The following programme contains descriptions of sexual violence.
(BIRDSONG)
This is the house that Julian was brought up in.
We used to get pheasants and rabbits and all sorts of things, you know.
Yes, it was lovely.
Just the job for somebody who was nature-crazy.
(CHUCKLES)
DIRECTOR: Can you show us his bedroom, which one it is?
It would have been over there.
What I've got in there are a lot of his things
and I've got all his big collection of records
and tapes and things.
It was punk. It was wonderful. (CHUCKLES)
Do you like it? I do, yes.
I did at the time, and I still do.
Does it remind you of him when you play them?
I guess it does, yes.
(MELANCHOLIC MUSIC)
What do you want me to do, start from the top?
Yes, please.
Could you tell me what it is you're reading?
My statement from...
to the court, I think.
Erm...
"Julian was my only son,
my only child.
He was a young man with all his life in front of him.
This was a particularly vindictive murder
perpetrated entirely for her personal gain.
To think that my son should be killed in this calculated
and cruel way torments me.
The grief, the pain
and the torment will not go away.
The wounds are still open,
I miss him so much.
I am devastated."
It was a man and a woman, police officers,
that turned up.
They told me he was dead.
(PROJECTOR REEL WHIRS)
Days passed and I couldn't tell you what I did.
The police, they told me "Well, maybe,
you know, he did commit suicide."
I wasn't going to have that.
I said, "Look, you know, this really cannot be true."
How could you know that? Gut feeling.
# JEFF BECK FT. JOSS STONE: I Put A Spell On You #
# I put a spell on you
# Because you're mine
# You better stop the things you do
# I said watch out
# I ain't lyin'
# Cos you're mine
# Hey, yeah
# You're mine, yeah
# Because you're
# Mine #
The story of Dena is very complicated.
Very confusing. (DOOR SHUTS)
People just think you're making it up,
because if you wrote this as a book,
it would sound too far-fetched.
(OMINOUS MUSIC)
In 1994 on the 4th of July,
I went to Dena's house in Douglas Close in Yapton.
So, I went to the house to take a witness statement
from Dena about the death of her husband Julian Webb.
A post mortem was carried out,
when Julian's body had been brought to the hospital.
And it established he had died
through taking an overdose of drugs.
How they'd been administered was what we were trying to establish.
What were your first impressions of her?
Oh, I'd say she was very... she was very nice.
And she was willing to talk.
Her account was that he had committed suicide by taking an overdose.
And there was a bottle of spirits, and drugs had been found.
She said he was depressed
and he'd been depressed for some time.
Did that seem believable to you?
Er, yeah. I've got to be absolutely honest,
we didn't disbelieve it.
But she didn't seem to be the grieving widow
or how you would expect somebody to be
four days after the person that they...
presumably love the most in the world had died.
She said not very long before
she made the phone call to the paramedics,
he was still alive and was snoring.
The paramedics turned up very quickly,
seven or eight minutes from the initial call.
But when they moved him off of the bed onto the floor,
rigor mortis had set in.
That would indicate that he had been dead for several hours.
I realised that there were a number of inconsistencies
in Dena's statement.
It was not an open-and-shut case of somebody committing suicide.
It needed a lot more investigation.
But it was quite difficult, to be honest with you,
because, you know, the only witness to this was Dena.
I was basically Julian's snotty-nosed little cousin
that used to, you know, come down and annoy him.
He was obviously older.
He was into his bodybuilding, he was quite a fit bloke.
He used to drive a nice red Triumph Stag,
which I was never allowed anywhere near.
It was quite a summer's day.
My mum had told me, "Come and meet Dena."
I kind of almost felt a little bit sorry for her.
You know, it's the 'girlfriend being grilled' kind of thing.
I mean, I just thought she was a fairly ordinary person.
She was at the Woolwich Building Society.
He was up in the offices of the West Sussex Gazette,
which was just down the road a wee bit.
And I think they used to meet at lunch time
in the pub across the road.
He was quite a shy person,
so I don't think he was one to go chatting up girls.
Julian lived at home until, you know, he'd met Dena.
She was divorced.
She had her little boy, Darren,
from her previous marriage.
He was a lovely little child.
He might have been about three at that time.
But I found Dena to be
absolutely humourless.
And, you know, I mean, some of the things she said
were so far-fetched, they could not be true.
My auntie, Rosie,
she took an instant dislike to Dena.
I wondered whether it was just, I don't know, you know...
an overprotective mum, kind of,
just not being keen on her.
Within less than a year they were engaged.
I said, "For God's sake, Julian, give it more time.
What's the rush?"
