Responding to a Freedom of Information request (FOI), according to the Ministry of Justice it costs the British taxpayer 37,163 a year to keep an inmate in prison. At the time of writing, Joanne Dennehy is housed in the high security unit, at HMP Bronzefield, and she has also served time in ‘The Block’, more commonly known as ‘The Hole’, for planning an escape. For prisoners worldwide, ‘The Block’ is the end of the road. Prove that you can walk on one level and onto the next, it is a form of ‘carrot and stick’ behavioural modification unit where, if you toe the line you get out, if not, you stay in.

Block time is hard time. You lose all privileges – no TV, no radio, no newspapers. It is all about control. Behave, and you walk on grass otherwise you spend yard time on concrete, for days, weeks, even years. From time to time Dennehy may fight the system, but the system will break her because it always wins. The regime can take even the most heinous psychopathic killer apart at the seams.

Dennehy is neither mad nor sad. She is undeniably evil, but how is she dealing with the prospect of spending the remainder of her life behind bars? After just fifteen months in custody already she is a shadow of her former self. If she lives to the ripe old age of seventy-five she still has forty-four more years of incarceration to go, and will have cost the taxpayer in excess of 1.5 million to keep under lock and key. With acres of time in front of her and freedom an impossible dream, mentally she is disintegrating and without doubt psychologically she will implode for a full life tariff imposed brings no hope at all.

I have met many offenders serving natural life, or who are on Death Row, some now executed throughout the United States, so I have witnessed first hand the devastating effects that a ‘no hope existence’ brings. It is like a slowly developing disease; almost cancerous from its onset when the reality of the punishment sinks in and usually, after the first six months, getting worse through a pitiless chain of hours, days, months and years until death supervenes.

Like Joanne Dennehy, US serial killer Aileen ‘Lee’ Carol Wuornos had always been slightly off the wall. Bisexual, incorrigibly fearless, a heavy drinker and drug-user, she was easily moved to violent outbursts and handed out vicious attacks that left truckers and leather-clad bikers three times her size cowering under the onslaught. As just one example out of dozens of recorded incidents, on 13 July 1976, Lee, aged twenty, went to Bernie’s Club in Mancelona, where she flaunted her body and started to hustle at the pool table. Some time after midnight, barman and manager Danny Moore decided he had seen enough of her. She was drunk, rowdy, shouting obscenities, uttering threats to other patrons and being generally objectionable. Danny casually walked over to the pool table and announced that he was closing it down. As he was gathering up the balls, he heard someone shout, ‘Duck!’ He turned just in time to see Lee aim a ball at his head. It missed him by inches, but it had been hurled with such force that the missile became lodged in the wall.

When Deputy Jimmie Patrick of the Antrim County Sheriff’s Department arrived, Lee was charged for assault and battery and hauled off to jail. She was also charged on fugitive warrants from the Troy Police Department, who had requested that she be picked up on charges for drinking alcohol in a car, unlawful use of a driver’s licence and for not having a Michigan driver’s licence.

Now executed, Aileen Wuornos was, and still is undoubtedly the US female version of the late Theodore ‘Ted’ Bundy, if only in the notoriety ratings. Unlike Joanne Dennehy, serial killer Lee was born on the wrong side of the track in a Leap Year on 29 February 1956, in Clinton Hospital, Detroit, Michigan. Her parents were dirt-poor; her nineteen-year-old handyman father, Leo Dale Pittman, was a kidnapper, rapist and child abuser who, fifteen years later, committed suicide by fashioning a noose from a bed sheet and hanging himself in prison. Lee’s mother was sixteen-year-old Diane Wuornos, but little else is known about her. Lee was farmed out to live with her grandparents.

The grandfather, factory worker Laurie Wuornos, systematically beat Lee with a wide, brown leather belt that she kept clean with saddle soap and conditioner at his bidding. Stripped naked and forced to bend over the kitchen table, the petrified child was frequently thrashed with the doubled-over belt. Sometimes she lay face down, spread-eagled naked on her bed, to receive her whippings and all the while her grandfather screamed at her that she was worthless and should never have been born. ‘You ain’t even worthy of the air you breathe!’ he would shout as the belt tore into her flesh time and again.

