Whatever happened to GPO Girl? The mind-boggling tale of a serial scammer who landed in Ireland

It’s 10 years since a young woman was discovered, dishevelled and in distress, outside the GPO in Dublin. Using primitive sign language, she indicated to the Garda that she was 14. The widespread assumption was that she had been trafficked to Ireland from eastern Europe. A media frenzy ensued – only for the story to take an unexpected twist.

That story and that twist are retold in Con Girl, a four-part true-crime documentary, streaming on Paramount+, that unspools like an Irish-set Inventing Anna, the Netflix drama from this time last year about the serial fibber Anna Delvey (aka Anna Sorokin). GPO Girl had a name too. She was Samantha Azzopardi, a fact that only emerged when the mystery had become a national talking point.

Con Girl has been made to appeal to fans of such true-crime smashes as Making a Murderer. Interviews are filmed head on, with the various experts and eyewitnesses looking straight into the camera and, therefore, straight out at the viewer. The programme is also padded with re-enactments, including scenes in which an actor playing Azzopardi pouts from beneath a hoodie.

The tale begins in Dublin before pivoting back to Azzopardi’s native Australia. “She looked very innocent, she looked very vulnerable, she looked very upset,” says the journalist Ali Bracken. “That was the question on everybody’s lips – who is this mystery girl?”

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“She didn’t speak ... didn’t verbally communicate,” says Det Supt David Gallagher, the lead investigator. She “clearly presented as distressed ... adopted a position of hair over her face‚ scrunched in a protective pose. She wasn’t speaking.”

Back in 2013 “you’d have to be living under a rock” not to be aware of the case. “Everybody loves intrigue. This had that in spades,” says Bracken. “There was a child who was vulnerable, potentially a victim of the worst kind of crime that can be committed against a child. She looked vulnerable ... like she needed our help.”

GPO Girl was unable – or unwilling – to communicate verbally. Stumped, the Garda took the unusual step of surreptitiously taking her photograph and then sharing it with the media. At first the strategy drew a blank. Then Australia woke up, and it turned out that GPO Girl was, in fact, the 25-year-old from Down Under.

[ From the Irish Times archive: Australian woman at centre of Garda inquiry returns home ]

Con Girl from there spirals into a mind-boggling tale of faked identities and manic gas-lighting. Azzopardi turns out to have been a serial fraudster who had more than 70 aliases, including those of a teenage Russian gymnast whose family had died in a murder-suicide and of a Swedish backpacker whose parents were Interpol agents.

Azzopardi isn’t interviewed, so the documentary relies on the testimony of those drawn into her circle of deceit. They recall her lies with bafflement and horror. “None of it was real. It was a complete scam. Her whole demeanour was an elaborate ruse,” says Supt David Taylor. “She was good. Anybody that could pull that off for a month while being in hospital, being tended to, being cared for, and could maintain this demeanour ... is very good at what they do. I’ve never seen anything like it before or since.”