Joanne Dennehy: The woman who murdered men ‘for fun’

Although exactly what happened between them in the lounge area of a house in Rolleston Garth, Peterborough, may never be known, he ended up being repeatedly stabbed in the chest and dumped in a wheelie bin.

He is thought to have been murdered on 19 March, although his body was not discovered until days later.

Kevin Lee and Mr Chapman were murdered 10 days later on 29 March – Good Friday.

Mr Lee, 49, of Fletton, ran a lettings business in Peterborough and Dennehy looked after his properties in return for rent-free accommodation at his house in Bifield, where Mr Chapman and Leslie Layton also lived.

“Her work was her rent,” said Det Ch Insp Brunning. But their relationship went further, at least in Mr Lee’s eyes.

On the day he was murdered, Mr Lee bought four CDs at HMV in Peterborough before heading to Rollerston Garth to see Dennehy. Two of the CDs were for his wife, Cristina. The other two – one featuring Bobby Womack, the other by the band The XX – were for Dennehy.

What he might not have known was that Dennehy was furious with him. Before the killing, Stretch told his housemate Carla White how “Mr Lee hadn’t paid Dennehy for work she had done on the house and she was getting stressed and he was harassing her”.

“He said ‘she will kill him’,” Ms White said.

“I said ‘don’t be silly, she would not do anything like that’.”

But she did. When Mr Lee’s body was found by a farmer in a ditch near Newborough, he was dressed in a black sequin dress with his buttocks exposed.

This was a form of “final humiliation”, a jury was told. Dennehy, as consultant forensic psychiatrist Dr Frank Farnham found when he assessed her after her arrest at HMP Bronzefield in Surrey, has the condition paraphilia sadomasochism.

Sadomasochism is a preference for sexual activity which involves the infliction of pain or humiliation or bondage.