Around the age of eleven, Lee learnt that her ‘parents’ were indeed her grandparents. But by now the worm had turned and she had an unacceptable temper. Lee’s volcanic explosions, which were unpredictable and seemingly unprovoked, inevitably drove a further wedge between herself and her grandparents, just as in the case of Joanne Dennehy and her real parents.

Although from totally different backgrounds – Joanne comes from a solid, middle-class family, while Lee was raised in a brutally incestuous environment we can immediately draw comparisons between Dennehy and Wuornos, for both were going completely off the rails aged around fourteen. Lee became pregnant and was sent to an unmarried mothers’ home to await the birth of her child. The staff found her hostile, uncooperative and unable to get along with her peers. She gave birth to a baby boy, who was put up for adoption in January 1971. However, in July of the same year, Lee’s grandmother, Britta, died. Lee dropped out of school, left home and took up hitchhiking and prostitution.

While there is no suggestion here that Joanne Dennehy was a prostitute in the true sense, we do know that while just ten years old Aileen swapped sex for cigarettes and alcohol supplied by older men. We also know that Joanne was already sleeping with men much older than her and she had been introduced to alcohol and skunk in return for sexual favours at fourteen.

Aileen’s case is a tragic one, more so for after she left home she completely spiralled out of control and fell in with a lesbian lover called Tyria ‘Ty’ Jolene Moore, after meeting her in a Daytona gay bar in 1986. Lonely and angry, Lee was ready for something new and when it came to the push, this included murder.

There is a comprehensive chapter on Aileen Wuornos in Talking with Serial Killers, and her complete story in my book Monster, both published by John Blake – the latter accompanied the movie of the same name starring Charlize Theron.

When I met Wuornos in February 1998 she was sharing Death Row with several faces familiar to students of murder most foul in the US, including Judias ‘Judy’ Buenoano. Popularly known as ‘The Black Widow’, she had been on ‘The Green Mile’ since 1985. Buenoano was convicted of poisoning her husband, drowning her quadriplegic son by pushing him out of a canoe, and planting a bomb in her boyfriend’s car. Gone were the painted manicured nails and the fashionable dark suits for the woman who used to swan around Pensacola, Florida, in a Corvette. Now, aged fifty-four, she looked like a frightened eighty-year-old. Her head shaved, she was strapped into ‘Old Sparky’ on 30 March 1998 at Florida State Prison, Starke.

But back to the end game for Joanne Dennehy. Interstate hooker Wuornos shot and killed six men out of the hundreds with whom she slept, but only those who had sexually insulted and abused her were murdered. Dennehy killed simply because she could, and it pleased her. Unlike Wuornos, she had a love of blood.

As Lee explained to me:

Sadistic Joanne Dennehy killed because she wanted to see what it was like to kill and, as she told a psychiatrist prior to her trial, ‘It got kind of more-ish.’

When I met Lee Wuornos, who was forty-six years old but looking a good two decades older, the condemned woman, wearing an orange T-shirt and blue trousers, was a mere 5ft 4in in height and according to her medical records weighed 133lb. The characteristic strawberry-blonde hair still framed her face but her eyes were bloodshot. From the moment she was born a helpless bundle of humanity, the seedy side of life always chewed on Lee. Her once attractive looks, the slim figure previously offset by skimpy, cut-off denim shorts and a tight gingham shirt were now replaced by a bloated body and a face that life had not treated lightly. She had a scar between her eyes and burn scars on her forehead. Her body was marked by a long cut along her left arm indicating self-harm and a cruel appendectomy wheal crossed her abdomen.

The cell in which Lee was confined measured 8 by 10ft. It was painted a dull-looking pink, the ceiling quite high, maybe 10ft, which made the room seem larger and more airy than it really was. Lee had a black and white television set, placed above a stainless steel toilet bowl, on a varnished brown shelf. Her furniture consisted of a grey metal footlocker that doubled as a desk, but no table and only a single chair, which she allowed me to sit on for a short while.

I also noted a dirty, lime-green cupboard at the foot of her metal bed. It contained her clothes and personal possessions. Everything had to be locked away at bed inspection time, between 9 and 11am. The only view of the outside world was a parking lot and a high fence, festooned with glittering razor wire. There were no bars at her cell window but a steel door with a small hatch separated her from the rest of the cellblock. It was costing the State of Florida $72.39 a day to keep Wuornos fit and well – well enough to be strapped to a gurney and injected with the ‘Goodnight Juice’ that would send her to perdition.

