The ex-husband of one of Britain’s most notorious female killers is convinced she will strike again.
Dena Thompson, aka the ‘Black Widow’, orchestrated a 20-year campaign of terror after tricking men into marrying her before attacking, defrauding and murdering them.
After marrying her first husband in the 1980s, Dena left him fearful for his life after defrauding him of his life savings and tricking him into thinking he was being targeted by the mafia.
She then bigamously married, defrauded and then killed her second husband by feeding him a poisoned curry and, having covered up the murder as suicide, married and stole from a third whom she later attacked with a metal baseball bat and carving knife.
Dena was finally jailed in 2003, but police feared her crimes may be just the tip of the iceberg, with police claiming she had targeted at least eight other men and possibly more via newspaper lonely hearts advertisements.
Yet despite being labelled as ‘utterly ruthless and without pity’ by a judge, she is now a free woman once more- and her victims fear she is ready to strike again.
‘Single men should beware,’ first husband Lee Wyatt told the Mail. ‘She plays the innocent, the sort of sweet woman that couldn’t hurt a fly but it’s all an act. No man is safe around her.’
The 69-year-old retired businessman first met the ‘pretty and fun-to-be- with’ 22-year-old in the early 1980s when both lived in North London, and married her shortly afterwards.
After having a child together, Wyatt quit his job and started a soft toy business with Dena, which she soon twisted to her advantage.
Using forged documents, Dena convinced her husband that Disney wanted to pay them millions for the rights to a character she had created- and used the same technique to trick him into thinking the mafia wanted a cut of their money.
More forged documents followed, some alleged to be from gangsters and others from the FBI, and fearing for his safety, Wyatt fled his home and went into hiding, changing his name to Colin Mitchell and paying his wages directly into his wife’s account.
But unbeknownst to him, whilst he was lying low in Cornwall Dena had shacked up with advertising executive Juloan Webb, who she met in 1991 and bigamously married six months later.
During this time Dena managed to con over £25,000 from Julian after falsely claiming she had cancer and needed money for treatments, instead transferring the cash into bogus accounts.
But she eventually grew paranoid her two husbands would meet, and murdered Julian on his 31st birthday after feeding him a poisoned curry laced with paracetamol and painkillers.
His death was deemed a suicide, and police saw no evidence of foul play- but an inquest into his death saw a coroner conclude there was no evidence Julian had taken his own life.
Over the next four years Dena conned a series of men out of their life savings, before eventually doing an 18-month stint behind bars for defrauding her former place of work.
But in 1998, less than six months after being released, she married third husband Richard Thompson, and immediately began draining him of his savings.
After telling him she needed money for cancer treatments, Thompson quit his job as a manager at BT and took an early retirement package, handing over his pension to Dena.
But less than a year into their marriage, she pretended to seduce Thompson by tying him and blindfolding him in the bathroom, before attempting to murder him with an aluminium baseball bat and a carving knife.
She avoided jail after claiming to have acted in self-defence- a claim Mr Thompson bitterly refutes.
‘She definitely tried to kill me, and they proved that she murdered her second husband,’ he told the Mail.
‘So, she would have been a serial killer if she had been successful. And God knows what else she has done.
Yet despite dodging an attempted murder conviction, the incident prompted police to re-open the investigation into Julian’s death, exhuming his body and discovering that all of her ex-lovers had been tricked into handing over large sums of cash.
Dena was jailed for life in 2007 and told she must spend at least 17 years behind bars, which she completed and was released on parole two years ago.
Her exploits are set to be revealed in ‘Black Widow’, a new three-part documentary set to premiere on Sky this week.
But despite the infamy, her surviving victims are convinced she will continue to target vulnerable men.
‘The woman I knew was an evil psychopath,’ said Wyatt ahead of her parole. ‘She has never shown any remorse for her crimes and it sickens me to think that soon she’ll be out and walking the streets again.’
Thompson meanwhile previously said: ‘She can’t change. She’s never shown remorse.
‘So many men were her victims. She’s the master of putting on an act. She’s a schemer.
‘There’s no way she should be released.’
Sean McDonald, a retired detective who led the investigation into Dena and met her on several occasions, told the Mail: ‘I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again, I am absolutely convinced she will commit further offences.’
‘She’s now moved into an age bracket where there are lots of divorcees and people with big pensions, who may well own their own homes with no mortgages,’ he says.
‘She picks her targets very carefully. They are vulnerable men who are lonely and who have got money.’
While Dena’s current location is unknown, she has previously been spotted in both Reading and London, and is rumoured to be in a new relationship with a pen pal she met in prison.
‘If it’s correct, then this person must know about her offending,’ says Sean McDonald. ‘But some people are drawn to the drama and excitement of that kind of relationship.’
He added: ‘I think she’ll continue to offend. It’s only a matter of time.
She is a manipulator. There will be other victims.’
He added: ‘If your father, son, uncle, cousin, friend, whoever, comes home and says they’ve met a lovely new lady called Dena, then my advice would be to ring the police.’
Black Widow will premiere on Sky Documentaries on September 15.
Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@metro.co.uk.
For more stories like this, check our news page.
