If you treat me as an animal, I’ll treat you as an animal. I do what I want to do, cos I might not be in the right mood that day.

Treat me like a dog, I’ll bite you like a dog. Do you understand?

I demand respect. Give me that respect and I can be okay.

Treat me like an ass and I can be an ass. Understand?

JOANNE DENNEHY, TO A PRISON OFFICER IN 2014

While working in the United States during the nineties I enjoyed the company of US Marshals Parnell and Mike McNamara, out of Waco, Texas. One of our many conversations turned to the subject of ‘surveillance’, with Parnell piping up over a slab of steak, ranch fries and gravy: ‘The trouble with surveillance is that most times you don’t see anything.’ This also seems to me to apply to the study of the psychopathic mind and the likes of Joanne Dennehy, for one can observe such an individual for decades and never come close to what makes them tick. Moreover, there is a very good reason for concluding this: the killers, themselves, have not really got a clue, either!

If we are to even begin to try and understand why Dennehy became a serial killer we should return to her early years. Indeed let’s take a few tentative baby steps ourselves towards the edge of the abyss and take a cautious peek in while asking, first of all, was she psychologically damaged some time during her formative years through until she went off the rails, aged fourteen?

‘Where do we come from? Who are we? Where are we going?’ These three great questions from Gauguin’s triptych we can apply to the life and crimes of Joanne Dennehy while sifting through the chronology of her early life in an attempt to find the seed of her evil.

If a child’s bonding with his/her parents is satisfactory, and he/she is brought up in a healthy environment, then the child goes through a healthy development process. That much is obvious but there is far more to it, for if the opposite occurs then a child may be psychologically damaged beyond repair. On the face of it, Joanne had a stable home life, with hardworking and loving parents who wanted only the best for her and her sister Maria, who recently implied in a Daily Mail article dated Saturday, 15 February 2014 article, that her father could sometimes be a bit strict – but what caring parent is not?

As a tree grows, the young tree that it once was never disappears; rather, layer upon layer comes to be superimposed on its core. Deep inside, the baby tree that it once was is still alive. The way in which the young tree first took shape, the forces that acted on it, the twists, turns, bends and breaks caused by wind, rain, humans or disease all determine the shape the tree assumes as it matures and ages. No matter how well it is cared for, it will never completely outgrow any neglect when it was just a sapling. If we were to cut it down and examine its innermost core, we would discover that the young tree that it once was continues to exist at its central core. Still alive, it forever retains its original form. What it was becomes the foundation for what it will be. Just as the living tree retains its early core, within the core of each of us is the child we once were. That child constitutes the foundation of what we have become, who we are and what we will be, serial killer or not.

In the late 1970s under the umbrella of the FBI, interviews with convicted killers became the core of the Criminal Personality Research Project, partially funded by the US Justice Department and involving Dr Ann Wolbert Burgess of Boston University and other academics, with the then FBI Supervisory Special Agent Robert K. Ressler as principal investigator. Using a research protocol of some 57 pages, the team interviewed 36 individual incarcerated murderers, concentrating on their histories, motives and fantasies; also their specific actions. Eventually, the team was able to discern important patterns in their lives and to learn something about their developing motivation.

In his book Whoever Fights Monsters, author Robert Ressler (who was the consultant in the 1991 movie, The Silence of the Lambs) writes: ‘In the opinion of a number of experts, our study was the largest, most rigorous, and most complete investigation of multiple murderers ever undertaken, one that included the greatest percentage of the living, incarcerated multiple murderers.’

In a 1968 article, forensic psychiatrists Doctors Katie Bush and James L. Cavanaugh Jr. of Chicago’s Isaac Ray Center called the research ‘exemplary’ because of its breadth and said that: ‘its conclusions warrant evaluation in great detail.’

One of the most valuable conclusions resulting from this study was that there is no such thing as the person who suddenly changes from being perfectly normal and erupts into totally evil, disruptive, murderous behaviour.

