Mum’s voice should never be far away.

DR ALICE MILLER

At the outset of this book I mentioned that I always strive to find something good on any journey I take along ‘Murder Road’. This, I penned:

 

During my frequent journeys along ‘Murder Road’ I am always desperately seeking some form of redeeming factor that might come from any of the cases I am investigating. I have found not a single one yet – not even a snippet, not a micro-speck of decency is anywhere to be found. Love of Blood has proven to be no exception.

 

But, as I draw towards the end of this particular journey, maybe with the benefit of hindsight while looking back over these pages, something has come to mind, a little something that may educate and encourage us all. Maybe, in some kind of lateral way, if you will, Joanne Christine Dennehy, at the expense of her children, and the way she lived her life while destroying the lives of others, can give us something back after all.

If the murders of Lukasz Slaboszewski, John Chapman and Kevin Lee and the attempted killings of Robin Bereza and John Rogers were cold-blooded acts of premeditated violence in extremis, one day, although the grief of the deceased’s next-of-kin will take decades – if ever – to heal, and Bereza and Rogers slowly come to terms with the trauma they suffered at the evil hand of Dennehy – if ever – there are two other innocent victims in this tragic case whom we may be inclined to forget: Dennehy’s two daughters. Perhaps a tragedy, indeed.

As a legacy to skunk, other types of toxic drug addiction and heavy alcohol ingestion, the last thing on any user’s mind should be to have children until they have kicked their habits. If a parent has a drug problem then it affects the child at every stage of the pregnancy. Almost all drugs pass through the placenta to reach foetus, and even more problems may arise later on during the pregnancy, affecting how the placenta actually works. There is also a risk of the placenta coming away from the uterus, which can be life-threatening, and heavy drug use can reduce the amount of oxygen that reaches the baby, which may not grow as expected.

Taking cannabis or even worse, skunk, during pregnancy may make the baby more unsettled and more easily startled after birth. In the long term it can cause behavioural and learning problems. There is also a possibility of a low birth weight and a higher risk of cot death. Added to this was Dennehy’s heavy consumption of alcohol, especially whisky. All alcohol is a toxin and heavy drinkers often miscarry, have a premature birth or a stillborn. Their children can become panicky, anxious, suspicious or paranoid and later develop a psychotic illness. Despite this, Joanne Dennehy drank large amounts of whisky and doped herself insensible with skunk so her behaviour bordered on psychotic. A user of cocaine, with no decent place to live, she was forced to shoplift to put junk food into her mouth but she and John Treanor sailed on regardless, with Dennehy first falling pregnant when she was just sixteen.

All of this toxicity would travel into the foetus, but neither Treanor nor Dennehy thought twice about it. Had Treanor any intellect at all, hopefully learning from past experience, then thinking about taking this evil woman back time and again, getting her pregnant for a second time around should have been the last thing on his mind. But it wasn’t – and it gets worse.

A newborn relies heavily on its mother during those initial precious years to develop physically and mentally into a healthy adult. Some believe depriving a young child of fundamental sensory input, especially tactile stimulation, is tantamount to condemning the newborn to a life of psychological pain and violence. Experiments on monkeys and other primates show that in the absence of maternal sensory stimulation the creatures become destructive and violent, eventually attempting a form of suicide by repeatedly banging their heads against the sides of their cages.

Although many children are not actually planned – which was certainly the case with Dennehy’s children – and a significant number may not be wanted in the first place, most parents-to-be accept the fact that they are going to have a child and do not deliberately inflict the inconvenience of the child upon it. When that does occur, the child will grow up to be a scarred adult but again, most healthy people can live with those scars and not become emotionally disabled. However, children in this category are invariably at a high risk of confrontation with the criminal justice system at some point before they reach adulthood. Their socioeconomic status, the quality of their home life, the amount of physical or emotional abuse they receive, and the violence present in their environment will, in large measure, determine the extent of that risk.

