Act Your Age

When 15-year-old Joanna Dennehy first met 20-year-old John Treanor in her hometown of St. Albans, Hertfordshire in the United Kingdom, the romance was like something out of “Trainspotting”. It predictably descended into madness over the course of 12 years, because Joanna had been hiding a secret. It was one that jeopardized the lives of everyone in her orbit.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:06):
A train leaving London and traveling twenty minutes northwest would
land in a little place called Saint Albans in Hertfordshire,
one of England's most charming cities. The historic architecture and
medieval landmarks make it an envious place to live and
a visit. That is, if you don't mind the frequent

(00:27):
and dreary rain. Saint Albans looks like it could be
out of another time if not for our modern fingerprints
in the form of street signs and traffic lights. If
you look past the modern editions, you'll see that the
historic preserved Tudor style pubs, massive clock towers, Roman ruins,

(00:49):
and dainty walkable streets with little shops and restaurants on
each side offer visitors and residents and experience straight out
of Harry Potter. Nobody tell my wife that, because we'll
be on the next magical train to wherever this is.
In any case, the Warner Brother Studio is just a
short train ride away if you want to see the

(01:11):
actual thing. This little town is where twenty year old
John Treeener met someone a local to Saint Albans. He
was out walking his German shepherd when he saw the freckled,
smiling face of a girl trotting over to him to
pat his dog on the head. She said, I really
love dogs. Her name was Joanna. She was only fifteen,

(01:35):
but John was in love. Joanna ran away from home
to be with John. But despite meeting in the most
magical of towns, their life together would be quite the opposite.
You see, though, we should cast some well deserved suspicion
on the age gap in this relationship. Joanna was hiding

(01:58):
a big secret, was one that would take twelve years
to finally reveal itself. But when it did, the entire
United Kingdom would be stunned. Welcome to sword and Scale Nightmares,

(02:32):
True crime for bedtime, when nightmare begins now. Joanna Denahey

(02:52):
was born in Saint albans Hertfordshire in August of nineteen
eighty two. Her father worked as a secure guard and
her mother managed a grocery store. She had a younger
sister too, and the four of them lived in a
four bedroom home. It was perfect white picket fence. Two
and a half kids in a dog situation. Joanna and

(03:16):
her younger sister were very close. They were only two
years apart, shared a bunk bed and spoke to each
other in a secret language that they themselves had invented.
The girls loved to play with dolls, played dress up,
put on makeup, and experiment with different hairstyles. Joanna's sister
has said that even though she was two years younger,

(03:38):
Joanna always made time for her, sharing all of their
secrets with each other and making up song lyrics to
sing together. Their parents were always protective of them, but
they certainly weren't helicopter parents, maybe just a bit too
strict with a few certain Rulesanna's sister on in adulthood

(04:01):
to join the military and found her own it company.
In school, Joanna seemed like she would take a similar path.
She was bright, driven, and performed fabulously. She played hockey
and other sports. She was well liked, and her parents
thought that maybe she'd go on to college and become

(04:21):
a lawyer. They even contributed extra money to her schooling,
hoping this successful path would pan out. By the time
Joanna reached adolescence, all of those dreams seemed to go sour.
It was clear that Johanna's prior diligence was taking a
back seat to raging hormones or whatever the hell else

(04:43):
goes on in young women as they grow up. By
nineteen ninety seven, Joanna started to skip sports practices and
classes at school to hang out with a group of
older boys, including John Treeener twenty at the time, fifteen
year old Joanna was more than ready to be an adult,
and she started to act like one, that's for sure.

(05:06):
At fifteen years old, she ran away with John. Joanna,
John and this group of boys started drinking and doing
drugs together, as you would. Eventually, Joanna's family found her
camping on a wasteland with John, and they convinced her
to come back home. With drugs and drinking didn't stop, though. Joanna,

(05:29):
once a star student, became the kid bringing vodka to
school in a water bottle. When she was sixteen and
John was twenty one, Joanna ran away from home for good.
She came back to ask her parents for money on
occasion and turned up pregnant a year later at seventeen.
What a disappointment this must have been. After her first

(05:52):
child was born, Joanna told her parents that they couldn't
see their grandchild unless they paid. Course they refused, so
all contact was cut off. She didn't need them anyway.
The couple were immediately given a government subsidized apartment in
Milton Keynes, and Trevor found a job as a security guard.

