She stabbed men to death for “sadistic blood lust”: The Joanna Dennehy’s story
Best-selling author Christopher Berry Dee wrote a book about Joanna’s story that he titled “Love for Blood”
Joanna Dennehy was born in 1982 and grew up in the outskirts of London, England. Although she was a sweet girl with an angelic face who apparently had a happy childhood, something in her adolescence made her change.
At the beginning of puberty, she began to experience the distortions caused by excesses, until later, life as a couple and two children arrived. Ultimately, she became one of Britain’s most dangerous serial killers.
At some point, Joanna made the decision to want to kill nine men. It was a goal that she set for herself. Her goal began to take shape in March 2013, when ‘knife in hand’, she put her plan into motion. She wanted to murder for pleasure, for lust; It excited her to feel how others suffered and the blood led her to sexual debauchery.
She also wanted her life not to go unnoticed in the world. She wanted her crimes to become famous, because that made her feel complete and also made her have fun. Her coldness was incalculable and exploded when the psychopath inside her took over and her life turned into extreme violence.
A BBC Mundo report points out that despite the usual belief of psychiatric experts about the personal history of violent murderers, Joanna Dennehy’s childhood was, according to her own relatives, quite normal.
She grew up in the outskirts of London, in Harpenden, a small town in Hertfordshire. Her childhood was spent in a large four-room house with a cozy garden. In primary school she excelled in her studies and in sports. She shared a room with bunk beds with her younger sister María, who was three years younger. “They were very close and had even created their own secret vocabulary”, says the review.
At that time — Maria remembers — she was docile, not aggressive and played with dolls. At school, she protected her and if someone said something ugly to her, Joanna would force that student to apologize. When they came home from school they would climb the tree in the backyard of their house and stay there singing and chatting for hours.
María — who joined the Army after school and is now a computer engineer — told the BBC that her parents worked very hard to maintain a good lifestyle. Her father, Kevin, was a security guard and her mother, Kathleen, was a clerk in a shop. To her parents, Joanna was the “smart” daughter and they dreamed that she would study law.
María admits that Kevin and Kathleen were a bit strict, although not too much, but she says they spent a lot of time with them. In one of the few interviews that María gave, she said that she could not understand exactly what had happened, but that at one point, when Joanna was in high school, everything abruptly changed: “There was a girl we loved who one day became a monster ”.
Drugs and alcohol in adolescence
When she was 17 years old, Joanna became pregnant for the first time. So, she stopped using drugs and alcohol to take care of the baby. In 1999 her eldest daughter was born: Shianne. Three years later her second child arrived. But the abstinence did not last and, shortly after having the boys, she returned to her excesses.
It was in the adolescence period that the defiant Joanna, who ran away from school and confronted her parents, emerged. When she was 13 years old, she left home with a young man of 18. The time was short, but it was enough to worry them. Around this time, she also began stealing money, drinking alcohol, and using drugs. They managed to get her back, but she eloped once more. Family life with her became uncontrollable.
The prohibitions of her parents were not enough to stop her. When she started dating John Treanor, she was 15 and he was 20. Kevin confronted John and told him that his daughter was a minor. It was of no use. The fights became daily and the couple moved on anyway.
There was even a time when they even set up a tent in the Dennehy’s garden. María says that, in those months, her mother used to cry all the time. When Joanna finally left with John at 16, the family was devastated.
Joanna and her addiction to excess
Living as a couple, she left her children with John and went out without any sort of control. The lack of control was absolute and began to manifest itself with extreme violence. When she was drunk or drugged she would hit John and kick him. She drank up to two bottles of vodka a day. Life was hell.
In 2009, John hit rock bottom and in anguish left with his two children, who were 10 and 7 years old. That happened after she threatened him with a 6-inch dagger.
John moved to Glossop in Derbyshire and dedicated himself to looking after his children. He didn’t hear from her again until the crimes occurred. He assures that he never thought that Joanna would be able to do what she did later: “Who could have such a premonition”, he defended himself when the media harassed him with questions.
In 2012, Joanna faced assault charges and was imprisoned. That same year she spent a few months in Peterborough City Hospital, Cambridgeshire, where she was diagnosed with an ‘antisocial personality’.