It was probably the fact that his friends were all
married or getting married.
And of course, I think she saw him
as someone she could manipulate.
And I'm sure she was very charming.
But you know, that's all part of the game, isn't it?
(GENTLE, BRIGHT MUSIC)
They got married in a registry office.
It wasn't a big wedding.
And then they went on a honeymoon to Florida.
He loved it, Julian absolutely loved it.
He loved his fishing, he was a really good fisherman.
(INDISTINCT CHATTER, LAUGHTER)
JULIAN: Huh? MAN: Good catch.
And that's when she suggested that why don't they move there?
He didn't tell me he was thinking of emigrating.
I expect he didn't cos he probably thought I would have said, "Don't."
(CHUCKLES)
Dena suggested running, you know, a fishing charter business,
taking tourists out on fishing boats.
You know, what a... That's a dream job for Julian.
Did it seem like Julian and Dena were in love?
"Whatever love is," to quote Prince Charles.
(CHUCKLES) Um...
I suppose the answer to that is no.
No real affection shown,
but perhaps there wouldn't be in front of me. Who knows?
At this point for you, no alarm bells?
No, no, no. Not for me. I didn't...
I just thought, you know, "He's married, he's in love."
You know, start of a new life.
But then a few months after the wedding,
she was diagnosed with cancer
Then I thought, "Oh, well, if she hasn't got long to live,
we'll be rid of her soon."
(CHUCKLES)
I laugh, but it's, um...
a way of surviving.
(EERIE MUSIC)
(LIGHTER CLICKS)
Within a matter of months, after she got cancer,
she was saying that her ex-husband Lee was about
and he was beating her up and that he was threatening
and they had to keep on the move to avoid him.
I kept trying to contact Julian,
and I couldn't.
So, they, instead of living in their home...
Yes.
..had spent time on the run? Yes.
It would have been, you know, several weeks,
which was why I was getting worried.
I thought her ex-husband was,
you know, one of these big bruiser types.
And when Julian told me
she'd got a panic button that the police had installed,
I thought if he turned up and found Julian,
then he'd beat him up.
Dena accused Lee Wyatt of several assaults.
He had used a police truncheon to indecently assault her.
She'd had cigarettes stubbed out on her.
They were very serious allegations.
Lee was hugely dangerous.
So yeah, there was a lot of concern,
for Julian's safety, but also for Dena's.
Officers investigating Dena's allegations had been looking
for Lee for over a year without any trace of him.
And now, with the death of Julian Webb,
we needed to find him and we needed to find him fast.
Dena and I both went to the same school.
We worked together at the Halifax bank in the 80s.
She was very clever,
a very good cashier.
We'd always try and wangle it that we got the same lunch break.
So, we'd go around the shops
and just do, I'd say, girl stuff really.
So, we had a laugh together.
She genuinely was a nice person.
The first time I met Lee,
I remember him vividly, with like, sort of, blonde hair.
Like a nice-looking guy.
You couldn't really not like him.
But all of a sudden,
I started to get phone calls
from Dena.
"Lee's done this. Lee's done that."
And they weren't pleasant things.
Lee had raped her.
It is awful. It's beyond all comprehension.
It was like this guy had turned into a monster.
As part of the investigation into the Julian Webb death,
one of the things we wanted to do was to establish
where Lee Wyatt was.
And he was out as 'Wanted.'
So, if he got stopped in the street,
he would be arrested.
But...
he was nowhere to be found.
Dena had also received death threats from Lee Wyatt.
DENA (ON PHONE): Hello? LEE: Is that Dena?
Yeah, is that Lee? Ahh, you remember!
Roses are red, violence is black,
you need arse shafting as a payback.
When you actually hear these threatening phone calls,
it sends a chill down your spine.
(CAR ENGINE STARTS)
We had to find him.
Are you conscious of how the story sounds?
I am because it sounds mental.
People will be looking at the, "Oh, is he telling the truth?"
This is what really happened. "Oh, look, he coughed there,"
or, "His eyes have moved over..." Everyone is an armchair detective,
and they all think they know. Hey, that's human life. We all do it.
So just accept it for what it is, the unbelievable
and it's truth.
This is what happened.
(CURIOUS MUSIC)
I've never been on a blind date before in my life.
There was butterflies.
Eventually we got to the theatre.
It's about a murder scene, a sort of whodunit.
Dena... (CHUCKLES)
She probably revelled in it.
The fact that, "Ah, yeah, this is good. Right up my street."
We kissed that night.
It's hard to say,
but all I will say is that there was a stage where
it was all genuine.
I loved Dena.
Yeah.
