Sword and Scale Nightmares - Act Your Age

Episode Date: September 11, 2024

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.

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Please gamble responsibly. Gambling problem? For free assistance, call the Connex Ontario Helpline at 1-866-531-2600. Bet MGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. A train leaving London and traveling 20 minutes northwest would land in a little place called St. Albans in Hertfordshire, one of England's most charming cities. The historic architecture and medieval landmarks make it an envious place to live and to visit. That is, if you don't mind the frequent and dreary rain.

St. 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 additions, you'll see that the historic preserved Tudor-style pubs, massive clock towers, Roman ruins, and dainty, walkable streets with little shops and restaurants on each side, offer visitors and residents an 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 Brothers studio is just a short train ride away, if you want

to see the actual thing. This little town is where 20-year-old John Treanor met someone, a local to St. 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 15, 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 a big secret. It was one that would take 12 years to finally reveal itself. But when it did, the entire United Kingdom would be stunned. Welcome to Sword and Scale Nightmares, true crime for bedtime, where nightmare begins now. Kick off an exciting football season with Bet MGM, an official sportsbook partner of the NFL, BetMGM is the best place to fuel your football fandom on every game day. With a variety of exciting features,

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Must be 19 years of age or older. Ontario only. Please gamble responsibly. Gambling problem? For free assistance, call the Connex Ontario Helpline at 1-866-531-2600. Bet MGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Joanna Dennehy was born in St. Albans, Hertfordshire in August of 1982. Her father worked as a security 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, and a dog situation. Joanna and 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, play dress-up, put on makeup and experiment with different hairstyles.

Joanna's sister has said that even though she was two years younger, 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 rules. Joanna's sister went on in adulthood 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 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 Joanna's prior diligence was taking a backseat to raging hormones or whatever the hell else goes on in young women as they grow up. By 1997, Joanna started to skip sports practices and classes at school to hang out with a group of older boys, including John Treanor, 20 at the time. 15-year-old Joanna was more than ready to be an adult, and she started to act like one, that's for sure.

At 15 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. The drugs and drinking didn't stop though. Joanna, once a star student, became the kid bringing vodka to school in a water bottle. When she was 16 and John was 21, 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 17. What a disappointment this must have been. After her first child was born, Joanna told her parents that they couldn't see their grandchild unless they paid. Of 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. Joanna was entering into what would be a lifelong pattern of putting herself and 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 and Trevor that she never 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 daughter around 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 2003. 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 2004, she went back to live with her parents, but she got kicked out after being caught having sex in the backyard and causing thousands of dollars in damage.

These two were separate incidents incidentally. The sex didn't cause the damn... you get it. Anyway, now Joanna was homeless again. She'd been honing her manipulative 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 2006. But nothing really changed. Joanna seemed to get bored with 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 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 alright. 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 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 was getting worse. Sometimes her employer would even pay her in 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, 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 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. The 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 to have a strong lager 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 only got worse with time. By 2009 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 in 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, 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 drunk in rage and Joanna would finally snap and kill him, their children or 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 be around. John shook with fear and anger when he thought about the mother of his children, knowing completely get away from her. Three years of relative silence passed before John Treanor heard anything about Joanna Dennehy. 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, her perceived

abandonment made her want to drink even more 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 2012 In the UK, I guess they put a little bit more effort into addressing the mental health concerns of the inmates So Joanna 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 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 seemed to be just that, a part of Joanna's personality. These weren't traits that the psychotropics could do anything to mask. They were just who she is.

Once again, thank you, psychology. So, in 2013, Joanna is out of prison after serving 14 weeks and she needs a place to stay. She comes upon this business called Quicklet, at least as homes to low-income and homeless people. The guy who owns it is a 47-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 big lie about her prison time, spinning a wild story about how her

father had raped her, so she had to kill 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. 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 Kevin's 17-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 all the other apartments and hassle people for rent. Even though she's got a petite build, Joanna likes to get really scary, threatening people with outstanding rent debts, and she earns a reputation as someone with a temper, someone that you are not to cross. Joanna starts to feel like 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 guilt is eating him alive. So on March 20th, 2013, 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 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, after all. A little over a week later, on March 29th, Kevin doesn't come home from work.

