Indeed, so severe was her personality disorder that Dennehy was later diagnosed as suffering from a condition known as paraphilia sadomasochism, in which the sufferer derives sexual excitement from the infliction of pain, humiliation and bondage. A woman with severe drug and alcohol addiction, Dennehy liked to give – and receive – pain.
Yet her life had not started out like that. As a child, Dennehy had been very close to her sister Maria, who was two years younger; so close, indeed, that they slept in bunk beds and invented their own secret language. But as Dennehy made the transition into adolescence, her personality changed. She became involved with a group of older boys who introduced her to ‘skunk’, a strong form of cannabis, and she started drinking and skipping school.
Then, at the age of fifteen, she met and ran away with John Treanor, who was five years her senior. They left St Albans and eventually ended up living rough in East Anglia. Dennehy briefly returned home, but at sixteen left again to live with Treanor, first in Luton and then in Milton Keynes. Within the next four years, while still a teenager, she had two children with him, even though she insisted that she ‘didn’t like kids’, and all the time her relationship with Treanor was disintegrating. Unsettled and uncertain, Dennehy would leave him for days or weeks at a time, cheat on him with both men and women, only to return and beg his forgiveness.
The couple tried moving to East Anglia again, but Dennehy’s drinking got worse as she worked as a farm labourer – sometimes even taking her wages in alcohol. She also started to have violent tantrums, in which she would repeatedly hit Treanor for no apparent reason. She was equally violent towards herself, cutting her arms, body and neck with razor blades – she even tattooed the green star beneath her right eye herself. Eventually, in 2009, Treanor left her, taking their two children with him, and Dennehy started to drift around East Anglia, often working as a prostitute to sustain her drug and alcohol habits. In the following four years she spent short periods of time in prison for minor offences, and was also treated for mental health problems.
Then, in 2011, Dennehy met the man who was to become her ‘slave’, a seven-foot-three-inch-tall burglar called Gary Stretch, who was then in his early forties and had a long criminal record, including one term of five years’ imprisonment and one of four years for offences including burglary and handling stolen property. In 2008 Stretch had also been sentenced to fifteen months for harassing his former partner, and threatening – through a mutual friend – to kill her.
By the beginning of 2013 Stretch had become utterly infatuated with Dennehy, so infatuated, indeed, that he devoted himself to satisfying her increasingly violent whims. At the end of March that year, for example, just before and during the Easter holidays, Stretch helped Dennehy fulfil her most violent fantasies, in a spree that lasted just ten days. She had finally lost control, and the tall, muscle-bound Stretch assisted her in every way he could.
And so it was that on Thursday, 21 March 2013, Dennehy killed her first victim at 11 Rolleston Garth, the rooming house that she had been living at in Peterborough, Cambridgeshire, though she had recently moved near by. As she had done so often before, she used her sexuality to ensnare a man – this time a thirty-one-year-old Pole named Lukasz Slaboszewski, whom she had met just a few days earlier.
Like many men before him, the Pole had rapidly fallen in love with the white-faced young woman with a green star tattoo beneath her right eye. He even texted a friend saying how beautiful the world was now that he had Dennehy as his girlfriend. Tragically, it was the last message he was to write. He had met his nemesis.
Alone that Thursday afternoon, without Stretch, Dennehy invited Slaboszewski to the rooming house she had recently left, and then – without any warning whatever – stabbed him through the heart with one of the many knives she had taken to keeping with her at all times. The single stab was delivered with such force that it killed him outright at once. But Dennehy showed not the slightest emotion.
She paused for a time and then, after a little thought, decided to leave the body in a wheelie bin outside the house, while she decided how she would dispose of it. Before she did that, however, Dennehy brought a fourteen-year-old girl called Georgina Page, whom she had recently befriended in the rooming house, to look at the dead Pole’s body in the wheelie bin, taking a bizarre pride in the killing.
Slaboszewski’s body remained in the wheelie bin for two days before Dennehy finally made an attempt to dispose of it. She had realised that she needed a car, and borrowed some money from Kevin Lee, the landlord of the rooming house that was now living in – 38 Bifield in Peterborough – to buy one. She settled on a blue Vauxhall Astra and took a taxi with Gary Stretch to collect it. Later that evening, under the cover of darkness, Dennehy and Stretch drove around the more remote outskirts of Peterborough looking for the right spot to dump the Pole’s body.
The site they chose was the isolated area of Thorney Dike, where Stretch had lived some years earlier. After dumping the corpse in a stream at the side of a field far away from any houses, the two complimented each other that ‘No one will ever find it,’ even boasting about it to teenager Georgina Page when they got back to Peterborough.
But Dennehy’s murderous spree was only just beginning.
No sooner had she dumped Slaboszewski’s body than she started planning her next killing. Her next victim was to be John Chapman, a kindly, inoffensive man of fifty-eight who lived in another of the rooms at 38 Bifield. An alcoholic who had served in the Royal Navy, he had been drinking with Dennehy in the days after she disposed of the Pole’s body, but, for some reason, Dennehy had taken against him, telling him that she would get him out of the house ‘by any means’. In return he had described her to another tenant in the rooming house as ‘the mad woman’.
