The Shocking Story Of Britain’s Most Notorious Female Serial Killer
After Joanna Dennehy murdered three men over the course of 10 days, she became known as 'Britain's most notorious female serial killer'.
The horrific crimes took place in 2013, when Dennehy stabbed to death Lukasz Slaboszewski, Kevin Lee and John Chapman before dumping their bodies in the Fenland ditches around Peterborough, UK.
The killer was born in St Albans, Hertfordshire and raised in Harpenden by her parents, who had hoped she would become a lawyer. But when she was 15, Dennehy ran away from home for the first time and continued to do so multiple times until she turned 16, when she had the right to decide where to live.
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Dennehy was diagnosed with psychopathic and anti-social disorders as well as borderline personality disorders prior to her killing spree, which began with Slaboszewski, a Polish national.
The 31-year-old man had told his friends he had met an 'English girlfriend', but when he went to meet Dennehy she stabbed him in the heart and put his body in a wheelie bin.
She killed Chapman just a few days later after meeting him at the bedsit property where she was living at the time. She stabbed him in the neck and chest before allegedly contacting her accomplice, Gary Richards, to say: "Oops, I've done it again."
Dennehy transported both the bodies in a car and attempted to bury them in ditches around Peterborough, before she killed Lee, her landlord and lover, later on in the same day she had killed Chapman.
Lee was found wearing in a black sequin dress, which Dennehy had dressed him in before leaving his body in a ditch in Newborough.
Dennehy went on the run for two days, but was caught after she stabbed two dog walkers in the street. The victims both survived the attack.
After being arrested and convicted, Judge Justice Spencer told Dennehy she murdered the three men in 'cold blood', adding: "Although you pleaded guilty, you've made it quite clear you have no remorse. You are a cruel, calculating, selfish and manipulative serial killer."
Dennehy was sentenced to life in prison, where she met and wrote letters to another inmate, Hayley Palmer. The pair planned to get married, with Dennehy telling Palmer in one letter she had found herself 'a fully committed psychopath'.
“Together we will travel a path so beautifully dark, so mentally and physically dangerous we will cease to know where I begin and you end," she wrote in the letter cited by The Sun.
Dennehy and Palmer made a pact to try and take their own lives amid fears of being split up, but Palmer was transferred to another prison before being released. She later claimed Dennehy 'laughed at the situation and had no regrets at all' over her crimes.
Dennehy, meanwhile, continued carrying out her sentence in HMP Bronzefield as one of only two women in Britain serving a whole-life prison term, the other being Rose West.
Emily Brown