From the Roadside Strangler to the chilling ‘Slavemaster’, I’ve met dozens of serial killers… psycho Brit scared me the most
HE has come face to face with some of the world’s most notorious serial killers, but it was a British psychopath who chilled criminologist Christopher Berry-Dee to the bone.
The ex-commander, 76, does the math Joanna Dennehywho killed three men and stabbed two others is the “most dangerous” person he has ever interviewed.
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Christopher, a renowned expert in the psyche of murderershas met killers like Ted BundyRose West and the Michael Ross, roadsidewho slaughtered eight girls and women.
Yet he was most disturbed by an encounter with Dehenny, 41, who killed three men, including her landlord, in a killing spree in March 2013.
Christopher told The Sun: “She is the most dangerous person I have ever come into contact with.
‘She’s not actually that big and the knife she used isn’t the big dagger she was holding, but a pocket knife about six inches long.
“To walk up to someone on the street like she did and stab someone over and over again in broad daylight like she did, with blood pouring everywhere… that’s just evil.”
Dennehy, from St Albans, Herts, went on a ten-day killing spree Peterborough stabbing her love interest Lukasz Slaboszewski31, flatmate John Chapman, 56, and her landlord and lover Kevin Lee, 48, before dump them in ditches.
With her bloodlust still unsatisfied, she traveled 140 miles to Hereford, where she attempted to kill two strangers on the street.
Incredibly, dog walkers Robin Bereza, then 57, and John Rogers, 64, survived the attacks.
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Dennehy, who at the Navy in the Falklands War, later told a psychiatrist that she “killed to see if I was as cold as I thought I was. Then it got even more intense.”
Christopher has previously told how Dennehy threatened to kill him Rose West minutes after arriving at the same prison as the House of Horrors killer.
West, who at least ten women killed with her evil husband Fred Westwas moved from her cell in Low Newton, Co Durham, after the threat.
Christopher said: “She tried to stand up for herself to West.
“It’s a dominance thing. As soon as she went to jail, it was ‘Bang!’ Go away Rose, I’m in charge. ”
The letters of the beast
The criminologist says Dehenny is all the more sinister because of her intelligence, as evidenced by letters they exchanged after she was given a life sentence in 2014.
He said: ‘Her letters were very beautifully written and the spelling was perfect, impeccable in fact.
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“One of the detectives involved said to me: ‘You know she had some training to be a lawyer or something like that before she went off the rails’.”
Christopher says their contact “freaked out” when he asked her if she was involved with drugs.
He said: ‘I said in a letter: ‘You know people say you are involved in drugs.’
‘The letter that came back was just rubbish. I had really finished her off.
“The strange thing is that Dennehy had a very good start in life, until she came into contact with fairground workers, alcoholics and drink and drugs. I think it exhausted her brain.
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The victims of Joanna Dennehy
Twisted Joanna Dennehy’s murder spree has been labeled the ‘most dangerous person’ that crimologist Christopher Berry-Dee has ‘ever, ever come into contact with’ – here we look at her chilling crimes.
Dennehy’s first victim was her flatmate Lukasz Slaboszewski, 31, on March 19, 2013. She convinced the Polish national she wanted to meet him for sex before stabbing him in the heart and dumping his body in a garbage bin.
Falklands War veteran John Chapman, 56, who was believed to have also lived with Dennehy, was murdered by her a week later.
Real estate developer Kevin Lee became Dennehy’s latest victim on March 29. He was her landlord and lover before she took his life. In a letter to a former lover, Dennehy revealed that she had dressed Lee in black sequins to “humiliate him” and dumped his body in Newborough.
Dennehy also tried to kill two others during her ten-day stint. She recruited accomplice Gary Stretch, 47, and the pair drove to Hereford where they stabbed John Rogers, 64, and Robin Bereza, 57. Fortunately, they both survived.
Dennehy received a life sentence for the murders and attempted murders. Stretch was given a life sentence after being found guilty of attempted murder.