Upon discharge from the hospital, she turned to a real estate agency called Quicklet to find a room to live in. The agency’s co-owner was named Kevin Lee and he was 48 years old. He told her that he could also give her a job: he commissioned her to help him evict tenants who did not pay.
“Joanna was beautiful, controlling, sexy, and provocative. Blue eyes, perfect features, straight blond hair. Everything was complemented by her piercings on her tongue and nose and tattoos all over her body. Bold and tempting, she knew how to camouflage her aggressive character. “Men did not resist her”, highlighted the BBC.
Joanna’s crimes
Joanna’s arrest took place on April 2, 2013, when she murdered three men in a span of 10 days in the city of Peterborough.
Her first crime occurred in one of those houses that she cared for her employer, in Welland, on the north end of Peterborough.
Lukasz Slaboszewski, 31 years old; Kevin Lee, 48, and John Chapman, 56, were her first three victims.
Joanna had known for some time the Polish Lukasz Slaboszewski, a warehouse clerk. They began a relationship up to the point that he bragged to his friends about his English “girlfriend”. On Tuesday, March 19, 2013, Joanna sent him a cell phone message to meet at a home in Welland.
He arrived with the promise of an intense sexual encounter, but as soon as he stepped through the door, she pierced his heart with a small knife. Then, she dragged the body and put it in the garbage container on the street. Joanna stopped a 14-year-old teenager, who was passing by chance, and unscrupulously showed her Lukasz’s body.
Joanna wanted her victim to be found and become the protagonist of the story. But that did not happen because the teenager, perhaps very scared, did not speak. Frustrated, 10 days later, on March 29, she murdered her roommate, 56-year-old John Chapman, a former marine and veteran of the Falklands War.
While the police concluded that she stabbed him while he slept helplessly, Joanna argued otherwise: she said she stabbed him because he didn’t come out of the bathroom where she was. The psychiatrists interpreted — during the trial — that she needed to put on a show where he was not a poor vulnerable man.
After killing John, she sent a text message to her boss and landlord Kevin Lee, with whom she had an affair since he had hired her. She wrote to him that they would have sadomasochistic sex. Kevin confessed to a friend that his “girlfriend” had told him that she wanted to put a dress on him and rape him.
The man went to meet her immediately. The date was in the house where Joanna had murdered Lukasz 10 days before. She had no mercy and stabbed him five times, piercing his lungs and heart. Kevin was her third victim. Then she dressed the body in a sexy black sequin dress.
By this time, Joanna had two bodies in two different houses. She needed help. She called Gary Stretch — a ‘large built’ criminal who was already registered with the police and whom she had met while working for Kevin Lee — and said verbatim: “Whoops, I did it again”.
Gary Stretch brought in another man, Leslie Layton, 36, to help Joanna. They both lived in the same house as her. Leslie lied to authorities to protect her and Gary helped her dispose of the bodies by dumping them in ditches in a rural area. Kevin Lee’s body, provocatively dressed in the woman’s suit, was arranged in a very particular way, something that suggested that everything had been thought through.
“I need to have fun”
On April 2, Gary was driving her car when he heard her say she wanted to kill again: “I want to have fun, I need to have fun”. Joanna was excited even though she knew the police were looking for her. In Hereford, Gary stopped his car so she could do it.
At random, she picked a man walking his dog and stabbed him in the back. It was Robin Bereza, 64 years old. A car passed and the driver looked their way, Joanna returned a charming smile and then, as a precaution, got in the car again with Gary.
Then, nine minutes later, in a dead end street, she savagely stabbed John Rogers, 56, who was also walking his pet. She stabbed him 30 times. She was sure she had killed him, but no. The last two men attacked managed to survive.
At the same time, several Hereford neighbors had reported to the police that a woman was attacking passersby. The testimonies of the wounded, plus the images captured by the surveillance cameras, led to her arrest that same day.
In the arrest videos, Joanna is seen flirting with the police officers who arrested her, making jokes and thanking them for saying that she was “little”. She assured the officers that she was flattered and that it was a “sexy comment”.
