Original subtitles

The following programme contains descriptions of real-life violence

that some viewers may find distressing.

(HOSPITAL CHATTER)

(LOW, SOMBRE MUSIC)

Unless it's happened to you or someone you know...

..you really, really struggle to take all this in.

You thinking, did that really just happen?

Did someone just try and kill me?

I've gone from married, dreams coming, everything.

In a split second, I'm fighting for my life.

This is where you go into a shock.

When you try and think about someone's mentality to do this

to another human being, I think it's monstrous.

(MUSIC FADES, ENDS)

(LOW, SOMBRE MUSIC)

He says there's blood all over the floor, blood all over the bathroom.

The logical person would dial 999.

The fact that Richard then took another day to phone the police.

It beggars' belief.

When I met Richard Thompson with his huge facial injuries,

it was quite clear this case was a runner.

But, Richard, he had wasted three days

and allowed the scene to be destroyed.

And even when he contacted the police purely said,

I want this logged in case I divorce her.

Unbelievable.

He was coerced into a hugely controlling relationship

and he didn't see the wood for the trees.

As she walked out the door, she turned back and said,

you'll never be able to tell anyone what I did to you.

Almost like a warning.

INTERVIEWER: Do you think that she meant that you would be

too embarrassed to tell anyone?

There could be that element there,

the only thing I find embarrassing that I was suckered into this.

Being suckered into lying on a floor is pretty horrendous.

It's trust.

That's the only way I got myself into that situation.

We've got this whole issue of the male ego.

Richard was embarrassed to admit what he'd been through.

But 20 or 30 years ago, the male psyche was one of dominance.

We were a very misogynistic society,

and so the possibility that a man would be targeted by a woman

was alien to most people.

And Richard could not accept that the person he married

would go to such lengths to kill him.

He said to me, you can't switch love on and off.

And that's the point.

The scary thing about Dena, it starts with a love story.

(TICKING)

(LIGHT MUSIC)

I was like a modern-day globetrotter.

Financially wise, I was comfortable.

But what I didn't realise was the longer and longer

I was working abroad,

my social network was just getting smaller and smaller.

What did you do?

Well in those days, back in the late '90s,

there was nothing else but lonely heart columns.

You had a code in your advert,

and then you could dial in and see if anyone left you a message.

(PHONE RINGING)

Were you optimistic?

I'm always optimistic.

I thought oh yeah, she sounds nice, we'll meet up.

She was very bubbly, extrovert, I'm an extrovert, confident.

And these were things that I found attractive.

Dena said, 'Oh, I'm off to Florida in a couple of months.

I go fishing in Florida. Would you like to join me?'

My hobby all my life's been fishing, I jumped at the chance.

the stuff I was catching in the English Channel,

they class as bait out there.

And that's when Dena put her first hook in me.

(LIGHT MUSIC CONTINUES)

We stayed in this little place called St Pete Beach.

She knew the layout of the place, she knew restaurants.

Even the Americans called it paradise.

We went out, we did a little grouper fishing, a little snapper fishing.

She was affectionate towards him. He was affectionate towards her.

It was that banter back and forth.

She was definitely like the alpha in charge on that deal.

Like I remember her making, like, loaded comments to me.

She was flirting with you? Oh of course. Yeah.

This was all a big act.

She was, like, very good at what she did.

He was under a spell, basically.

There was attraction there. A very, very strong friendship.

And that's why we decided to get married.

That night, she said, look I've got something to tell you.

She told me a couple of years ago she'd won the lottery -

wasn't the jackpot, but it was £300,000.

Why did she tell you about it on your wedding night?

Who knows?

Who knows? Was she hatching her plan?

Was she putting these seeds in my head?

When I sit down and think about it,

it's really clear that Dena had an agenda from the very beginning.

Out to scam him and steal his money.

It's unbelievable, really. Unbelievable.

Did you have any inkling of all this when you met her?

Who could have. That she was a thief, a fraudster,

and a murderer.

I did find a few things strange.

After Dena moved in,

then the fishing and crewing for me um, stopped.

He told me that...