‘She probably looked back on her life and thought she had messed everything up and hated everyone, especially men.
‘She was so cold. She had two children and never touched them when they were born, never nursed them. She never kissed them. She didn’t want anything to do with them.
‘She treated men like dirt and used them. That is a very dangerous woman.”
‘Boy Next Door Disguise’
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Berry-Dee has met about 30 killers, including Roadside Strangler Michael Ross, who murdered eight women and girls between the ages of 14 and 25 in New York and Connecticut in the early 1980s.
He raped seven out of eight of his victims and is said to have raped two other women whom he did not kill.
The criminologist said: “When he told me he had raped two little girls after strangling them, he giggled. He thought it was funny.
Those unblinking black eyes of his suddenly turned to hatred.
Berry-Dee on Kenneth Bianchi
‘The special thing about Michael is that he was a very nice young man.
“There was a journalist who interviewed him for a newspaper in New York and she told me, ‘If I were walking down a dark alley at night and heard footsteps behind me and turned around and saw Michael Ross, I would be relieved are.’
‘That’s how he presented it. He was like the boy next door.”
‘Real monster’
Berry-Dee has also been close murderer Kenneth Bianchi when he found himself locked in a cubicle with no guards with an ‘evil’ unchained.
Bianchi was half of the Hillside Stranglers as they became known.
He and cousin Angelo Buono were convicted of the kidnapping, rape, torture and murder of ten women and girls between the ages of 12 and 28 between October 1977 and 1978.
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Meeting the killers
Christopher Berry-Dee has interviewed some of the world’s most dangerous serial killers and built relationships while making films, writing books and helping cops solve crimes. These include:
- Ted Bundy, one of the most notorious murderers in American history after committing a series of gruesome murders over a four-year period in the 1970s. He was responsible for the murder of more than thirty young women.
- Aileen Wuornos, the infamous female serial killer from Michigan who shot and killed seven men. She was executed by lethal injection by the state of Florida in 2002.
- Henry Lee Lucas, also known as The Confession Killer, who was convicted of murdering his mother in 1960 and two others in 1983. He falsely confessed to about six hundred other murders.
- David Alan Gore: American serial killer convicted of six murders in Vero Beach and Indian River Country, Florida, in the 1980s.
- Kenneth Allen McDuff, the only death row inmate to be released on parole and then go on to kill again. He was convicted of murdering three strangers and breaking the victim’s neck with a broomstick.
- Arthur John Shawcross, also known as the Genesee River Killer, who raped and strangled eleven women in the Rochester area of New York from 1972 to 1989.
Christopher said he tricked Bianchi, now 72, into giving him an interview by pretending to believe his stories of innocence.
He said: “I was inches away from a real monster. But for some reason he was ‘unhappy’ and started staring at me. Those unblinking black eyes of his suddenly turned to hatred.
“To break the ice, I got up from my seat, walked over to him, put my arm on his shoulder and whispered in his ear, ‘Come on, give your buddy a smile’.”
Slave master sleigh
Berry-Dee, who says he never feels fear during his encounters with killers, has also had contact with serial killer ‘Slavemaster’ John Edward Robinson – the first killer to use the internet to find victims.
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He has been linked to the murders of eight women between 1985 and 2000 and has been convicted of five.
The rotting bodies of his victims were found in chemical vats – two on his farm.
He got his nickname after making sexual offers to his neighbors’ wives, calling himself the slave master of a secret BDSM society.
Berry-Dee said, “I wrote it with an FBI woman.
“He told her that slavery was completely wrong and that he was never a slave master as he wrote to me explaining everything he wanted to do to her.
“Finally I said, ‘Guess who my friend is?’ and that was that.”
Christopher Berry-Dee’s Psychopaths and Savages: Guilty But Insane, and Talking With Psychopaths: A Journey Into The Evil Mind (edited by John Blake) are available now.
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