Most of the male serial killers I have interviewed over some 20 years graduated from committing petty crime in their juvenile years to fantasising about bondage in their early twenties, then became Peeping Toms, moving on to sexual assault through to rape and serial rape before crossing the threshold into sexually motivated homicide and then on to committing serial murder. Therefore, the behaviours that are precursors to murder have been present and developing in that person’s life for a long, long time – often since childhood.

For example, I corresponded with the sexual sadistic serial killer Kenneth Bianchi, aka ‘The Hillside Strangler’, for several years before I interviewed him at the Washington State Penitentiary, Walla Walla. I had been through his history with a toothcomb; I had exclusive access to his adoptive mother, Frances Piccione, his former girlfriends, all of his medical history, psychiatric evaluations, schooling and employment records. The City of Rochester Police, LAPD Homicide, the FBI and the Bellingham PD all gave me copies of every document and scene-of-crime photograph they had. And I personally visited every location and spoke to scores of people with first-hand knowledge of Bianchi.

This sexual deviant had been petty thieving before he was seven years old and was already fantasising about sex with ten-and eleven-year-old girls – ‘women’, as he later called them. Below is how this sick monster described his first encounter. You may find it shocking because the girl in question was just nine years old and there were many more children he abused afterwards, going on to kill two of them:

Bianchi’s full story is included in my book, Talking with Serial Killers 2, also published by John Blake.

Of the female serial murderesses I have interviewed, all of them – with the exception of Aileen Wuornos – refused to discuss their early years, but some of Aileen’s history has been outlined earlier in this book. And, like Joanne Dennehy, all of them were bisexual, heavy drinkers and drug users.

Another conclusion reached by the Criminal Personality Research Project destroyed the common myth that all murderers come from broken, impoverished homes. The team’s sample showed that this wasn’t really true. Many of the murderers started life in a family that was not desperately poor, where the income was stable, as in the case of Joanne Dennehy. More than half lived initially in a family that appeared to be intact, where the mother and father lived together with a child or children. These were on the whole intelligent offspring, as were Joanne and her sister Maria. Though 7 of the 36 subjects had IQ scores below 90, most were in the normal range, and 11 had scores in the superior range – above 120.

Robert Ressler is also at pains to point out, somewhat ominously perhaps: ‘Nonetheless, though the homes seemed to outward appearances to be normal, they were in fact dysfunctional.’ Half of the subjects had mental illness in their immediate family; half had parents who had been involved in criminal activities. Nearly 70 per cent had a familial history of alcohol or drug abuse. All the murderers, every single one of them, were subjected to serious emotional abuse during their childhoods. And all of them developed into what psychiatrists label as sexually dysfunctional adults, unable to sustain a mature consensual relationship with another adult, as witnessed in Dennehy’s 12-year on-and-off relationship with John Treanor [author’s italics]. However, apart from Joanne’s dysfunctional periods spent with Treanor, there is no evidence that there was anything dysfunctional in Dennehy’s parents – quite the opposite seems true with the following proviso.

In her internationally acclaimed book, The Drama of Being a Child, world-respected psychoanalyst Alice Miller has written that parents need not necessarily be physically abusive to the child for the passively cruel parent, who imposes a rigid set of conflicting beliefs upon a child, can in so doing create a monster.

From birth to age six or seven, studies have shown that the most important adult figure in a child’s life is the mother, and it is in this time period that the child learns what love is. Every child has a need to be noticed, understood, taken seriously and respected by his/her mother. As Dr Alice Miller says: ‘In the first few weeks and months of its life, the child needs to have its mother at its disposal, must be able to use her, and to be mirrored by her.’

The research carried out by Robert Ressler and his colleagues found that the relationships between their subjects and their mothers were uniformly cool, distant, unloving, neglectful. There was little touching, emotional warmth or training in the ways in which normal human beings cherish one another and demonstrate their affection and interdependence. Ressler adds: ‘These children were deprived of something more important than money – love,’ and this sadly resonates with the way Joanne Dennehy later treated her own two daughters [names removed to protect their identities].

While there cannot be any suggestion that Kevin and Kathleen Dennehy did not love Joanne, all of Ressler’s subjects ended up paying for such deprivation throughout the remainder of their lives and society suffered, too, because their crimes removed many people from the world and their assaultive behaviour left alive equally as many victims who remain permanently scarred, as Dennehy herself has done.