The late US Senator Patrick Moynihan suggested a lack of sex education amongst young people (and contraception appears to have been the last thing on Dennehy and Treanor’s minds), especially parents who have existed for long periods on welfare or below the poverty level, which Dennehy and Treanor certainly had, is creating an entire generation of children who will also become almost permanent wards of society.

We witness this every day – families in social housing, living on benefits with ten kids or more, who tax the liabilities of the social services system to provide for them and ultimately many will enter the criminal justice system, where they will create an additional burden. ‘These are unwanted children,’ as Senator Moynihan said, ‘Children whose very existence serves only to feather the nests of their irresponsible parents at the cost of the state. Whose very existence is perceived by their parents as a form of retribution.’ There is much empirical evidence, indeed we are overloaded with so much of this evidence it cannot be denied that as many of these children reach childbearing age, they, too, will spawn another generation who are unplanned and unwanted.

Indeed, cold-as-ice Dennehy despised her daughters and all that came with motherhood, to include the father. She hated weakness yet thrived on it and she exploited weakness. A user and an abuser, she had treated her teachers and parents with utter contempt and Treanor knew this. She treated her daughters likewise. To her, they were like aluminium takeaway meal containers – fit for purpose then thrown away – in Dennehy’s case to gain social housing and child benefits to support her deviant lifestyle. According to one neighbour she frequently beat Treanor black and blue, too. Yet for his part, John Treanor still loved Joanne to bits, so much so that he took her back no less than three times to repeatedly subject himself, and his daughters, to the same physical and psychological abuse – it is as blunt and tragically banal as that.

Now, I hope, you are truly getting inside Joanne Dennehy’s head and also the minds of the moronic fools who surrounded her.

During infancy physical, social and emotional interaction are all crucially important in the neurological, social and emotional development of a child. In order to thrive and prosper, and to withstand emotional stress and other negative onslaughts, children need all the love and physical stroking they can get. In this regard youngsters are so needy that they are biologically driven by their limbic systems to seek out loving contact.

‘Every child has a need to be noticed, understood, taken seriously and respected by its mother,’ says Dr Alice Miller in her groundbreaking book, The Drama of Being a Child. Miller adds: ‘and 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. Mum’s voice should never be far away.’

Therefore, it would correct to say that during this crucial period neither of Dennehy’s daughters enjoyed the benefits of having a mother. Yes, John Treanor was to some extent on hand, but like so many children born into dysfunctional families these two girls must have surely been emotionally deprived and damaged. If not, then it is a miracle, and although this author has no knowledge of their present circumstances at least they are in safe hands now.

Being the lawless, renegade, free-spirited person that she was, then why did Dennehy have a child in the first place when she didn’t plan for one, or want one cluttering up her life and had no intention of caring for it? To be blunt, having sex with John Treanor certainly did not light her fire or her maternal fuse because she was sleeping with scores of men, and women, throughout the 12-year relationship. For either of them to have considered bringing a child into this world under these circumstances defies belief.

It is likely that being in love with Dennehy, as he claims he was, Treanor wanted Joanne and himself to be a real family, for he has said this much. However, now knowing Dennehy for who she truly is, one gets the impression that she may well have been thinking, ‘Well, if you want a child so much, let’s do it and you can take care of the consequences because I don’t give a fuck. I will still come and go as I please. No one tells me what to do.’

That Treanor took her back time and again, then brought another child into the world with this woman from Hell, suggests that in order to survive emotionally, he was capable of ‘splitting off’ from his weaker self. To do this he used denial and repression, which broadly means when one is unhappy with a situation, one puts any conscious thought of it out of one’s mind. This may have been his mental defence mechanism, a vital requirement for him to survive, even to save his children. And when it became all too much, he scooted back to his mother to recuperate and give himself breathing space before returning to Joanne, for him and his kids to be abused again.