(06:17):
Joanna was entering into what would be a lifelong pattern
of putting herself in her own wants above anything else,
including her own children. Though Trevor settled into fatherhood and
life as an upstanding citizen, motherhood didn't seem to appeal
to Joanna, often telling friends in Trevor that she never

(06:39):
really wanted children. She began to disappear for weeks on end,
drinking and cheating on John with both men and women.
When she felt it was time to come home, she'd
come crawling to John, apologizing and asking for forgiveness. John,
working as a security guard at the time, moved his

(06:59):
daughter to different towns each time he and Joanna broke
up over her infidelities. One of John's final straws was
when Joanna, in a drunken rage, pushed their toddler and
she almost fell down the steps. John immediately grabbed the
child and moved out of the house. In two thousand

(07:19):
and three, eighteen months later, he heard Joanna had been
sectioned under the Mental Health Act, which is basically the
British equivalent of Baker acting someone, and she spent some
time in prison for violent behavior. When she was released
in two thousand and four, she went back to live
with her parents, but she got kicked out after being

(07:43):
caught having sex in the backyard and causing thousands of
dollars in damage. These two were separate incidents. Incidentally, the
sex didn't cause that. Damn it, you get it anyway,
Now Joanna was homeless again. She'd been honing her manipulative

(08:03):
tactics for quite a few years now and convinced John
to give their relationship another chance. He said yes, and
things were calm for a while. Joanna then gave birth
to the couple's second daughter in two thousand and six,
but nothing really changed. Joanna seemed to get bored with

(08:27):
her family and with John, and the bad behavior started
all over again. John was at his wits end, with
Joanna already his dignity eternally scarred from all of her
blatant infidelities. He thought, as one last ditch effort, that

(08:48):
moving to East Anglia might help their situation. He thought
maybe a change of scenery and influence would do the trick.
For a while things were all right, Joanna's substance abuse
wasn't so noticeable to her children. She loved to read,
and she'd often read books to them, swim and play

(09:10):
with them, and even do crafts like paper mache. One
of her children has recalled that Joanna herself was like
a big kid, happy to do whatever they were doing
at the time. Soon after moving to East Anglia, Joanna
started working as a laborer on farms, but her drinking

(09:30):
was getting worse. Sometimes her employer would even pay her
an alcohol for her work instead of cash, giving her
an abundant flow of liquor. It became evident that Joanna
was self harming too. Cuts all over her body started
appearing like freckles in the sun. She was cutting her arms, stomach, neck,

(09:57):
and even her face with razor blades. We know that
alcohol can exacerbate already existing mental health issues, but this
was extreme. Joanna was mutilating herself intentionally. During a break
in her military career, Joanna's sister tried to track the

(10:17):
couple down to check in on Joanna, but when she
found them in Cambridgeshire, Joanna made it very clear that
she wanted to remain estranged. But drinking intensified Joanna's already
habitual violent tantrums. John told people that Joanna seemed to
turn into a devil when she drank. Her routine was

(10:41):
to have a strong logger in the morning for breakfast,
followed by whole bottles of vodka later on in the day,
all coupled with self harming using razor blades. What a party.
These violent episodes were something that started when she was
a teen, drinking and taking drugs every day, and it

(11:04):
only got worse with time. By two thousand and nine,
Joanna was taking her anger out on John regularly punching
and kicking him. By this point, she had also started
carrying a long dagger in her boot. Joanna's cheating also
became egregious and extreme. She was engaging more often and

(11:27):
violent BDSM with everyone under the sun, sometimes even on
the front lawn she shared with John as John looked
out the window in horror. One night, after a night
of drinking, Joanna showed up at home stumbling drunk and declared,

(11:49):
I wish I could kill someone as she plunged her
six inch dagger into the floor right in the middle
of the living room. That's it. That's when John had
had enough. He knew it was only a matter of
time one more drunken rage and Joanna would finally snap

(12:10):
and kill him. Their children were both John took both
girls and moved away, cutting off all contact with Joanna.
They hoped they'd never hear from her again. She had
become scary, not someone any of her family wanted to

(12:30):
be around. John shook with fear and anger when he
thought about the mother of his children, knowing deep down
that they'd never be able to completely get away from her.

