At the age of 13 Shianne Treanor found out her mother was a serial killer.
The schoolgirl was being brought up by her father John Treanor and had not seen her mum for nearly four years.
The woman who brought her into the world was Joanna Dennehy, a hopeless drifter who led a life of booze, drugs, self-harm and casual sex with both men and women.
One day at the end of his tether, Shianne’s dad had just walked out on Dennehy and took their two kids.
Shianne was at a sleepover at a pal’s house when he rang to break the news: “Your mum has killed someone.”
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The truth was far worse. Dennehy stabbed three men, torturing one, and dumped their bodies in ditches over ten days in 2013.
The judge told Dennehy she will die behind bars for her crimes – a sentence her daughter agrees with.
Without a moment’s hesitation, Shianne said: “She deserves to spend the rest of her life in prison.
“I’m sorry to the victims. I can’t imagine what they went through.”
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For years Shianne tried to fathom how her mum turned from a loving parent into a man-hating psychopath.
Now 19 and speaking for the first time about the case, she told the Sunday People she finally visited her in jail late last year to try to find out
“I was told nothing about my mum and I wanted answers,” she said.
“I turned 18 and started to look into it. Eventually I got an email telling me where she was.
“In October last year I wrote her a letter. I was really cold because I thought she hated me. I told her I wasn’t looking for a relationship with her, I just wanted to know why.
“But I got a letter full of love and warmth and how much she wanted to have me in her life. I just cried. It was so emotional.”
Reliving their first jail meeting at HMP Bronzefield, Surrey, she went on: “I was nervous, shaking. When I got into the visit hall I had to take a double look when I saw her. She looks completely different.
“We were the only people in the room apart from the guards. We sat opposite each other at a table.
“She was wearing a black T-shirt, blue jeans and boots. She’s got short blonde hair and piercings on her face, one next to her eye. She looks well.
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“I said to my mother, ‘I’ve missed you.’
“In all honesty I never thought I’d see her again. I never thought she’d do what she did or that she’d ever be in my life again. We both just cried.
“I asked her, ‘Why?’
“She apologised to me. It doesn’t make it right and doesn’t excuse anything but I wanted the apology.
“Part of the punishment is that she will never get to see me grow up or get married.”
Shianne remembers Dennehy as a loving parent before drink and drugs took over.
“My mum would love to read,” she said.
“She was always on the sofa reading a book and she would go out on long walks. She loved Mr Darcy. She read Pride and Prejudice. She would talk to me about it all the time.
“She’d do paper-mache art with me and my friends.
“We had a hallway just inside the front door and one day my mum and my friend we got paint and painted all the walls with drawings.
“My dad got home and he was really, really mad but to me that was a really happy memory.
“I had another friend and in the summer Mum would get the paddling pool out and we’d do somersaults into it and make mud pies. She was just a really big kid.”
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Dennehy was 17 when she gave birth to Shianne in 1999, in Milton Keynes, Bucks.
Shianne’s dad John, now 42, left her over claims she had cheated on him and he took his daughter to King’s Lynn, Norfolk.
The couple rekindled their relationship and moved to nearby Wisbech. Dennehy worked on a farm there and they had a second child three years later.
Security guard John has told how his girlfriend turned into a “devil” cutting herself with knives, necking strong lager at breakfast and sometimes downing two bottles of vodka a day.
Recalling her mum’s changing personality, Shianne said: “She had gone out drinking. In the middle of the night she sent a man round to beat up my dad. It was terrifying.
“I was about five and I had woken up and I heard this shouting. There was this man outside shouting at my dad.
“He said, ‘Jo has sent me here because you’ve done this,’ but I didn’t know what. My dad shouted at me to go back to bed so I did. I didn’t know what happened after that but I was petrified.
“My mum would just come home after being away for so long and she would have a black eye from a fight.
“She’d disappear for days on end, sometimes for months.
“She would come home and she would have cuts all over her or she’d been cheating and she’d have love bites and she’d have to hide it with a scarf.
“They would have massive arguments. I don’t know what about but they’d be screaming at each other for hours and hours and hours.”
He finally left one night after she pulled a six-inch knife from her boot and stabbed it into the carpet.
Shianne was nine. John took the two children and moved to Glossop, Derbyshire.
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Four years later in 2013 Dennehy pleaded guilty to three murders and two attempted murders.
Two men said to be “under her spell” were convicted of being her accomplices after the killings and the dumping of the bodies around Peterborough.
She is one of only three women to be given a whole life jail term. The others are Rose West and Moors murderer Myra Hindley.
Sadomasochist Dennehy, now 36, admitted to a psychiatrist she killed for fun.
Her words were: “It got moreish. I got a taste for it.”
She said she was “sorry” for the attempted murders but “not sorry for the murders”. Shianne’s dad banned her from using the internet to learn about her mother’s crimes.
But it was a losing battle and Shianne found a way to go online, learning the whole devastating story at 13.
She became depressed and had to move schools after her friends found out.
She had nightmares, her grades suffered and she feared she would turn into a psychopath like her mum, who she compares to Hindley.
Shianne recalled one day innocently asking her father: “Will I turn out like mum?”
She added: “It was a genuine thought. I was only 13 and I didn’t know if it was a genetic thing.”
Shianne now lives in Manchester and completed a course in travel and tourism at Tameside College last year.
She added: “I will never turn out like my mum. I’m my own person. I might have some personality traits of hers but we’re two different people.
“I was not around her for many years. She hasn’t had that massive influence on me.”
Shianne added: “I can’t believe she did what she did. It makes me want to cry.
“She’s hurt those people and I can’t ever forgive her for that. She should spend the rest of her life in jail thinking about the misery she’s caused.
“In a way she’s completely ruined my life. I have this family name associated with the fact she’s taken lives.
“When Myra Hindley was arrested they never found where the bodies were because she never gave anything up.
“In a way, because my mum hasn’t said anything, or given an explanation, those families will never understand.
“I can’t get my head around it. I think she should explain why she did what she did. Those families deserve peace of mind in their lives.
“They are in the dark. Like me, they should have a reason why. ”
