The woman responsible for almost 24,000 drug cases being dismissed in Massachusetts in the single largest single largest dismissal of criminal convictions in U.S. history and who may have put thousands of innocent people behind bars was a woman with a long history of fabrication.

Her husband, Surrendranath Dookhan, once warned a prosecutor, 'She’s a liar, she’s always lying. She is looking for sympathy and attention.'

And Dookhan, or 'Little Annie' as she was sometimes called, had long drawn suspicion from her coworkers for her overwhelmingly large testing numbers at the William A. Hinton State Laboratory Institute, at the time the state drug lab.

One lab supervisor, Peter Piro, reported Dookhan as early as 2007 for what he thought was shoddy work and underhanded tactics, including forging a supervisor's signature and making up test results. But her supervisors paid no mind as 'superwoman' Annie was so valuable to the backed-up lab's testing numbers.

In 2004, her first year on the job, Dookhan tested 9,239 samples, more than three times the average chemist in the lab, according to a 2013 story in The Boston Globe. The following year, she tested 11,232 samples, almost twice that of the next most prolific tester.

At first, her colleagues assumed she was arriving early, not taking lunch or breaks, staying late, and taking work home. One colleague called her the 'superwoman of the lab.'

But within a few years, some grew suspicion and reported dubious behavior.

Piro said that long before the scandal broke, he caught her falsifying a chemist's signature, identifying samples as cocaine that were really heroin, not properly checking the accuracy of her scale, and making up lab test numbers. He also said that despite her staggering numbers, he hardly ever saw her in front of a microscope.

Although he reported the incidents to supervisor Charles Salemi, Salemi handed off the problem to another supervisor named Julie Nassif, who apparently did nothing.

Fellow chemist Michael Lawler told police that everyone 'had discomfort with Annie Dookhan’s monthly numbers.'

When chemists were then ordered by law to testify to test results in court, numbers for the lab chemists dropped precipitously since they were now spending time out of the lab - all of them did except Little Annie, whose numbers were now six times that of the other chemists.

Dookhan's fabrications were apparently not just limited to the lab. Her husband, Surrendranath Dookhan, who became angry about a somewhat overly-friendly relationship she had with a prosecutor, George Papachristos, sent a series of text message to him saying 'This is Annie’s husband do not believe her, she’s a liar, she’s always lying. She is looking for sympathy and attention.'

Her relationship with Papachristos started with her saying she was a divorcee looking for love at the same time she would email her husband.

'I need someone to love me and make me laugh,' she told him.

She also told him she was unlike the others in the lab. 'My work ethic is very different from my co-workers, I give 110 % in everything I do . . . I work hard,' she said.

Eventually, she seems to have fessed up to being married, though she told Papachristos that she and her husband were having problems. Papachristos denies the two ever had an affair but he later resigned from his job as district attorney.

Later, she would tell police that she'd been going through a long divorce, yet there is no record of a divorce filing for her or her husband.

The two had a son, Branden, but she also suffered two miscarriages, which seemed to affect her profoundly.

'The miscarriages seemed to put some stress on the relationship,' said a brother-in-law who didn't want to be named.

But the lying didn't start with the lab or with her marriage. It went far back.

Born in Trinidad in 1977, Annie Sadiyya Khan, as she was known before her marriage, who would grow to be only four-foot-eleven, moved to the Boston area with her parents sometime around 1989.

From the beginning, she was determined to stand out. At Boston Latin Academy, she ran on the track team and got an A for effort from her coach, if not her skills. 'Annie’s dedication was far greater than her ability,' said coach Ray Behenna.

Despite being an A student, this wasn't quite enough for her.

After she graduated in 1996, she put on her resume that she'd graduated 'magna cum laude' even though there is no such honor at the school.

She left Regis College in Weston after two and a half years for mysterious reasons. She then went to University of Massachusetts Boston. Her biochemistry professor, John Warner, remembers her as one of the best students in class. 'She was really quite driven,' he said.

One classmate remembers her saying she had to leave Harvard for financial reasons and that both of her parents were doctors, neither of which is true.

The student said that Dookhan's attitude was that she was much smarter than everyone else in class. 'She was like, ‘Oh, this is so easy. I finished my homework two weeks ago.’ Well the rest of us didn’t think it was so easy,' the person said.

She graduated cum laude with a bachelor of science degree in 2001, majoring in biochemistry.

In 2002, she worked as a quality control analyst at MassBiologics Laboratory. Supervisor Aaron Weagle remembers her as 'clearly ambitious.'

Another supervisor, Anthony Parham, remembers her driven more by prestige than money.

'She wanted to be able to say that she was an accomplished person,' said Parham.

But he said he did find it a bit suspicious that she got results in half the time her colleagues did and subsequently came to suspect she may have done the same shenanigans in that lab as in the state lab.

She also told several people she was working on a master's in chemistry at UMass. In reality, she wasn't even taking any extra classes. A year later, she claimed to have a doctorate from Harvard University.

'People were excited about that, saying what a genius she was, and someone put up a banner congratulating her,' said a colleague, Michael Gennaco. 'She was superproductive and supercompetitive and she took on a lot of responsibilities. She was going to run the lab. Well, we all got fooled, didn’t we?'

But she didn't have that either.

She also inflated her salary, putting on her resume that she made $40,000, when it was $32,800.

In November 2003, she moved on to the state lab and began racking up her astonishing testing numbers. But she would tell police she began 'dry labbing' in 2009. She said she did this to 'get more work done.'

By the end of 2010, she had tested 10,933 samples compared to the mean of 2,230 by other chemists.

Several workers again took their suspicions to lab supervisor Salemi, who checked Dookhan's paperwork but not her test results, and pronounced her work fine.

He was given disciplinary action by the state.

In 2011, Dookhan was found to have removed 90 drug samples from the evidence room without authorization. Despite that, she was not asked to return her key to the room for six months.

However, the breach of protocol caught up with her when the Massachusetts State Police forensics unit took over running the lab and decided to look into the many issues with Dookhan.

In August 2012, Dookhan was interviewed at home by police where she confessed to the 'dry labbing.'

On September 28, she was arrested and by December she was charged with 17 counts of obstruction of justice, eight counts of tampering with evidence and one count each of perjury and falsification of records.