My wife murdered her ex-husband… and I’m sure I was meant to be next

Ahead of a new documentary, the Black Widow’s surviving partner speaks out about his torment and her trail of death, fraud and bigamy

After Richard Thompson placed a lonely hearts ad in his local paper in 1998, he was optimistic: following one failed marriage and a period of work overseas, the 40-year-old telecomms manager was ready to settle down again. So when he got a reply from a woman named Dena – “bubbly, extroverted, confident” – he was excited. “These are things I found very attractive,” he says, and recalls their first meeting: “There was some chemistry there. And that’s what you’re looking for.” 
Two years later, blood pouring from his head on their bathroom floor, their plans for an idyllic future together came to an end. Blindfolded with his hands tied behind his back after Dena allegedly suggested a sex game, Richard says he felt a crash to the skull as she landed a blow with a baseball bat. Adrenalin coursed through him to such a degree that he didn’t feel the subsequent lacerations to his neck and shoulder with a carving knife. 
The brutal attack on Richard, Dena’s third husband, would ultimately uncover a trail of murder, fraud and bigamy spanning at least a decade. For the first time, he and several others she ensnared appear in Black Widow, a new Sky documentary about their battle to bring Dena to justice, and the fear that there are more victims out there. 
Almost a quarter of a century on, Richard says he has been denied retribution. The documentary and this interview, he says, are his opportunity to finally set the record straight. “I want justice. I want people to know what really happened” – something he says was not achieved in court. In 2000, a jury acquitted Dena of attempted murder, despite both Richard and the police being convinced she would be convicted. Though the court dismissed Dena’s alleged attempt on Richard’s life, the litany of deceptions she wrought on her victims led police to describe her as “every man’s nightmare”.
Sean McDonald, then-detective constable at Sussex Police, remembers the moment the report of Richard’s attack crossed his desk: “I just went, ‘F—k!’ It was the Dena,” a woman whose suspicious activities had plagued the force for years. That phone call would spark their biggest investigation into her past, unravelling sexual manipulation, and physical and financial abuse of men from West Sussex to Florida, and would lead to her being jailed for fraud and, after a long battle, murder. 
Detectives believe that there may be more victims staying silent due to embarrassment. But McDonald’s concerns don’t end there. In 2022 Dena was released from prison on parole after serving 16 years of a life sentence (plus a further three for fraud), and was last seen in Brixton, south London, last year. “If she gets to a point where she needs money or she needs something else, I definitely think that she will reoffend, and she has the modus operandi that she knows works for her.” There is good reason, he adds, to “be frightened”. Should any man meet a romantic interest called Dena, he warns them to be wary, and report anything suspicious to police immediately. 
Despite the 2000 trial for Richard’s attempted murder being the catalyst in unravelling Dena’s lies, he remains angry at how the case panned out. As soon as proceedings began, it became clear that Dena’s lawyers “were wiping the floor with the Crown Prosecution Service”, with her legal team maintaining that she had acted in self-defence after Richard lashed out on learning she had stolen his money. 
But several of those present during the trial describe Richard as “bullish”, a term equally applicable 24 years later when we meet in the boardroom of an upmarket hotel in Eastbourne. McDonald acknowledges too that, while police supported Richard’s version of events, his story had “holes”.
In the immediate aftermath of the attack Dena called her parents, who drove for two and a half hours to the Thompsons’ home in Rustington, West Sussex. Her father drove Richard to hospital. It was only days later, on the advice of a friend, that he first made contact with the police, stating that there had been an attack and that he wanted to record the incident as grounds for divorce – but making no mention of attempted murder. 
None of that played well with the jury, nor the fact that 5ft Dena “looked like a demure lady”, remembers McDonald – all helping to paint a picture of someone incapable of the allegations against her. Richard, meanwhile, was becoming increasingly frustrated by the rules of the court, speaking out of turn, and being admonished by the judge. 
But some truth did come out: she told the court that she had never loved him and only wanted his money; that she planned to sell their home, uproot their lives to America and abandon him there; that she had lied about a £300,000 lottery win, pilfered the payout from his “golden goodbye” from BT and emptied his accounts. Dena was convicted of 15 counts of deception of Richard and two other lovers and sentenced to three years and nine months in prison. 
What Richard hadn’t suspected was that he wasn’t the first of Dena’s lovers to find his life in peril – and that, as his own trial went on, Sussex Police had been building an even bigger case against her. Outside the courtroom, detective chief inspector Martyn Underhill announced that they would be opening an investigation into the 1994 death of Dena’s second husband, Julian Webb – who Richard never knew existed. When police later asked how long he had known Dena Webb, “I went, who? Never heard of her,” Richard says. 
Shattered by the failure of his case, the news afforded a shred of hope, Richard remembers. “I was thinking, are we all going to get justice eventually? [If] I won’t, maybe someone else will.” Unbeknownst to Richard, Julian’s mother, Rosemary Webb, had been following his case. Julian, her only son, had died on his 31st birthday six years earlier. When she had called to wish him a happy birthday, Dena picked up, telling her that newspaper sales executive Julian was too unwell to come to the phone. The next day, when police knocked on her door with the worst possible news, Rosemary’s suspicions were raised. “In my heart I knew she had done this. I’d never met anyone who could tell so many lies.” 
Most of those lies concerned Dena’s first husband, Lee Wyatt, with whom she had a son, Darren. Dena had told Julian that Lee was a thug who beat her and tortured animals. Rosemary learned from her son that police had installed a panic button in their house due to threats from Lee. On multiple occasions during their three-year marriage Dena insisted that she and Julian go on the run with Darren. 