..he had put her on the land registry documents

so she was a joint owner of the cottage.

I was surprised at that.

Probably about six months after we got married, I rung home.

And she said, 'I have cancer'.

Well, of course you're worried. And I was worried.

Cancer's that horrible word.

I took her to hospital, and I collected her.

She said 'Let's move out to Florida and let me live my last few years

living a really good dream.

And I'll set you up in business with the lottery money.'

Dena said, 'Richard's leaving for the States,

and he won't be coming back'.

Why did Dena tell you? Why didn't Richard just tell you?

I don't know. That was a bit strange.

I think probably because she was in control by that time.

I think I probably felt, "Oh well, that's the end of a friendship".

(LOW, TENSE MUSIC)

Although Richard didn't want to press charges,

his injuries were so severe

we were able to get a warrant for Dena's arrest.

She was in Devon living at her parents.

I rang the local police station and said,

'We need her arrested as quickly as you can.'

Then she was brought back to Sussex to be interviewed.

I first met Dena when she had been arrested for the attempted murder

of Richard Thompson.

I gave her a look to say,

I know what you've done and I'm going to put you away.

And then something really strange happened. I remember it vividly.

She gave me the look.

I got the Dena look.

She has this really alluring look that entices men in.

It didn't work with me, but it wasn't lost on me

that she did it to me, in the most bizarre of circumstances...

..while she was under arrest for attempted murder.

I think that demonstrates to me just how dangerous she is.

At that point the pressure was on to get the evidence together

to keep her in custody...

..but we're way behind.

We'd lost 2 to 3 days because Richard had waited so long

to report the incident.

Because he still loved her.

And as he said to me,

I've been in love with this woman for nearly a year.

She's my wife.

She may have done wrong, but I believe in my wedding vows.

I said to him, if you don't help us, Richard,

I'm going to carry on with this anyway.

Luckily, Richard did come to his senses,

and we went for the prosecution.

You're piecing it all together in your mind. I'm concussed, basically.

Eventually the reality does set in

and you realise how horrific this was,

and how worse it could have been.

Suppose she stabbed me through the throat.

Supposed she had hit me in the jugular

because it's only a few inches away.

The detectives were great.

They came and they said, "We believe you".

And there was a lot to explain.

The day after the attack at half past eight,

knock at the door.

There's a guy in a suit with a clipboard.

He said 'Oh your wife's selling the house, what are you doing here,

you're supposed to be in Florida.'

SEAN: Richard had signed over his last will and testament to Dena.

He signed over a power of attorney to her,

and Richard said she was going to sell his house and take everything.

He went to his bank accounts and all the money was gone.

The £30,000 of my pension payment.

The £12,000 on the American Express.

The £5,000 cheque.

She knew exactly what she was going to do,

and she explained how I wasn't going to be there.

There's your premeditation.

Had she achieved killing me,

how she was going to dispose of me, who knows?

Dena is remanded in custody. But we have a ticking clock.

The trial is coming and sure enough,

she went for the self-defence argument.

She said that Richard had tried to kill her.

But Dena was examined for injuries and had no injuries.

The problem in a case like this particularly with partners

is it's one word against another.

We needed more than that.

As the forensics team went over the crime scene,

they discovered that the attempt to clean up wasn't perfect.

Fortunately, when you look at it more closely,

behind the radiator, quite high up on the walls,

Richard's blood spatterings were found all around the room.

It was a relief that not all the evidence was lost.

And then we have another major breakthrough.

Dena had an address book.

It was full of names of men, with their addresses,

telephone numbers, and business cards.

And we were tasked to go through it and call all these numbers.

And one of the numbers, this chap answers,

and he is horrified.

He says, 'I'm married, I will lose my wife,

I'll probably lose my job, and please don't call me again.'

Some of the people flatly denied that anything ever happened.

And I don't believe them.

But we did establish more than ten more victims.

These guys meet her, she's too good to be true,

telling people that she'd won lotteries,

and how rich she was and how ill she was, um, none of which was true.

And they had been subjected to her maxing up their credit cards

and then dumping them.