Unlike Joanne Dennehy, who frequently complains about the conditions at HMP Bronzefield, describing her conditions on Death Row, Lee Wuornos told me: ‘The food ain’t all that bad. We’re served several meals a day. At 5am, 10.30 to 11am, an’ 4pm to 4.30. They cook it in here. We get plates and spoons, nothing else. I can take a shower every other day, and we’re counted at least once an hour. Everywhere we go, we wear cuffs except in the shower and exercise yard, where I can talk to my cellies. Lately, I like to be by myself. Apart from that, I am always locked up in my cell. I can’t even be with another inmate in the common room.’

Wuornos spent her last, solitary days reading books on spiritual growth and writing lengthy letters. Her lifestyle, unlike that of Dennehy, was to be spartan and monotonous; and the days and years would roll indistinguishably past her locked cell door.

Having refused a last meal, Lee drank a single cup of coffee before she was taken to the death chamber. By now she had completely lost her mind. Asked by the warden if she had any last words, she said: ‘Yes, I would like to say I’m sailing with the rock, and I’ll be back, like Independence Day, with Jesus. June 6, like the movie. Big mother ship, and I’ll be back.’

Another female lifer who mentally and physically disintegrated when she entered ‘No Hope Land’ is Melanie Lyn McGuire, aka ‘The Ice Queen’. Like Joanne Dennehy, McGuire enjoyed a solid, stable upbringing. She was highly educated and became the mother of two adorable children but then in 2004 she spiked her husband’s drink, then shot Bill in the head, chopped him into large pieces and stuffed the remains into suitcases before dumping them in the Chesapeake Bay which is surrounded by the states of Maryland and Virginia. The jury had her measure and the media dubbed her ‘The Ice Queen’ because she was so cold and emotionless throughout her trial.

As a 5ft 3in, 121lb brown-eyed, brown-haired nurse, she was known for her kind and generous nature. And as a wife and a mother she seemed to have a perfect life. In fact, she and Bill had just realised their perfect dream – buying their own $500,000 upscale house in Ashbury, Warren County, New Jersey. But behind that seemingly idyllic picture were secrets that would soon surface, revealing a murder, chilling in its calculation and its cruelty:

1 count of murder – life

1 count of disturbing/desecrating human remains – ten years

1 count of perjury: false statement – five years

1 count possession of a firearm for unlawful purposes – life

She would never be a free woman again.

Unlike Joanne Dennehy, Melanie McGuire had genuine blue-chip class, however beauty is only skin deep. McGuire was undeniably pretty when the camera’s gaze caught her in the right moment. With her lustrous dark hair, pixie-like profile and almost vulnerable features, she was certainly not unattractive. Nevertheless, in her police photo she already appeared emotionally drained. When her sentence was confirmed she collapsed into the arms of her attorney, Joseph Tacopina, sobbing and saying: ‘I didn’t do it. I didn’t do it… My babies, my babies,’ meaning her two sons.

Melanie will be eligible for parole after serving 85 per cent of her sentence, or when she is one hundred years old. At the time of writing she is only forty-two. She has been in prison just seven years but with everything forever lost and virtually no chance of walking the streets again, already she resembles a withered crone.

Married mother of two Catherine ‘Cathy’ May Wood and unmarried Gwendoline Gail Graham were bisexual serial killers who, in 1986, smothered to death patients in their own beds at the Alpine Manor Nursing Home, Grand Rapids, Michigan. Alpine Manor was the finest nursing home in the area. Clean, quiet, comfortable and humane, it serves as ‘a model of efficient and considerate long-term care for the elderly’ according to the home’s promotional literature and yet five of these vulnerable individuals were killed by the very people they depended on most: their nurses.

The arrests only came about after weeks of investigation by a persistent detective, a probe that produced no physical proof but revolved around a high-stakes psychological shell game with an evasive Cathy Wood. Ultimately she spun a hypnotic tale of her relationship with Gwendoline Graham, one riddled with violence and bizarre sex. Wood claimed to have been manipulated by Graham and said they had killed the patients as part of an eternal love pact in an attempt to spell ‘MURDER’ with their victims’ names. The authorities believed Wood’s self-described role as a tragic accomplice dominated by a diabolical Graham. After a year in the courts both women were imprisoned for life – in Gwendoline’s case with no possibility of parole.

