Born in 1982, Joanne Dennehy was described by her mother as a “bright girl” with big, beautiful blue eyes, who grew up in a good home in the affluent town of Harpenden, Hertfordshire. So what would lead this bright, young girl to grow up to be a deadbeat mother of two who suddenly went on a murderous spree in 2013?
Peterborough Ditch Murders
The Killing Spree Begins
Kevin Lee’s family reported him missing on March 29th, 2013. Detective Martin Brunning of the Cambridgeshire Police was the lead investigator and said from the very beginning he had a gut feeling that something wasn’t right, which was solidified when Kevin Lee’s car was found in the countryside of Cambridgeshire, England. 48 year old Kevin Lee, a beloved husband and father of two, lived in Peterborough and managed properties for a living. But Kevin had a secret – he was having an affair with one of his tenants.
The morning after Kevin was reported missing – March 30, 2013 -, a man walking his dog found the body of Kevin Lee face down and nude from the waist down. He was stabbed to death in the chest and neck, and his body had been deliberately posed in a way to degrade him – with a black sequin dress on the top half of his body.
As soon as Brunning observed the manner in which Kevin Lee was disposed of, he knew that this crime was personal and not consistent with that of a stranger killing, so he began digging into who Kevin associated with. Not long after the investigation began, cell phone data came back which placed one of Kevin’s tenants in the vicinity of his burnt out vehicle – 30 year old Joanne Dennehy. The data also placed Gary Richards, a/k/a Gary Stretch, a 7 foot 3 man with a rap sheet of burglaries under his belt.
Joanne, Gary, and another friend, Mark Lloyd, who was later deemed to have been forced to go with them, then drove 140 miles to Hereford where Joanne decided on a whim to jump out of the car to randomly attack and leave for dead two men walking their dogs – 64 year old Robin Bereza and 56 year old John Rogers. All because Joanne had simply “wanted a man with a dog”. The attacks happened within twenty minutes of each other.
Robin Bereza, a retired fireman, was her first victim, and he was attacked from behind and stabbed over 30 times. Joanne fled the scene after Bereza fought back, then he walked the half mile (UPHILL – holy shit) back to his home to call for help. He passed a surgeon’s office on the way to his home, but didn’t want to stop because he just wanted to get home to see his wife first since they had just celebrated their 36th anniversary the day before.
John Rogers was next – he was also attacked from behind and stabbed over 40 times, and then Joanne stole his dog. A passerby came upon him and called for help. Upon getting back into the vehicle with John’s dog, all she said was, “Hey, I got a new dog.” Both were airlifted to the hospital where they were both in intensive care for several days. Joanne’s demeanor was described by the victims as “matter of fact” and completely devoid of emotion.
Both men attribute their lives being saved to expert medical teams who attended to them, but they both still suffer emotional and psychological effects. John Rogers, a musician, suffered nerve damage to his hand and arm afterward and was no longer able to play his guitar.
Arrest and Conviction
However, after being on the run for two days, Joanne Dennehy was apprehended shortly after she randomly attacked the two dog walkers. Police had been tracking them by using CCTV footage taken of Joanne as she and Gary drove across the country – stopping to buy cigarettes and snacks at service stations. Gary Stretch made a run for it, but was captured later on. Upon arriving at the jail to be booked, Joanne was told that she was being booked for suspiscion of murder and attempted murder, to which her reaction was to just crack a shit-eating grin and ask what happened to her new dog, then say, “it could be worse. I could be big, black, fat, and ugly”. Then she proceeded to joke around and flirt with the officers and admitted that she had drunk half of a bottle of whiskey.
The next day was when Detective Brunning received a call about two bodies side by side in a ditch, 10 miles from where Kevin Lee’s body had been discovered first. In the documentary, Brunning says that his reaction to the news was, “Crikey, where is this going?” The bodies belonged to Lukasz Slaboszewski, a 31 year old Polish national who worked as a builder, and John Chapman, a 56 year old veteran, who was a housemate with Joanne Dennehy.
Lukasz had just met Joanna a couple of days before he was murdered. On March 28, 2013, she sent him several suggestive text messages and lured him with the promise of sex. The last CCTV footage of him showed him withdrawing cash from an ATM before he headed to Joanne’s house. When he arrived at her house, Joanne stabbed him in the heart with a pocket knife. Then she stored his body in a wheelie bin until she could dispose of it and showed it off to a 14 year old girl. She also took pictures of it so she could show it off to others.
