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‘I killed to see how I would feel’

Joanna Dennehy

Michael Adebolajo was not the only person to be given a whole life sentence for murder in the final days of February 2014.

Just two days after Mr Justice Sweeney imprisoned the Islamic extremist for the rest of his life for the barbarous killing of Fusilier Lee Rigby, Mr Justice Spencer, also sitting at the Central Criminal Court in Old Bailey, sentenced another vicious killer to spend the rest of their life in prison – the only difference was that this killer was a woman.

On 28 February 2014, thirty-one-year-old Joanna Dennehy, who was born to a respectable middle-class family in the affluent town of St Albans in Hertfordshire and had played netball for her school team before descending into severe drug and alcohol problems as a teenager in 1997, became the first woman ever to be sentenced to a whole life term by a judge.

Only two women before Dennehy had ever been condemned to end their days behind bars – the ‘Moors Murderer’ Myra Hindley, who died at the age of sixty in November 2002 without seeing freedom since her arrest in 1965, and Rosemary West, who is now sixty-two and has been in jail since April 1994, with no prospect whatever of release.

Both of those women, however, had originally been given fixed terms of imprisonment by the judges in their cases – only for those twenty-five-year terms to be extended to whole life by the Home Secretary of the day. In the case of Hindley, this was done by the Conservative David Waddington and confirmed by his successor Michael Howard, and in West’s case by Labour’s Jack Straw.

Indeed, no woman had been subject to a whole life sentence since the last days of 2003, when the Home Secretary lost the power to amend any term of imprisonment under the new Criminal Justice Act, which became law in November of that year. At no point during the ensuing decade had any woman committed a crime so heinous that she should be considered as warranting the most draconian penalty under English law. But in the case of Joanna Dennehy that was to change.

On the surface, Dennehy hardly looked as though she could deserve such a punishment. A thin, white-faced young woman with piercing eyes, she may have sported a green star tattoo beneath her right eye, but she appeared to be nothing more than a troubled teenager who had never quite managed to grow into maturity.

Her appearance could not have been more deceptive, however, for behind the mask of normality Dennehy was a psychopath who suffered from a severe antisocial personality disorder that revealed itself in ferocious bouts of ‘anger, aggression, impulsiveness and irresponsibility’ – in the words of one psychiatrist who interviewed her. No matter how harmless she may have looked, she killed for her own amusement and, to use her own words, ‘to see how I feel’.

Indeed, so severe was her personality disorder that Dennehy was later diagnosed as suffering from a condition known as paraphilia sadomasochism, in which the sufferer derives sexual excitement from the infliction of pain, humiliation and bondage. A woman with severe drug and alcohol addiction, Dennehy liked to give – and receive – pain.

Yet her life had not started out like that. As a child, Dennehy had been very close to her sister Maria, who was two years younger; so close, indeed, that they slept in bunk beds and invented their own secret language. But as Dennehy made the transition into adolescence, her personality changed. She became involved with a group of older boys who introduced her to ‘skunk’, a strong form of cannabis, and she started drinking and skipping school.

Then, at the age of fifteen, she met and ran away with John Treanor, who was five years her senior. They left St Albans and eventually ended up living rough in East Anglia. Dennehy briefly returned home, but at sixteen left again to live with Treanor, first in Luton and then in Milton Keynes. Within the next four years, while still a teenager, she had two children with him, even though she insisted that she ‘didn’t like kids’, and all the time her relationship with Treanor was disintegrating. Unsettled and uncertain, Dennehy would leave him for days or weeks at a time, cheat on him with both men and women, only to return and beg his forgiveness.

The couple tried moving to East Anglia again, but Dennehy’s drinking got worse as she worked as a farm labourer – sometimes even taking her wages in alcohol. She also started to have violent tantrums, in which she would repeatedly hit Treanor for no apparent reason. She was equally violent towards herself, cutting her arms, body and neck with razor blades – she even tattooed the green star beneath her right eye herself. Eventually, in 2009, Treanor left her, taking their two children with him, and Dennehy started to drift around East Anglia, often working as a prostitute to sustain her drug and alcohol habits. In the following four years she spent short periods of time in prison for minor offences, and was also treated for mental health problems.

