True Crime Campfire - Succubus: Killer Con-Woman Dena Thompson

Episode Date: December 10, 2021

We all think of charm and good looks as a good thing, right? Something we all wish we had goin’ on. But for some people, a silver tongue and a knockout bod are nothing more than tools to help them hurt and manipulate. Tools that make it easier for them to wreak six kinds of havoc on the lives of everyone they meet. Some people are just forces of destruction, determined to take everything they can get their hands on and not worried about who they destroy in the process. We’ve covered some bad bitches on this show before—Dante Sutorius, Tracey Richter—and we think this li’l English rose we’re about to tell you about could hold her own with the worst of them. Join us for a twisting tale of fraud, outrageous deception, greed, attempted murder and murder, all at the hands of one of our worst "bad bitches" yet: Dena Thompson.Sources:BBC Channel 4 documentary "Black Widow"The Argus: https://web.archive.org/web/20140907164935/http://www.theargus.co.uk/archive/2003/12/16/5099453.Black_Widow__Inside_the_mind_of_a_predator/https://www.theargus.co.uk/news/5060737.interpol-hunt-for-missing-lover-of-sussexs-black-widow/Guy Toyn: https://web.archive.org/web/20140704134021/http://www.courtnewsuk.co.uk/c_murderers/a_dena_thompson/crime_vaults/Daily Mail: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1257751/Black-Widow-new-probe-vanished-lover.htmlFollow us, campers!Patreon (join to get all episodes ad-free, at least a day early, an extra episode a month, and a free sticker!): https://patreon.com/TrueCrimeCampfireFacebook: True Crime CampfireInstagram: https://gramha.net/profile/truecrimecampfire/19093397079Twitter: @TCCampfire https://twitter.com/TCCampfireEmail: [e-mail]: https://shop.spreadshirt.com/true-crime-campfire/Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crime-campfire--4251960/support.

Hello, campers. Grab your marshmallows and gather around the true crime campfire. We're your camp counselors. I'm Katie. And I'm Whitney. And we're here to tell you a true story that is way stranger than fiction. We're roasting murderers and marshmallows around the true crime campfire. We all think of charm and good looks as a good thing, right? Something we all wish we had going on. for some people, a silver tongue and a knockout bod are nothing more than tools to help them hurt and manipulate. Tools that make it easier for them to wreak six kinds of havoc on the lives of everyone they meet. Some people are just forces of destruction, determined to take everything they can get their hands on and not worried about who they destroy in the process.

We've covered some bad bitches on this show before, Dante Satorius, Tracy Richter, and we think this little English rose we're about to tell you about could hold her own with the worst of them. So buckle up because this is Sucubis, the story of Dina Thompson. So, campers, for this one, we're back in England again. Specifically, a seaside resort town in Cornwall called Nuky. In the late spring of 1991, a stranger showed up asking for work at an arcade on the boardwalk. He said his name was Colin Mitchell, said he wanted to get away for a while from his life in West Sussex, about 300 miles away.

It being the tourist season and all, the manager needed an extra hand, so he hired him right away. Even said he could move into the flat above the place. And soon, Colin had merged into the flow of things at the arcade. He seemed like a nice laid-back guy, the type who didn't take himself too seriously. But sometimes, his new co-workers couldn't quite put a finger on it, but every now and then it seemed like Colin was hiding some kind of secret sorrow, or secret worry, anyway. They'd find him staring off into space just zoned out, a million miles away.

And he never wanted to talk about why. Now, it's not too rare for people to come to places like nuky to escape something, or someone. Boardwalk towns are like that. So it wasn't anything Colin's new friends hadn't seen before. They left him alone about it. They liked the guy. He was a good worker. What Colin's co-workers didn't know was that his name wasn't Colin Mitchell at all.

It was Lee Wyatt, and he was on the run for his life and the safety of his family. So what the hell was going on here? Let's go a few years back before Lee's stint as Barg and Ben Jason Bourne on the boardwalk. Lee and his wife, Dina, started up a small business. Dina had a hobby making stuff toys, or cuddly toys, as the Brits call them, and in 1983, she and Lee started selling them to toy stores and gift shops and stuff like that. She made the toys, Lee sold him. It was a nice little side hustle to bring in extra money.

