This programme contains depictions of violence.
Please be aware that this programme also contains themes of suicide.
LEE: When I was on the run,
Dena was psyching me up by saying the mafia
only want to kill us if you're alive.
She was saying... if you committed suicide or pretend suicide,
can we take photos?
DIRECTOR: You would fake committing suicide,
and then no-one would be after you anymore?
There'll be a new identity for me to pick up,
because Lee Wyatt has killed himself.
There's a special hangman's noose,
you put it over your shoulders and arms,
aand you've got to be a very good actor to sort of make the disguise.
Did you ever feel like she was suggesting
you should actually commit suicide? Yeah,
yeah,
on quite a few occasions.
I was her biggest problem,
because I'm still alive, and I can fill in all the gaps.
(CLICK)
(THEME MUSIC)
# I put a spell on you
# Because you're mine
# You better stop the things you do
# I say, watch out
# I ain't lying
# Because you're mine
# Because you're mine #
I remember,
I was sitting in my office
and someone called Sean McDonald, who was a DC I'd never met,
walked in, and he said,
I've done some profiling of you,
and you've worked on a lot of murders.
And I said, I have.
He said, I think you're pretty good at murder.
I said, well, thank you. (CHUCKLES)
And he started talking about someone called Julian Webb.
A few years earlier, Julian had unexpectedly died.
His wife Dena straight away said that he committed suicide,
but everybody took the view that this was a suspicious death.
Sean and a lot of the officers felt that there was far more to this,
and Sean gave me the files in the hope that I could further that view.
Dena told the paramedics that Julian had died
literally 15 minutes before the ambulance arrived,
and, yet, when they went to move the body,
the body had rigor mortis.
And that rang alarm bells
because rigour mortis takes far longer than 15 minutes to set in.
He had died long before she told us he had died.
And then we got the A+E Doctor,
who had thought Dena was faking her grief.
Really, really unusual.
Finally, I have never in my life heard of anybody
claiming for a partner's money the day after an unexpected death.
It was quite obvious there was more to this case than met the eye.
And now Dena's first husband, Lee Wyatt, had reappeared.
Lee had been missing for about four years
and he was accused of seriously assaulting Dena
and his disappearance appeared to be linked to that.
He was arrested for benefit fraud using an alias of Colin Mitchell.
There were quite a few things to talk to him about
and we were hoping that some light on what happened to Julian
would be shed in the interview.
LEE: I'd been living alone for four years on the run.
Dena was living with Julian.
And there I was
moving from place to place, sometimes living rough,
really rough.
I was desperate and broken.
I didn't tell anyone about the mafia
because they'd think I'm mad. (CHUCKLES)
So that's the sort of thing you have to keep quiet.
Tell no-one. Nothing.
And for all those years I hadn't seen my son, Darren,
because Dena told me it wasn't safe.
I'd lost all perspective on truth and what was lies.
I got the impression she's trying to make me mad.
I was probably bordering on that nonsanity thing
simply because what I've gone through.
I made these dozens of little notes.
I would write things like, "Is Dena lying to me?"
And then another one saying,
"Has all this story about Disney been a lie?"
Every time I spoke to her,
I would say, "How long is this going to keep on going on for?"
"What's happening?"
I want answers.
And that's when she said "Julian is dead."
And I said, "Well, how is that? Why is that?"
And then she put the phone down on me.
So obviously I was asking too many questions.
I took a deep breath,
and I thought, so I'm not going to be a protection squad
taking over the identity of Julian Webb.
I tried to ring her again after that, but she wasn't picking up.
Did you think, for even a moment,
that she might have killed him? No.
No, I didn't. I didn't think it was in her.
A week later, she contacted me.
And that's when she strung up the thing about the States.
You've got to get yourself over there with a passport.
And she said you'll see Darren;
you'll see him in the hotel.
She said we were going to be starting a new life together
as a family unit.
I said, "At last!"
But she said it wasn't safe to travel together,
so she said, I'll meet you over there.
That's when the brain started ticking over,
thinking there's something not quite right here.
But I need to try and make a life,
and I need to try and get my son back.
So, I went anyway.
She came into the hotel room
I'm thinking now we can have an embrace together.
And straight away she would come out with, "Do you have any money?"
And I said, I've got no money.
She wasn't happy with that at all.
And I thought, this isn't right.
She said, "I'll go back, and I'll get Darren now."
And I thought, what the hell is going on?
I need to follow her when she leaves
and see if she's telling the truth.
I ducked out the rear entrance, climbed over a fence
and I saw her heading towards a young man.
They kissed.
