Lifers

by Geoffrey Wansell

  Miraculously, Rogers survived, although once again principally due to the expert medical treatment he received rapidly after the attack. Dennehy’s stab wounds to his chest, abdomen and back had left him with both lungs collapsed and his bowel perforated and exposed. The stab wounds had been delivered with such force that Dennehy had broken nine of his ribs, as well as wounding his hands and arms, which resulted in irreparable nerve damage.

  Given that both these vicious, unwarranted attacks took place in broad daylight in an English county town on an ordinary Tuesday afternoon, it is hardly surprising that Dennehy and Stretch were caught by the police minutes after the second attack on the defenceless and unsuspecting guitarist and musician John Rogers, who was now so badly injured that he would never regain the dexterity he needed to be able to play his guitar again.

  Yet the thin young woman with a penchant for wearing woolly hats, sticking her pierced tongue out and sniggering for the camera showed not a single trace of remorse for her killing spree as the truth about her murders was steadily revealed in the days after her arrest on 2 April 2013.

  Instead, she gloried in her attempt to kill two innocent passers-by that afternoon. She even joked with the police officers that detained her, saying, ‘It could be worse – I could be fat,’ before telling one of the officers, ‘You’re a decent copper, I’m a crap criminal – you will read about it in the newspapers shortly. You will think, “That’s the girl I arrested – I know her.”’

  Extrovert and unashamed to the last, and only too aware of her status as one of a tiny number of female serial killers, Dennehy performed what one officer later describe as a ‘bizarre chicken walk’ at the police station as she hunched her shoulders and clucked, before claiming, moments later, ‘I’m The Incredible Hulk.’

  When Mark Lloyd, the man she and Stretch had bullied into staying in the back of the Vauxhall Astra that day as they looked for potential victims, told the police about the couples’ boast that they had left ‘other bodies’ where ‘no one will ever find them’, the police in Peterborough extended their search and discovered not only the two bodies in Thorney Dike, but also the body of Kevin Lee in Newborough.

  Within a month, Joanna Christine Dennehy had been charged with three murders and two attempted murders, along with her seven-foot-three-inch accomplice Gary Stretch, and their associates Leslie Layton and Robert Moore, who had helped them dispose of the bodies and harboured them when they were known fugitives from the law.

  During her time on remand in custody awaiting trial, it emerged that Dennehy had been in and out of prison, on short sentences, in the years running up to the Peterborough murders, mainly for offences that involved dishonesty, although she had been convicted early in 2012 of ‘possessing a bladed article in a public place’, namely razor blades, and later that year had been given a ‘community order’, that did not involve imprisonment, for an assault that caused actual bodily harm.

  When Dennehy was examined by a psychiatrist during her remand, he diagnosed her as suffering from ‘severe emotionally unstable personality disorder’ and from ‘antisocial personality disorder’. Significantly, however, he also suggested that she suffered from the rare condition of paraphilia sadomasochism, a disorder which led her to prefer sexual activity that involved the infliction of pain or humiliation or bondage.

  In the psychiatrist’s words, she suffered from ‘psychopathic disorder, that is a personality disorder characterised by superficial charm, callous disregard for others, pathological lying and a diminished capacity for remorse.’

  At one point Dennehy baldly confessed to him, ‘I killed to see if I was as cold as I thought I was. Then it got moreish and I got a taste for it.’

  But Dennehy did not rely on any psychiatric excuse for her actions when she appeared at an arraignment hearing at the Central Criminal Court in Old Bailey on 18 November 2013. She had travelled down from Cambridgeshire, where she was being held on remand before her trial.

  Once in the dock, however, she suddenly, without warning, and to the astonishment of her own legal team, announced that she was pleading guilty to all the charges. When her startled barrister, Nigel Lickley QC, asked for more time to consult with his client, Dennehy interrupted him, saying, ‘I’m not coming back down here again just to say the same stuff. It’s a long way to come to say the same thing I have just said.’

  But, on 28 February 2014, Dennehy did stand in the dock of the Central Criminal Court once again, this time alongside Gary Stretch, Leslie Layton and Robert Moore to hear Mr Justice Spencer pass sentence on them all. Her three accomplices, two of whom had pleaded not guilty at the trial, had been found guilty by a jury of the charges against them, and now all four would learn their fate. Typically, Dennehy was wearing a pink Adidas sweatshirt and grey tracksuit bottoms, much like the outfit she wore in the notorious mobile phone photograph of her brandishing a huge jagged knife with handcuffs at her belt which had been taken while she was on the run.

  Mr Justice Spencer did not mince his words. ‘You are a cruel, calculating, selfish and manipulative serial killer,’ he told Dennehy as she sat in the dock opposite him. He then told the Court that she had written a letter to him ‘claiming to feel remorse’ for the stabbing of Robin Bereza and John Rogers in Hereford.

  ‘I have no hesitation in rejecting that suggestion,’ he told her firmly.

  From the dock Dennehy shouted, ‘Bollocks!’

  Then she reverted to smirking and occasionally laughing out loud throughout the judge’s remarks to the defendants.