John Chapman had served in the Royal Navy and was well-liked by everyone, although he suffered from alcoholism. John had been drunk and high when Joanne attacked and stabbed him six times in the neck, severing the carotid artery, and the chest, hitting the heart twice. It is speculated that he could have been attacked while he was sleeping as his blood alcohol content was four times the legal limit.
John had previously referred to Joanne as “the mad woman” when speaking to other tenants in the complex and had said that she told him that she would get him out by any means. When police searched his home, they found a blood-soaked mattress in the garden as evidence. After John’s murder, Joanne casually called Gary ‘Stretch’ Richards to tell him – “oops, I’ve done it again”. Richards then came to the crime scene with his friend, Leslie Layton, where they helped Joanne dispose of Lukasz and John’s bodies in the ditch at Thorney Dyke. Forensic analysts later found a photo of John’s body on Layton’s phone.
As far as Kevin Lee, he had said in his last conversation with a friend the afternoon of his murder that he had plans to meet up with Joanne later, and she planned to dress him up and rape him. Joanne stabbed Kevin five times in the chest, penetrating his lungs and heart, and there were also defensive wounds to suggest he tried to fight her off. Richards and Layton had also assisted in dumping Kevin’s body and setting his car on fire. After all of the murders, Gary and Joanne visited their friend, Georgina Page, where they bragged about what they had done and how the bodies would never be found.
Joanne told Georgina that she had lubricated Kevin’s bottom and pushed an object into his rectum to make it look like his murder had been part of a sexual act. Joanne was also extremely excited when she saw that the police were looking for her on the news. Georgina Page had been too scared of what they would do to her if she called the police. While they were on the run, they were housed by Robert Moore who was also aware of what they had done.
Minutes after Joanne was arrested for the murder of three innocent men and the attempted murder of two others, she laughed and said, “Murder and attempted murder is nothing. It’s like going down for a Sunday roast…..easy.”
Friends of Joanne described her as having a magnetic personality which drew men to her. The description is hard to match with the mugshot of her post-arrest – with scars up and down her arms and stomach and a laissez faire demeanor about what she had done.
In Joanne’s police interview, she was completely silent and subdued and only replied “no comment” to the questions she was asked. She was immediately deemed to be a psychiatric risk and was taken to a mental health unit for evaluation where she was diagnosed with psychopathy with characteristics including having a charming nature on the outside, being a pathological liar, having no regard for others, and showing zero remorse for her actions. She told her psychiatrist that she was sadistic and saw the murders as a fetish.
Detective Brunning fully anticipated that Joanne would enter a not guilty plea, and then they would proceed to trial where some explanations would come out in regard to her actions. However, when the judge asked how she would plead, Joanne shouted “Guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty!…” over and over. Joanne’s legal counsel were in shock at the last minute change in her plea.
At 31 years old, Joanne was one of the three British women to be sentenced to life in prison. She is now serving her time in Bronzefield Prison where she has attempted to carry out escape plans and has committed violence against other prisoners. Detective Brunning described her as the most violent woman in the prison system. Gary Stretch went to trial and was found guilty of two counts of attempted murder and three counts of preventing lawful burial and sentenced to life in prison with a minimum of nineteen years. Leslie Layton was sentenced to fourteen years for two counts of preventing lawful burial and preventing the course of justice by lying to the police. Robert Moore was sentenced to three years for two counts of assisting an offender.
Joanne’s Early Life & Leading Up To Murder
Joanne’s best friend from secondary school, Vicky Greenwood, described Joanne as having a dark side starting from when she was about 14 years old. She would manipulate people to do things for her, such as her homework, and get into physical altercations with them if they didn’t do it. She would get close to people and make them feel special, but if they didn’t conform to what she wanted them to do, she would completely turn on them.
Another former school friend was the subject of Joanne’s charm and manipulation, until Joanne suddenly began bullying her – saying that she would be waiting for her outside or somewhere on her walk home from school to “give her what was coming for her”. Joanne also told her to go ahead and commit suicide, because everyone would be better off without her around. She said she thought that Joanne’s bullying was like a game to her.
Her family described her as a bookworm and girly girl, until she met John Treanor who was 6 years older than her when she was fifteen years old. She ran away from home to be with him and they were together for the next ten years. In the documentary, John Treanor says that it is her family’s belief that she changed because her relationship with him was a “load of crap” because he made his intentions with her clear from the beginning. John stated that he was aware that the age of consent was sixteen and that they had no sexual relationship until after she turned sixteen.