MAN: My 21st birthday party,
I went dressed as a bumblebee
and he and Dena made themselves teddy bear outfits.
She was an attractive, blonde young lady
with a seemingly very bubbly personality.
I mean, there was nothing there that raised my suspicions.
My cousin was just getting into a serious relationship,
and he was going to settle down.
So we both dressed up as teddy bears,
sort of holding hands walking into there.
Well, ten minutes into the dance floor and dancing, wow!
I wish I'd taken a bit more underarm perspirant or aftershave,
cos it was a bit hot in there. (CHUCKLES)
(BRIGHT MUSIC)
Real happy memories were buying the house.
She would help me out, doing the painting.
We were doing things together.
She was into soft toys, making soft toys,
and everyone always used to remark on it.
and I thought, with my sales background,
I could retail them.
In the beginning, we were quite successful.
We went on holidays together.
Dena knew that I'd always wanted kids.
When my son was born, Darren,
that was the happiest point of my life.
Yeah.
So, for a couple of years,
my life was pretty OK.
I was doing alright.
Did he seem besotted?
In retrospect, yes.
And I think, to be honest, to carry on,
to follow the path that he followed,
then he had to have been completely besotted.
Anyway, one of these soft toys
was a little leprechaun, about so big.
I was selling them at £25 a time. (CASH REGISTER DINGS)
One of the directors that owned the business premises
where we were renting out
just came up to me and he said,
"I want 25,000."
We shook hands. (CASH REGISTER DINGS)
Next minute, a letter turns up from the BBC
that they want to do a cartoon series of Shaun the Leprechaun,
and it was worth £250,000.
Wow! (CASH REGISTER DINGS)
Then Dena told me someone in Walt Disney
saw what we had to offer,
and they want to buy Shaun the Leprechaun,
and the sum is between 40
and 50 million pounds. (CASH REGISTER DINGS)
It was like, "Phwoar, what?!"
Dena would be on the phone
talking with Hilary, the solicitor.
To be honest, she was the person that was in the office
and in charge of the phone,
so I just let her carry on that way.
(SCOFFS)
It's interesting that he didn't share that news
with you or anyone else. I get the feeling,
or I got the feeling subsequently
that once she started spinning that story,
the disappearance was quite quick after that.
Dena sat me down and she said,
"Our lives are in danger."
She said that the Mafia
want the money from Walt Disney.
And I said, "What Mafia? Who is this?"
Now I'm thinking the Mafia from the States.
But no, it was the Irish Mafia.
The Irish IRA, another form of criminal underworld gang.
The last thing they want is an Englishman
making money out of their own folklore item.
And what they're gonna do is kill
Dena and my son
if they don't get the money.
And she said,
"You've got to either leave the country or go somewhere.
And try and set a life up for us wherever you're going."
And I trusted her.
Why would I not?
I was terrified in what was gonna happen,
not necessarily to me, but to Darren.
When you left, was that the last time that you saw Darren?
Yeah.
By that point, he is completely controlled by Dena.
Nobody had had any contact with him whatsoever.
We didn't know where he was.
No phone calls. No letters. No... zero communication.
He was just a ghost.
Just a ghost.
At that point,
I was in Cornwall.
So many things had already gone on,
my mind was just in circles, everywhere.
Cos she said, "You can never ring the house phone,
because it's being tapped."
I had a list of about half a dozen phone boxes.
She had to give me a day, a date and a specific time.
I'd be sitting in the phone box waiting for her to ring me.
(PHONE RINGS) Ring, ring. Pick it up.
And she kept on saying, "Don't give up on us now!
You've got to keep this whole thing going,
for the lives of Darren and ourselves so we can be together."
I mean, she said that more than a dozen times. All the time.
I remember on one occasion, she was literally crying.
I was crying as well
for the fact that I hadn't seen my son for a long time
and the fact, am I ever going to see him?
I just believed everything that she was telling me was the truth.
At some stage,
she said that there were people watching the house.
A protection squad looking after Dena and my son.
I was told this guy that was part of the team,
that was protecting us, was called Julian Webb.
(OMINOUS MUSIC)
Dena said to me that I was going to take his name.
I was going to become Julian Webb.
I would be taking on the whole identity.
And he would just be
entering back into the protection squad,
protecting others.
And I'm thinking, "I'll go along with it."
To get a new ID in the name of Julian Webb.
(PROJECTOR REEL WHIRRING)
Little group of Psathyrella.
This is the horn of plenty.
It's very tasty, I gather, to sort of put into stews.
But in France, they also call it "the trumpet of death."
(CHUCKLES)
Oh.