Writing in The Week UK, psychoanalyst Coline Covington says this about Joanne Dennehy: ‘Our first love relationship and the most powerful person at the start of our lives is our mother. It is possible that Dennehy’s violence was directed at her loving mother who had betrayed her in having another child with her husband.’ She adds, ‘This situation is often experienced as a painful rejection and betrayal by the older child, particularly so when that child has been idolized. This “special” treatment can be immensely narcissistically damaging as it places huge emotional expectations on the child and ignores the child’s basic needs and limitations. The child becomes a god without limits and, because of this, without security.’

However, Maria Dennehy says that she and her sister were treated as equals by both parents and Joanne was doing just fine until she turned fourteen. She was, by all accounts, just a normal, well-balanced adolescent. This, of course, is Maria’s perception; Joanna may have held an entirely different view and this could be why she turned out to be the only rotten apple in a small basket of otherwise good fruit.

The now-executed Connecticut sexual sadist and serial killer, Michael Bruce Ross, had three siblings. Their mother, Patricia, was a borderline schizophrenic who had spent time in the state mental hospital. She would twice abandon her husband and children only to return home and she never hid the fact that she was forced to get married by her parents because she was pregnant with Michael. From the outset he was an unwanted child. Nevertheless, the Rosses went on to have more children, who were regularly beaten and psychologically abused by both parents.

Michael remembered his mother’s mood swings, which all the children feared, and I can confirm this to be true after speaking with one of Michael’s siblings. They couldn’t understand how she could laugh after making them ill by feeding them bad meat. Or why she would ruin her daughters’ clothes with a box of dye. Patricia tried to trick young Michael into shooting his pet dog, after convincing him that it was suffering after a short illness. So, by all accounts, Patricia was simply ‘The Mother from Hell’.

Yet, all four kids loved their mother, simply because she was their ‘mom’. They grew to accept her mood swings, and learned to keep out of the way when she was angry. Like unwanted pets returning even meagre scraps of affection with devotion and loyalty, the three children had to love her just to survive. Yet, Michael turned out to be the only rotten apple for his sisters went on to live healthy and rewarding lives. But despite his horrendous childhood Ross continued to love his mother and father until the end of his days.

Psychoanalyst Coline Covington makes the suggestion in The Week UK, that following on from this dynamic, ‘Dennehy may have been trying to kill two birds – or parents – with one stone,’ adding, ‘She was enacting revenge on her mother who betrayed her and destroying her rival, her father, so that in fantasy she could regain her position as ruler-child, able to control the world around her.’ However, Joanne Dennehy has not blamed her mother for anything, but she has accused her father of sexually assaulting her around the ages of six and seven to anyone who would listen, to include Kevin Lee – as substantiated by Kevin Lee’s business partner Paul Creed - and Gary Stretch.

‘I was abused as a child’ is therefore one of the many excuses amongst serial killers when they later attempt to mitigate their crimes, hoping for a more lenient sentence, a reduction in sentence or, in the US, to appeal against a death sentence. One look on the Internet at any Death Row inmate’s appeal papers illustrates not only are these convicted felons inventive, their attorneys are even more so. Here you will find bad potty training, no potty training, fell off a playground swing, or tripped down some stairs and banged my head; bed-wetting until I was twelve; forced to wear my sister’s dress at school and the other boys laughed at me, or the more inane: ‘The Lord ordered me to kill. He came into my bedroom in a ray of light. I hid under my bed cos I was scared, so I did as I was told’. And if the appellate cannot come up with something different, the lawyers will. There is always Satan so we must not forget him either, and what follows is a case where a lawyer went completely over the top and earned himself millions of US dollars into the bargain.