Then, in 2011, Dennehy met the man who was to become her ‘slave’, a seven-foot-three-inch-tall burglar called Gary Stretch, who was then in his early forties and had a long criminal record, including one term of five years’ imprisonment and one of four years for offences including burglary and handling stolen property. In 2008 Stretch had also been sentenced to fifteen months for harassing his former partner, and threatening – through a mutual friend – to kill her.

By the beginning of 2013 Stretch had become utterly infatuated with Dennehy, so infatuated, indeed, that he devoted himself to satisfying her increasingly violent whims. At the end of March that year, for example, just before and during the Easter holidays, Stretch helped Dennehy fulfil her most violent fantasies, in a spree that lasted just ten days. She had finally lost control, and the tall, muscle-bound Stretch assisted her in every way he could.

And so it was that on Thursday, 21 March 2013, Dennehy killed her first victim at 11 Rolleston Garth, the rooming house that she had been living at in Peterborough, Cambridgeshire, though she had recently moved near by. As she had done so often before, she used her sexuality to ensnare a man – this time a thirty-one-year-old Pole named Lukasz Slaboszewski, whom she had met just a few days earlier.

Like many men before him, the Pole had rapidly fallen in love with the white-faced young woman with a green star tattoo beneath her right eye. He even texted a friend saying how beautiful the world was now that he had Dennehy as his girlfriend. Tragically, it was the last message he was to write. He had met his nemesis.

Alone that Thursday afternoon, without Stretch, Dennehy invited Slaboszewski to the rooming house she had recently left, and then – without any warning whatever – stabbed him through the heart with one of the many knives she had taken to keeping with her at all times. The single stab was delivered with such force that it killed him outright at once. But Dennehy showed not the slightest emotion.

She paused for a time and then, after a little thought, decided to leave the body in a wheelie bin outside the house, while she decided how she would dispose of it. Before she did that, however, Dennehy brought a fourteen-year-old girl called Georgina Page, whom she had recently befriended in the rooming house, to look at the dead Pole’s body in the wheelie bin, taking a bizarre pride in the killing.

Slaboszewski’s body remained in the wheelie bin for two days before Dennehy finally made an attempt to dispose of it. She had realised that she needed a car, and borrowed some money from Kevin Lee, the landlord of the rooming house that was now living in – 38 Bifield in Peterborough – to buy one. She settled on a blue Vauxhall Astra and took a taxi with Gary Stretch to collect it. Later that evening, under the cover of darkness, Dennehy and Stretch drove around the more remote outskirts of Peterborough looking for the right spot to dump the Pole’s body.

The site they chose was the isolated area of Thorney Dike, where Stretch had lived some years earlier. After dumping the corpse in a stream at the side of a field far away from any houses, the two complimented each other that ‘No one will ever find it,’ even boasting about it to teenager Georgina Page when they got back to Peterborough.

But Dennehy’s murderous spree was only just beginning.

No sooner had she dumped Slaboszewski’s body than she started planning her next killing. Her next victim was to be John Chapman, a kindly, inoffensive man of fifty-eight who lived in another of the rooms at 38 Bifield. An alcoholic who had served in the Royal Navy, he had been drinking with Dennehy in the days after she disposed of the Pole’s body, but, for some reason, Dennehy had taken against him, telling him that she would get him out of the house ‘by any means’. In return he had described her to another tenant in the rooming house as ‘the mad woman’.

