Peterborough ditch murders

In March 2013, three men were killed in Cambridgeshire, England, and their bodies were left in ditches outside Peterborough; all three died from stab wounds. Kevin Lee, a property developer and landlord who was in a relationship with Joanna Christine Dennehy, was killed on 29 March 2013, and his body was found the next day near Newborough, dressed in a black sequined dress. John Chapman, a housemate of Dennehy, was also killed on 29 March 2013. Łukasz Słaboszewski, a Polish national who had met Dennehy through a shared interest in drink and drugs, was killed at some point between 19 and 29 March 2013. The bodies of Słaboszewski and Chapman were found together near Thorney on 3 April 2013.

Dennehy was born in St Albans, Hertfordshire, in August 1982 and grew up in nearby Harpenden; at the time of the killings she was an absent mother of two young children. According to court accounts, she specifically targeted men, telling Mark Lloyd, who later travelled with her, that she did not wish to kill a woman, particularly a woman with children. Lloyd said Dennehy told him she had wanted to kill nine men in total. After the Cambridgeshire killings, Dennehy's friend Gary Stretch, formerly known as Gary Richards, drove her to Hereford, where she stabbed two men, chosen separately and at random; both survived, and she stole a dog belonging to one of them. Lloyd, who had travelled in the car unwillingly, was later cleared of criminal involvement in the Hereford attacks.

In November 2013, Dennehy pleaded guilty to all three murders and to two further charges of attempted murder over the Hereford stabbings. She was held on remand at HM Prison Bronzefield, where assessing psychiatrists diagnosed her with psychopathic, anti-social and borderline personality disorders. At her trial at the Old Bailey in London, presiding judge Mr Justice Spencer described her as a "cruel, calculating, selfish and manipulative serial killer." On 28 February 2014, he sentenced her to life imprisonment with a whole life order, citing the premeditation of each murder; she became the third woman in the UK to be given a whole life tariff, after Myra Hindley and Rosemary West.

Two men, Gary Stretch and Leslie Layton, stood trial charged with a range of offences relating to assisting Dennehy; both declined to give evidence in their defence. On 10 February 2014, Stretch was found guilty of attempted murder and Layton was found guilty of perverting the course of justice; both were convicted of the remaining charges against them on 12 February. Stretch was sentenced alongside Dennehy at the Old Bailey to life imprisonment, with a recommended minimum term of 19 years, and Layton received a total sentence of 14 years. Robert Moore, who admitted assisting an offender, was sentenced to three years' imprisonment.

After the trial, it emerged that the Probation Service had been supervising Dennehy at the time of the killings, following earlier convictions for assault and for owning a dangerous dog, and that the staff involved were inexperienced. While held on remand before trial, Dennehy was placed in solitary confinement at HM Prison Bronzefield from September 2013 to September 2015, after prison staff discovered an escape plot in her diary. She unsuccessfully challenged the confinement in the High Court, which found that it had been lawful, necessary and proportionate.