That was a gap, I must have missed one.
If I'm out on the nature reserve and so on,
I've always got my photographic gear.
There's all sorts of things that I see.
You just think, "I wish Julian could have seen that."
And of course, we both of us had this great love of wildlife.
What else makes you remember him?
I suppose absolutely everything really.
You know, it's one of those things.
You can come round a corner and see something...
(WHISTLES) ..straight through the heart.
Julian wouldn't have committed suicide ever. He wasn't that person.
And certainly, even if he was massively, massively depressed,
which he wasn't because everything was going right,
it doesn't make any sense.
I mean, I know you can never
completely know another person,
but in the same way that I could never do it,
I'm quite sure he could never do it either.
After Julian's death, we went down to Hampshire
where Julian Webb was originally from.
We took statements from friends and family.
Not one person I spoke to said
that they believed he would he would take his own life through depression.
If Julian had committed suicide, he would have left a note
or have been telling people he was considering committing suicide.
He hadn't done that.
That's when it started becoming really concerning.
This is totally out of character for him.
So, if it wasn't suicide,
could it have been an accidental overdose
or had somebody given him those drugs?
One of the neighbours, he said that leading up to Julian's death,
Dena and Julian had had several arguments about money
and he'd heard these.
(MUFFLED ARGUING)
Something happened.
I remember he said...
"I believe marriage is for life, no matter how difficult it is."
He was not his happy,
ebullient general self.
Did you ever get to find out? No, I didn't.
Because it was within a matter of months he was dead.
It was early hours of the morning.
I drove up to Sussex.
I want to protect my son and I'm not there. How the hell do I do this?
How long is this gonna keep on going on for?
I want answers cos there's something not quite right going on here.
Is Dena lying to me?
Would I see my son?
(GENTLE KNOCKING)
I knocked on the door.
It was strange because she was behaving
weirdly towards me.
"What are you doing here? You're going to ruin everything."
And I think I said,
"Ruin what? What's going on?"
But she was not telling me nothing.
So, I guess that's because there was someone else in the property.
I believed that there was a protection officer called Julian
who was looking after Darren and Dena.
Well, there was no sign of Julian.
And then she said,
"We'll have to see one another tomorrow,"
or "I'll talk to you tomorrow."
Did you know he was upstairs in bed at that point?
No.
I had no idea.
I didn't know what was happening.
I want to ask you about the last days of Julian's life.
Yes. It began with...
him not being very well. Is that right?
I'd been down to the New Forest
and I'd seen these massive carp in the river at Beaulieu.
And they'd come up and the big pink mouths,
open mouths waiting for you to drop something in them and so on,
and I thought he'd like to know about that.
And I think I phoned him when I got home.
And she said he was unwell and he...
he'd got a tummy upset or something and he was in bed.
I get a phone call and it's Dena.
She says, "Oh, Mandy, Julian's not well."
She said, "Oh, I went up and he was really, really boiling hot."
She said, "So I gave him paracetamol,
but then when I went up again,
he was, like, freezing cold."
I'm like, "Maybe you should phone an ambulance or something?"
And then she went, "Oh, must go,
cos yeah, Dad's coming now".
And then that... that was it.
Nothing.
(PHONE RINGING)
It was his birthday so I phoned again,
and she said he was very ill and he was in bed and he was asleep.
She was very chatty then.
More chatty than I've ever heard her.
And I said, "Would you go and wake him up
and ask him to speak to me, please?"
And she made all sorts of excuses.
I said, "Look, he's still ill, phone the doctor."
"Julian wouldn't want the doctor." I said, "Yes,
he would want the doctor. Phone the doctor."
And in the middle of that conversation, she said,
"Umm, oh..." she said,
"He's being very sick."
And put the phone down.
I think he was trying to get down to the phone to speak to me,
cos he would have known it was me.
I did think of going round there.
I knew there was something wrong.
(THUNDER ROLLING)
(THUNDER CLAPS)
(RAINFALL)
(MELANCHOLIC MUSIC)
At the funeral, I was sort of living in a zombie limbo.
Cos it's almost unreal.
I think I'm still in a state of limbo, really.
(RAINFALL CONTINUES)
NICK: It was just horrendous.
Your cousin is dead.
In my heart, I knew she had done this.
I've never met anyone who could tell so many lies.
Is Dena a killer? Is she a mur... you know.
I found it really, really hard.
It was kind of very, very surreal, very strange,
but Rosie was absolutely adamant. Absolutely adamant.
Unless someone's found with a knife in their hand
and standing over the body, you don't think...
someone would do that.
Julian didn't have a bad bone in his body.