In the early hours of Good Friday, 29 March 2013, Dennehy did indeed get rid of Chapman by any means. She killed him in his own bed-sitting room on the top floor of the house. She stabbed him once in the neck, severing the carotid artery, and five times in the chest. Two of the stab wounds penetrated the heart, and one was delivered with such violence that it passed through the breast bone. Chapman’s blood alcohol limit was four times over the limit for driving and it is quite possible that Dennehy stabbed him while he was asleep in bed.

Leslie Layton, another occupant of the rooming house at 38 Bifield, and another man who had fallen under Dennehy’s spell, took a photograph of Chapman’s blood-soaked body at 7.32 on that Good Friday morning – just a few hours after the murder.

By now consumed with an intense, unremitting desire to kill, Dennehy quickly identified her next victim, another man who had become infatuated with her over the previous months. Kevin Lee was forty-eight, a husband, father and her landlord. In the time since they had first met in the autumn of 2012 he had fallen under her spell completely. He had employed her in his property letting business and had provided her with rooms in the series of bedsits in the houses that his company owned. For her part, Dennehy had confided in him, hinting that she had been abused as a child, and then, following her first killing, confessing to him what she had done. The police later suspected that she may even have shown him the Pole’s corpse.

What is not in doubt is that Dennehy lured the likeable, compassionate Lee to 11 Rolleston Garth – by telling him that when he arrived on that Good Friday afternoon she was going to ‘dress him up and rape him’. It would not have been the first time that Dennehy and Lee had engaged in sadomasochistic sex games together, and Lee was clearly looking forward to a repeat.

No one knows exactly how far they went in their sexual charade; it is possible that she had already dressed him in a black sequinned dress that she owned – leaving his buttocks exposed. Whatever the truth, it is clear that Dennehy stabbed him five times in the chest, penetrating both his lungs and heart. Lee tried to defend himself, but the attack was so unexpected and so fierce that he had no chance.

Now Dennehy had two dead bodies – John Chapman and Kevin Lee – at two separate addresses in Peterborough, one at 38 Bifield and the other at 11 Rolleston Garth. The question was: how to dispose of them and where? Naturally enough, she recruited her ever-willing lover Gary Stretch, but this time she also recruited her other loyal follower Leslie Layton – the photographer of Chapman’s bloodied body – to collect the body of Kevin Lee.

Layton, in turn, borrowed a tarpaulin from another follower of Dennehy’s, Robert Moore, who lived near by and had also been shown her first victim in the wheelie bin. He, like Lee and Stretch, was infatuated with the extrovert young woman with the dancing eyes and no conscience whatever.

The plan was for Layton to drive Lee’s Ford Mondeo, with Lee’s body in the boot, and follow Dennehy and Stretch as they searched for a site to dispose of his body. In the end, once again taking advantage of Stretch’s local knowledge, they chose Newborough, another remote rural location on the outskirts of Peterborough.

But Dennehy had not finished humiliating Kevin Lee. She and Stretch pulled his bloodstained corpse out of the boot of his own car, while Layton remained in the driver’s seat, and Dennehy posed it in the black sequined dress, with his buttocks prominently exposed and pointing upwards. Followed by Dennehy and Stretch, Layton then took Lee’s Mondeo to an area of waste ground at Yaxley – a long way away from where its owner’s body had been dumped – and set fire to it.

The three of them then returned to 38 Bifield in the Vauxhall Astra to dispose of John Chapman’s corpse. Layton helped Dennehy carry Chapman’s blood-soaked body down from the top floor. Stretch put it in the boot of the Astra. This time Dennehy and Stretch knew where they were going – back to the stream in Thorney Dyke where the body of Lukasz Slaboszewski still lay undetected. When they arrived, all three of them got out of the car and placed Chapman’s body beside the Pole’s corpse – confident that no one would ever find either of them.

Intoxicated by her killing spree, Dennehy took refuge in Gary Stretch’s flat in Peterborough, but nevertheless she sensed that John Chapman’s disappearance would be noticed and that the police were likely to investigate it, with every possibility that they would link his disappearance with her in view of their very public arguments. She quickly decided that they were going to need somewhere to hide out in case the police came looking for them.