When she asked why she was being arrested and was told that it was “suspected of attempted murder and murder”, she said, smiling calmly: “It could be worse”.
In jail
Two days before her arrest, on March 30, Kevin Lee’s body was found in a well in Newborough. The autopsy established that he had died from wounds to the chest caused by a knife.
Lukasz Slaboszewski and John Chapman were found after her arrest on April 3. Both had stab wounds to the heart, neck and torso.
During the judicial process, Joanna was diagnosed by specialists as a psychopath, after admitting — without hesitation — to having killed these people. She was sentenced to life in prison and she never showed regrets for her heinous crimes.
The Old Bailey Criminal Court in London did not spare any adjectives when it came to qualifying her. It said that Joanna Dennehy was a “compulsive, calculating, manipulative, malicious and cruel liar.”
“Yes, I am a serial killer”, confessed Joanna. “I have pleaded guilty and that’s it”, she concluded.
On February 28, 2014, she was sentenced to life in prison for the three homicides and the two attempted murders. She will one day die in Surrey’s HMP Bronzefield Prison without the possibility of parole. Gary Stretch Richards also ended up sentenced to life for attempted murder.
Diagnosis
To the prison psychiatrist, Joanna confessed something else: “I killed to see how I would feel, to see if I was as cold as I thought I was. Then I took a liking to it, it became addictive”.
The concrete thing is that she was diagnosed with psychopathy, antisocial disorder, borderline personality, paraphilia and sadomasochism, since she recognized that she was excited by the pain and the humiliation of others.
Joanna needed to feel and provide pain when she had sex. She assured that she enjoyed murdering and that she planned to end the lives of nine more men to achieve more fame than Bonnie and Clyde, the famous American criminal couple of the 1930s.
The murderess went so far as to confess that she felt a kind of “sadistic blood lust”.
David Wilson, writer, professor of criminology, expert on serial killers at the University of Birmingham and advisor to various security forces, explained in a report that it is surprising how attractive some psychopaths can be: “They can make you feel that you are the center of the universe, since they need to get closer to later use you. It is that chameleon ability that makes it difficult to identify the true psychopath”.
It was incredible how her accomplices enjoyed her sexual charms and obeyed her without question. Her personal charm attracted them even knowing that their relationship with her was dangerous. For Wilson, Joanna is a unique phenomenon because her male allies never questioned her role and leadership.
“The psychology behind these relationships is called folie a deux or. ‘madness shared by two ’, although in those two, generally, the man is the dominant one. What is unusual in Dennehy’s case is that she was the dominant one and the men were who obeyed”, said Wilson.
Over the years, some of her former neighbors are unable to shake off the bitter taste of having lived near a criminal. Toni-Ann Roberts, a woman who knew her, commented that John Chapman, Joanna’s third victim, was a gentle and sweet man, a bit of an alcoholic, but that there was no reason for Joanna to do what she did to him.
Joanna was intimidating and flirted with people in a strange and effective way. “It was very direct. She approached to find out who you were and was very smart to find out who had low self-esteem. Men used to fall at her feet, like dogs. She had a strange control over them (…) I can still remember the way she looked at you at times. It was terrifying”, she added.
Joanna in pop culture
With this aberrant case, the English tabloids increased their circulation and television programs focused on her. For a long time, nothing else was talked about.
Best-selling author Christopher Berry Dee wrote a book about Joanna’s story that he titled Love for Blood. It was this author who claimed to have noticed — after publication — the manipulation that Joanna exerted on people.
He verified it himself when she sent him several letters demonstrating her chameleon ability. “She changes her colors to suit her surroundings. For example, she realized that her landlord wanted to have sex with her and in the case of the Polish boy, she put a spell on him so he would think that he had met the good girl”.
“When she wrote to me, her handwriting was beautiful and her spelling and vocabulary perfect. She presented herself as a calm and content person. She wanted to impress me . But I had the opportunity to see the letters that she had written to Gary and they were completely different, as if she belonged to a slum district”, Dee said.
In the documentary A Murderer in My Family, her ex-husband and father of her two children spoke. He maintains that the shock caused by the events has not yet passed: “What she did is horrifying. But I am not responsible for that, my children are not responsible for that… I cannot apologize for what she did”.
