EMILY Bamberger met Samantha Azzopardi while holidaying in Sydney in 2014.
It was all “peaches and cream”, the California native says, but it didn’t stay that way.
Ms Bamberger, 18 at the time, was on her first big trip overseas. She connected with the quiet, standoff-ish Azzopardi at a hostel and the pair struck it off immediately.
Ms Bamberger thought they were friends, but it turned out everything Azzopardi told her was a lie. Azzopardi wasn’t even using her real name. The name she was using was Annika Dekker.
For those unfamiliar with Azzopardi’s story, you can read about her here. In a nutshell, the 27-year-old from Sydney’s southwest has lied her way around the world using as many as 40 different aliases.
She was convicted by the Brisbane Magistrates Court of forging documents and making false representations twice in 2010 alone.
She turned up in 2013 looking skinny and shaken outside a post office in Dublin. She wasn’t speaking, instead she drew pictures for police illustrating how she had been abused by a group of men.
She was eventually deported but not before authorities spent a great deal of time and more than £200,000 ($386,000) trying to identify her. Her story made international news.
In late 2014, she landed in Calgary telling a different story under a different name. She was Aurora Hepburn now, and she was trying to start a new life.
When her path crossed with Ms Bamberger in 2014, it would change the young tourist’s life forever. For four months, the self-confessed “wide-eyed” American believed everything she was told. It landed her in jail and got her deported.
Now 20, she is talking about her experience for the first time. It is a rare insight into how Azzopardi operates and a cautionary tale about being careful who you trust on holiday.
‘I LIVED WITH A PSYCHOPATH FOR FOUR MONTHS’
After the pair met in Sydney, Ms Bamberger says her new friend started acting strangely.
“She would test me, like it was some kind of social experiment,” she told news.com.au.
“We were on a bus one day and when we got off she asked me, ‘How many people were on the bus?’
“I told her I didn’t know and she told me there were 28 people, 13 caucasians. She said I needed to be more aware of my surroundings.”
Things got far, far weirder than that. Ms Bamberger says Azzopardi told her a backstory made for Hollywood.
She said she was royalty and had been kidnapped when she was a young girl. She said her “keepers” were Interpol agents and that, for the majority of her childhood, she’d been moved around the world to stay off the radar.
Looking back, she says she should never have let herself be manipulated but, at the time, she had no reason to believe she was being lied to. The lies were so detailed and so well thought-out she found it hard to believe anybody could make them up.
Ms Bamberger says she was sceptical until she received an email from an address ending with @interpol.com. It was a man claiming to be Azzopardi’s “keeper”, but what the tourist didn’t know at the time is that it was Azzopardi herself.
The email told Ms Bamberger that she and the mysterious Australian were in trouble. She was told she and Azzopardi were being followed and should leave Sydney. The email included details about Ms Bamberger she does not remember revealing to anybody in Australia.
“It’s the strangest thing that’s ever happened to me,” she said. “She knew my family, my addresses.”
Ms Bamberger told news.com.au she was sent documents for obtaining fake IDs for herself and Azzopardi.
“I was terrified,” she said. “I’ve never felt so scared. They sent me some documents and we went down to RMS. I got a new ID, my name was Amy Fisher. I was freaked out, I thought, ‘This is real’.”
Instead of walking away, Ms Bamberger says she decided to stay and help however she could. She says it’s part of her personality. The pair travelled to Brisbane where things went from bad to worse.
“One night, she wakes me up complaining that her head hurts,” Ms Bamberger said.
“I called her an ambulance. When the ambulance arrives, she tells doctors she’s 14 and that I’m her sister. I didn’t know what to say so I went along with it.
“At the hospital, police arrived and started questioning me. They accused me of kidnapping her and I spent hours answering questions.
“They asked me if I thought I was in danger and I nodded yes but said no into the recorder. I spent two days in jail and they charged me with fraud over the fake ID. I was fined a lot of money.”
The pair didn’t cross paths again until Azzopardi fled from her hospital bed.
“[Azzopardi] escaped and met me with her catheter still in her f***ing arm. We boarded the plane back to Sydney the night she escaped.”