The couple settled on the home of Robert Moore, who had provided the tarpaulin to transport the bodies the day before. Dennehy knew only too well that he was as much in her thrall as Stretch and Layton, and would literally ‘have done anything for her’, even if that meant harbouring her as a murderer.

On Saturday 30 March, she and Stretch went to stay with Moore in his house in Peterborough – it turned out to be a wise decision because, by the following day, the police had indeed begun a search in earnest to locate the missing John Chapman. One person they visited was Leslie Layton, seeing him first on that Easter Sunday morning and again the following afternoon of Monday 1 April. Still determined to protect Dennehy, he denied knowing anything about Chapman, and told the police he had not seen Dennehy since the previous Wednesday. It was, of course, a pack of lies.

By that time, however, Dennehy and Stretch had decided to remove themselves entirely from Peterborough for a while – not least because the police were actively looking for them both. In the late afternoon of Easter Monday the couple took a trip to King’s Lynn to see Georgina Page, the fourteen-year-old whom Dennehy had confided in before. By now the disappearance of John Chapman had been widely reported and a police search was under way for both Dennehy and Stretch, who were being sought to ‘help the police with their enquiries’.

The notoriety positively delighted Dennehy, who could not resist comparing herself with Bonnie Parker, the American gangster of the Depression era, who along with her partner Clyde Barrow robbed more than a dozen banks in the first years of the 1930s, and who was alleged to have killed seven people. Not that Dennehy thought she was going to end her life in a hail of bullets as Parker had done. Instead, she confessed to the impressionable young Georgina Page that she thought she and Stretch would eventually be caught and go to prison for ‘a long time’. For his part, Gary Stretch told her, ‘My kids are grown up, so I don’t care.’

That night the couple returned to Robert Moore’s house, but, by then, they had decided to leave for another place well known to Stretch – the county town of Hereford on the border of England and Wales, where he was born. The couple had burgled a house in Norfolk on their way back from seeing Georgina Page and, because of his background, Stretch knew a group of criminals in Hereford who would give them money for the electrical goods they had stolen. On the way to see them, Dennehy and Stretch also burgled a house in Herefordshire to increase the amount of money they might make.

In a flat in Kington, about twenty miles from Hereford on the Welsh border, Dennehy and Stretch met the criminals he knew, who did indeed agree to help them sell the stolen property. One of them, named Mark Lloyd, agreed to go with them into the town. The idea was to sell the goods, although Stretch had also thought of a plan to rob one of the local drug dealers.

By then, Dennehy’s appetite for killing had begun to return – and she told Stretch, ‘You’ve had your fun. Now it’s my turn.’ The implication was clear – she intended to kill again, but this time choosing her victims at random. Her fantasy of being Bonnie Parker had overwhelmed her.

Before Dennehy left Kington, however, Stretch took a photograph of her brandishing a huge, jagged knife almost a foot long, while sticking out her tongue as she laughed for the camera. It was not a photograph of a young woman consumed by guilt or remorse. Indeed, shortly after the couple arrived in Hereford in their Vauxhall Astra – with an uncomfortable Mark Lloyd now a passenger in the back – Dennehy took an even more revealing photograph of herself on her mobile phone which shows her grinning at the camera, once again with her mouth open, as if she were about to take part in an adolescent prank.

Her intentions were far worse. This thirty-one-year-old mother of two had decided to kill again – and was depending on her loyal partner, Stretch, to help her find a victim. On the way into Hereford she visited a small store, where the closed circuit television cameras captured her in high spirits, indeed almost a state of euphoria, about what she expected to happen next. Shortly afterwards, Stretch duly fulfilled his promise to her to help her find a victim by driving them to a secluded, wooded part of the county town where owners often walked their dogs.