(13:17):
Three years of relative silence passed before John Triener heard
anything about Joanna Denihey. After he left her and took
their children with him, Joanna was homeless, drifting around from
couch to couch. Her drinking hadn't gotten any better. In fact,

(13:38):
her perceived abandonment made her want to drink even more.
She needed money to support this habit, so she sometimes
turned to prostitution and theft, the latter landing her a
stint in prison in twenty twelve. In the UK, I
guess they put a little bit more effort into addressing
the mental health concerns of the end mates, so Joanna

(14:02):
actually did receive some treatment during her time incarcerated. She
was ultimately diagnosed as having antisocial personality disorder and obsessive
compulsive disorder. Those are the names of the things that
are not fixable. Thank you psychology. The notes on her

(14:22):
mental condition also said that the clinician noticed underlying psychopathic
traits in Joanna, things like rage, impulsivity, violence, and anger.
The doctors prescribed her medication to help regulate these aspects
of her personality, but they seem to be just that
a part of Joanna's personality. These weren't traits that the

(14:47):
psychotropics could do anything to mask. They were just who
she is. Once again, thank you psychology. So in twenty thirteen,
Joanna is out of prison after serving fourteen weeks, and
she needs a place to stay. She comes upon this
business called Quicklet at Leasta's homes to low income and

(15:11):
homeless people. The guy who owns it as a forty
seven year old named Kevin Lee. He's a married man
with kids, and he seems like a genuinely nice guy.
Kevin offers Joanna a space in a shared apartment. She'd
have her own bedroom, but would be sharing a kitchen
and bathroom with other tenants. Joanna tells Kevin a whole

(15:35):
big lie about her prison time, spending a wild story
about how her father had raped her so she had
to kill him, and that she had spent eight years
in the slammer because of it. That's not all. Joanna
also confides in him that she's involved in four additional murders,

(15:55):
two people she had apparently killed in a house fire,
and two that she ran over with her car. Real nice, right,
something to brag about. By the way, Kevin lets her
live there. Surprise, surprise, Kevin starts to get a little
crush on Joanna. It happens quite quickly, in fact, despite

(16:22):
Kevin's seventeen year marriage and his kids at home, He
begins to have a sexual relationship with her, bringing gifts
to her apartment and even letting her stay rent free.
In exchange, Joanna agrees to be his henchwoman. She revels
in the job because she gets to go around to

(16:44):
all the other apartments and hassle people for rent. Even
though she's got a petite bill. Joanna likes to get
really scary, threatening people without standing rent debts, and she
earns a reputation as someone with a temper, someone that
you are not to cross. Joanna starts to feel like

(17:06):
her life is really great, like she's stable all of
a sudden, So she stops taking her medicine, and she
starts to say unnerving things to Kevin. She tells him
she's got the urge to kill. Before long, Kevin's quiet

(17:28):
guilt is eating him alive. So on March twentieth, twenty thirteen,
he tells his wife about his affair. Obviously, she's upset,
but eventually they decide to work it all out. During
this long conversation about the infidelities, Kevin also shares with

(17:52):
his wife the strange comments Joanna's been making. He compares
her to Uma Thurman from kill Bill and the woman
from Terminator. This raises alarm bells in his wife's mind,
but she tucks those thoughts away. They're too dark. Who
would say those things out loud? This is a civilized world,

(18:16):
after all, a little over a week later, on March
twenty ninth, Kevin doesn't come home from work and his
wife freaks out this isn't like him. Then, paired with
the confession he gave just the other day, the picture
she had in her mind of this other woman, well

(18:39):
things aren't looking good with law enforcement in tow. Kevin's
wife drives out so the property Joanna was staying at.
She sees one of the apartments has its lights on
when before the light was off. She tells police to
go in and look. So they opened the door. The