  That did nothing to deter the Mr Justice Spencer. Referring to the Court of Appeal’s decision, just two weeks earlier, that a ‘whole life’ term was acceptable under English law, Mr Justice Spencer then pointed out to her that there was only one sentence for murder – life imprisonment. Therefore the only question for him was whether the seriousness of her offences was ‘exceptionally high’, which would warrant her spending the rest of her life in prison.

  ‘You have shown no genuine remorse,’ the judge pointed out. ‘Quite the reverse. In the letter you have written to me you say in terms that you do not feel any remorse for the murders and to claim otherwise would be a lie.’ He then went on: ‘The only reason you can offer for the attempted murders is “drunken cruelty, plain and simple, compelled by my lack of respect for human life”. As I have already made clear, I reject your protestations of remorse for these attempted murders.’

  Then, in the most chilling moment of the trial, Mr Justice Spencer added: ‘It is very significant, in my judgement, that from a single stab wound to the heart to kill your first victim you progressed by the end to the frenzied attack on John Rogers when you so nearly killed him, stabbing him more than thirty times. You told the psychiatrist you saw the killings as a kind of fetish and that you were sadistic.’

  ‘I am quite satisfied,’ he went on, ‘that the seriousness of these murders is exceptionally high and that the element of just punishment and retribution requires the imposition of a whole life order.’

  Mr Justice Spencer then sentenced Gary Stretch to life imprisonment, though with a minimum term of nineteen years.

  ‘Thank you very much,’ Stretch muttered from the dock.

  Leslie Layton was sentenced to fourteen years’ imprisonment for preventing the ‘lawful and decent burial of bodies’ and perverting the course of justice, while Robert Moore, who had pleaded guilty to the two charges he faced for harbouring Dennehy and Stretch while they were on the run, was given three years’ imprisonment. ‘It is clear to me from the pre-sentence repor
t that you do not fully understand even now just how serious your conduct was,’ the judge told him.

  Layton was sitting behind Stretch in the dock and when the sentencing was completed, Dennehy leaned across the man she always called ‘Gaz’ and said to him in a stage whisper, ‘I may be taking your life sentence but you and Stretch are idiots.’

  It was a theme that she was to repeat more than once in the first month of her sentence, insisting just a few weeks after the end of her trial that Layton was also a killer. Unusually for a spree killer who pleaded guilty to her murders, Dennehy proved anxious to explain herself to the world.

  In two letters to Gary Stretch’s ex-wife Julie Gibbons, who was fifty-three, Dennehy claimed that her friend and accomplice Leslie Layton killed John Chapman in a ‘pathetic attempt to impress’ her.

  The extraordinary six-page letter was handed to the Daily Mirror by Gibbons, who handed it on to the police.

  Dennehy wrote, ‘Dear Julie, thank you for your letter and your honesty. I know I am portrayed as a person without feeling but it’s not the case. I will repay your honesty shortly. My crimes were not impulse nor were they without reason.’

  She claimed that her murder of her lover and landlord Kevin Lee was planned, but she did not reveal her motive. Dennehy explained, ‘Gaz was there in the room for the first one, I told him what I was going to do but not why, I told him to leave over and over before I did it. I told him to leave after, my path was set.’

  ‘My crimes Julie were vengeance,’ Dennehy added. ‘I knew what the outcome would be, I tried my best to make sure Gary was away from me before I set about the killings. I got him a place to stay and a job. I got him a car which he insisted was in my name.’

  But that was not all. Dennehy also said that she had broken off all contact with Stretch after their imprisonment, even though he had written to her five times declaring his undying love. She told his ex-wife, ‘I replied to him once since your first letter, telling him how sick it made me feel to hear he claimed I was a threat to you or your family. I informed him that out of respect for you … I no longer wish for contact, which led to another begging letter.’

  In an earlier letter to Gibbons, Dennehy had said that writing ‘an apology would be pointless’, but denied that she forced Stretch to help her by threatening his family. He had told his ex-wife that he did not know why he had become involved in the killings, but that Dennehy was ‘evil’ and ‘had control over him’, while he was also frightened she would harm Gibbons and their three children.

  Then Dennehy added her reasons for breaking contact with Stretch. ‘There is something you must understand, I am incapable of harming females or children, I think that’s why his lie cut so deep.’

  That did not prevent her from confessing that ‘Killing Kevin Lee was planned … I kept my mouth shut in the police station, I did not take the stand either because Gary said it would harm him and no doubt he was right. He knew if I were to take the stand and lies were being chucked at me I’d lose my temper and tell it how it is, regardless of the outcome. Gary knows I react badly to lies.’

  For her part, Julie Gibbons explained after receiving the letters from Dennehy, ‘I’m surprised to say this but I believe every word she says. Police should investigate the letter. The families of the victims will want to know exactly what happened. It won’t take any of the pain away but I hope this confession will help them get a little bit of closure. It certainly helped me. I feel like a massive weight has lifted off my shoulders. She obviously thought out what she was going to write very carefully.’