In fact it was Stretch who spotted her next victim, a retired fireman called Robin Bereza, aged sixty-three, who on that Tuesday afternoon of 2 April 2013 had decided to take his dog for a walk instead of going jogging. Stretch may have asked Dennehy – ‘Will he do?’ – but what is not in doubt is that he pulled up the Astra some little way behind Bereza, no doubt so that Dennehy could attack him from behind.

No sooner had the car come to a stop than Dennehy jumped out of the passenger side, ran up behind the unsuspecting retired fireman and stabbed him in the back. She then stabbed him a second time in the upper right arm.

When he turned to face her Bereza asked, ‘What on earth are you doing?’

‘I want to hurt you, I am going to fucking kill you,’ Dennehy told him.

The fireman responded by trying to fight her off, kicking out at her with his legs, and starting to run away. Dennehy pursued him, but not for long, as another car suddenly turned into this quiet road in Hereford.

Stretch had been driving the Astra slowly behind Dennehy as the attack took place, and he beckoned her to get back into it. She calmly did so – and smiled at the driver of the car that had just arrived.

Meanwhile Bereza was lying on the ground, in great pain from the serious injuries she had inflicted on him. The deep wound to his back penetrated the chest wall and had both bruised his lung and fractured a rib, while the other stab wound to his right arm shattered the shoulder blade and fractured his arm. He only survived the injuries because of the rapid response of the local paramedics and medical staff who treated him.

Dennehy’s appetite for murder was not quenched by her attack on Bereza, however, and she encouraged Stretch to find her another victim near by, which he duly did, driving her to a cul-de-sac next to a path also used by dog-walkers and close to where his grandmother used to live. Once again Stretch spotted a potential victim walking away from their Astra down the path. He was John Rogers, a fifty-six-year-old man, not in the best of health, who was also walking his dog.

Once again Dennehy leapt out of the car and stabbed her victim from behind without any warning – or hesitation. Then, when he turned round, she stabbed him repeatedly in the chest, pushing him backwards as she did so. When Rogers finally fell over, she continued to stab him relentlessly in both the front and back in a frenzy of bloodlust, clearly determined to kill him. She stabbed him no fewer than thirty times, and when she finally stopped she left Rogers motionless on the path, picked up his dog and walked back to the car – clearly convinced that she had killed him.

Miraculously, Rogers survived, although once again principally due to the expert medical treatment he received rapidly after the attack. Dennehy’s stab wounds to his chest, abdomen and back had left him with both lungs collapsed and his bowel perforated and exposed. The stab wounds had been delivered with such force that Dennehy had broken nine of his ribs, as well as wounding his hands and arms, which resulted in irreparable nerve damage.

Given that both these vicious, unwarranted attacks took place in broad daylight in an English county town on an ordinary Tuesday afternoon, it is hardly surprising that Dennehy and Stretch were caught by the police minutes after the second attack on the defenceless and unsuspecting guitarist and musician John Rogers, who was now so badly injured that he would never regain the dexterity he needed to be able to play his guitar again.

Yet the thin young woman with a penchant for wearing woolly hats, sticking her pierced tongue out and sniggering for the camera showed not a single trace of remorse for her killing spree as the truth about her murders was steadily revealed in the days after her arrest on 2 April 2013.

Instead, she gloried in her attempt to kill two innocent passers-by that afternoon. She even joked with the police officers that detained her, saying, ‘It could be worse – I could be fat,’ before telling one of the officers, ‘You’re a decent copper, I’m a crap criminal – you will read about it in the newspapers shortly. You will think, “That’s the girl I arrested – I know her.”’

Extrovert and unashamed to the last, and only too aware of her status as one of a tiny number of female serial killers, Dennehy performed what one officer later describe as a ‘bizarre chicken walk’ at the police station as she hunched her shoulders and clucked, before claiming, moments later, ‘I’m The Incredible Hulk.’

