Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
Serial killer’s still trying to snare men.. from her cell
Says Susanna Reid
in 2013 and police launched a nationwide hunt after the bodies were found in ditches in Cambridgeshire.
She and accomplice Gary Stretch drove 140 miles to Hereford, where she stabbed dog walkers Robin Bereza and John Rogers, who survived.
CCTV footage from a Hereford station after she was finally caught, 40 minutes after her attack on the pair, showed her looking carefree – and she even compares her murders to “going down for a Sunday roast”.
Susanna, who had access to all the police footage, said: “Those tapes from the custody suite are mindblowing.
“Here is a woman who might at that point have murdered five people, because two men were at that stage fighting for their lives in hospital.
“You’d expect a wave of realisation coming over her that she is now going to face justice for this horrific brutality. Not at all. Not a moment of it. She doesn’t show any remorse, she’s revelling in what she’s done. It’s awful to because it’s not even as if she’s just being cold, she’s standing there playing with her hair, flirting with the officers. She’s trying to get them on her side. You can almost see they’re reluctantly drawn in as well.
“It’s appalling behaviour but a sign of the psychopath that she is.”
Susanna met former friends of Dennehy in Hertfordshire. She also spoke to her former partner, now a single parent to their two children.
Vicki Greenwood, her best friend at school, tells how Dennehy’s behaviour changed in her teens and they were smoking and drinking from 14. She says: “She’d get geeky boys to do things for her, like doing her homework.
“If they didn’t she was very open with giving someone a slap.
She was very manipulative.” Another girl, named only as Marika, says Dennehy told her she would be “better off dead” and offered to help her do the deed.
Marika says: “There were times when the bullying was bad. I could’ve taken my life. She’d be like, ‘You’re better off dead’, or, ‘I can help if you want, you should just kill yourself ’.”
Dennehy ran away from home at 15 to be with boyfriend John Treanor, who was 21. He said she became a drug-loving tearaway and having her first child at 17 did not slow her down.
They split up for a year and having a second child during their reconciliwatch ation did not change things. Recalling the day he decided to leave, he says: “She’s come round with pins in her arms, you know, needles, and just shut the door and put her back against it and sat on the floor. She pulled out a knife and just went ‘bang’ in the floor and ‘I could kill someone’.”
John would like to see the death penalty brought back for her, adding angrily: “She is not my children’s mother – she gave birth to them, that’s all. She is the donor, she gave them over. I don’t really want my kids to have anything to do with this woman.” After they split in 2009, Dennehy moved to Peterborough and was living in a bedsit owned by victim Kevin Lee. She acted as his enforcer to make sure people paid on time and did odd jobs in return for her rent. It was then that she started plotting to kill him and her flatmates, before driving off to try to kill more men at random.
After working on the documentary, Susanna considers the killer, now 36, to be a truly “toxic mix”.
She says: “Drugs, violence, extreme sexual behaviour, murder, attempted murder. She’s just a thoroughly 100% nasty piece of work, isn’t she?
“She used men, she manipulated them, she threatened them, but she has also got this kicker, which is that she’s charismatic, she’s magnetic, she’s compelling. That is an absolutely toxic mix in this psychopathic woman.”
Senior detective Martin Brunning, who led the case, concludes: “She is the most dangerous woman I’ve ever met and the most dangerous woman in the British prison system.”
Joanne Dennehy: Serial Killer is on ITV, tonight at 9pm.