And then that's when it suddenly hit me like a ton of bricks.
She's carrying on like I never existed.
I felt sick.
I realised the whole thing was a sham.
All these years, Lee, you've been manipulated and used
and everything has been a lie.
I was thinking, I need to see the parents,
I need to ask them questions.
I've got no money, so I signed on at The Job Centre.
And signed on as..? As Colin Mitchell.
And then I had a letter, saying, "Can you come into the office?
We believe there's something not quite right."
And I said, right. Game is up.
SEAN: He had been sleeping rough, sleeping in bus shelters.
He looked a bit dishevelled, shall we say.
But, you know, he's not got tattoos on his face or anything like that.
He was just a very ordinary sort of looking bloke.
MARTYN: We'd suddenly got Lee Wyatt. I couldn't believe it.
We knew that Lee and Dena were still married legally
when Dena married Julian.
And we knew Lee was at the house in Yapton
about the time when Julian died.
Dena accused Lee of stealing money,
of breaking into her house, of assault,
and we had this awful allegation of sexual assault against him.
These are serious allegations;
he would easily be facing five years or more in prison.
LEE: As soon as the door shut, I was frightened.
I was shaking.
I thought, well, what story do I tell?
I did what I did
because I thought I needed to save the lives of my son and Dena.
But whether or not they would believe me, I don't know.
MARTYN: And I said, we're going to go through this
from start to finish.
So, let's start at the beginning and take me through it.
Yeah.
'86.
That was probably the very start of it all.
We'd had the first years together,
which were quite wonderful, as in we were going places.
And then Dena was pregnant.
She said this isn't right, this is uncomfortable.
And the medical staff declared that the baby was dead.
DIRECTOR: How many weeks pregnant was she?Oh...
About 36 weeks.
So, it was like, you know, full term.
Dena had to go through the motions of birth.
Such was the exhaustion of doing it,
Dena's heart stopped.
I heard what we call the death "throttle."
(RASPING BREATH)
The sister then ran out
to get the machine to give her a shock,
and I was shouting, "Don't do this to me, we've got a life together."
Whacked her in the heart
and then there was a big, deep breath that came from her.
The sister rushed in and said,
"She's alive, she's alright".
The baby came out,
and I remember saying,
"Here's our child, our baby, let's just say goodbye to it".
The name was Louise Amanda Wyatt,
and that would be... my initials. (VOICE BREAKS)
So, it was a part of me dying with her.
Yeah.
I wanted to pick up the baby
and she wouldn't allow it.
(DENA SCREAMS)
She was just saying, "Don't look at it, don't touch it."
I never once touched the baby and nor did she.
And I didn't touch Louise
because I didn't want to upset Dena.
Did something change that day?
Yeah.
That, to me, was a moment where Dena died.
And I honestly to God think Dena came back
as truly another person.
Everyone gave Dena the sympathies.
And quite rightly so.
But she just carried on as normal.
As if nothing had happened.
And within weeks she insisted she had to get pregnant again.
So we did that.
And Darren was obviously on his way.
Darren was 6.7 lbs when he was born
but it took five days for him before he could come out
because he became a blue baby.
So he got put into an oxygen box tank, and I'm thinking,
"I can't believe this is happening again".
From that point onwards,
I became fearful that I was going to lose him, too.
GARETH: I think what Lee went through made him feel vulnerable.
Do you think that Darren was used as a way of controlling Lee.
Oh, yeah.
In that sort of situation,
it's currency.
How soon after Darren was born did Dena tell you about the mafia?
Uh...
It's got to be within weeks...
He was a little baby.
I believed that the Irish Mafia wanted to kill all of us.
This was hitmen
and Dena had said there was a price on my head of £100,000.
They wanted all the money from the cuddly toy business -
from the rights to Shaun the Leprechaun.
But you must've said to her, "What do you mean, the Mafia?"
Like, what was your reaction?
Yeah...
Well, I had heard of stories like the Irish Mafia before.
When I heard the Irish Mafia, I just assumed the IRA.
At the time, there was a war of the IRA against people on the mainland,
and the day we got married
The Grand Hotel in Brighton got bombed.
And I just thought this is a dangerous organisation.
I was frightened.
It's quite hard to imagine there were numerous people
out there trying to kill
your newborn baby, your wife, yourself.
Yep.
You're always looking at someone as...
well, are they the enemy or are they a good person?
It sounds crazy but every time we came out of the house,
I would go through the standard security check,
looking under the cars for bombs.
I kept track of the number plates in the back of the rear-view mirror.
I would write it down on a little notepad.
See if I had the same number plate following me.
Every time we went out.
