at the Highland Walmart by a woman obsessed with her fictitious husband.
The Hickoxes confronted her on the “Dr. Phil” show, where she admitted to having a “lying addiction.” They later helped FBI investigators with the fraud case and became something of a clearinghouse for victims.
Liz Hickox estimates that Delashmit has scammed hundreds of people across the country over 20 years, including charity employees and volunteers, disability camp participants and counselors, support group members, churchgoers, co-workers, patients and friends.
“I have no doubt that she will do this again, and any of her other victims or people who knew her personally would say the same thing,” Hickox said.
Delashmit is back on social media. She changed her Facebook profile photo on Jan. 28 to one that showed her sitting in the passenger seat of a car, smiling broadly and holding up a cookie.
That was more than a month before her release from the Federal Bureau of Prisons. The Greenville prison’s public information officer didn’t return phone calls or reply to emails seeking information on whether Delashmit was living in a halfway house at the time.
Several of her Facebook friends posted “Welcome home” messages and compliments related to her appearance.
“Im the blessed one to have your love and support,” she responded to one.
Known for ‘Dr. Death’
Beil is a freelance journalist based in Dallas, Texas, who specializes in stories on health-related topics. She’s best known for hosting “Dr. Death,” a podcast released in 2018 that focused on egregious cases of medical malpractice.
Beil worked on “Sympathy Pains” for more than a year.
Beil said she exchanged short texts with Delashmit, hoping to get her side of the story. She also reached out to family members and spoke with a couple of high school friends, but none would agree to be interviewed on tape.
Liz Hickox doesn’t feel that 11 months in prison was justice for Delashmit, noting that she wasn’t tried for most of her scams, including many that weren’t even considered illegal, despite the negative effect on victims. Some people ended their involvement with beloved charities.
“It caused us to look at everything differently,” Hickox said. “It caused a tremendous loss of trust and confidence. You basically look at every relationship and think, ‘Are you who I think you are?’”
Beil recognized trust issues as a common thread among all of Delashmit’s victims.
“Sympathy Pains” consists of six half-hour episodes. People can download the first three for free wherever they get their podcasts beginning Wednesday. Beil expects the other three to be released soon after. Representatives of iHeartMedia didn’t respond to a request for information.
The podcast’s trailer can be heard at https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/sympathy-pains/id1617326066.
“In the end, I think I told a story that was fair and true,” Beil said. But she admits that there are still unanswered questions. “Who is Sarah when she’s not pretending to be ill or disabled? I really don’t know.”
This story was originally published April 13, 2022 at 6:00 AM.