  In the second letter, written from high-security women’s prison Bronzefield, in Surrey, Dennehy insisted that Stretch ‘went along’ with her on his own but added, ‘I do not wish to cause you pain, I respect and admire the strength it has taken you to survive. I took the coward’s way out by not being able to restrain my hate. Under different circumstances I would have liked to have met you, maybe we could have balanced each other out … Please stay strong and have faith in yourself, respectfully, Joanna.’

  Then she added a PS. ‘Again I am sorry. God I can’t tell you how much I admire you!!! For your sake alone I wish I had never met Gary Stretch.’

  Julie Gibbons was not the only person to pass judgement on Dennehy after her conviction and sentence. Dennehy’s younger sister Maria told the BBC that she was a ‘bright, happy and bookish’ child, who showed no evidence whatever of violent behaviour. ‘Parents always blame themselves, but they were a great mum and dad,’ she went on. ‘My sister turned into a monster.’

  For their part, Dennehy’s parents, Kevin, a security guard, aged fifty-six, and Kathleen, fifty-one, had lost contact with their daughter in the fifteen years before her arrest. But their other daughter Maria spoke for them when she said, ‘It has ruined my mum completely. If you can imagine being a mother and giving birth to someone who causes a family so much hurt. It is indescribable how she is feeling … from one day to the next all she ever talks about is the families that Joanna has caused this to.’

  Meanwhile, the father of Dennehy’s two daughters, John Treanor, aged thirty-seven, who had remarried since his time with her, told the Daily Express, ‘Jo is evil, pure and simple, that is why I took the girls as far away from her as possible.’ He also said that their elder daughter, aged thirteen, was having difficulty coming to terms with her mother’s killings and was afraid she might end up like her. ‘She’s seen her mother’s face all over the news, the papers and internet. Now she’s struggling to come to terms with it all.’

  Treanor then told ITV’s This Morning programme that his former partner should face the death penalty because she will ‘lord it up in prison’ and that life with her was ‘like living with the devil’.

  Significantly, he added, ‘I think the punishment, a whole life sentence, is not enough – not for what she’s done to those people … It should be capital punishment as far as I’m concerned … There are certain crimes that need to be punished in the right way and just serving life in prison and having your TV and your nice bunk and your warm radiator and your three meals a day, she’s going to enjoy it, she’s going to love it.’

  John Treanor’s conclusion about Joanna Dennehy is reflected time after time in the reactions to the dreadful crimes that lead to a whole life sentence, and it precisely encapsulates the argument that runs throughout this book – is being incarcerated in a prison cell for sixty years or more better or worse than the death penalty?

  After all, there is no chance that Dennehy was innocent of her three murders – no chance that that an innocent woman might be put to death – for she admitted them in open court.

  Dennehy’s whole life sentence underlines the dilemma for a society, its judges and its legislators over whether it is indeed either ‘justifiable’ or ‘human’ treatment to sentence any man or woman to spend more than half a century in prison.

  The former President of the Supreme Court in England, and a former Lord Chief Justice, Lord Phillips of Worth Matravers, suggested in 2006 – when he was still Lord Chief Justice – that judges had been pushed into longer and longer sentences in England and Wales by public opinion and politicians.

  ‘But I sometimes wonder whether, in a hundred years’ time,’ he said, ‘people will be as shocked by the length of sentences we are imposing as we are by some of the punishments in the eighteenth century.’

  Is the whole life term the modern equivalent of the rack – rendering exquisite pain over ever-increasing periods of time? And can that truly be justified?

  5


  ‘I am bored and it was something to do’

  Gary Vintner, Ian McLoughlin and Lee Newell

  The courts of England and Wales have been struggling with the issue of the morality of whole life sentences for murder since 2003, when the Criminal Justice Act formalised their use by the judiciary in the wake of Parliament’s decision to remove the power to instate them from politicians and, in particular, from the Home Secretary.

  In Scotland, the law was changed in 2001 to ensure that a fixed minimum period should be the case whenever a life sentence was imposed – to bring Scottish law into line with the European Convention on Human Rights. That is certainly not the position in England and Wales.

  In the past few years the struggle in England and Wales has become increasingly intense, with three convicted murderers sentenced to whole life terms – Douglas Vinter, Jeremy Bamber and Peter Moore – conducting a battle against them in the European Court of Human Rights.

  Meanwhile, two others, Ian McLoughlin, who was sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum period of forty years, and Lee Newell, who had a whole life sentence, took their appeal to the Court of Appeal in England and Wales. These two sets of appeals encapsulate the arguments over whether life should mean life.

  Let us begin with Vinter, Bamber and Moore, who are particularly critical of whole life terms. Vinter, who is now in his early forties, cannot accept being locked up until he dies, irrespective of his behaviour or remorse.

  ‘I’m young and fit,’ he said in 2012, ‘and I’ve maybe got another fifty years of life as a category A prisoner. Torture every single day. I actually pray for a heart attack or cancer.’

  In another letter in 2012, Vinter also pointed out the irony that his whole life sentence meant that he could commit any offence whatever – including murder – while in prison as there is no further punishment available to the courts to deter him.