When Mark Lloyd, the man she and Stretch had bullied into staying in the back of the Vauxhall Astra that day as they looked for potential victims, told the police about the couples’ boast that they had left ‘other bodies’ where ‘no one will ever find them’, the police in Peterborough extended their search and discovered not only the two bodies in Thorney Dike, but also the body of Kevin Lee in Newborough.

Within a month, Joanna Christine Dennehy had been charged with three murders and two attempted murders, along with her seven-foot-three-inch accomplice Gary Stretch, and their associates Leslie Layton and Robert Moore, who had helped them dispose of the bodies and harboured them when they were known fugitives from the law.

During her time on remand in custody awaiting trial, it emerged that Dennehy had been in and out of prison, on short sentences, in the years running up to the Peterborough murders, mainly for offences that involved dishonesty, although she had been convicted early in 2012 of ‘possessing a bladed article in a public place’, namely razor blades, and later that year had been given a ‘community order’, that did not involve imprisonment, for an assault that caused actual bodily harm.

When Dennehy was examined by a psychiatrist during her remand, he diagnosed her as suffering from ‘severe emotionally unstable personality disorder’ and from ‘antisocial personality disorder’. Significantly, however, he also suggested that she suffered from the rare condition of paraphilia sadomasochism, a disorder which led her to prefer sexual activity that involved the infliction of pain or humiliation or bondage.

In the psychiatrist’s words, she suffered from ‘psychopathic disorder, that is a personality disorder characterised by superficial charm, callous disregard for others, pathological lying and a diminished capacity for remorse.’

At one point Dennehy baldly confessed to him, ‘I killed to see if I was as cold as I thought I was. Then it got moreish and I got a taste for it.’

But Dennehy did not rely on any psychiatric excuse for her actions when she appeared at an arraignment hearing at the Central Criminal Court in Old Bailey on 18 November 2013. She had travelled down from Cambridgeshire, where she was being held on remand before her trial.

Once in the dock, however, she suddenly, without warning, and to the astonishment of her own legal team, announced that she was pleading guilty to all the charges. When her startled barrister, Nigel Lickley QC, asked for more time to consult with his client, Dennehy interrupted him, saying, ‘I’m not coming back down here again just to say the same stuff. It’s a long way to come to say the same thing I have just said.’

But, on 28 February 2014, Dennehy did stand in the dock of the Central Criminal Court once again, this time alongside Gary Stretch, Leslie Layton and Robert Moore to hear Mr Justice Spencer pass sentence on them all. Her three accomplices, two of whom had pleaded not guilty at the trial, had been found guilty by a jury of the charges against them, and now all four would learn their fate. Typically, Dennehy was wearing a pink Adidas sweatshirt and grey tracksuit bottoms, much like the outfit she wore in the notorious mobile phone photograph of her brandishing a huge jagged knife with handcuffs at her belt which had been taken while she was on the run.

Mr Justice Spencer did not mince his words. ‘You are a cruel, calculating, selfish and manipulative serial killer,’ he told Dennehy as she sat in the dock opposite him. He then told the Court that she had written a letter to him ‘claiming to feel remorse’ for the stabbing of Robin Bereza and John Rogers in Hereford.

‘I have no hesitation in rejecting that suggestion,’ he told her firmly.

From the dock Dennehy shouted, ‘Bollocks!’

Then she reverted to smirking and occasionally laughing out loud throughout the judge’s remarks to the defendants.

That did nothing to deter the Mr Justice Spencer. Referring to the Court of Appeal’s decision, just two weeks earlier, that a ‘whole life’ term was acceptable under English law, Mr Justice Spencer then pointed out to her that there was only one sentence for murder – life imprisonment. Therefore the only question for him was whether the seriousness of her offences was ‘exceptionally high’, which would warrant her spending the rest of her life in prison.

‘You have shown no genuine remorse,’ the judge pointed out. ‘Quite the reverse. In the letter you have written to me you say in terms that you do not feel any remorse for the murders and to claim otherwise would be a lie.’ He then went on: ‘The only reason you can offer for the attempted murders is “drunken cruelty, plain and simple, compelled by my lack of respect for human life”. As I have already made clear, I reject your protestations of remorse for these attempted murders.’

