Ciaran Dunbar

She joins me now with this incredible life story.

Gillian, you're very welcome to the Belltale.

Before we started recording, we were saying, and I couldn't help being struck by the similarities between Julia Holmes' career, if I can call it a career, in scamming and being a coroner, and many other similar cases that we've done on the podcast and that I've read about as well.

in terms of how she went about her scamming.

I don't know where to begin, therefore, but I suppose we must begin at the start and that is her childhood.

But unfortunately, we don't know an awful lot about the childhood, which maybe is a pity because it might have revealed an awful lot.

Do we know if the son remained with the husband or not?

And we don't know the circumstances of that.

So we have to give her at that stage the benefit of the doubt, which we don't have to give her in her subsequent life.

She left Northern Ireland when she was just 19 and almost immediately she went to the United States of America.

She lives in a small community of Athens, incredibly.

Although, as I said, we've seen this before, she poses as a psychologist.

He was a divorced father of two.

Yes.

It is interesting, I mentioned that this psychologist thing, the advantage of it is that unlike a hospital...

they would check out your documentation very well.

But I assume it's because you can print off a fake certificate, put it on the wall.

Maybe people don't question it too much.

And then they tell you their intimate details, which makes, leaves them very vulnerable.

She called herself Dr. Julia Watson.