On New Year's Day 2000, at their home in Rustington, West Sussex, Dena Thompson asked her husband Richard whether she could tie him up and blindfold him for a sexual game. He agreed. She left the room and came back with a baseball bat and a knife. Bleeding heavily from the head, he worked his hands free, fought her off and forced her to drop the knife, at which point she broke down and said, "It's all been a lie. I've spent all your money." She left the house. The next day an estate agent arrived to value it for sale; she had told him Richard would be away in Florida, where he had a long-planned trip booked. Police came to believe she had meant to kill him and sell the house while everyone assumed he was abroad. She was arrested on January 2.
She admitted the money. Richard Thompson, a BT manager she had met through a newspaper's lonely hearts column and married in 1998, found his accounts emptied, his signature forged and his credit cards run up. Detectives who traced her former partners found that she had taken money from each of them. The violence she denied: she said he had attacked her when he discovered the fraud and that she had fought back. At Lewes Crown Court in 2000 the jury accepted that she had acted in self-defense and acquitted her of attempted murder. She was sentenced to three years and nine months on fifteen counts of deception, which she had admitted, for money taken from Thompson and two other men.
The deception had a long history. She was born Dena Holmes in Hendon, north London, in 1960, the daughter of a man later described as a retired prison officer, and moved to Sussex in the 1980s. She married Lee Wyatt in 1984 and persuaded him that he had been paid fifty million pounds for a toy he had patented and that the Mafia was now after him; he spent years living rough to stay out of their way. She had earlier obtained an injunction against him on false claims of assault. Working at the Woolwich Building Society, she moved twenty-three thousand pounds into an account under a false name and tried to lay the theft on Wyatt. She was jailed for it in 1995, for eighteen months according to the Guardian, though other accounts give a shorter term. They divorced in 1997.
Julian Webb met her while she was still Wyatt's wife. He worked in advertising sales for the West Sussex Gazette, and he married her in November 1991 after a courtship of about three months; his mother, Rosemary, later testified that she had warned him against marrying a woman he had known so briefly. Soon after the wedding Dena told him she had cancer, and he gave her his savings of twenty-five thousand pounds for treatment. In 1994 Wyatt resurfaced and got in touch with her at the house in Yapton she shared with Webb. The prosecution's case was that she killed Webb because she feared her two husbands would meet and her double life would come apart.
Webb turned thirty-one in June 1994. For his birthday she cooked him a curry, and he liked his curry very hot, hot enough to hide the taste of the antidepressants she put in it; she also laced his drinks with ground aspirin. As he lay dying, his mother telephoned to wish him a happy birthday and was told he was too unwell to come to the phone. She told Dena to call a doctor. No doctor was called. The next morning Dena was at the Gazette asking how soon she could collect his death-in-service benefit of about thirty-six thousand pounds. She insisted he had killed himself, and the inquest returned an open verdict. She pressed for cremation; Rosemary Webb refused and buried her son in a family plot on Hayling Island, then showed the employer that Dena was not his next of kin, since she had still been married to Wyatt.
That grave made the second investigation possible. After the Lewes acquittal Sussex police reopened Webb's death, and a friend of Dena's came forward to say she had given him to understand that she had put the overdose in a curry. Webb's body was exhumed in October 2001, and fresh tests found a higher level of the drug than the original examination had recorded. She was tried for murder at the Old Bailey and convicted on December 15, 2003. The judge called her "utterly ruthless and without pity"; Detective Chief Inspector Martyn Underhill called her "the most dangerous woman I have ever met." She was sentenced to life, and in December 2007 the High Court set her minimum term at sixteen years, a figure the press reported as an increase.
One man from her past has never been accounted for. After the murder conviction police said they were trying to trace all her former lovers, and that they could not rule out that others had been harmed. Stoyan Kostov, a Bulgarian she had been involved with in the 1970s and 1980s while training as a gymnast in Bulgaria, had been missing since that relationship. A fresh inquiry involving Interpol was launched in 2010, with investigators saying that some sort of incident seemed to have happened in Bulgaria but that they did not know what. Kostov has not been found, and she has never been charged with anything concerning him.
She served her sentence at HMP Send among other prisons, exhibiting artwork through the Koestler Trust, and by 2022 was in an open prison on day release. When the Parole Board took up her case that spring, Richard Thompson said she should stay inside and complained that he had not been told of the hearing; Sean McDonald, the officer who led the murder inquiry, said he believed she would reoffend. On May 23, 2022, the board granted release, noting that she had been deceptive, could hold grudges and had not always controlled her temper, but finding that her progress in custody made her suitable. She left prison in June 2022 on a life license requiring her to disclose new relationships and the vehicles she uses, wear an electronic tag and keep a curfew.