In the early hours of Good Friday, 29 March 2013, Dennehy did indeed get rid of Chapman by any means. She killed him in his own bed-sitting room on the top floor of the house. She stabbed him once in the neck, severing the carotid artery, and five times in the chest. Two of the stab wounds penetrated the heart, and one was delivered with such violence that it passed through the breast bone. Chapman’s blood alcohol limit was four times over the limit for driving and it is quite possible that Dennehy stabbed him while he was asleep in bed.
Leslie Layton, another occupant of the rooming house at 38 Bifield, and another man who had fallen under Dennehy’s spell, took a photograph of Chapman’s blood-soaked body at 7.32 on that Good Friday morning – just a few hours after the murder.
By now consumed with an intense, unremitting desire to kill, Dennehy quickly identified her next victim, another man who had become infatuated with her over the previous months. Kevin Lee was forty-eight, a husband, father and her landlord. In the time since they had first met in the autumn of 2012 he had fallen under her spell completely. He had employed her in his property letting business and had provided her with rooms in the series of bedsits in the houses that his company owned. For her part, Dennehy had confided in him, hinting that she had been abused as a child, and then, following her first killing, confessing to him what she had done. The police later suspected that she may even have shown him the Pole’s corpse.
What is not in doubt is that Dennehy lured the likeable, compassionate Lee to 11 Rolleston Garth – by telling him that when he arrived on that Good Friday afternoon she was going to ‘dress him up and rape him’. It would not have been the first time that Dennehy and Lee had engaged in sadomasochistic sex games together, and Lee was clearly looking forward to a repeat.
No one knows exactly how far t
hey went in their sexual charade; it is possible that she had already dressed him in a black sequinned dress that she owned – leaving his buttocks exposed. Whatever the truth, it is clear that Dennehy stabbed him five times in the chest, penetrating both his lungs and heart. Lee tried to defend himself, but the attack was so unexpected and so fierce that he had no chance.
Now Dennehy had two dead bodies – John Chapman and Kevin Lee – at two separate addresses in Peterborough, one at 38 Bifield and the other at 11 Rolleston Garth. The question was: how to dispose of them and where? Naturally enough, she recruited her ever-willing lover Gary Stretch, but this time she also recruited her other loyal follower Leslie Layton – the photographer of Chapman’s bloodied body – to collect the body of Kevin Lee.
Layton, in turn, borrowed a tarpaulin from another follower of Dennehy’s, Robert Moore, who lived near by and had also been shown her first victim in the wheelie bin. He, like Lee and Stretch, was infatuated with the extrovert young woman with the dancing eyes and no conscience whatever.
The plan was for Layton to drive Lee’s Ford Mondeo, with Lee’s body in the boot, and follow Dennehy and Stretch as they searched for a site to dispose of his body. In the end, once again taking advantage of Stretch’s local knowledge, they chose Newborough, another remote rural location on the outskirts of Peterborough.
But Dennehy had not finished humiliating Kevin Lee. She and Stretch pulled his bloodstained corpse out of the boot of his own car, while Layton remained in the driver’s seat, and Dennehy posed it in the black sequined dress, with his buttocks prominently exposed and pointing upwards. Followed by Dennehy and Stretch, Layton then took Lee’s Mondeo to an area of waste ground at Yaxley – a long way away from where its owner’s body had been dumped – and set fire to it.
The three of them then returned to 38 Bifield in the Vauxhall Astra to dispose of John Chapman’s corpse. Layton helped Dennehy carry Chapman’s blood-soaked body down from the top floor. Stretch put it in the boot of the Astra. This time Dennehy and Stretch knew where they were going – back to the stream in Thorney Dyke where the body of Lukasz Slaboszewski still lay undetected. When they arrived, all three of them got out of the car and placed Chapman’s body beside the Pole’s corpse – confident that no one would ever find either of them.
Intoxicated by her killing spree, Dennehy took refuge in Gary Stretch’s flat in Peterborough, but nevertheless she sensed that John Chapman’s disappearance would be noticed and that the police were likely to investigate it, with every possibility that they would link his disappearance with her in view of their very public arguments. She quickly decided that they were going to need somewhere to hide out in case the police came looking for them.
The couple settled on the home of Robert Moore, who had provided the tarpaulin to transport the bodies the day before. Dennehy knew only too well that he was as much in her thrall as Stretch and Layton, and would literally ‘have done anything for her’, even if that meant harbouring her as a murderer.
On Saturday 30 March, she and Stretch went to stay with Moore in his house in Peterborough – it turned out to be a wise decision because, by the following day, the police had indeed begun a search in earnest to locate the missing John Chapman. One person they visited was Leslie Layton, seeing him first on that Easter Sunday morning and again the following afternoon of Monday 1 April. Still determined to protect Dennehy, he denied knowing anything about Chapman, and told the police he had not seen Dennehy since the previous Wednesday. It was, of course, a pack of lies.