I did fear for our lives, every hour of every day.
It's such a crazy story. It's extremely hard to believe.
But you validate a lot of what he said happened.
Yep. How do you manage to isolate somebody that effectively
and where does the drive come from
to want to do that to another human being?
But, by that point, he is completely controlled by Dena.
And we had no idea.
Dena struck me as being a very well-balanced,
perfectly normal human being.
Dena was contacting my Auntie Jean with phone calls,
very, very odd visits, without Lee.
And there was the constant blaming of Lee being the one
that didn't want anything to do with his mother or the family.
And she was the innocent one doing her best to communicate.
When you're only given one side of the information...
what do you believe?
There was no reason to not believe her at all.
Dena had said that my mother and family
had been infiltrated by the Mafia.
And that's why contact ceased from me.
And I believed her.
Within two years, I'd lost my grandfather, my father,
and then I had the stillborn of Louise.
And together with her bringing up the stories of all the mafia,
that was just juggling about in my brain.
Perhaps I was having a mental breakdown.
Not just that particular minute that week,
but just gradually building up.
Lee, I saw as being a strong, well-adjusted person.
Successful. Knew his own mind. Knew what he wanted out of life,
and he absolutely got torn apart
by somebody's manipulation.
I absolutely couldn't believe the story I was hearing.
You think this can't have happened.
SEAN: You have to unravel all the stories that are there.
And they're so intertwined and so difficult to unravel.
LEE: I thought, well, are they against me or are they with me?
I had a lot to tell them,
I'm the victim of her lies.
GARETH: Nobody had any contact with Lee whatsoever.
He was just a ghost.
Just a ghost.
Lee was an only child,
and he was very, very dear to his parents.
You know, I was angry at the time.
And, in my naivety, I just thought,
I want to go and find Lee and have a go,
and I'm going to find out why he's not talking to his mother.
I drove down a very long lane to get to their house.
And nobody was more surprised than Dena when she opened that door
and I was stood there.
And she told me Lee was away and he wouldn't be back.
So, I might as well go.
DIRECTOR: Away where?
Didn't elaborate on that at all.
LEE: Dena told me just hide.
I was just huddled up in the corner.
So that I wouldn't be acknowledging myself to him.
Why did you accept what Dena said that Lee wasn't there?
Did you not feel like you wanted to have a look around inside?
That's...
I should have done.
But, at that point, we had no reason to disbelieve that wasn't the case.
You know, we weren't privy to what was effectively
the psychological warfare that was going on, aimed at Lee.
Lee was part of a journey for Dena.
I think she was learning how to control people
to the extent that she controlled Lee.
And then what she did post that, became the murderess.
MANDY: By then, Dena didn't really talk about Lee.
I guess I didn't really ask.
I knew that Lee had assaulted her,
but I didn't know anything else.
Lee was definitely out of the picture.
And all of a sudden, she's talking about someone called Julian.
Suddenly she was Julian's partner.
This one day I remember being in the front room,
I look out the window, it's Dena
and this person walking down.
"Hello! This is Julian."
"Oh, hi. Hello, pleased to meet you."
It kind of... didn't make sense.
But it wasn't like, "Oh, I'm having an affair."
Which, you know, that's what it would be classed as, in theory.
And then it was like, suddenly they were married.
I've never seen two people that would be so different.
But it was very much,
to me, that she was in charge.
LEE: Her father said, Dena's just married.
Some chap, and I said, "What do you mean married? What marriage?
She can't marry. I'm married." There's no divorce.
She told her parents
that we were in the proceeds of divorcing one another.
But it wasn't true.
She married him bigamously.
She actually put on the marriage certificate "spinster."
At the time, I thought it was just part of this plan to protect us.
A week before Dena married Julian,
she said to me you have to be on the run without us.
And she told me I couldn't stay as Lee Wyatt.
I had to have another identity.
It felt like I was an undercover operative.
So, I'd read a couple of books.
There was The Day of the Jackal. I think it was.
This guy was going through the French countryside,
killing all manner of people, taking cars and money.
So, I pulled out a map of the UK,
and I quite literally
hovered my arm and a finger and a pencil around this.
I spun myself in a circle to make myself giddy.
And the first bit I hit was Newquay.
It wasn't quite on Newquay.
It was near Newquay.
DAVE: In those days the amusements arcades were in their heyday.
So it would be, pushers, and things like that.
And then the cranes, which was the grabbers.
You pick it up and win every time.
No. (LAUGHS)
What we used to do is take the weight of the toy,
hold it in there and just ease it off
so basically the grab would do that.
One day a person walked through the front door, long hair and a beard.