As part of a twelve-part television documentary series called The Serial Killers, I met both women. First, I interviewed Cathy Wood. It was obvious from the outset that this woman was a psychopath – one moment a control freak shedding crocodile tears before bursting into laughter moments later. Playing the ‘little girl lost, butter wouldn’t melt in my mouth’ role, at once avoiding eye contact with me and indeed the camera most of the time, she was grossly overweight but otherwise a picture of good health. Wood protested her innocence and blamed everything on Graham. Then, as she left the room, she was overheard telling another inmate: ‘That fooled the dumb fuckers!’

I interviewed Gwendoline Graham at the Huron Valley Women’s Facility. We met in a large, empty communal room. Unlike Wood, who will eventually be released from prison, Graham was stooped and frail, a pathetic physical and mental wreck. Emotionally unstable, she had resorted to self-harming and her body was covered with burns from lit matches. Every time I posed a question, she asked me to repeat it. She spoke very quietly and when I asked her to speak up, she whispered, ‘Christopher, I cannot even stand the sound of my own voice.’ It was as if she was sobbing her heart out inside for Gwen is living in ‘No Hope Land’. At the time of writing she is only fifty-two.

It is my opinion that Joanne Dennehy, like Lee Wuornos, Judy Buenoano, Melanie Lyn McGuire ‘The Ice Queen’ and Gwen Graham, will go the same way, too. With all of these women – and of course this also applies to male killers – their self-esteem and grandiosity, their entire psychopathological infrastructure simply crumbles away like weathered cement once they enter prison. Physically and mentally they disintegrate until The Grim Reaper, in whatever form He takes, gives them their just deserts.

As with most murderers there are greater and lesser degrees of evil attached to these offenders. Just as it would be wrong to address a petty shoplifter with the same degree of condemnation as a violent mugger because both steal property, it might be said that the crimes of some murderers are considerably more evil than others. It is this indifference to the value of human life, and the high level of certainty that they would kill again with no qualms should they be set free, that separates the truly heinous monsters from those who have killed only once and whose crime was committed in the heat of the moment.

Joanne Dennehy is a sado-sexual serial killer and such a person may be defined as a serial murderer if he/she has killed three times or more, with a cooling-off period between the events, as distinct from a mass murderer who commits all of the killings at one place during a single event, or a spree killer who embarks on a continuum of slaughter lasting hours or even a day. Of course there are exceptions but the mass murderer and the spree killer are usually caught, or shot dead by police, soon after their crimes have been committed. It is if they have a death wish. However, it is the serial killer who is more terrifying simply because no one can predict when, or where, the offender will strike next. We know such a person is loose in society, a wolf in sheep’s clothing, and he/she could be just about anyone – and in the case of Dr Harold Shipman a local GP.

The universal definitive definition of a serial killer is based upon research carried out by the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit, Quantico, Virginia, and it is unambiguous: ‘The offender will have killed at least three times with a “cooling-off period” between all of the events’.

With regard to Joanne Dennehy – and much as she will rail against this – the facts are that she murdered Lukasz Slaboszewski with a cooling-off period of eleven days before she killed Kevin Lee and John Chapman – the latter two victims within the same day and with no cooling-off period in between these murders. That Dennehy attempted to kill another two men in Hereford – and I need to be coldly specific – matters little in her scheme of things because, by the Grace of God, this wannabe serial killer failed. Therefore, as much as we are all fascinated by serial murderers, Joanne ascribes to be a serial killer when she was an emerging one and she came within a single stab of achieving her aim. When I presented her with this she went berserk and it prompted an observation from DCI Martin Brunning, who drily remarked that I was ‘pushing her buttons’.

Moreover, Dennehy professing to police that she and Stretch were the next ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ defies belief.

Amongst other things Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow were cop killers and somewhat successful bank robbers who evaded police dragnets and survived shootouts for over a year until they were shot dead in an ambush at Arcadia, Louisiana, on 23 May 1934. As a killing team, if we can call them such, Dennehy and Stretch struggled all of a few days to resist the clutches of the law. Bonnie and Clyde held up banks to stay on the run. Stretch stole a few electrical items, including a camera from a holiday home, to achieve the same purpose, only to be caught red-handed when he attempted to sell the swag.