30 years ago it was a very unusual modus operandi

for a woman to target men.

There's this male desire to keep things private,

which is why Dena got away with so much.

We established patterns of behaviour with these men.

There may have been different lies,

there may have been different backgrounds to the men

and to the stories.

But there was always the American dream.

The American dream was all about moving to a beautiful place

and live happily ever after.

Dena was promising Lee that he would be going to America with her.

And Julian was going to do fishing trips

and work for the Tampa Tribune.

Richard thought he was going off to do this job in Florida

once his green card had come.

And this is a theme that runs through

all her other victims as well,

but why she was so obsessed with Florida,

I don't think it was ever really established.

What was also very clear was that there was a lot of sex,

and the sex was very adventurous.

It became apparent it was part of the coercive game.

She would phone me randomly and say she's- Oh, God.

She's into bondage and whips and I'm laughing 'cause

maybe it's just like knowing that

I'm a bit blinking strange and prudish.

I can't say that if you walked into a room and he saw her

that you'd go, she's very attractive.

I still feel very much that...

..her attraction would be...

..her attitude maybe to sex.

(LOW, SOMBRE MUSIC)

One thing we never saw with Dena is any form of sympathy or empathy.

We never found a natural, healthy relationship with a man

or a woman in her life.

And that, I think, speaks volumes about the psychology of her mind.

The mother wouldn't speak to us at all.

The father was very anti police...

..which I found staggering because the father was a prison officer.

This suggested a warped mentality which I think rubbed off on her.

She never really talked about her childhood.

But she spoke about gymnastics and going abroad with her father.

She never mentioned her mother at all.

It was always dad this, or dad did that.

It was just seemed like if anything was going wrong,

he would be the person that would sort it out.

But like when she talked about the gymnastics and things like that,

something just doesn't seem right.

As more and more evidence came to light, you figure it out.

When the police did a very thorough search of the cottage,

they found a tin.

It was full of photographs of this other guy. Julian Webb.

No idea. Never heard of this person.

The police explained that Julian had met his end

in what they regarded as suspicious circumstances.

Who I now know was her second husband, Julian Webb.

But I didn't have any knowledge of Julian Webb until this moment.

In some respects, your memories of people still live.

I think it's counterproductive to get sort of mawkish and morbid.

It really is. Doesn't help anybody.

INTERVIEWER: Had you got to the point where you thought

perhaps you weren't going to get justice for Julian?

Well, I don't know if I thought so negatively as that.

But it's what kept me going.

(PHONE RINGING)

I think it was Martyn Underhill called me

and told me she was about to appear in court

for the attempted murder of Richard Thompson.

I could have fallen off my chair.

Having seemingly got away with murder once,

here she was having another go.

(LOW, SOMBRE MUSIC)

JUDGE: All rise. This court is now in session.

Dena Thompson, you are charged that you unlawfully took out

a credit card in Richard Thompson's name, therefore committing fraud.

Do you plead guilty or not guilty? DENA: Guilty.

You are charged that you did unlawfully attack Mr Thompson

with a baseball bat

and that you stabbed him with a knife,

therefore committing attempted murder.

Do you plead guilty or not guilty? Not guilty.

(MIC FEEDBACK)

Dena looked very, very small in the witness box...

..and she admitted that she had lied to Richard about her health,

and it was solely so that she would get some sympathy from him.

I was very apprehensive about the court case.

When Dena was on the stand, she said that,

I was in the bathroom trimming curtains with a carving knife

and then said that when she confessed that all my money

had gone, that's when I attacked her.

She said he'd come at her with the knife

and she had managed to grab the baseball bat,

hit him twice with it to defend herself,

and then, got the knife off of him and stabbed him

because she thought her life was in danger.

She was asked 'Did you love Richard Thompson?'

She just said 'no'.

Richard was broken by that.

This was this was a dagger through his heart really.

Hearing someone say that, you realise, I was the means to an end.

I think I was in this dock for at least two days.

They were trying to convince the jury I was the aggressor;

I was totally frustrated with the ridiculous questions I was asked.

