True Crime with Rachel Shannon
The Female Serial Killer Who Murdered Men "For Fun": JOANNA DENNEHY
04 Dec 2025
Chapter 1: What is Joanna Dennehy's background and how did she become a serial killer?
Hello everyone, my name is Rachel and welcome back to another true crime video. So today's case is going to be another installment in my Halloween month series all about serial killers. This case is about a dark twisted serial killer who admitted that she killed people for fun.
I wanted to cover this case because I personally had never heard of it, but also because I find female serial killers pretty fascinating. We don't often see women killing for the reasons that are outlined in this case. We typically see women killing for maybe attention, like the nurse, Lucy Letbee.
Women serial killers are oftentimes nurses or women in medical positions of power, whether it be for attention or to make themselves look like heroes if they want to hurt their patients before trying to resuscitate them and look like the hero.
Sometimes women kill for financial gain, like we see in all of these cases popping up of women trying to order hits on their husbands who want to divorce them. But no matter the reason is, I don't think I've seen a case quite as sick and twisted as this one, especially when it comes to female serial killers. This is a case that involves a lot of names. There are a lot of moving parts.
So I tried my best to make it as easy to understand as possible. But if you need to grab a pen and paper to write down names and keep track of everything that's happening as it's happening, then be my guest, because that's what I had to do while researching.
This case is definitely a very interesting one in the way it progressed and how it happened from start to finish, and I'm really looking forward to hearing everybody's thoughts on this one. Okay, so with that being said, let's just jump into today's case because there is a lot to unpack. Joanna Dennehy was born in St.
Albans, Hertfordshire in the United Kingdom on August 29th, 1982 to parents Kevin and Kathleen Dennehy and she was the oldest of two daughters with her baby sister Maria being born two years after Joanna. Kevin, her father, worked as a security guard while Kathleen worked as a grocery store manager. The family raised their two girls in a nice four-bedroom home in Harpenden.
By all accounts, Joanna had a normal, decent, middle-class upbringing. She did well in school growing up, getting along with her teachers and her peers. She was interested in history, but she wasn't too good at math. She was active and loved playing rough and tumble sports like hockey. She loved music, taking private music lessons growing up.
She loved animals, saying that she probably loved dogs more than humans, and that is something I can definitely relate to. Kathleen and Kevin loved their daughters and did everything in their power to give them the best lives possible. They always dreamed of their little Joanna growing up, going to college, and becoming a lawyer.
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Chapter 2: What events led to Joanna Dennehy's first murder?
And I don't think the name of her second daughter has ever been released because I haven't been able to find it. And even the book that I read about this case didn't mention the name. But either way, after the birth of her second child, John said that Joanna continued to show no maternal instinct. She had no interest in looking after her daughters. She wouldn't hug them or kiss them.
She refused to feed them or put them to bed. Once again, after living together and resuming their relationship, Joanna progressively got more out of control. At that point, she started sleeping with tons of random men and women, bringing them home right in front of John and their two daughters. She started getting piercings on her tongue and belly button.
She also got a green Pentagon star tattooed on her right cheek. Then she got another tattoo on her arm that said Licking Legend, which was a reference to her sexuality, if you know what that is supposed to mean. She also started to self-harm, including cutting herself all over her own abdomen. She started sticking pins into her own skin and she would make herself bleed.
She would yell at her kids and make them feel as terrible as possible. According to Cheyenne, she remembers these awful nights from the time that she was as young as five years old. She remembered her mom being gone for days and weeks at a time. She remembered one time when Joanna sent a man over to their home in the middle of the night to try to beat up John.
Joanna would come home with cuts and bites all over her body and sometimes she would have black eyes from getting into fights. Cheyenne remembers Joanna yelling and screaming at John at all hours of the night. She was absolutely out of control and nothing that anybody did could stop her.
This continued for another three years until 2009 when John finally realized that he needed to get his daughters away from this toxic monster. There was one night where Joanna and John got into a massive argument while Joanna was absolutely hammered.
During that night, Joanna suddenly pulled out a six inch serrated dagger from her boot and plunged the knife into the carpet of their home while screaming, I wish I could effing kill someone. At that time, John didn't even really know what Joanna was mad about, but this really scared him. He thought that this was a massive red flag that he just could not ignore.
And he was afraid for the lives of himself and his daughters. So he finally took his daughters away and left the home, moving 140 miles away to Derbyshire. After that, after 12 years of this tumultuous, toxic, draining relationship, John finally cut off contact with Joanna for good. That was the last time that Joanna saw her daughters in over 14 years and I'm so happy for them.
By all accounts, John was a loving father to his daughters and he did his best to raise them in a happy, healthy home. He would later go on to get married to his wife, Vicky, and I believe they are still together to this day.
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Chapter 3: How did Joanna's relationships influence her violent behavior?