If it were not for a sensational bestselling book and subsequent motion picture, The Amityville Horror (1979), along with several sequels and scores of books and thousands of newspaper and magazine articles, the village of Amityville, Long Island, and the story of the slaughter at the DeFeo’s home ‘High Hopes’ on Ocean Avenue in 1974 would have evoked hardly any interest. As it is, ‘Amityville’ – which suggests peace and contentment – has become identified with what was marketed as an outstanding true horror story but which, in the final analysis, is only a well-publicised, run-of-the-mill haunted house tale with overtones of mass murder.

You can order the first movie (forget the sequels) via Amazon, but did the evil spirit of a dead Indian chief truly haunt the house? Was the property really built on the site of an ancient Indian burial ground? Did green slime ooze from the walls and blood pour from the taps? Did a pink pig fly around in the garden and did flies plague the place during the murders of the entire family of six as they slept in their beds? Absolute hogwash!

With a plea bargain agreement in one hand, a movie and book contract in the other, DeFeo’s attorney William Weber had started his case by arguing that Ronald DeFeo was insane and mitigating this haunted house yarn before a pinched-faced, no-nonsense Judge Thomas M. Stark. I interviewed Judge Stark at his home, at Riverhead, Long Island, and realised that he was the type of man who would lynch a Mormon if he knocked on his front door more than once, and whose great grandfather probably shot every Indian – friendly or not – that came within musket range. However, it then came to light that over a few bottles of wine during the evening after ‘Butch’ DeFeo was sentenced on 4 December 1974, Weber and the new owners of ‘High Hopes’, George and Kathleen Lutz, had had high hopes for themselves. They cooked up a story that would shock the world and so ‘The Amityville Horror’ was born.

Although Weber was severely disciplined for breaking his canons and ethics, he made a small fortune in the process, taking money from anyone he could exploit. He teamed up with Professor Hans Holzer, a ghost-hunter born in England. Together they wrote a book called Murder in Amityville, which subsequently became the 1982 motion picture, Amityville II – The Possession.

During the 1990s, as one of a 12-part series called ‘The Serial Killers’ we made an investigative TV documentary on the case, interviewing all of the principal characters, to include DeFeo and Mr Weber. At his Central Park apartment in New York City I met Hans Holzer. He was then a dear old chap, full of bonhomie, although very suspicious of the film crew around him. But I got the distinct impression if I had said I’d been visited by an angry Indian chief while researching my project, he would believe that too. Then, as I was about to leave, this tall, stooped man stopped me in my tracks and pointed to the grandfather clock, ticking away in his living room. ‘Do you hear that?’ he whispered, ‘Tick, tick, tick, tick,’ before adding, ‘The clock always ticks. One day, just one day, when the clock strikes midnight the Indian chief will rise again at “High Hopes”. Dead Indians do not like to be insulted.’

Make of that what you will. However my advice, based on not a little experience, is: never trust a word an ambulance-chasing lawyer says in mitigation for a client, and if you meet a professor in ghosts, run a mile! But I have to leave DeFeo on a lighter note.

During my investigation into the Amityville slayings I met Detective Dennis Rafferty and Lt. Robert Dunn at the Suffolk County Police HQ, Yaphank, NY. These two hard-nosed cops had gained a confession from DeFeo, and they had a remarkable ‘prosecution involving verbal confession rate’ of 94 per cent – a rate that far exceeded the 55 to 73 per cent in almost any other jurisdiction in the US.

‘Is it true,’ I asked them, ‘Did you really hit Ronnie with a telephone book?’ ‘Nah, we didn’t hit him,’ came the reply. ‘We beat the living shit outa him with one, cos he was a fuckin’ dumb prick! Chris, have you seen the size of the Long Island directory – it’s a big mother, we can tell ya!’

They then got down to business and showed me the murder weapon, the victims’ bloodstained clothing, cartridge cases and the scene-of-crime photos; also the pictures of DeFeo’s siblings, Dawn (eighteen) – her head imploded on one side, Allison (thirteen) – face destroyed, Mark (twelve) and John (seven) – both shot in the back. The parents too were shot in the back. Then, having seen all of this, the cops took me out for a cold beer.