(19:00):
room smells like bleach and there looks to be evidence
of a struggle. The police can't do much of anything
but wait. The next morning, March thirtieth, they get their answers.
Kevin Lee's body is found by a dog walker in
a ditch off the motorway in Newborough. He's been stabbed

(19:25):
and is dressed in a black sequined dress, his underwear
pulled down and a bathroom implement shoved into his rectum.
This is a sexually motivated crime. Remember that bleach smell
in the apartment that Kevin's wife had the police check. Yeah,

(19:47):
that was definitely there because someone tried to clean up blood.
As it turns out, though, the blood in that room
wasn't just Kevin's. Just a few days prior to the

(20:22):
discovery of forty seven year old Kevin Lee's body, there
was another boring Tuesday for thirty one year old Lucas Schwabashevski.
He was a DHL warehouse worker and he had just
met Joanna Denahe the day prior, on the streets of Petersborough.
He told his friends that he'd found himself an English girlfriend.

(20:45):
He really liked Joanna. Right away, they both did drugs
and drank, but on this Tuesday, Joanna was texting him
in more of a booty call kind of way. It
was clear to Lucas that if he met Joe Janna
at the location she suggested, he'd be getting alcohol, drugs,
and sex. In truth, Joanna had just found her first victim.

(21:12):
When Lucas arrives at Joanna's apartment, the two have a
few drinks and banter back and forth before Joanna suggests
Lucas put on a blindfold so they can play a game.
As soon as his eyes are covered, Joanna pulls a knife,
presumably from her boot where I'd like to live, and

(21:32):
plunges it into Lucas's chest, right through the heart. The
first kill thrills Joanna, but she soon realizes she has
a mess to clean up. She calls her friend Stretch,
a seven foot three mammoth of a man, to help

(21:53):
her dispose of Lucas's body, Stretch, whose real name is
Gary Richards, quickly a blig. He too, was infatuated with
Joanna for some reason, later saying quote, if she told
me to put my head through the windscreen, I would
have done it. End quote. The truth was he enjoyed

(22:15):
committing crimes, and he enjoyed making Joanna happy. He was
killing two birds with one stone. Pardon the expression. Well,
it would actually end up being way more than two birds,
but you know I'm getting to that. So Gary or Stretch,
arrives at the apartment with another guy, his criminal associate,

(22:35):
thirty six year old Leslie Leyton. The two of them
scoop up Lucas's body and throw it into a dumpster
before relocating it to a ditch in the Petersborough countryside.
At one point, Joanna returns to the dumpster to lift
the lid and show Lucas's corpse to an unsuspecting fourteen
year old for some reason, probably just to get a

(22:59):
thrill out of shocking a poor girl. On Friday, March
twenty ninth, Joanna does it again. She's been drinking with
a neighbor, fifty six year old John Chapman, when John
passes out. Using the exact same knife she killed Lucas with.
She stabs John six times in the chest just for

(23:22):
shits and giggles, just like before. She calls up her
good buddy Stretch, whose big dick energy is just happy
to do whatever Joanna wants. She actually sings the Britney
spears oops, I did it again song to him, and
Stretch brings Leslie Layton over again. They heave John's body

(23:44):
up and dump him in the same Petersborough ditch they'd
later throw Lucas in. It was the same process for
Joanna's landlord and lover, Kevin Lee. She lured him to
her apartment with promises of sex, and when he got there,
she stabbed him in the heart. That's not the same thing,

(24:08):
ladies close, but not exactly. Dressed in Joanna's own black
sequin dress, these evil people then humiliated Kevin further by
sodomizing him with a metal bathroom implement. Then the three
assailants jumped Kevin's body in another ditch that was eight

(24:28):
miles from John Chapman's body. Lucas wasn't moved to the
ditch until March thirtieth. By this point, police are on
the hunt for Joanna, but she and Stretch have skipped
down in her own minds. There the modern day Bonnie
and Clyde. And on April second, Joanna and her lover