But then she tried changing her story and said that their roommate, Leslie Layton, had stabbed John to death, not her. But ultimately, she admitted that she was the one who killed John Chapman in his sleep and that she needed Gary's help.
according to the book i read on this case when she called stretch she was playing the song oops i did it again by britney spears that is a fact that i don't want to believe because it just seems so like ex it seems to be such an exaggeration but knowing joanna and knowing how she conducted herself i believe it i believe that's what really happened then apparently as joanna was leaving the bedroom to wash her hands of the blood that she had on her hands after stabbing john
she bumped into Leslie. At that point, she told Leslie what she had just done to this man's drinking buddy and roommate, but he didn't call for help. He didn't do anything. All he did was go in that room, look at the body of John, and took a photo of John's blood-soaked body lying in that bed before deleting the photo.
Of course, after calling Gary Stretch to say, oops, I did it again, she asked for his help with disposing of his body as well. And not only did Gary Stretch help, but he recruited the help of their other housemate, Leslie Layton. We don't know why Leslie randomly joined in and decided to help, but it can be assumed that it was for the same reason that every other man in Joanna's life helped her.
They were infatuated with her. Gary and Leslie then carried John's body from the bed that he was killed in and placed him in the car to be disposed of. After loading John Chapman's body into the car, they returned back to that same ditch that Gary and Joanna had been to previously, Thorny Dyke, and there they also dumped the body of John Chapman.
Now, at this point, Joanna has now killed two men within the housing that she was renting from Kevin Lee. He knew about one of them and gave her money to hide the body. Again, we don't know for sure if he knew that the body was in his rental property, but he at least knew about it.
At this point, he did know that she killed someone in general because it is thought that she ended up telling him after dumping the body But at this point again, Kevin did not know about the second one and Joanna was set on Kevin not finding out. By Good Friday in 2013, Kevin sent Joanna a happy Easter card which she received at the house that she was living in with John Chapman.
That same evening, Joanna called Kevin and set up a time for them to meet up later that day. At around 2 p.m. that day, Kevin went to an HMV store in the Queensgate shopping mall in Petersburg. He bought two CDs there, one for his wife and one for Joanne. I guess at this time, Joanne had been very upset with Kevin.
Apparently, he hadn't paid her for this tenant harassment deal that they had set up, and she was getting increasingly frustrated with him, but he didn't know that. She had expressed to Gary Stretch that Kevin better pay her, but Kevin either didn't get the hint or he flat out ignored her when she demanded payment.
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Chapter 4: What happened during Joanna Dennehy's attacks on her victims?
And then for the three murders, she was handed three additional life sentences. Then came time for Gary's sentencing. He tried asking the judge for lesser sentencing because of the fact that he played a secondary part in those attempted murders. He didn't actually stab anybody, he just drove around the unhinged maniac who did.
But the judge saw him as just as much as a willing participant as Joanna herself. So, for those two charges of attempted murder, Gary was also handed two life sentences with a minimum of 19 years served before he will be eligible for parole. For the charges of preventing lawful and decent burial, he was given an additional 15 years to be served concurrently to the 19 years.
For Leslie Layton and his two charges of preventing lawful and decent burial, he was given two sentences of 10 years in prison to be served concurrently. And then for his charges of perverting justice, he was given four years to be served consecutively. So his total sentence is 10 years behind bars.
Then, as I stated before, Robert Moore was given a sentence of four years behind bars for lying to the police for helping with the murders. But he was given credit for a quarter of his sentence for his guilty plea. So he will only have to serve three of those years. I believe one and a half will be behind bars and then one and a half will be on like a close... probation type of situation.
Thankfully, the judge did not play around with these sentences, and I'm happy that each participant in these murders will be spending plenty of time behind bars, especially Joanna and Stretch, who I hope will never be released. So that's pretty much the information that I have for this case as a whole. Quick and easy, right?
I know there was a lot to go over and even with what I told you, boy, there is still more. I did my best to provide you with the most relevant information that I could without getting too bogged down in the details because there were a lot of moving parts in this case. The one thing that I did still want to discuss though is Joanne's daughters.
Like I said earlier, we don't know the identity of Joanna's youngest child, but we do know Cheyenne. Cheyenne thankfully lived a relatively good life with her father. From the time that she was little, John, her father, actually banned her from going on the internet so that she couldn't find out about the awful things that her mom did.
But when she was 13, she actually accessed the internet and found out about her mother. After finding out all of that disturbing information, of course, Cheyenne was never the same. She grew very depressed. She suffered from eating disorders, self-harming, and anxiety because she was scared that she was going to turn out like her mother.
At one point, she even contemplated taking her own life because she was so scared that she was going to turn into a psycho like her mom. She thought to herself, maybe I should just end it now, get it over with, so I don't hurt anybody. She said that she was just 13 when she found out, so she wasn't sure if it was genetic or what.
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