It goes without saying that Ronald DeFeo also claimed that he had been sexually and psychologically abused as a youngster. I have interviewed many murderers who have made such claims, which for the most part are untrue. While we are all too aware that during the last four decades child abuse has become exposed as a social blight, there is not a scintilla of evidence that so many serial killers were abused on the scale they assert. I include Joanne Dennehy in this summing up as well.

Harvey Louis Carignan, aka ‘Harv’ the Hammer, is responsible for the killings of 30 or more young girls and women. Presently, ‘Harv’ is incarcerated at the Minnesota Correctional Facility, Faribault. He told me in a letter dated 14 April 1993:

Even now, it seems my childhood was short, only a few days long. There is nothing about it I cling to and nothing to look fondly backwards toward. From where I sat then, and sit now, it was, and is, truly a pit of despair.

In later correspondence he claimed that he never knew his genetic father and his mother was too sickly to look after him. This much is true, but he then said that he was sexually abused by a babysitter and humiliated in front of his class, then by a female teacher while at reform school. There is not a shred of evidence to support any of it. According to the FBI, his Mandan, North Dakota school records show that a female teacher was constantly reprimanding him and he had abused younger boys. On one occasion he took his penis out in class and masturbated in front of everyone. Oh, and I almost forgot this. In mitigation for at least three of his murders he walked into court dressed in a white robe and Jesus-type sandals. He said that God had ordered him to kill women. Naturally the jury didn’t buy it and he was given several life sentences. Prior to him appearing again on charges of kidnapping, rape and multiple murder, his attorney told Harvey: ‘God didn’t help you out last time so I doubt he’ll change his mind this time around.’

When I interviewed ‘The Hammer’ face to face, he merely blamed all of his victims for getting themselves killed: ‘I murdered them to stop them making false allegations of rape against me,’ he said. What – all of them?

The now-deceased serial killer Arthur ‘Art’ John Shawcross, aka ‘The Monster of the Rivers’, told me during an interview on 19 September 1994 that his mother and an aunt had sexually abused him as a young child. There is no evidence of that either. But then again, he claimed it was the Army who taught him to kill but didn’t tell how not to kill when he was discharged. He boasted that he was like an army-type Rambo who slaughtered 50 VC, including women and babies, then single-handedly burned their villages when his service record proves that he was a mere storeman, who worked 200 miles from where the action was. Then, like Carignan, God came up on Art’s excuse list. ‘It was The Lord who ordered me to kill prostitutes, who all had AIDS,’ he told me which didn’t entirely explain why he had unprotected sex with them before they were murdered, or why he had killed two very young schoolchildren.

In fact, I would be extremely hard pushed to find a single killer who I have studied in-depth, who didn’t falsely blame their parents somewhere along the line for the way they turned out: John Wayne Gacy, Kenneth Alessio Bianchi or the now-executed English serial killer John Martin Scripps, who blamed his behaviour on his deceased father, who, in 1968, had committed suicide by placing his head in a gas oven. Also, Theodore ‘Ted’ Robert Bundy, Henry Lee Lucas, Englishman John David Guise Cannan and Keith Hunter Jesperson. All of them have blamed someone else for being the root of their problems rather than taking the responsibility upon themselves.

Maybe a father was strict, maybe a drunk. So what if mother had another child? I could go on and on, but when I learned that Joanne Dennehy was blaming her father for sexually abusing her, or that she may have been narcissistically damaged by her mother because she gave birth to Maria, I took it all with a pinch of salt. Next, Dennehy will be telling us that it was her mum’s fault that she dressed Kevin Lee up in a black, sequined dress. That it was her dad’s fault that Lukasz Slaboszewski popped around for a bit of fun and games. And it was both their faults that John Chapman was butchered in his bed. Lord only knows who she will eventually blame for her attempting to stab to death Robin Bereza and John Rogers!

Dr Elliott Leyton has taught anthropology at the Queen’s University of Belfast, the University of Toronto, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and at Memorial University of Newfoundland, where, in 2001, he was professor of Anthropology. He has worked with police forces around the world, notably the FBI; is the author of 11-plus books and is past president of the Canadian Sociology and Anthropology Association. Elliott may also be considered something of a renegade and I can imagine him saying to me now in his usual, matter-of-fact way: ‘Millions upon millions of children every year have problems in their earlier years and have younger siblings but they don’t all turn into serial killers, do they? Show me some empirical evidence that just one single individual has graduated into serial homicide just because he, or she, has a younger brother, or sister, and I would be amazed.’

