The Story of a Female Serial Killer
This piece appeared on VICE in January 2017
A house should not be a frightening thing. Houses do not get haunted. Houses, unless they are on fire, are incapable of harming you. Yet, standing in front of a small, drab maisonette on the edge of Peterborough – the house in which serial killer Joanna Dennehy committed her first and third murders – I can’t help but get the creeps.
People on the Welland estate have no great wish to talk about Joanna Dennehy and the terrible things she did here. Two teenagers on a dirt-bike, tearing up and down on a patch of grass beside the house, wonder why I would care about the woman or her murders.
“She was a psycho, mate,” says one.
“A fucking psycho killer, wasn’t she?” says his friend. “End of story, mate.”
Joanna Dennehy and the Peterborough murders of 2013 still evoke a grim fascination: how did this woman wander through life, doing all the normal things normal people do, and then at the age of 31 stab three men to death for no discernible reason?
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