ROD: In court, he would sit there

and if he didn't like what he's hearing,

he would smack his hands down "(GROANS)".

I said to him,

"The jury are watching your every move, Richard."

SEAN: Her mother and father gave evidence on her behalf.

I don't think either of them think that Dena could do anything wrong,

which seems astonishing to me, really.

MARTYN: Of course, Julian couldn't be mentioned to the jury,

but I was confident in the evidence.

We had all of the motives that we knew about,

the coerciveness towards Richard.

It was a slam dunk for me.

They came back in and asked to hear the original call

from Richard Thompson to the police.

Richard Thompson phoned up to say my wife tried to kill me.

I just want it logged in case I'll seek a divorce.

So that's what seemed to create a question of doubt for the jury.

NEWS: The black widow, as she's become known,

stood trial for the attempted murder of Richard Thompson.

NEWS 2: Mrs Thompson had denied that she had tried to kill her husband.

NEWS 3: After stabbing him and beating him with a baseball bat

she was acquitted of attempted murder.

NEWS 4: The jury accepted that she had acted in self-defence.

(TENSE, SOMBRE MUSIC)

When I heard the verdict, I was absolutely devastated.

I had been through hell,

and I thought how on earth did the jury not see what was happening.

I thought we had got Dena

and that she was going to prison for a substantial amount of time.

I was wrong.

We had to shrug it off and carry on fighting.

And that's why on the same day as the acquittal,

I announced we were reopening the Julian Webb Case.

The events portrayed during this trial,

and the unusual nature of Julian Webb's death,

means that Sussex Police will re-examine

the circumstances of that death.

I was determined to stop Dena and get justice for Rosemary Webb.

We now knew that Dena was obsessed with insulin.

We'd heard from five other men that they had been injected with insulin.

If you inject someone with insulin, you will cause shaking,

you'll be disoriented, your temperature will rise,

and if it's enough insulin, you will die.

And the theory I came up with is that Dena had used insulin on Julian

to incapacitate him.

And over several days she made him ingest aspirin and dothiepin...

..and suddenly I had a line from A to B

of how a young man went from being fit and healthy

to a dead body a week later.

But we had a problem.

If you have a suspicious death, you have a forensic post-mortem.

And Sean said to me, we didn't do that.

It was classified as a unexpected death, not a suspicious death.

Even though many, many people had their own doubts.

If you are trying to find long-term drugs in someone's body,

it would be in their hair.

I realised that I would have to exhume the body.

There are only four or five forensic exhumations in this country a year.

I reached out to the world's expert on exhumation at that time.

His first question to me completely threw me and he said, Martyn,

is there a tree next to the body?

Because the tree roots suck all the water out

and save the body decomposing.

So, of course, straightaway we drove to Hayling Island,

we found Julian's plot, and it was right next to an oak tree.

(SOMBRE MUSIC)

I'm very much a person who believes you go back to the earth

that you never really go away.

Your chemicals, your spirit, is there in the natural world.

It's not nothing. It's something else.

It's things like that, that makes me wish I was religious,

because I would then imagine we would meet again in some form,

and that's hard to deal with.

(LOW, TENSE MUSIC)

It was a really daunting experience.

Each six inches you go down, you have to take soil samples

because bodies do leak fluid and they do leak poison.

After about two hours, we got to the coffin.

That was heavy duty.

We were lucky.

96, 97% of his body was intact, very little of it had decomposed.

But if we didn't get anything back from the post-mortem,

the case would be closed.

(SOFT DRAMATIC MUSIC)

(MUSIC FADES, ENDS)

The forensic post-mortem showed that small amounts of dothiepin

had been fed to Julian over several days,

it was enough to question whether Dena had killed Julian Webb.

I remember punching the air, I was absolutely over the moon.

But Dothiepin tastes very bitter.

How did Dena get Julian to take dothiepin without knowing?

To prove she did it, I needed the answer to that question.

But the results from the scientists came in in the late summer of 2000.

On the 1st July 2000, Sussex Police started investigating

the biggest murder enquiry ever launched,

which was the Sarah Payne case.

