Joanne Dennehy and the Peterborough ditch murders

A retired firefighter was walking his dog along a road in Hereford on the afternoon of 2 April 2013 when a woman got out of a Vauxhall Astra behind him and stabbed him in the back.

He was sixty-three and fit. When he turned round and asked her what on earth she was doing, she told him. "I want to hurt you, I am going to fucking kill you." She stabbed him again, in the arm, and chased him into the road. He kicked out at her. A car pulled up at the junction, waiting to turn, and she stopped. The Astra was creeping along behind her, and the driver beckoned her back in. Before she got in, she looked across at the other driver and smiled.

Her name was Joanne Dennehy. She was thirty-one, and the police were already looking for her. Near Peterborough, more than a hundred miles away, three men were lying in ditches.

To see if I was as cold as I thought I was

Joanne Dennehy, to a psychiatrist

The firefighter survived. A blade had gone through his chest wall and another had shattered his shoulder blade. The judge would later say that without fast hospital treatment his life would have been in danger.

Dennehy was not satisfied. She had set out to kill a man, and she had not managed it. So the driver, Gary Stretch, went looking for another one. He knew Hereford. He pulled into a cul-de-sac beside a path that dog walkers used, near where his grandmother had lived.

The second man was fifty-six and a keen guitarist. He had gone a few yards down the path when she stabbed him in the back. When he turned, she kept going. She pushed him backwards, stabbing him all the way, and when he fell she stabbed him front and back. It was, the judge said, "a relentless and frenzied attack". He was stabbed more than thirty times. Both his lungs collapsed and nine ribs were broken.

She left him for dead, picked up his dog, and walked away. Minutes later she was arrested. She told the officer she thought she had killed him. He lived, but he no longer had the dexterity to play his guitar.

Before they had set off for Hereford, the court found, Dennehy had said that Stretch had had his fun with a burglary that morning, and now she wanted hers.

The first man to die was Lukasz Slaboszewski, a thirty-one-year-old Pole who had come to England in 2005. He had known Dennehy only a matter of days. He texted a friend to say that life was beautiful now that she was his girlfriend.

Some time in the second half of March 2013 she lured him to 11 Rolleston Garth in Peterborough, where she had been living. The judge was sure she brought him there to kill him. She stabbed him once, through the heart, and put his body in a wheelie bin.

Then she did something the judge singled out above almost everything else. She brought a fourteen-year-old girl she had befriended to the house, opened the bin and showed her the body. Dennehy denied it. The judge did not believe her.

She needed a car to move the body. She borrowed money from her landlord, Kevin Lee, and bought a Vauxhall Astra. That evening she and Stretch drove round the countryside outside Peterborough looking for somewhere to leave him. They picked a ditch at Thorney Dyke, near where Stretch used to live. Stretch boasted that nobody would ever find the bodies there.

John Chapman was fifty-six. He had served in the Royal Navy and fallen on hard times through drink, and he lived in a bedsit at 38 Bifield, one of Kevin Lee's houses. Dennehy had just moved in. He told another tenant he was having problems with "the mad woman". She had threatened to get him out of the house by any means.

In the early hours of Good Friday, 29 March, she stabbed him in his own room, once in the neck and five times in the chest. There was no sign he had tried to defend himself. He may have been asleep.

Later that day she killed Kevin Lee. He was forty-eight, a married father who ran a property business, and he had fallen for her. She had told him she had been abused as a child and had killed her own father, none of which was true. He gave her work and a roof. She confided in him about the first murder.

That Friday afternoon he told his best friend she had promised him something sexual when he came round. He went to Rolleston Garth, and she stabbed him five times in the chest. This time there were signs he had fought back.

That night Dennehy, Stretch and a housemate of John Chapman's, Leslie Layton, got rid of the bodies. Kevin Lee was dumped in a ditch at Newborough, dressed in a black sequinned dress of Dennehy's, positioned, the judge was sure, to humiliate him. His car was driven to waste ground at Yaxley and set on fire. Then they went back for John Chapman and left him in the ditch at Thorney Dyke, beside Lukasz Slaboszewski.

Kevin Lee's body was found the next day. The other two were found on 3 April, the day after Hereford.

For the Easter weekend Dennehy and Stretch hid at the home of a Peterborough man, Robert Moore, who was besotted with her. Layton lied to the police about his missing housemate. On the Monday night the pair visited a friend in King's Lynn and talked about the murders as if they were ordinary news. When Dennehy saw on television that she was wanted, the friend told the jury, she was "ecstatic".

The next morning they drove to Hereford.

At the Old Bailey in November 2013 Dennehy pleaded guilty to three murders and two attempted murders. Her sister said later that she did it to stay in control. Stretch and Layton went on trial and were convicted in February 2014. Neither gave evidence.

A psychiatrist found she had severe emotionally unstable and antisocial personality disorders, a psychopathic disorder and a sexual disorder involving pain and humiliation. She told him why she had started. "To see if I was as cold as I thought I was. Then it got moreish and I got a taste for it."

She wrote to the judge to say she felt no remorse for the murders, and that claiming otherwise would be a lie. She said she was sorry about the two men in Hereford. He did not believe that either.

On 28 February 2014 Mr Justice Spencer called her "a cruel, calculating, selfish, and manipulative serial killer". He noted how she had gone from a single blow to Lukasz Slaboszewski's heart to more than thirty in Hereford. He gave her a whole life order. Reports at the time said she smirked and laughed while he spoke. Stretch got life with a minimum of nineteen years. Layton got fourteen years and Moore three.

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Prison did not end the story. Staff at HMP Bronzefield found a written plan in her cell. It involved killing or seriously hurting a female officer, taking her keys and using her finger to beat the biometric locks. Her side called it a doodle. She was kept apart from other prisoners for two years.

She sued, saying the segregation had left her tearful and self-harming. In May 2016 a High Court judge agreed that the paperwork had been wrong, because the Justice Secretary had never signed it off. But he ruled the segregation itself necessary and proportionate, and she got nothing.

In 2019 she was moved to HMP Low Newton in County Durham. Newspapers reported that she had threatened to kill Rose West there and that West was moved. The government denied it, and none of it has been tested in court.

She was a hockey and netball girl from Harpenden whose parents expected her to go to university. She chose men at random to kill for fun. The full story is in our film on Gangland.