Joanne Dennehy despises weakness but she is completely addicted to weakness and the experiencing of her own power over men.
CLAIRE HARRIS
As my regular readers already know, I speak as I find. Therefore, I make no apologies for the tone of this foreword since it will set you up for the remainder of the book. No fancy words, no cosy prose from Christopher, I can assure you of that because I’m about to take you on a journey along a ‘Murder Road’ and straight into a dysfunctional woman’s mind, a place as black as the grave.
I’m not going to sugarcoat the text of this book with ‘establishment lingo’, or use fancy phrases to try and come across as some kind of expert in my field. Serial homicide is serial homicide whichever way you cut the cake. The individuals who commit such terrible deeds and those who associate and conspire with them are not worthy of the air decent people breathe.
At this point I need to clear something up. Despite numerous press articles who call her ‘Joanna’, her correct Christian name - the name used by her in her letters, in prison records, by police, the Crown Prosecution Service and at trial, is ‘Joanne’, and I am not going to sugarcoat Joanne Christine Dennehy, either. Middle-class, Home County English born and bred, she is, however, the first woman in UK, US indeed world criminal history to have stuck a knife deep into three men, killing them all. She is also the attempted murderer of two other men.
As for Joanne’s former partner, the father of her two children? Over an intermittent period of twelve years John Treanor merely stood by, repeatedly cuckolded, verbally abused, punched by her and given black eyes, yet he loved, and wanted, Joanne even more.
Over a period of 25 years I have interviewed, face-to-face, more than thirty of the world’s most notorious serial killers and mass murderers. I have entered into lengthy correspondence with many more. It is a matter of public record that I have cleared up cold-case homicides in the United States, and it is always the same: blood-spattered walls, carpets, soft furnishings, white goods, cars and sidewalks. Victims being police officers, the elderly or mentally retarded, men, women, children of all ages, unborn and newborn babies; their bodies dumped where they were killed, or placed in rapidly-dug holes in the ground, ditches and sewers.
I have sat with these human predators on death rows throughout the United States, where the reeking, sweet stench of cheap disinfectant, human sweat and evil personified permeates every brick of these correctional warehouses incarcerating those from the Legion of the Damned.
I have listened to their sickening, gut-wrenching tales of murder most foul; their boasts, intermingled with chuckles of glee, while they recounted how they caused so much suffering to their victims well beyond the comprehension of normal souls like you and me.
I have witnessed a good few executions: the hangman’s halter in Singapore and Pakistan, the ‘Goodnight Juice’ (lethal injection in ‘The Lone Star State’) or a final sit down in ‘Ole Sparky’ in Florida, sending the condemned to perdition.
In the Washington State Penitentiary, at Walla Walla, I requested the entire Death Row tier population be unlocked. They sat around me in a circle, drinking Coke and eating the candy I had brought in, fascinated that an Englishman had decided to come to their home – their own ‘Green Mile’. No threats to me at all because ‘Dead Men Walking’ are laid-back and, unless a stay of execution is granted, accepting of their fate; respectful, too. For two hours during this unique encounter they recalled their terrible crimes, with the strap board, the gallows, the noose, the long drop just a well-manacled, short stumbling walk away.
These murderous sociopaths/psychopaths – whatever label one would wish to tie around their necks – love to play mind games. Most often cunning as hyenas, they are control freaks who attempt to manipulate everyone with whom they come into contact, which prompts the chilling question: what chance did their vulnerable, often gullible, prey have against such twisted characters who can, at face value, appear as nice as the man or woman living next door?
These monsters have killed in every way imaginable: electrocution, running over using a vehicle, pushing over a precipice, throttling, drowning, manual strangulation, shooting, stabbing, flaying alive, bludgeoning, poisoning, hanging and burning.
One of my subjects superglued his helpless victim’s lips and nostrils together, then sat by and watched while she died a terrible death. Suffocation by asphyxiation using a plastic bag is a common enough method but another pair of serial killers used a plastic bag into which they piped coal gas. One fugitive from the law even blew up a Tallahassee cop with a bomb placed inside a Sharpe microwave oven. How did he do that?
Think of any way of murdering a person and these people have already done it. I have met Phillip Carl Jablonski. He once ate a woman’s eyeballs and cut off her nipples, carving his signature into her flesh before she expired.