The case did not end there because there were several more books, such as those written by Janet Crowder and Andrew Alexander, and numerous documentaries of the true crime genre.
Unbridled violence
In February 2014, Joanna Dennehy was sent to prison. Her entry into prison was also shocking because immediately her partner in prison, the serial killer Rose West, had to be transferred to another penitentiary for her own safety. Joanna had threatened to kill her.
That same year, Joanna began an affair with a West Sussex builder. The bold man told tabloid media that he had fallen in love.
But the reality is that she was going to use him because she wanted to escape. She had devised a plan to kill a prison guard and use her fingerprints to open the prison’s biometric locks and flee. The plan was discovered, she was confined and isolated.
In 2017, Joanna started telling the other inmates that she had actually killed four people. She was thirsty for attention. In August 2018, with her girlfriend in prison, she devised a suicide pact. Both were supposed to die, but they were found in a pool of blood.
Joanna had tried to cut her throat. Her girlfriend had cuts on her wrists. According to the newspaper The Mirror, the security guards discovered the unconscious couple, lying on the ground.
From there, they were put into separate cells. A short time later, Joanna failed with another suicide attempt.
Her mother and daughter
In January 2017, her mother, Kathleen, spoke in a Crime + Investigation channel documentary. She painted Joanna as a normal girl, who loved netball and hockey and who looked like a very sensitive girl: “If she stepped on a worm, she felt bad and used to take the bugs to her bed. She was a lovely girl. She was polite to everyone. Her teachers said the same”.
She acknowledged that it was in her teens that she began to change drastically: She started skipping school and hanging out with older boys.
Joanna’s daughter, Shianne Treanor, 19, also spoke in 2019, for the first time and exclusively, for The Sunday Mirror.
She said that she had found out that her mother was a serial killer when she was 13 years old and was visiting friends. Later, she searched the Internet and found out the whole truth. Since then, she has lived on a kind of roller coaster under the shadow of a criminal mother. She was afraid of becoming a serial male killer psychopath herself and suffered from frequent nightmares. One day she naively asked her father: “Will I become like mother?”.
For four years, she did not hear from Joanna, but, in October 2018, she sent her a letter: “I wanted answers”, she explained and that, in the absence of explanations, she had decided to contact her. She was convinced that her mother hated her and for that reason she wrote in a cold way: “I told her that I was not looking for a relationship with her, that I just wanted to know why (…) But I received a letter full of love and warmth in which she told me how much she wanted me in her life. I cried. It was very emotional”.
The first time she went to visit her, “I was very nervous, I was shaking (…) when I entered the prison I had to look twice, she looked very different. We were the only ones there, apart from the guards. We sat at the table, facing each other. She had a black T-shirt, jeans, and boots. Short blonde hair and face piercings. One near her eye. It looked good. I said: I missed you. Honestly, I had never thought that I would see her again (…) We both cried. And I asked her why. She apologized to me (…) Part of the punishment is that she didn’t see me grow up and she won’t see me when I get married”.
Shianne didn’t get the answers she was looking for. Despite everything, she remembers from her early childhood, a loving mother, who read them Pride and Prejudice, who “made papier-mâché with my friends and one day we even drew the walls with them”. That was before she started with drugs and alcohol.
She also remembers when everything changed and the disappearances of her mother began, the screams and the excesses: “She would come back with cuts all over the place and bites on her neck that she hid with scarves. She would spend hours and hours yelling with my father”.
Shianne, who completed a travel and tourism course at Tameside College and lives in Manchester, said: “My mother hurt those people and I will never forgive her for that. She must spend the rest of her life in prison thinking about the miseries she caused (…). Somehow, she completely ruined my life. I have my last name associated with the fact of the lives that she took. I can’t get it out of my head. I think she should explain why she did what she did. Those families deserve peace in their minds and their lives. They are in the dark like me. They should know why all this happened”.
Shianne openly apologized to the families of the victims for her mother’s horrendous crimes. Now, 38-year-old Joanna Dennehy is considered one of the nine cruelest serial killers in Britain.