Asked if there's any employment available.
And I offered him a job fixing machines.
I asked him his name, he said he was Colin.
Colin Mitchell.
Hi, I'm Colin Mitchell.
So, who was Colin Mitchell?
Well, he's someone that worked in the hotel trade
and I probably used to see him every day.
So, you knew him? So, I knew him. Yeah.
And you stole his name? And I used his name.
I managed to get a passport in the name of Colin John Mitchell.
How did you do that?
Uh, I just applied for it. (CHUCKLES)
It's funny because there was a film on, called The Fugitive.
And I saw that at the cinema,
and I thought, "Oh, God, is that me?"
I'm not going to be jumping off of rivers and helicopters
and stuff like that, but that's how I felt.
DAVE: I'd say, "Colin, can you do this?"
And basically, he wouldn't answer to Colin.
Now I know why, yes.
Cos he wasn't called Colin! (CHUCKLES)
I was waiting.
Waiting for the threat of the Mafia to be gone.
Leaving your son behind,
obviously that was quite horrific.
So, my trust was in Julian and his mates, the protection squad,
to look after them two.
And Dena always said, "Yeah, they're doing their jobs.
They're looking after us."
They're arresting the hitmen, according to her.
Well, it turns out, Julian became a stepfather sort of thing,
a substitute dad.
He probably behaved quite well to him.
But I'm not to know that cos no-one ever told me anything.
MARTYN: Lee hasn't seen his son for years because of Dena.
For a parent to leave their child, this is a very extreme action.
This is not normal behaviour.
I realised what we were looking at
was a really controlling relationship.
Coercion starts with very small control
like, "I'll answer the phone,"
"I'll open the door."
A month later, it's, "I'll access our joint bank account."
And the scary nature of coercion
is that often the person being controlled doesn't realise it.
But it was a complex story, and we had this awful allegation
of sexual assault against Lee that we had to put to him.
(BUTTON CLICKS)
LEE (ON RECORDING): Roses are red, violence is black,
you need arse shafting as a pay back.
LEE: It's not good.
My hands were shaking.
My feet were shaking.
And I admit to them that I did make that call.
She said you have to make a phone call
where you're slagging me off.
Then I question and she said, "Don't give up on Darren."
I said, "I'm not giving up on Darren."
"But you are. You're asking all these questions."
And this is this twist that she does.
Then I read the sexual assault statement,
which she signed.
She set me up with a crime I haven't committed.
I knew this was serious.
And that's when it all came to me.
I ask, "What date did she say this happened?"
And he gave me the date.
I said, "It's impossible.
I was in Cornwall, working, on that day."
And the detectives looked at each other and they left the room.
Did you attack or abuse Dena?
Not then, no other times, whatever.
So that wasn't me. That was her mental state.
She's just on another level.
SEAN: I called his old boss.
And Lee's alibi checked out.
He was 200 miles away when the incidents
that she's saying were happening in Yapton,
when he was working in Cornwall.
Worryingly, she got Lee Wyatt to incriminate himself
in numerous offences that he hadn't committed
purely because she coerced him into doing it.
I loved her that much that I would have done anything for her.
Love does make you do crazy things.
SEAN: His had all been fabricated by Dena.
He was never charged with any offences.
Full credit and marks to them.
Because they believed in an innocent man.
(SIGHS)
MARTYN: I'd never heard of a case as extreme as Lee Wyatt.
It was mind-numbing what she did to him.
By the end of the interview, I don't think any of us thought
he was in any way connected with the death of Julian Webb.
The way Dena set up Lee Wyatt,
took a lot of intelligence.
took a lot of thought. A lot of planning.
Premeditation.
But we couldn't charge Dena with anything
because, at that time, coercive control wasn't a crime.
She got away with it
and the damage caused was horrendous.
LEE: Of course, I tried to get custody.
But the family court judge took her word rather than mine.
What she's done isn't against the law,
and the police would not help.
It's like a civil matter rather than a law enforcement thing.
I think Darren has always lived with his grandmother,
Dena's mother, Margaret.
I got the impression
he's been taught the father is the devil.
So, he's been brainwashed.
Of course, he has.
I wanted a life together with my son.
But I hadn't seen Darren for three or four years.
When I left, all I could say is, "Daddy will see you again soon."
But I never saw him after that.
I remember sending things for his birthday.
It was all sent back to me.
I've never known what he's done in his life,
how he got on at school.
Darren is the greatest loss of my life.
I was frustrated that we hadn't got a charge.
Dena completely destroyed Lee's life and Julian Webb had been found dead.