‘SHE TOOK ME TO A SYDNEY SAFE HOUSE’
She took Ms Bamberger to what she described as a “Sydney safe house”. The house was in Campbelltown, where Azzopardi grew up. For eight days, she was kept in a cabin and not allowed to use the main house. There was no Wi-Fi, meaning she couldn’t let her family know where she was or if she was OK.
“I can’t believe how creepy that was looking back on it,” Ms Bamberger says. “Nobody knew where I was.”
Ms Bamberger says her tourist visa was expiring so she flew from Australia to New Zealand to apply for another. She was questioned extensively by Australian customs officials and then again in New Zealand.
When she landed back in Australia, she was deported. The first flight out was to Hawaii.
“All of my belongings stayed with (Azzopardi),” Ms Bamberger says. “My $1000 camera, everything.
“I logged on to the internet as soon as I landed and she had already messaged me. I thought I was done with her and she told me there was somebody in America trying to kill me. She told me I was in danger and not to get off the plane and to somehow try and get back to Australia if I could.”
Ms Bamberger travelled back to San Francisco where she received another message, this time with an offer to meet her in Canada. Tickets were paid for by Azzopardi. She went, she says, “because she told me Interpol had put out an alert that California was going to have an attack and that she already booked flights for me to meet her there.”
She says once she landed, Azzopardi gave her a “tracking device” that looked like a card with wires in between it and “earnings that supposedly had GPS in them”.
She went along with it but the smallest thing made her realise Azzopardi was a liar.
“Earlier, she told me she was Swedish but in Calgary somebody tried to speak Swedish to her and she had no idea. I was like ‘F*** you, you’re not Swedish’. I knew then that she was nuts.”
Ms Bamberger hasn’t seen the Australian since. She says when she landed in San Francisco, she left her trip behind. She didn’t tell anyone.
“I knew I couldn’t tell anyone because well, how dumb can I sound? I also knew nobody would believe me. I lived with a psychopath for four months.”
That changed when she searched online for a name Azzopardi had given her during their four months together.
‘I WAS BLOWN AWAY, EMBARRASSED, SCARED’
“I typed ‘Aurora Hepburn’ into Google and story after story came up about this woman,” Ms Bamberger says.
The story revealed that Azzopardi had walked into a health centre in Calgary after the two parted ways. Azzopardi alleged she was the victim of years of prolonged sexual abuse. She told authorities she was 14 years old.
The story revealed a long list of Azzopardi’s aliases — Emily Peet, Lindsay Coughlin, Dakota Johnson and Georgia McAuliffe. Aurora Hepburn was there. So was Azzopardi.
“Ms Azzopardi has a long history of impersonating others, lying and committing fraud,” a hearing officer said before Azzopardi was deported.
“She’s been uncooperative, refusing to answer our questions about how she obtained the travel documents needed to gain entry to Canada.”
Ms Bamberger says she was “blown away, embarrassed and scared”.
She asks herself every day why she fell for Azzopardi’s lies and why she went along with them, knowing something was not quite right.
“It’s a fair question. The best way I can describe it is I was wide-eyed, terrified, and really thought I was helping another human being be safe.
“I am not the follower, I am the leader in every other situation but this event was my blind spot, my dreadful learning experience that will forever mold my future relationships with people.
“She betrayed me and lied to me and made me do things I wouldn’t normally do. I got arrested for this chick, I have a fake ID, I got deported for this chick,” she said.
“There’s no straight answer but part of it is that I was a kid, I was very objective, I’m very empathetic. When you throw somebody like me in a situation where I felt like I could be of help to somebody, I obviously want to help them.
She said she has since changed the way she approached social situations and tightened her friendship group.
“I don’t even believe people when they tell me their profession anymore. I have a small group of friends. I don’t do anything social anymore.”
She said Azzopardi messaged her recently and she told her never to message again. But she has a couple of things she’d like to get off her chest.
“If I could say one thing, it’s that you don’t play with people’s lives. It’s not fair. I want someone to find her and get her help or keep her locked away so she can’t hurt anybody anymore.”
The profile picture on one of Azzopardi’s aliases on Facebook contains a photograph of Azzopardi and Ms Bamberger.
Azzopardi has not been heard from since landing in Australia in late 2014.
All of Ms Bamberger’s movements over the four months she travelled with Azzopardi have been corroborated by news.com.au.
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