(24:50):
commit a robbery in Norfolk. She in Stretch call yet
another random guy to help them sell the stolen items,
but as soon as he gets in the car, Joanna
starts going on and on about the murders she's just committed,
and it freaks the guy out rightfully, so Joanna makes

(25:11):
it pretty clear that she wants to kill again. As
the three of them are driving around gary Or, Stretch
seems to select a victim for Joanna at random, and
before their unsuspecting passenger knows it, Joanna is jumping out
of the car, leaping onto a sixty four year old

(25:33):
man named Robin Bereza and stabbing him, before running back
to the car covered in blood as the man collapses
onto the ground outside. Apparently it happens so fast that
the victim, Robin, didn't even know what was going on.

(25:54):
He was already bleeding having been stabbed. When he asked
Joanna what she was doing, she replied, I'm hurting you.
I'm going to fucking kill you. She only stops stabbing
him when Stretch motion for her to come back to
the car. Nine minutes later, like an actual horror movie,

(26:17):
it happens again. Joanna jumps out of the car and
attacks another man, fifty seven year old John Rodgers. She
stabs him over thirty times. Both of these victims miraculously
survive the attacks and have lived on to tell the tale.

(26:38):
What's most interesting about this case to criminologists is that
Joanna seems to check so many of the boxes for
serial killing, but she's unique. One criminologist says, serial killers
disengage from the process of killing and revert to their
normal life. There was never any sense of her disengaging.

(27:00):
She seems to have constantly been in the moment of killing,
unlike her other victims. Kevin Lee had a wife and
a family, and he was officially reported missing. His body
was discovered by a member of the public on March thirtieth.
The other two victims, Lucas Swabashevski and John Chapman, were

(27:23):
discovered on April third. No initial connection was made between
Joanna and these murders, so if it hadn't been for
her close relationship with Kevin and Kevin's confession to his wife,
Joanna may have never been caught for these two other murders.
All three, by this point had been dubbed the Petersborough

(27:46):
Ditch murders. Joanna Denahey was charged on May eighth, twenty thirteen,
with the murder of Kevin Lee and the attempted murders
of Robin Beiza and John Rogers. Once pathologists determine the
connection to the other two murder victims and established that
they'd been killed with the same knife, Joanna was charged

(28:09):
with their murders as well. But let's not forget about
Stretch and Leslie Layton. They too were charged with the
litany of crimes for their participation in this atrocity. In
November of twenty thirteen, Joanna pleaded guilty to all three
murders and two attempted murders. Upon hearing this news, Joanna's

(28:31):
little sister said, I think she did that to control
the situation. She likes people to know she's the boss.
Gary Stretch Richards and Leslie Layton both pleaded not guilty
to their crimes and stood trial in the beginning of
twenty fourteen. They were convicted of all of the charges.

(28:55):
Both Gary Richards and Joanna were sentenced to life imprisonment
with a wreck amended minimum term of nineteen years, and
Leslie Layton got fourteen years. A long and dramatic court
hearing seems to suggest that despite the minimum term of
nineteen years, Joanna will spend the rest of her life

(29:17):
in prison, a rarity in the United Kingdom. During her sentencing,
the judge brought up a comment Joanna had made to psychiatrists.
She told them she had killed to see if she
was as cold as she thought she was. Then it

(29:38):
got quote Moorish and she got a taste for it.
During her time in prison, the father of Joanna's children
had finally gotten some peace of mind, knowing she can
never hurt anyone ever again. Despite her absence, salute for reality,

(30:02):
Joanna has found love again. Oh nice for her. Everyone
needs love, even monsters. Her prison fiance, a woman named
Halee Palmer, was serving time for street robberies. After a
sixteen year sentence, She's now out of jail while Joanna

(30:24):
sits behind bars. Despite the separation, the two are planning
a wedding. Haley has joked that they wouldn't be allowed
to cut her wedding cake because there's no way they'd
let Joanna have a knife. If you enjoyed the show,

(30:46):
please consider joining plus at Sword and Scale dot com
slash plus, But if you can't, consider leaving us a
positive review on your preferred listening platform. Sweet Dreams and
good Night,