We have to catch and lock up the person who abducted

and killed a this little girl.

And so we're going to have to park this.

It was really frustrating,

I just started getting into the swing of this case,

but I knew I would go back to it.

(GENTLE MUSIC)

Rosemary kept everything in relation to her son's death. Everything.

Let's have a look.

And that's when I first heard about Don Hutson.

'Dear Don, how's things, are you enjoying your beer?

And here's another one, 'Dear Don and Kathy.

Happy Christmas to you both and hope to see you soon, Julian and Dena'.

Some of the letters were sent after Julian's death,

where Don had written condolences to Dena.

So, I was determined to find Don, because I want to know his version

of what he thought happened to Julian and how Julian died.

And the first thing I did was contact the local police in Tampa

and ask for their help.

(PLANE ENGINE ROARS) (UP-BEAT POP MUSIC)

(MUSIC FADES, ENDS)

I got a message that there was...

I needed to speak to some British detectives, English bobbies.

(CHUCKLES) They got an accent. You know.

(FAKE ENGLISH ACCENT) Hello, JD.

Could you be of some service? Possibly? Yes, sir.

(NORMAL) Yeah, I can help you out, brother. What you got?

We need to find Don Hutson.

We would run, you know, it's just a standard driver's license checks

to see if there's anything available on that person.

But there was just nothing that we could, you know, locate them at.

And I believe that ultimately led to Martyn and Sean coming here.

(LIGHT MUSIC)

As soon as we landed, I think we were probably curiosities.

SEAN: Yeah, we were. They loved the accent.

And they wanted just to know if we'd brought our hats with us,

and all that sort of thing. Of course.

Did you? No!

There were lots of reasons why we went to America.

One was to trace Don Hutson,

but also it strengthened the plank of the American Dream.

We only had four days, so we immersed ourselves

in the fishing community of South East Florida.

(MUSIC ENDS)

We went everywhere:

marinas, yacht yards, pubs, restaurants.

We spent three days looking for him and our time is running out.

We're flying home in two days.

I really wanted to find Don Hutson,

because I knew he was a personal friend of Julian's,

and we had a really strong clue that he had spoken to Dena

after the death.

So I decided to use the media.

Hi.

This appeal is for Don Hudson, who's an American living in Florida.

I am Detective Inspector Underhill,

and this is... Detective Constable Sean MacDonald.

And we are both from the Sussex Police in England.

I didn't want the American press exaggerating

or running off with the wrong idea. And of course, they did.

Within 24 hours,

we were Scotland Yard detectives and Don was a suspect in a murder.

Within a day, Don Hudson contacted me,

but the dude was pissed that his name is associated

with a police investigation.

He was incredibly angry, you know,

how dare you come over to this country and tell everyone

that I'm a murder suspect? You've ruined my life.

I got him to agree for me to go and see him,

at this huge outdoor hunting lodge.

There was lots of taxidermy animals there.

You know, six-foot tall bear. (LOW, TENSE MUSIC)

There was an alligator. The whole thing was gun centric, man centric.

When I met him there, he was incredibly hostile.

He gave me both barrels.

I said, 'Look, this has just completely been exaggerated

beyond all belief.'

Slowly we brought him down and then he started talking.

He told us the story that Don and Julian had met through fishing.

They corresponded together; they spoke on the phone.

He said 'the last time he spoke with Dena was a couple of days

after Julian had died.

Dena called Don and said... 'I'm sorry, Julian is dead'.

She said 'He had a really hot curry.

Next morning, I found him dead in bed.

It looks like he killed himself.'

I just went, whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa.

What was that you just said?

That was the- the moment for me. That was my Pandora's Box.

'Can you conceal the taste of dothiepin in a curry?'

Yes, of course you can.

Suddenly, to me, everything clicked into place.

That was how she gave him the tablets.

It was that eureka moment for me.

I was a man possessed for then on.

I thought 'I've got you now'.

NEWS: Dena Holmes arrived at Crawley Police station

in West Sussex just before 10 o clock this morning.

Shortly afterwards, detectives began questioning her

about the death of her former husband 8 years ago.