To help us understand the true possible causes of Joanne Dennehy’s downward spiral into homicidal violence a little better, perhaps we might refer to a study entitled ‘From Violent Juvenile Offenders to Dangerous Violent Offenders’, published in Sociology of Crime, Law and Deviance Volume 4, 2003. The authors are G. Roger Jarjoura (School of Public and Environmental Affairs, Indiana-Purdue University, USA) and Ruth Triplett (Department of Sociology, Old Dominion University, USA). Their classification of predictors of violence very much echoes the research protocol used by Robert Ressler and his team of experts and lies at the root of these questions: Where did Joanne Dennehy come from? Who was she and where was she going?

The following list of predictors show that Dennehy’s difficulties started to manifest themselves with family problems in her early teens.

Predictors of Future Serious Antisocial Behaviour 
[Joanne Dennehy indented where applicable]

Predictors of Future Serious Antisocial behaviour are broken down into four levels: Community-level; Family-level; School-level and Individual-level.

Certainly there is no evidence of parental alcoholism or drug abuse in the Dennehy household. Nor is there evidence of physical or psychological abuse and up to the age of late thirteen, Joanne appeared to have been an emotionally healthy, well-educated, well-adjusted, well-spoken teenager, who excelled in her studies, enjoyed music and sports. Indeed, she was almost ready to be hotwired into a university, where she would study law.

It is true to say that most children who come from healthy or dysfunctional childhoods don’t go on to murder people, or to commit violent antisocial acts, as Professor Elliott Leyton might agree. The reason for this is that when they start to cross the line, they are rescued by strong hands in the next phase of childhood, that of preadolescence. But all of Ressler’s subjects were certainly not saved from drowning – instead they were pushed further under during this phase of their lives. From the ages of eight to twelve, all of the negative tendencies present in their early childhoods were exacerbated and reinforced. It is assumed that there are always points of intervention and Joanne’s parents and her teachers frequently did try and intervene in an effort to reverse the offending behaviour of a girl who was becoming a potentially dangerous individual. However psychological counselling, which may have got to the heart of the problem and moved the girl away from the path towards deviant behaviour, was a missed opportunity.

But there is an important aspect to note here. Where there is some intervention at this stage, the child who has been ‘rescued’ may go on to disappoint the family, become a truant, not respond overtly; but as an adult may never offend, at least to the extent of committing abductions, sadistic acts and murders. However, a person on the track towards antisocial behaviour can be re-booted only so far; the chances, as evidenced by Dennehy’s behaviour, are that he/she will become a largely dysfunctional adult. For Joanne to have been reshaped and to return completely to a normal life after she absconded from home and became hooked on drugs was unlikely so she is quite unique: this angelic little girl from a well-adjusted home developed into a psychopath, going on to graduate in serial homicide.

In his contribution to the 1986 anthology, Unmasking the Psychopath, leading psychologist Robert D. Hare proposed a 20-item checklist for the psychopathic personality, and how many of these can we tick with regard to Joanne Dennehy?

The un-ticked boxes are correct because Dennehy has finally accepted responsibility for her actions, which rather contradicts her earlier claim that she was sexually and psychologically damaged by her father as a young child. It also blows out of the water any notion that it was her mother’s fault because she gave birth to Maria, too. Besides, Maria Dennehy is at pains to point out that Joanne was a loving sister to her. They more or less got on like the proverbial house on fire. And although she never married Joanne did ‘enjoy’ scores of short-term relationships, so these are two grey areas for us.