Another monster, the aptly named Frederick Alan Gore, kidnapped schoolgirls and young women, raped and then spread-eagled them from a beam in his cellar, flaying them inch by inch at a time, gutting them like deer as they slowly died in agony, their entrails spilling onto a sawdust-covered floor. His exclusive confessions to me have been published in one of my books, helping fast-track his execution.
Tasked with caring for mentally retarded Louis ‘Buddy’ Musso, forty-four-year-old Suzanne Margaret Basso, and her son James O’Malley tortured and beat helpless Buddy for weeks while claiming his social benefits payments for themselves. In 1998, they bathed the hapless man in scalding hot water and scrubbed the blisters with a wire brush, poured cleaning fluid down his throat and then, when he eventually died, his body was dumped by the side of Main Street, Galena Park, Texas – and this wasn’t Basso’s first murder, either!
Then there was the now-executed Willie Seth Crain, a Florida lobster fisherman by calling, who, in 1998, kidnapped and raped seven-year-old Amanda Brown before placing her still-living body in one of his pots to let crabs finish off the work he had already started. But never before had I come into contact with a woman who was a sado, sexually driven homicidal maniac until I became involved with Joanne Christine Dennehy – a killer, whom, by the enormity of her crimes, the way she treated her victims leaves the notorious US serial killer Aileen Wuornos in the shade.
There is killing and there is killing. It is not the final body count that matters so much, more the manner in which all of her victims were slaughtered that makes Joanne Dennehy so evil.
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. As yet I have discovered not a single one, not even a snippet nor a micro-speck of decency anywhere to be found.
Aside from the principal character – self-confessed sexually sadistic, personality disordered sociopath Joanne Dennehy, whose body should now be rotting in a lime-filled grave behind prison walls, the entire supporting cast of her associates lack any decency whatsoever. So, please, please do not ask me if they are of the Anglican faith, or have a scrap of faith in any faith, in themselves, in anyone else to include their own friends and family, or in life’s richly embroidered tapestry, because they haven’t – full stop! The only time any of them may visit a church will be at their own funerals.
All of Joanne’s accomplices in crime are pathological liars: bone-idle, money-grabbing social benefit scroungers who couldn’t tell the time of day with an alarm clock hung around their necks. Weak-willed, sexual deviants, degenerate drug users, alcoholics and thieves; with what pickled brains Dennehy’s male halfwit buddies have left snuggly tucked into their underpants, genitals ruling their heads – the etymology of ‘dickheads’, if you will.
Notwithstanding this, the more I searched for something good to say about any of them the worse it got. Desperately seeking a glimmer of hope, a light at the end of a tunnel if you will? It was downhill all the way.
Like peeling an onion, layer by layer the more the smell of this case made my eyes screw up. This book will make yours water, too. Here, you will find true accounts that will break your heart. Conversely, this book could make your blood boil incandescent with rage.
During the research for a work such as this on the face of it seems appropriate for the writer to focus on the murders and the killer’s modus operandi (method of operating) and modus vivendi (literally, their way of living) because we all want to know the gory facts, don’t we? Such crimes put bums on seats in cinemas, help TV ratings with no-holds-barred documentaries and offer up juicy, exclusive interviews for the press. Dig deeper, however, and one enters a sewer of human depravity – one we should not dare enter because the stench is just too great. Nevertheless, having wallowed around in the filth where these bottom feeders live, and having examined such characters under a forensic microscope, I promise you there will be a few laughs along this particularly heinous ‘Murder Road’, just to lighten your load.
I say this, while at once offering great respect to those lives lost and those left behind with their grief. Just like many of us, homicide police are normal people, with families and kids. In order to emotionally survive the grim work they undertake on our behalf – and these cops never take the horrors of their work home – they must become ‘Brothers in Arms’ and with this at times comes humour. It is the only way they can make it through just to lighten their load too. In the US, I have helped law enforcement locate buried bodies. I’ve been there when pathetic human remains have been exhumed from some marshy, mosquito-infested wood, or tugged out of a drain. Just as Cambridgeshire police reverentially treated the corpses of Dennehy and Stretch’s victims found in ditches, cops do the same worldwide. Always solemn, yet highly professional occasions, with a cold beer afterwards just to lighten the load.