Among the dangerous prisoners in Britain there is a smaller group, the deadliest of all, and Joanne Dennehy belongs to it. She murdered three men in the space of days, then went out onto the streets and tried to kill two more, chosen at random. Psychiatrists would later say the killings were driven by control, domination and gratification. The court found no remorse, and prison, according to later reporting, did not end the threat.
St Albans and Harpenden
Nothing in her childhood pointed towards murder, and that is what unsettled people later. Dennehy was born in St Albans and raised in Harpenden, in a stable, respectable family with two working parents and a younger sister who would go on to serve in the army. She was bright. She played hockey and netball, and her parents believed she would go to university.
In her mid-teens she began skipping school and mixing with older boys. At 15 she ran away with a man five years older. Drugs and alcohol followed, and by 16 she had left home for good. She had two children while still a teenager, then told friends she never wanted to be a mother. Relationships ran the same course: intense, then volatile, then violent. By her early twenties she was self-harming.
Doctors would later diagnose a severe antisocial personality disorder. After her arrest, forensic psychiatrists added a diagnosis of sadomasochism. She wore handcuffs clipped to her trousers, carried knives and told friends she often felt like killing someone. The people around her still did not believe she would.
Peterborough
The first killing was deliberate. Dennehy met Lukasz Slaboszewski only days before she killed him. He told friends life felt better with her in it. She lured him to her address in Peterborough and stabbed him once, through the heart, then put his body in a wheelie bin. According to the court, she showed the body to a 14-year-old girl she had befriended.
While she decided what to do with the body, she borrowed money from her landlord, Kevin Lee, and bought a car. With Gary Stretch driving, she scouted remote rural places where she thought no one would search.
The second victim, John Chapman, was a former Royal Navy serviceman and an alcoholic, and Dennehy knew he was vulnerable. She stabbed him repeatedly in his own room. The court found no signs of a struggle. He may have been asleep.
The third was Kevin Lee himself. He had given her work and somewhere to live, and believed her stories. She told him enough to make him complicit, then lured him to her flat and stabbed him five times in the chest. His body was dumped in a ditch, dressed in women's clothing. The court saw it as a final act of control and degradation.
Hereford
With the police closing in, Dennehy did not lie low. She went on the run with Stretch to Hereford, a place where she had no connections at all, and there she picked victims at random.
The first man was walking his dog. She got out of the car and stabbed him from behind. In the film he describes what felt like a heavy punch in the small of his back, turning to find a woman who kept stabbing him in the chest, and falling back onto a grass verge by a cycle path. He says she told him her boyfriend had told her to do it, and then, seeing him bleed, that she had better do some more. He remembers her as matter of fact about it all.
Moments later she wanted another victim. Stretch drove again. A second dog walker was ambushed and stabbed more than 30 times, leaving him with collapsed lungs and a perforated bowel. The court said he narrowly avoided death. Dennehy believed she had killed him. She was arrested shortly afterwards, still armed and still calm.
Inside
She was given a whole life order, with the judge saying there was no prospect of release. According to reports in The Sun, prison intelligence later described her as one of the most dangerous inmates in the female high security estate. The same reporting alleges she tried to kill fellow prisoner Rose West, an allegation never tested in open court, and links her to an alleged escape plan that involved murdering a prison officer and using the officer's finger to beat biometric doors. There is no suggestion the plan was ever carried out.
Former prison governor and criminologist David Wilson has said part of her danger lies in manipulation through sex and control, pointing to reports that she flirted with a female custody sergeant during her police interviews. Gary Stretch, nearly seven feet tall, drove her to the scenes and moved the bodies. But the court was clear: Stretch facilitated, and Dennehy decided.
Prison did not rehabilitate Joanne Dennehy. It contained her, and the containment was made permanent. The film leaves the last word with her sister, who says their parents worked hard to give both girls everything, and who still cannot understand how the girl they loved turned into what she calls a monster.