Psychopathy and its causes have been a source of study and mystery for years. Even the name of the disorder has changed three times: Psychopath. Sociopath. Antisocial Personality. Some practitioners have simply written off the disorder as the embodiment of evil. A psychopath is often defined as a person who lacks the ordinary social feelings of conscience, regret and empathy. Often charming, witty and intelligent, these are superficial people whose shallow nature is only evident to those close to them. Often their charm leads friends and loved ones to expect great things, as did Dennehy’s parents, and such people are frequently let down. Self-gratification is all-important for the psychopath. If Joanne wanted something, she set out to obtain that something with scant regard for the consequences. During her journey along ‘Murder Road’, she ran every red light stoplight, come what may.

A decade ago I met with Judge Stuart Namm, a former Suffolk County judge, Long Island, New York, while I was making the aforementioned TV documentary on Ronald ‘Butch’ DeFeo Jr, and I interviewed Mr DeFeo several times at the Green Haven Correctional Facility, Stormville, New York, New York State. Stuart and I went on to work together on many projects and he once said this to me:

Although fully aware of society’s rules, they mattered little to Joanne Dennehy and Gary Stretch, as did the effects of their actions inflicted on their victims and their intended victims, those closest to them and the people around them. Simply put, they did not give a damn.

Unfortunately, psychiatric treatment is of little help to psychopaths as they are often too manipulative to allow themselves to be helped. All psychopaths are diagnosed as having an antisocial personality disorder – a disorder that means they periodically violate the rights of others. This violation can manifest itself as stealing, lying and drug and alcohol abuse. As with all psychopaths, Joanne Dennehy has shown no remorse for her crimes. Under interrogation she remained calm and matter-of-fact, if she said anything at all. As DS Martin Jinks remembers: ‘Despite being generally cooperative and attentive throughout my time with her, she simply answered “No comment” to all questions.’ Therefore, Dennehy exhibits a genuine lack of feeling for what she has done. She gave no thought to her daughters’ welfare or to the victims themselves or their families. Her only concern was, and is, for herself. For she had the ultimate power – control over life and death.

Two people, the late John Chapman and Moore’s daughter described Joanne as a ‘Man-Woman’ who revelled in describing herself as ‘gay’, one who presented herself as being vulnerable to those she intended to exploit. Some observers say that she actually wanted to be a man, others that she wanted to be more powerful than any man.

All of the above-ticked boxes form the very kernel of a sociopath’s psychopathology. They are the foundation stones upon which this disorder is built. However, while psychiatric treatment and the prison system cannot remove Dennehy’s inherent psychopathy, it can and will exercise ultimate power over the offender – the carrot-and-stick behavioural modification techniques, as described previously, until the subject in question is powerless and comes to heel. And, it is appropriate to say, just like vicious dogs that snarl and bite they are either put down or collared tied to a very tight leash indeed.

The manner in which we were treated as children and how our parents treated each other, good or bad, we observed and responded to emotionally then stored away in our memories. If we were neglected, teased or ridiculed and made to feel bad, insignificant or incompetent by our parents or other children, such feelings, hurts and fears not only define us, they are stored away and become part of us. These feelings become familiar, and to a child who has little with which to compare them, they seem ‘normal’. Fortunately, good feelings, happy memories and impressions of love and warmth are also present. Accomplishments that made us feel proud, the knowledge of what we are best at, and all the little rewards we received contribute to our formation as well.

Children, like adults, define themselves according to how they were treated and then attempt to live up, or down, to the labels and expectations others apply. It is on these emotional building blocks that our entire self-concept is erected. We never outgrow our foundations, rather we build on them; and foundations do not disappear or go away, they tend to get buried. Nevertheless, our entire future rests on such foundations.

Children do not analyse or process their experiences in the manner an adult would process similar information. They do not have well-developed language skills and are more greatly ruled by the immediacy of emotion. Hence, a great deal of this early experience, including their initial self-concept and all attendant joys, triumphs, traumas and bad feelings, is internalised and stored away in the portion of the psyche that is not controlled by the language-dependent conscious mind, that is the unconscious. This is why it is so difficult to remember events, be they good or bad, that occurred when we were young.

With all of the above considered it seems that Joanne Dennehy enjoyed a perfect childhood, therefore, we must look elsewhere for clues as to the reasons why she eventually turned into a serial killer and this is why I say that drink and drugs played such a crucial part in her downfall.