Then, in the most chilling moment of the trial, Mr Justice Spencer added: ‘It is very significant, in my judgement, that from a single stab wound to the heart to kill your first victim you progressed by the end to the frenzied attack on John Rogers when you so nearly killed him, stabbing him more than thirty times. You told the psychiatrist you saw the killings as a kind of fetish and that you were sadistic.’

‘I am quite satisfied,’ he went on, ‘that the seriousness of these murders is exceptionally high and that the element of just punishment and retribution requires the imposition of a whole life order.’

Mr Justice Spencer then sentenced Gary Stretch to life imprisonment, though with a minimum term of nineteen years.

‘Thank you very much,’ Stretch muttered from the dock.

Leslie Layton was sentenced to fourteen years’ imprisonment for preventing the ‘lawful and decent burial of bodies’ and perverting the course of justice, while Robert Moore, who had pleaded guilty to the two charges he faced for harbouring Dennehy and Stretch while they were on the run, was given three years’ imprisonment. ‘It is clear to me from the pre-sentence report that you do not fully understand even now just how serious your conduct was,’ the judge told him.

Layton was sitting behind Stretch in the dock and when the sentencing was completed, Dennehy leaned across the man she always called ‘Gaz’ and said to him in a stage whisper, ‘I may be taking your life sentence but you and Stretch are idiots.’

It was a theme that she was to repeat more than once in the first month of her sentence, insisting just a few weeks after the end of her trial that Layton was also a killer. Unusually for a spree killer who pleaded guilty to her murders, Dennehy proved anxious to explain herself to the world.

In two letters to Gary Stretch’s ex-wife Julie Gibbons, who was fifty-three, Dennehy claimed that her friend and accomplice Leslie Layton killed John Chapman in a ‘pathetic attempt to impress’ her.

The extraordinary six-page letter was handed to the Daily Mirror by Gibbons, who handed it on to the police.

Dennehy wrote, ‘Dear Julie, thank you for your letter and your honesty. I know I am portrayed as a person without feeling but it’s not the case. I will repay your honesty shortly. My crimes were not impulse nor were they without reason.’

She claimed that her murder of her lover and landlord Kevin Lee was planned, but she did not reveal her motive. Dennehy explained, ‘Gaz was there in the room for the first one, I told him what I was going to do but not why, I told him to leave over and over before I did it. I told him to leave after, my path was set.’

‘My crimes Julie were vengeance,’ Dennehy added. ‘I knew what the outcome would be, I tried my best to make sure Gary was away from me before I set about the killings. I got him a place to stay and a job. I got him a car which he insisted was in my name.’

But that was not all. Dennehy also said that she had broken off all contact with Stretch after their imprisonment, even though he had written to her five times declaring his undying love. She told his ex-wife, ‘I replied to him once since your first letter, telling him how sick it made me feel to hear he claimed I was a threat to you or your family. I informed him that out of respect for you … I no longer wish for contact, which led to another begging letter.’

In an earlier letter to Gibbons, Dennehy had said that writing ‘an apology would be pointless’, but denied that she forced Stretch to help her by threatening his family. He had told his ex-wife that he did not know why he had become involved in the killings, but that Dennehy was ‘evil’ and ‘had control over him’, while he was also frightened she would harm Gibbons and their three children.

Then Dennehy added her reasons for breaking contact with Stretch. ‘There is something you must understand, I am incapable of harming females or children, I think that’s why his lie cut so deep.’

That did not prevent her from confessing that ‘Killing Kevin Lee was planned … I kept my mouth shut in the police station, I did not take the stand either because Gary said it would harm him and no doubt he was right. He knew if I were to take the stand and lies were being chucked at me I’d lose my temper and tell it how it is, regardless of the outcome. Gary knows I react badly to lies.’