And his wife freaks out. This isn't like him, and paired with the confession he gave just the other day, the picture she had in her mind of this other woman, well, things aren't looking good. With law enforcement in tow, Kevin's wife drives out to 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 open the door. The 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 30th, 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 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 that was definitely there because someone tried to clean up blood. As it turns out though, the blood of 47-year-old Kevin Lee's body, it was another boring Tuesday for 31-year-old Lucas Swaboschewski. He was a DHL warehouse worker, and he had just met Joanna Dennehy the day prior on

the streets of Petersburg. He told his friends that he'd found himself an English girlfriend. He really liked Joanna right away. He told his friends that he'd found himself an English girlfriend. 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 Joanna at the location she suggested, he'd be getting alcohol, drugs, and sex.

In truth, Joanna had just found her first victim. 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. 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 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 7'3 mammoth of a man, to help her dispose of Lucas's body. Stretch, whose real name is Gary Richards, quickly obliges. 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 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. 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, 36-year-old Leslie Layton. The two of them scoop up Lucas's body and throw it into a dumpster before relocating it to a ditch in the Petersburg countryside. At one point, Joanna returns to the dumpster to lift

the lid and show Lucas's corpse to an unsuspecting 14-year-old for some reason. Probably just to get a thrill out of shocking the poor girl. On Friday, March 29th, Joanna does it again. She's been drinking with a neighbor, 56-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 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 Leighton over again. They heave John's body up and dump him in the same Petersburg 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, ladies. Close but not exactly. Dressed in Joanna's own black sequined dress, these evil people then humiliated Kevin further by sodomizing him with a metal bathroom implement. Then the three assailants dumped Kevin's body in another ditch

That was eight miles from John Chapman's body Lucas wasn't moved to the ditch until March 30th By this point police are on the hunt for Joanna, but she and stretch have skipped town in their own minds, they're the modern day Bonnie and Clyde. And on April 2, Joanna and her lover commit a robbery in Norfolk. She and 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 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 64-year-old man named Robin Barisa and stabbing him before running back to the car covered in blood as the man collapses onto the ground outside. Apparently it happened so fast that the victim Robin didn't even know what was going on. 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 stopped stabbing him when Stretch motioned for her to come back to the car. Nine minutes later, like an actual horror movie, it happens again. Joanna jumps out of the car and attacks another man, 57-year-old John Rogers. She stabs him over 30 times. Both of these victims miraculously survive the attacks and have lived on to tell the tale. 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. 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 30th. The other two victims, Lucas Swaboschewski and John Chapman, were discovered on April

3rd. 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 Petersburg Ditch Murders. Joanna Dennehy was charged on May 8th 2013 with the murder of Kevin Lee and the attempted murders of Robin Barisa and John Rogers. Once pathologists determined the connection to the other two murder victims and established that they'd been killed with the same knife Joanna was charged with their murders as well

But let's not forget about stretch and Leslie Layton They too were charged with a litany of crimes for their participation in this atrocity in November of 2013 Joanna pleaded guilty to all three murders and two attempted murders. Upon hearing this news, Joanna's 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 Leighton both pleaded not guilty to their crimes and stood trial in the beginning of 2014. They were convicted of all of the charges.

Both Gary Richards and Joanna were sentenced to life imprisonment with a recommended minimum term of 19 years and Leslie Leighton got 14 years. A long and dramatic court hearing seems to suggest that despite the minimum term of 19 years, Joanna will spend the rest of her life 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 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 absolute virality, Joanna has found love again.

How nice for her. Everyone needs love. Even monsters. Her prison fiancé, a woman named Haley Palmer, was serving time for street robberies. After a 16-year sentence, she's now out of jail while Joanna 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.

Have a knife. If you enjoyed the show, please consider joining PLUS at swordandscale.com slash PLUS. But if you can't, consider leaving us a positive review on your preferred listening platform. Sweet dreams and good night.