Joanna Christine Dennehy was born in St Albans on August 29, 1982, into a settled family, and left home at fifteen. She had two daughters, a long history of drink, drugs and self-harm, and a record for assault and criminal damage. By 2013 she was working for a landlord, Kevin Lee, showing tenants around properties in Peterborough.
Between March 19 and March 29, 2013, she killed three men: Lukasz Slaboszewski, a thirty-one-year-old she had lured by text message; John Chapman, a fifty-six-year-old navy veteran who lived in one of the houses; and Kevin Lee himself, whom she stabbed and then dressed in a black sequinned dress and left face down in a ditch. She dumped all three bodies in ditches around Peterborough and Newborough with the help of two men, Gary Stretch and Leslie Layton.
She then went on the road. On March 2 in Hereford, with Stretch driving, she got out of the car and stabbed two men she had never seen before, Robin Bereza and John Rogers, in the street in daylight, telling police afterwards that she had wanted to see how it felt. Both survived. She was arrested in Hereford three days later.
She pleaded guilty to three murders and two attempted murders at the Old Bailey in November 2013, laughing in the dock, and in February 2014 Mr Justice Spencer imposed a whole-life order, saying she had killed for no reason beyond her own enjoyment. She was the third woman in England to receive one, after Myra Hindley and Rose West.