Dakota. Emily. Aurora. Lindsay. Who’s that girl? Harper. Marley. Sakah. Samantha.
When Chris Nunes hired a new waitress for her busy pancake restaurant in 2011, she knew she was taking a risk. There was something peculiar about “Sammy”, but she seemed like “a lovely girl”, and Chris wanted to give her a chance. Pancakes on the Rocks in Campbelltown, in south-west Sydney, was a bustling restaurant where families would pile into big, orange booths to eat pancakes with smiley faces drawn on in whipped cream. The new waitress, however, “didn’t fit in”. More concerningly, she sometimes failed to turn up and Chris realised she needed to dismiss her. When she did, the young waitress made the strange comment that she was going to “travel the world to donate a kidney”.
“I just said ‘that’s nice’. I knew she had issues – that’s why we let her go,” Chris said two years later, in an interview with the Irish Independent newspaper. “She was a lovely girl. There was nothing I could say that she was a horrible person or anything – that’s why I gave her the opportunity.”
Chris relayed these observations after Sammy made headlines as the centre of a police investigation into a suspected international sex trafficking ring. Police had found her in an agitated state on a main street in Dublin’s CBD one chilly autumn afternoon in 2013 and had launched a global appeal for information. Chris saw Sammy’s face on the news and recognised her. “I called my sister and said, ‘That’s Sammy’,” she told the Independent.
At this point, members of Ireland’s police force had spent more than 2000 hours going door-to-door around the area where the then-unnamed girl was found. She had barely spoken since they’d helped her off the street, but because of her slight build and recently fitted braces, the authorities