There is a killer out there and I was definitely worried.
I just knew something else was going to happen.
I had no doubt that she'll be looking to meet more victims.
And that's what concerns me the greatest.
In August of 1995, a man walks into the police station at Worthing,
and states that he is a victim of Dena as well.
And his name is Rob Waite.
Dena had mentioned his name several times,
blaming him for all kinds of thefts and things.
And I thought it's just another made up name
that she'd come up with.
But this guy has arrived to tell me
he has been coerced to go to America with Dena.
And the date that he was there is exactly the same
as when Lee met Dena at a hotel, and then followed her back
to where she was with a guy.
That was Rob Waite.
Alarm bells go off straight away.
Dena had told him that she's dying from cancer,
and she wanted to go to America for the last three months of her life.
So, he had agreed to take all the money that he could
and they went to Florida.
And I sat there open mouthed.
Dena's told Rob the same fabricated story that she told Julian.
They had ended up doing midnight flits from hotels, motels,
and taking anything that they could grab before they left
cos people were after them.
And then Rob told us that she administered something to him
in their hotel.
He felt a sharp pain in his upper thigh.
He believed that she was administering insulin.
Dena then went back to England
and abandoned him in America.
He had no money, no clothes.
All he had with him, really, was his passport and a few pennies.
And now I'm thinking, could this be what happened to Julian Webb?
Was he injected with insulin as well?
We're truly shocked by what is going on,
that this is her pattern of behaviour.
I realised that we had something much more serious going on here.
DIRECTOR: Now you've got three victims. Can you take action?
At that point, there was nothing else we could do to arrest Dena,
because we had no proof that she had injected Rob.
I kept trying to push people to see if there was anything else,
because I think everybody had begun to think,
there may be other victims here.
But then the case went quiet.
RICHARD: On the 1st of January 2000,
there I am, on the floor, feet tied, hands tied,
and I'm thinking, this is uncomfortable.
And she said, "I'm just going to tie you up and have some fun."
And she put a towel over my face.
She goes, "Can you hear me? Can you hear me?"
"Yeah, I can hear you."
Bang! (GLASS SHATTERS) (MAN SCREAMS)
A bright flash goes off in your head.
It's like someone firing a flash gun in your eyes.
Bang! Again. (SCREAMING)
So hard
the impact split my head up both sides.
I didn't even know I'd been stabbed.
Honestly, I just couldn't take it in.
"What? Your wife just tried to kill you?"
There was so much blood, it was all over the floor.
To her horror, I sat up.
I'm literally fighting for my life.
I pinned her on the floor.
She dropped the knife.
And I said to her, "What on earth are you doing?"
And she said, "It's all been a lie."
All been a lie!
There was nothing else said...
So... she calls her parents.
After about two and a half hours, her parents turned up.
Her mother walks in.
First thing, she said, "Dena, what have you done this time?"
Her father took me to a hospital to get me stitched up.
I was lying in a hospital bed.
I could see two policemen attending another incident.
And I was trying to get their attention.
But her father pulled the curtains. He wouldn't let me.
When we got back to the house,
Dena had packed some basic stuff.
I just assumed she was going off with her parents.
And I'm trying to work it all out.
I could still hear the ringing of this baseball bat in my head.
I really wanted to go to sleep. The pain was incredible.
And I noticed that all the blood had been cleared up.
Her mother had cleaned it up.
And then they left, and they drove her back to Devon.
So, I'm in the DS's office,
he tells me take a seat and we're going to talk about job
that's been called in the day before.
Richard Thompson says he has been assaulted by his wife,
and her name is Dena Thompson.
I just went, "Fuck!"
Dena Thompson was also Dena Webb and Dena Wyatt.
I thought, this can't be happening again.
Immediately, police officers were sent to the address.
But because Richard had waited so long to contact us -
it had been three days since the alleged attack -
we were playing catch up.
By the time we get to do the bathroom,
Richard told us Mum has already cleaned up all the blood
that's in there.
You would never clean a scene ever like that, ever.
And somebody had.
MARTYN: This is a crime scene. The man nearly died.
It stretches belief.
We'd lost a lot of evidence.
The golden hour, as we call it, had been and gone.
The logical person would dial 999.
Richard had wasted three days
and allowed the scene to be destroyed.
Unbelievable.
SEAN: Not only had we lost all the evidence that could give us
clear proof of what happened, we had another problem...
Richard doesn't want to press charges.
I was shocked.
MARTYN: I was in a real dilemma
because if he didn't want to prosecute,
Dena could go off again and do this to someone else.
This woman is out there, and she could do it again...
She's dangerous.
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