For her part, Julie Gibbons explained after receiving the letters from Dennehy, ‘I’m surprised to say this but I believe every word she says. Police should investigate the letter. The families of the victims will want to know exactly what happened. It won’t take any of the pain away but I hope this confession will help them get a little bit of closure. It certainly helped me. I feel like a massive weight has lifted off my shoulders. She obviously thought out what she was going to write very carefully.’

In the second letter, written from high-security women’s prison Bronzefield, in Surrey, Dennehy insisted that Stretch ‘went along’ with her on his own but added, ‘I do not wish to cause you pain, I respect and admire the strength it has taken you to survive. I took the coward’s way out by not being able to restrain my hate. Under different circumstances I would have liked to have met you, maybe we could have balanced each other out … Please stay strong and have faith in yourself, respectfully, Joanna.’

Then she added a PS. ‘Again I am sorry. God I can’t tell you how much I admire you!!! For your sake alone I wish I had never met Gary Stretch.’

Julie Gibbons was not the only person to pass judgement on Dennehy after her conviction and sentence. Dennehy’s younger sister Maria told the BBC that she was a ‘bright, happy and bookish’ child, who showed no evidence whatever of violent behaviour. ‘Parents always blame themselves, but they were a great mum and dad,’ she went on. ‘My sister turned into a monster.’

For their part, Dennehy’s parents, Kevin, a security guard, aged fifty-six, and Kathleen, fifty-one, had lost contact with their daughter in the fifteen years before her arrest. But their other daughter Maria spoke for them when she said, ‘It has ruined my mum completely. If you can imagine being a mother and giving birth to someone who causes a family so much hurt. It is indescribable how she is feeling … from one day to the next all she ever talks about is the families that Joanna has caused this to.’

Meanwhile, the father of Dennehy’s two daughters, John Treanor, aged thirty-seven, who had remarried since his time with her, told the Daily Express, ‘Jo is evil, pure and simple, that is why I took the girls as far away from her as possible.’ He also said that their elder daughter, aged thirteen, was having difficulty coming to terms with her mother’s killings and was afraid she might end up like her. ‘She’s seen her mother’s face all over the news, the papers and internet. Now she’s struggling to come to terms with it all.’

Treanor then told ITV’s This Morning programme that his former partner should face the death penalty because she will ‘lord it up in prison’ and that life with her was ‘like living with the devil’.

Significantly, he added, ‘I think the punishment, a whole life sentence, is not enough – not for what she’s done to those people … It should be capital punishment as far as I’m concerned … There are certain crimes that need to be punished in the right way and just serving life in prison and having your TV and your nice bunk and your warm radiator and your three meals a day, she’s going to enjoy it, she’s going to love it.’

John Treanor’s conclusion about Joanna Dennehy is reflected time after time in the reactions to the dreadful crimes that lead to a whole life sentence, and it precisely encapsulates the argument that runs throughout this book – is being incarcerated in a prison cell for sixty years or more better or worse than the death penalty?

After all, there is no chance that Dennehy was innocent of her three murders – no chance that that an innocent woman might be put to death – for she admitted them in open court.

Dennehy’s whole life sentence underlines the dilemma for a society, its judges and its legislators over whether it is indeed either ‘justifiable’ or ‘human’ treatment to sentence any man or woman to spend more than half a century in prison.

The former President of the Supreme Court in England, and a former Lord Chief Justice, Lord Phillips of Worth Matravers, suggested in 2006 – when he was still Lord Chief Justice – that judges had been pushed into longer and longer sentences in England and Wales by public opinion and politicians.

‘But I sometimes wonder whether, in a hundred years’ time,’ he said, ‘people will be as shocked by the length of sentences we are imposing as we are by some of the punishments in the eighteenth century.’

Is the whole life term the modern equivalent of the rack – rendering exquisite pain over ever-increasing periods of time? And can that truly be justified?