So, basically according to him, he did everything right. Joanne became pregnant at the age of seventeen, however, this was unplanned according to John. He said that during her pregnancy, Joanne never smoked or drinked, but everything changed after their daughter was born. As soon as she got home from the hospital with her baby, she wanted to get high and drink, and she was very stand-offish towards their baby with no real maternal instinct. She drank up to 2 liters of vodka per day and would still be walking around.
Then she began cheating on John while using cocaine and other drugs. She was unable to cope with having a relationship and a daughter, so she began to attempt to numb it by self medicating. John left her for the first time, but then shortly got back together with her. She had started to become violent, and the violence increased drastically after they had their second child. It was when Joanne started sticking pins through her arm and stabbed a knife into the floor saying, “I could just kill someone” that John decided to take their children and leave Joanne for good. According to John, life in prison should not be punishment enough for her, and he believes that she deserves the death penalty, stating that she is not the mother of their children, she just birthed them.
After John left Joanne, she moved to Peterborough where John Chapman was her housemate. According to police, the reason this all happened was during Joanne’s relationship with Kevin Lee, he would use her as intimidation to do his “dirty work” by physically threatening and assaulting tenants into paying rent or moving out. Carla White was one of the neighbors that was a victim of her assaults. When she first introduced herself to Joanne, Joanne immediately put her hand around Carla’s throat and only let go when Carla grabbed a hammer out of her bag to defend herself. Carla described hearing certain disturbing details about Joanne’s sex life, such as her waking up a man by carving into his back because “she wanted to see what it felt like” and then her wanting to be punched in the face during sex.
Carla mentioned that she warned Kevin about their relationship, saying that “if he played with fire, he was going to get burned.” Kevin’s sister-in-law stated that Kevin was most likely manipulated into a relationship with Joanne, and Kevin’s son said that his father probably became a victim because of his nature to see the best in people – always giving everyone a chance, seeing everyone as equal, and helping others.
In April 2019, Joanne’s daughter – 19 year old Shianne Treanor – was interviewed and disclosed that while she misses her mother, she knows that her mother deserves to die in prison. Shianne was born when Joanne was only 17. Her parents tried to stay together off and on, even having a second child, even though Joanne started going down the wrong path – drinking copious amounts of alcohol, self harming, and having casual sex.
One night when Shianne was 5 years old, Joanne went out drinking and sent a man over to their home in the middle of the night to beat up John. Joanne would go on drinking benders and leave for several days to months at a time, usually returning home with black eyes, cuts all over her, and hickeys from her cheating escapades. Then huge arguments between her parents would ensue for hours. Shianne says her mother went from a doting mom to a “man-hating psychopath”.
Finally, John left Joanne after the last straw – Joanne stabbing a six inch knife into their carpet. Shianne was only 9 years old at the time her father took her and moved to Derbyshire. Shianne was at a sleepover at a friend’s house on the day her dad called her to tell her that her mother had murdered someone. From then on, her dad banned her from getting on the Internet to try and protect her. However, when she was 13 years old, she searched for her mom on the Internet against her dad’s wishes and found out the horrific truth.
Closure
From then on, Shianne became depressed and scared that she would turn out like her mom. She even had to change schools when more and more people began to find out who she really was. When Shianne turned 18, she decided to go directly to the source and write her mother a letter to try to find out why she had gone on a murdering spree. She describes her letter as emotionless, because she had assumed her mother hated her. She didn’t expect to receive a letter back from her mom explaining that she wanted to be a part of her life and how much she loved her.
On her first visit to see her mom in prison, Shianne was incredibly nervous and shaking as she went into the prison. On their visit, they both cried together and Shianne asked the question everyone wanted to know – why? Joanne apologized to her – something that Shianne had always wanted her to do since her mom’s actions would cause her to miss out on so many important events in her life. Although she never gave a real explanation, Joanne has admitted that she killed the men “for fun” and that “she got a taste for it”. Shianne tries to remember the good times she and her mom shared – they loved to curl up on the couch and read books together, go for walks, and Joanne did art projects with Shianne and her friends, even letting them paint artwork all over the walls. She described her mom as a “big kid”.
Now, Shianne realizes that she could never turn out like her mother because she is her own person and her mother never had much of an impact on her since she wasn’t around for so long. She said that in some ways her mother ruined her life just because she is tied to a murderer. Shianne has apologized to the families of the victims and wishes that her mom would give some sort of explanation for what she did.