Why would his wife kill him?
I do remember my partner went over and spoke
to Dena's family,
saying, "We don't want any more contact with you."
Her father said to him, "Just you watch what you're saying."
In sort of desperation,
sort of bullying sort of terms.
It did strike me as odd.
How soon after Julian's death
did you set your mind to...
finding out what happened and getting justice?
Half an hour?
Very soon, you know, because I knew she had done this.
I've always been someone
who likes to work through things.
I am a bit bizarre, I understand that.
(CHUCKLES)
But it was the thrill of the chase.
And it was another salvation.
I mean, she looks innocent, doesn't she?
It was a question really of finding evidence.
I found a letter
telling him he'd got a job in America.
"Dear Julian, I have pleasure in offering you the position
as travel representative with Tibbs."
Well, she's made it up, hasn't she?
You know what they say about scams,
poor grammar and bad spelling.
This has it all.
I mean, I didn't set out to do a detective's job.
And I didn't know whether the police knew it or not,
but I was making sure that they did know it.
During the investigation, we were able to confirm
Dena went to her next-door neighbour's,
to use the word processor to write the letter.
The neighbours said, "Well, actually, Dena wrote it
and here's the copy that I took of it."
I just kept finding these things.
She spins these wild yarns.
I mean, she did claim she had cancer and that was not true.
She was seeking for sort of sympathy.
It was all part of her plot.
Everybody starts telling us stories about Dena's health,
about how she had breast cancer, womb cancer,
liver failure,
how she was going to have to have one foot amputated
because of her diabetes.
When you actually meet her, there's absolutely nothing wrong with her.
So much stuff came out about what she'd done.
The morning after Julian died,
Dena was on the steps at Julian's work
at 8:30AM saying that
she wants to know about the death in will service.
You know, she turned up a matter of hours after Julian had died
to ask where her money was.
That's incredible.
Dena was obviously a liar.
The extent of her lies was so extreme,
I think she started to believe them herself.
She created a world of fabricated stories.
The amount of different versions that she had given to people
about Julian's death was staggering.
Saying he had seasickness,
sunstroke,
he'd been depressed,
and he'd taken to drinking alcohol.
Well, most of those we could show weren't true.
The post-mortem established he had no alcohol in his blood
or in his urine.
There would have been some traces of alcohol. There was none.
It rang alarm bells.
You have to put all this together to try and establish
whether she had murdered Julian.
This is definitely no accident.
We made discovery after discovery.
The biggest bomb shell of them all
was that she'd never divorced Lee Wyatt.
We were all truly shocked.
She was still married to Lee Wyatt.
And of course, Julian didn't know that,
and neither did we.
We had suspicions around Dena,
but we had to consider whether
Lee was involved in the death of Julian Webb,
or whether they'd done it together.
Or was Lee in fact another victim?
It's very difficult for someone to disappear completely
for that length of time.
We had serious concerns that he may well be dead.
Despite the circumstantial evidence
pointing to Dena having a hand in Julian's death,
there was no smoking gun.
The Crown Prosecution Service said, "You don't have enough evidence
to charge her with murder."
I can't describe the frustration because
we felt we were letting Julian down.
(DRAMATIC MUSIC)
It was interesting cos I think they thought it was a sort of,
you know, just a small case.
And loads of people turned up
and obviously the coroner thought, there's something up here.
We know that in Julian's body, there was aspirin and dothiepin.
Which the coroner confirmed were found in fatal doses.
But the coroner couldn't say how the drugs had got there.
There was no evidence that Julian had committed suicide.
But also there wasn't sufficient evidence of foul play.
The coroner came back and said, "Well,
there wasn't a completely satisfactory
explanation for his death."
Therefore, he was recording it as an open verdict.
That proved that he hadn't committed suicide
It meant that murder was still an option.
The case wasn't closed? The case wasn't closed, no.
It is incredibly disappointing,
the fact that we weren't able to give justice to the victim
and the victim's family.
And I felt that because we hadn't got Dena behind bars
something else was going to happen.
I come into work in the morning,
and I'm told by one of the DSs,
a man is stopped by the police
for benefit fraud
and is in custody.
He had been using the name of Colin Mitchell.
Which was a false name.
So, I walk downstairs...
..looked in...
and I immediately recognise him.
We have Lee Wyatt in custody.
I always remember my mother said,
"Lee, you can never tell them the complete truth
because no one will believe it.
They'll think you're mad."
Based on what I now know,
I do believe that she tried to kill me
on a couple of occasions.
I was victim number one,
and no one was going to believe victim number one.
(DRAMATIC MUSIC BUILDS)
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