
EXCLUSIVE How Britain's most dangerous female inmate chopped off a prison officer's FINGER to use in failed escape: Serial killer's life in 'monster mansion' jail where she is kept in total isolation to stop her claiming more victims
Joanna Dennehy chillingly described killing as 'moreish and fun' while being questioned by police for three murders.
The 42-year-old went on to become one of only four women in the UK to be sentenced to a whole life order – meaning she will die behind bars.
But today, she continues to pose such a threat to staff and inmates that keeping her in total isolation is the only option to stop her claiming more victims, according to a former prison governor who has studied her case in detail.
During a 10-day killing spree in March 2013, Dennehy stabbed her 31-year-old lover Lukasz Slaboszewski to death before killing her housemate John Chapman and her landlord Kevin Lee.
After dumping the three men's bodies in ditches across Cambridgeshire, she travelled 140 miles to Hereford with an accomplice, Gary Stretch, where she randomly stabbed two dog walkers, Robin Bereza, 64, and 56-year-old John Rogers.
In 2014, a judge sentenced Dennehy to die behind bars, calling her a 'cruel, calculating, selfish and manipulative' serial killer.
But the threat she poses is far from over, with the psychopath now considered Britain's most dangerous female prisoner. In fact, Dennehy is considered so violent and depraved she may be one of the most high-risk inmates in the entire prison system.
Professor David Wilson, a criminologist who began his career in the Prison Service, has now given MailOnline a fresh insight into the extreme security that will be needed to control the fiend behind bars.
Part of the threat she poses, he says, is due to her ability to manipulate people using sex - a 'skill' she has already used to embark on an affair with a prison officer and a fellow murderer she was locked up with.
She also remains a highly violent psychopath who has been accused of plotting to kill fellow prisoners, including Rose West, and planning to escape by murdering a guard and using their severed fingers to unlock biometric doors.
The four women handed whole life orders
Joanna Dennehy: Murdered three men during a 10-day spree and tried to kill two others.
Rose West: Helped her husband, Fred West, torture and murder ten young women between 1973 and 1987.
Myra Hindley: Murdered five children alongside her lover Ian Brady as part of the 'Moors Murders'.
Lucy Letby: Convicted of murdering seven infants and attempting to murder seven others between June 2015 and June 2016.
'Dennehy was identified very early on as someone who had to be managed very carefully due to her unusual offending profile and ability to manipulate,' Professor Wilson told MailOnline.
'So clearly, you're dealing with someone who you need maximum security and control over.
'It would be a question of solitary confinement to keep her away from other people. She is alleged she threatened the life of Rose West and - as was heard in court - also planned to escape.'
Dennehy was held on remand at HMP Bronzefield in Surrey, where she was quickly put into solitary confinement after her threats against Rose West, who was herself convicted of 10 murders in 1995.
For Professor Wilson, who has met several people close to Dennehy, targeting the 71-year-old was evidence of her determination to attain a sense of power by being seen as the prison's 'top dog'.
The murder threat reportedly saw Dennehy moved into solitary confinement at Bronzefield.
At the start of the decade, she was moved to HMP Low Newton after allegedly embarking on an affair with a male prison officer.
But she continued causing problems after the move to the high-security jail in County Durham by striking up a relationship with a much younger woman, the murderer Emma Aitken.
Aitken was jailed for life alongside her father Vincent Aitken and boyfriend Nathan Doherty for the murder of Barry Smith, who they battered to death before dumping his burnt body outside Kilburn Welfare Social Club in Derbyshire in 2013.
Professor Wilson is far from surprised about Dennehy's illicit relationships, seeing them as evidence of her ability to con people with offers of sex in the hope of gaining control over them.
'It is part of the conning and the cunning to use sex as part of that manipulation, so it doesn't surprise me in the least that she is having sexual relations,' he said.
'She will be using this to get what she wants.
'Even when she was being interviewed in a police station in Hereford for attempting to kill two men out walking her dogs, she started to flirt with the female custody sergeant.'
A disturbing insight into Dennehy's life behind bars came in 2016, when she filed a High Court damages claim on the basis that spending two years in solitary confinement was damaging to her human rights.
Evidence submitted by the Prison Service in the case revealed she had once forged a gruesome escape plot.
The plan is said to have involved killing a female officer to steal her keys and use her fingerprints to trick the biometric systems that operate the prison locks.
Dennehy was placed in segregation after guards discovered the plot in September 2013. The triple killer claimed it had just been a 'doodle'.
A prison uniform was discovered hidden in the laundry room and guards discovered a drawing of the jail's layout in Dennehy's diary, the High Court heard before ruling against her.
According to Professor Wilson, the killer's 'very unusual' criminal profile means she will almost certainly continue to pose a severe threat for as long as she maintains her physical and mental faculties.
'Dennehy is one of the very few female spree killers in criminological history,' Professor Wilson said. 'Spree murders tend to be a male phenomenon but here you have someone who killed three men and tried to kill two more alongside her accomplice Gary Stretch.
'There is some indication that Dennehy and Stretch were operating inside a folie à deux, which is a term for a shared psychosis or ''madness of two''.
'And often folie à deux has a dominant man and a subordinate woman - like Fred and Rose West - but in this one it is quite clear that she was the dominant partner, and Stretch was subordinate and afraid of her.
'I don't know what can be done with her in terms of changing her behaviour because she seems to have extreme violent tendencies, and that is based on having interviewed people who were very close to her - including her former husband.'
The expert believes the American 'supermax' model - where the most serious offenders are kept in complete isolation from others - would be the best choice for inmates like Dennehy.
She has never expressed regret for her crimes, after being arrested told a psychiatrist that she had started killing to 'see how it would feel, to see if I was as cold as I thought I was...then it just got moreish.'
The killer subjected one of her victims to 'post-death humiliation' by squeezing his mutilated corpse into a sequined black dress and dumping it into a ditch with his buttocks exposed.
Another victim was stabbed through the heart with a pen knife and left in a wheelie bin. A third was stabbed 40 times until, a witness said, the knife's blade was 'as black as the handle' because of all the congealed blood, and 'smelled like copper'.
Having brutally killed one man, Dennehy promptly phoned a friend and sang the Britney Spears song Oops, I Did It Again.
Later, she told acquaintances: 'I've killed three people, and I want to have some more fun,' adding that she was 'meant to be a serial killer, a monster'.
With Dennehy still only in middle age and as dangerous as ever, she promises to prove a major headache for prison bosses for many decades to come.
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