By that time, however, Dennehy and Stretch had decided to remove themselves entirely from Peterborough for a while – not least because the police were actively looking for them both. In the late afternoon of Easter Monday the couple took a trip to King’s Lynn to see Georgina Page, the fourteen-year-old whom Dennehy had confided in before. By now the disappearance of John Chapman had been widely reported and a police search was under way for both Dennehy and Stretch, who were being sought to ‘help the police with their enquiries’.
The notoriety positively delighted Dennehy, who could not resist comparing herself with Bonnie Parker, the American gangster of the Depression era, who along with her partner Clyde Barrow robbed more than a dozen banks in the first years of the 1930s, and who was alleged to have killed seven people. Not that Dennehy thought she was going to end her life in a hail of bullets as Parker had done. Instead, she confessed to the impressionable young Georgina Page that she thought she and Stretch would eventually be caught and go to prison for ‘a long time’. For his part, Gary Stretch told her, ‘My kids are grown up, so I don’t care.’
That night the couple returned to Robert Moore’s house, but, by then, they had decided to leave for another place well known to Stretch – the county town of Hereford on the border of England and Wales, where he was born. The couple had burgled a house in Norfolk on their way back from seeing Georgina Page and, because of his background, Stretch knew a group of criminals in Hereford who would give them money for the electrical goods they had stolen. On the way to see them, Dennehy and Stretch also burgled a house in Herefordshire to increase the amount of money they might make.
In a flat in Kington, about twenty miles from Hereford on the Welsh border, Dennehy and Stretch met the criminals he knew, who did indeed agree to help them sell the stolen property. One of them, named Mark Lloyd, agreed to go with them into the town. The idea was to sell the goods, although Stretch had also thought of a plan to rob one of the local drug dealers.
By then, Dennehy’s appetite for killing had begun to return – and she told Stretch, ‘You’ve had your fun. Now it’s my turn.’ The implication was clear – she intended to kill again, but this time choosing her victims at random. Her fantasy of being Bonnie Parker had overwhelmed her.
Before Dennehy left Kington, however, Stretch took a photograph of her brandishing a huge, jagged knife almost a foot long, while sticking out her tongue as she laughed for the camera. It was not a photograph of a young woman consumed by guilt or remorse. Indeed, shortly after the couple arrived in Hereford in their Vauxhall Astra – with an uncomfortable Mark Lloyd now a passenger in the back – Dennehy took an even more revealing photograph of herself on her mobile phone which shows her grinning at the camera, once again with her mouth open, as if she were about to take part in an adolescent prank.
Her intentions were far worse. This thirty-one-year-old mother of two had decided to kill again – and was depending on her loyal partner, Stretch, to help her find a victim. On the way into Hereford she visited a small store, where the closed circuit television cameras captured her in high spirits, indeed almost a state of euphoria, about what she expected to happen next. Shortly afterwards, Stretch duly fulfilled his promise to her to help her find a victim by driving them to a secluded, wooded part of the county town where owners often walked their dogs.
In fact it was Stretch who spotted her next victim, a retired fireman called Robin Bereza, aged sixty-three, who on that Tuesday afternoon of 2 April 2013 had decided to take his dog for a walk instead of going jogging. Stretch may have asked Dennehy – ‘Will he do?’ – but what is not in doubt is that he pulled up the Astra some little way behind Bereza, no doubt so that Dennehy could attack him from behind.
No sooner had the car come to a stop than Dennehy jumped out of the passenger side, ran up behind the unsuspecting retired fireman and stabbed him in the back. She then stabbed him a second time in the upper right arm.
When he turned to face her Bereza asked, ‘What on earth are you doing?’
‘I want to hurt you, I
am going to fucking kill you,’ Dennehy told him.
The fireman responded by trying to fight her off, kicking out at her with his legs, and starting to run away. Dennehy pursued him, but not for long, as another car suddenly turned into this quiet road in Hereford.
Stretch had been driving the Astra slowly behind Dennehy as the attack took place, and he beckoned her to get back into it. She calmly did so – and smiled at the driver of the car that had just arrived.
Meanwhile Bereza was lying on the ground, in great pain from the serious injuries she had inflicted on him. The deep wound to his back penetrated the chest wall and had both bruised his lung and fractured a rib, while the other stab wound to his right arm shattered the shoulder blade and fractured his arm. He only survived the injuries because of the rapid response of the local paramedics and medical staff who treated him.
Dennehy’s appetite for murder was not quenched by her attack on Bereza, however, and she encouraged Stretch to find her another victim near by, which he duly did, driving her to a cul-de-sac next to a path also used by dog-walkers and close to where his grandmother used to live. Once again Stretch spotted a potential victim walking away from their Astra down the path. He was John Rogers, a fifty-six-year-old man, not in the best of health, who was also walking his dog.
Once again Dennehy leapt out of the car and stabbed her victim from behind without any warning – or hesitation. Then, when he turned round, she stabbed him repeatedly in the chest, pushing him backwards as she did so. When Rogers finally fell over, she continued to stab him relentlessly in both the front and back in a frenzy of bloodlust, clearly determined to kill him. She stabbed him no fewer than thirty times, and when she finally stopped she left Rogers motionless on the path, picked up his dog and walked back to the car – clearly convinced that she had killed him.
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