But the fact that John loved Joanne so much allows us a look at another aspect of their relationship for some people are reluctant to break off relationships with abusive partners because they view the little love they occasionally receive (and the occasional sex, which seems, paradoxically, to go hand in hand with abusive interactions, at least during the initial stages) as a privilege that only this person can grant. In addition, many individuals perceive the ‘love’ they receive from their abusive, critical partner as a reward for the abuse recently suffered. When abuse is eventually followed by ‘love’ the love makes the abuse even more tolerable. In Dennehy’s case, what ‘love’ she gave to John Treanor was, in fact, her way of controlling him.

Take, for example, the principles of reinforcement as they are applied in gambling situations and overlay this onto the relationship between Dennehy and Treanor. You put your pound coin in the slot machine and you lose. So you do this again, and again you lose. This is followed by a third and fourth try at which point you are about to give up and move on to the next slot machine – losing is not fun. However, on the fifth try you win 5,000. You are now willing to put up with three or four losses because they pale in insignificance to the possible reward you might receive. Indeed, the tension and excitement of knowing a winner may be coming up drives you to continually put money in this machine until finally at some point you rationally realise that your losses now far exceed your winnings. Unless you are addicted to gambling and the pain of losing, you walk away.

The same thing happens in relationships and it most certainly applied to Joanne Dennehy and John Treanor. His anticipation of being loved, of being a ‘proper family’ as he put it, was a wonderful high that only Dennehy could provide and drove him to try, try again since he was positive, in his own mind, that he would win some day.

Unfortunately, Treanor was, like Joanne’s parents, dealing with a narcissistic sociopath and therefore to her what logic he had appeared delusional. To her he was weak and she had power over him. She could push him to such an extent, knowing he would run back to his mother but come back to her on the promise of another win. And this happens frequently when, regrettably, sometimes the strength of the emotional attachment and the dependency win out, and the individual – in this case, John Treanor – is drawn back to the abusive relationship. Because the individual is addicted and has occasionally received a ‘loving’ reward, they do not walk away.

This confused package of mental and financial instability spilled into the girls’ home on a daily basis. The screaming, and the fighting and the loud music; curious strange faces going in and out of the place; ‘guests’ who wanted sex with their mum, who treated the children as a nuisance. And the consequences? Without doubt the parents’ joint paranoia was soon rubbing off on their daughters.

Children can have parents who burn them with cigarettes and break their bones but they will still cling to those parents in search of love. Their parents are their world, the only world they have. Children need love and are biologically predisposed to seek association and physical contact, most especially with the mother, and once these bonds have been established they are extremely difficult to break. So intense is the need for stimulation that sometimes a bad parent is better than none at all. If mothering and the stimulation of physical contact are not provided regularly, this may even result in the child’s death.

However, if contact and interaction with the mother is restricted during the early phases of infant development, through their teens, the ability to interact successfully with others at a later stage of life may be retarded. In other words, if a child is not firmly attached to its mother figure and has been neglected by her early in life, his or her ability to form loving attachments increasingly narrows and then disappears, possibly forever. The child becomes attached to no one, and his or her ability to form loving attachments later in life will be abnormal if drastic countermeasures, such as counseling, are not taken.

In all of this, apart from murdering three people and attempting to kill two more, Joanne Dennehy has much to answer for. However, having given John Treanor a hard time in this book, one should give him some credit. In the absence of mothering by Dennehy, Treanor managed to compensate because he clung onto his daughters. After all is said and done he is still their dad.

Lee Wuornos’s baby son was taken away from her by Social Services straight after the birth. He has grown up to become a strapping fellow, full of promise, with a professional career in front of him. Yet, despite his mother’s stigmatic reputation, he still uses her surname. He knows all about his mom and he misses her greatly.

Blood is thicker than water, and in his case I would totally agree with that. John Treanor, and his wife, might just achieve what Joanne Dennehy could not do – give the two girls, as her parents did for Joanne, a reasonable start in life and ensure their dreams really do come true.

Now that would be a truly wonderful thing.