Dena was arrested, but wouldn't speak to us.

She chose to provide a prepared statement.

POLICE: There was only two people in the house on that night,

you and Julian.

Of course, sadly Julian can't help.

But you were there Dena...

..tell me what happened.

DENA: I've given you a statement, I'm not giving you any more.

(MYSTERIOUS MUSIC)

In this case, it was undeniable that she was a liar.

That in itself doesn't get you very far in proving a case of murder.

We had put together a lot of strands of evidence

about Dena's extraordinary,

I would say, deformed personality.

About her dishonesty, about her motives,

and about her very curious conduct

in the period up to Julian's death and immediately after.

Days before Julian died,

Lee unexpectedly turned up at Dena's house.

Had Julian and Lee met, then the bigamy would have come out.

I mean if Lee had started to tell Julian what had happened to him,

well, imagine what the effect would have been on Julian

and on Dena's marriage to him.

And so maybe she decided relatively quickly to kill him.

And that timeframe, Lee turns up,

it's only a week later that Julian dies.

Is it just a coincidence?

She didn't want to get caught.

Suddenly I had not just the method in which she'd given

Julian Webb a fatal dose of dothiepin, I also had the motive.

And I thought, the pieces are coming together.

One my analysts created an A3 chart, and I called it a story on the page.

We had each victim's name and story that they were told.

I said when the jury goes into the jury room,

having listened to a very bizarre story,

I want them to refer to a piece of paper and it's all there.

A repetitive serial fraudster who used violence when it was necessary.

It was back to the thrill of the chase again.

INTERVIEWER: You were excited?

Well, I suppose anticipation, but I think mostly thankfulness

that something had been recognised at last.

I think that was the overwhelming feeling.

Couldn't contemplate that the perpetrator would get away with it.

(SOMBRE, HAUNTING MUSIC)

NEWS: Dena Thompson was described in court as a very disturbed person.

NEWS 2: Police say she was motivated by money and hatred of men.

NEWS 3: Thompson denies murder and the trial continues.

Here I was presenting the jury and, in effect, the public,

with this very intimate analysis of what we thought was going on

in this woman's mind

and her very remarkable and distorted personality.

But I never heard her speak.

Dena didn't testify in court.

I think there's one reason for that

because the lawyer has said if you go to that stand,

your story will collapse.

(MUSIC FADES, ENDS)

A woman's has been jailed for life for murdering her second husband

by poisoning his curry on his 31st birthday.

Curry. Poison in curry.

NEWS: Sentencing Dena Thompson to life imprisonment,

the judge Michael Hyam told her

'Nothing could excuse you for the wickedness of what you did.'

NEWS 2: Dena Thompson is tonight beginning a life sentence

for murder.

She is dishonest, untruthful, manipulative, deceitful

and scheming.

We got there.

(RELIEVED WHISTLE)

It's one of these sorts of highs, you know, adrenaline flow.

You know, you could have gone out and danced all night sort of thing.

(LOW, OMINOUS MUSIC)

It's still really hard to believe that I know that person.

You know, if someone goes, what does a murderer look like?

Well, not Dena.

LEE: I remember there would be moments

where if you thought something,

she'd be reminiscing the same thought.

And that's where I thought we were going, as one.

It makes me sick now, actually, when I think about it.

'Cause to me, that was a wasted life with her.

She's paid for her crimes,

but she hasn't paid for her crime against me.

(LOW, TENSE PIANO MUSIC)

INTERVIEWER: She still goes by the name Dena Thompson.

She still uses your surname.

Yeah, I find that odd.

Do you think she ever loved you?

No. I've accepted it.

A hard acceptance.

But I had no choice, I had to accept this and move on.

It would be much easier to entrap men now than it was in her day.

Now you just swipe left or right on an app.

You can spot vulnerabilities in people

just on their profiles online.

What better age for somebody like Dena to then start targeting

my age group.

So, has the story finished? After 30 years?

We'll wait and see what the next chapter says.

Would she do it again?

Yes, I am sure she would.

I don't think she can help herself.

I hope I'm wrong.

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