But all of this “was her complete fantasy”, Rosemary, now 82, says. “I thought there was a great big bruiser about, who would bash the living daylights out of anybody – the sort you would see in films. And, of course, it wasn’t like that at all.” Dena’s lies were unceasing, including that she had been diagnosed with cancer. As the months passed, “I kept telling people that all the things that were supposed to have been happening to her and had happened in her life were so extraordinarily over the top that it couldn’t really be the case,” Rosemary remembers. “She was like a B-movie.” 
Yet Rosemary could not have imagined the fate that awaited her son, who died after Dena laced his birthday curry with aspirin and antidepressants. The morning after his death, Dena pitched up to his workplace at 8.30am, enquiring about his £36,000 death benefit. That was not the only act that would mark her out as not the average grieving widow. Four days after Dena murdered Julian, while being questioned by police, McDonald remembers her “talking to me about going to Florida and how she loves going to America, and all happy and smiley… it was a very surreal situation”. Meanwhile, her story kept shifting: Julian was suicidal and had overdosed; he was seasick; he had sunstroke; he was a drunk. “The extent of her lies was so extreme, I think she started to believe them herself,” McDonald says. 
During Sussex Police’s investigation it emerged that Dena had never divorced Lee Wyatt – who was no brute. In fact, he believed Dena when she told him that he needed to disappear for their safety in the early 1990s, as they were being targeted by the Irish “mafia”. Her deceit involved the mafia wanting to get their hands on the £50 million deal she had agreed with Disney for plush toys she had made (letters that she had falsified using her neighbour’s word processor). She also defrauded the building society where she worked out of £23,000, and tried to blame it on Lee. 
Lee’s family remembers him being “completely controlled by Dena”, and more than 40 years since they first met, he has spoken little of his ordeal. “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. She said that more than a dozen times, all the time,” Lee recalls in the documentary. “I remember one occasion she was literally crying. I was crying as well… I just believed everything she was telling me was true.” He remembers his mother warning him, “You can never tell them the complete truth, because no one will believe it.” Based on what he knows now, he believes that Dena “tried to kill me on a couple of occasions. I was victim number one.” 
McDonald acknowledges that “if you wrote this as a book, it would sound too far-fetched”. That didn’t stop the force making “discovery after discovery” about nearly a dozen men whom Dena had got romantically involved with before stealing their money, including a Gatwick Airport customs officer she left stranded in Florida, and a teacher who, infatuated with her, gave up his job and handed over his savings on being told she had cancer. In spite of the many leads, the investigation ran out of road. That was until Richard’s call in 2000, which renewed efforts to dig into Dena’s past – including the uncovering of a letter from an American friend who had written to Julian’s family after his death. The letter, along with the other evidence the police had gathered, helped pave the way for Julian’s body to be exhumed in 2001. 
That news was hard-won for Rosemary, who has always felt “it was absolutely incumbent on me to get justice for Julian”. At the murder trial in 2003, as Dena sat behind glass, Rosemary “never looked in her direction at all. I didn’t want her to have the satisfaction.” Instead she turned to the jury as she read her statement. “To think that my son should be murdered in this calculated and cruel way torments me. The grief, the pain and the torment will never go away.”
That has not changed in the two decades since the trial, at which Dena was given a life sentence. Newspapers at the time dubbed her the “black widow killer” – a reference to the female spiders who eat their mates. “This year, he’s been dead as long as he was alive. Gosh,” Rosemary pauses. “That gets me at the quieter moments, I suppose.”
It remains difficult to draw a straight line between Dena’s victims. While the lies told to each are familiar – that she had come into a windfall, that she had cancer, that they should start a new life in Florida, and their subsequent suspicions that she was trying to kill them – there is little else linking them. Rosemary suggests that “she was little and sort of pathetic-looking, and I think [her victims] all thought, ‘Oh, I can help her.’” Their generosity was in direct contrast to Dena’s own. “I don’t think she has any feelings for anybody, actually. Not really deep feelings. I think she sees people as something she can exploit… She had no sense of humanity,” Rosemary says. 
The judge at the Old Bailey trial had a similar take on Dena, describing her as “utterly ruthless and without pity”. Underhill remembers that when he charged her with murder, far from showing remorse, she was flirtatious. “She gave me that wistful look that she obviously used to attract men and I remember thinking: ‘Oh my God… you’re coming on to me!’”
Time has given no insight into what drove Dena to commit such cruelty. Rosemary believes Dena has a personality disorder, and simply “wasn’t clever enough” to execute her plans – including killing Richard – as intended. McDonald speculates a “hatred of men” (she was not subject to psychiatric evaluations during the trials) may have played a part. Richard believes she is driven by intense greed. “She is completely money-orientated… [she] cleaned out my bank accounts and left me in debt.”
Like McDonald, Rosemary too believes there may be more to come. “I suspect [parole restrictions] will ease up in some way, the more that she doesn’t get into trouble, and then I feel that could be dangerous.” This is just “a gut feeling”, she mulls. “Maybe I’m prejudiced, but I somehow feel that the leopard doesn’t really change its spots.”
None of the money Dena stole from her victims, thought to total over half a million pounds, was ever recovered, including the tens of thousands she stole from Richard. He (along with Lee) was horrified by the parole board’s decision to release her two years ago. Friends have asked him if, now free, he is worried that she might pay him a visit. Is he? “No. She should be worried about coming near me because I know who she is now, and what she is.”
The decades since he last saw her in court – and was forced to come to terms with the fact that his wife had never loved him, as she told those present, and that the future he had envisaged was built on lies – have only amplified his anger over the attack. The poor handling of the case, which he says involved a significant amount of “mudslinging… I went through hell in that courtroom”, and the theft of all he had worked for, remain difficult memories. 
In 2005 Richard got a new job and met his current partner, allowing him to finally move on from the horrors of his past. Life is good, he says, but for one thing: “she got away with it”. 
Black Widow is on Sky Documentaries and Now in September