And a little ways into doing that, Dina had a brainstorm. Sean the Leprechaun, a white-bearded little dude with a red nose and a green hat. Sean was an immediate hit, and one afternoon in 1991, when Lee came home from work, Dina met him at the door. He could tell she was just burst in to tell him some good news, and it was a doozy. Ireland's major airline, Aer Lingus, which I realize sounds a little bit like the name of a sex act, so let's just process that, and move on. Aer Lingus wanted to start giving Sean the leprechaun dolls to their first-class passengers. And that, as awesome as it was, was not even.

even the best news. Disney wanted a seat on the Sean Express, too. They wanted to make an animated movie about him. So, holy shit snacks, right? Suddenly, Dina and Lee were looking at a big financial windfall, millions of pounds, all thanks to this little leprechaun toy, which is great for them, but I've seen pictures of Sean the leprechaun, and I'm not going to lie, uh. Yeah, I mean, I guess he's kind of cute in a way. Like, Cute in the way that haunted dolls that you find on Craigslist are kind of cute. But if I found one on my seat in an airplane, I would immediately just assume it was some kind of cursed item put there to get back at me for some kind of past life transgression or other. Oh, yeah, definitely.

And I would assume I was in the opening scene of a horror movie and I would yeat the fucking thing out the airlock. Do planes have airlocks? Is that a plane or is that just space? ships. We're not rocket scientists over here. We don't know. It doesn't matter. Anyway, the leprechaun dolls, in my opinion, were creepy. Oh, my God. You know what they're like? They are like the masks in Halloween 3 season of the witch. Absolute fucking classic. They're just like a little bit wrong and are absolutely going to bring about the apocalypse. Yeah. Yeah, Dina's leprechauns, they've got like unlucky charms.

You know, no hearts and moons and clobers for them. They've just got like spiders and not marshmallow spiders, like actual spiders. Like you open the cereal box and spiders just come streaming out. Not so much lucky charms as fucking charms. Can you imagine that just opening the cereal box and just fucking wave of spiders just streaming out? No, thank you. Sean the Lepicon. Dina, for her part, was over the moon about her creepy little dolls, though.

She showed off the letters from Disney and the Irish airline, both on fancy letterhead stationary, both congratulating her and looking forward to a productive business partnership. This was a whole new world for Dina and Lee and their little boy. They'd never had a ton of money. They lived in a small house. They both had day jobs in addition to the cuddly toy business. Dina worked for the local building society, which is similar to what we call like a credit union here in the states, a bank, but one that's cooperatively owned by its members. Now, they were looking at becoming straight up wealthy with a capital W and having a whole new career.

Lee's family was over the moon about it. They all adored him. His cousin Bob, who had set him up on a blind date with Dina years earlier, told Channel 4 that Lee was a ton of fun to hang around with. Great sense of humor. Lee Wyatt didn't have a mean bone in his body, and he adored Dina and their son. The excitement didn't last, though. One afternoon, not long after the amazing news about the Disney film and the deal with the airline, Dina met Lee at the door once again.

He could tell immediately that something bad had happened. Dina told Lee he'd better sit down. They were in bad trouble, she said. See, some organized criminals had found out about their wind fall from Sean their leprechaun. They knew about Disney and Aer Lingus, and they were demanding a cut of the money. If Lee refused to give it to them, these guys would kill him. Lee was stunned. He said, Dina, this can't be real. You're joking, right? But Dina was as serious as a heart attack. These men had come to the house. They'd threatened her. It was so scary. She started to cry.

Lee, she said, These men are after you. The only way we can protect ourselves is if you leave town for a while. It took some convincing, but eventually Lee figured Dina was right. If these criminals were after him, then Dina and their son weren't safe with him around. He'd have to go on the run for a little while, hopefully not too long, just long enough for this whole thing to blow over, or for the police to do their jobs and make sure his family was safe.

He and Dina had read a book a few years earlier. Frederick Forsyth's Day of the Jackal. It's a thriller about an assassin who's hired to kill the president of France, and it has a really detailed explanation of how to change your identity to, you know, slip past the man. This was the book Lee Wyatt used as his instruction manual. Oh, God. After an emotional goodbye to Dina and their little boy, Lee Wyatt slipped away and became Colin

Mitchell. Later, when it came out that he'd been living in Nuky, Under a false identity, one of his coworkers realized, oh, that's why he'd never answer me when I called out. Colin, I just thought he was hard of hearing. Wow, you know, that's kind of new identity 101, Lee, answering to your new name. I'm pretty sure that's on like page one of the manual. Should have practiced that, man. Oh, and get this bizarre little detail.

Dina also told him that their family was under the protection of a secret group called the G-Squod. unfortunate name we've got aerolingus and the g squad that's my new indie band name the g squad and she said as long as they did whatever the g squad told him they'd be safe so i guess allegedly this like run away and change your identity thing was the g squad's ideas good gravy so anyway Lee slipped away in the night, scared and sad and already missing his family, but determined to keep them safe by staying away for as long as it took. As far as anybody in West Sussex knew, Lee had just kind of disappeared. And it didn't take long for Dina's neighbors to notice something strange. A new man started coming around Dina's house. His name was Julian Webb. Julian was media manager for the West

Sussex Gazette. He and Dina met before Dina's hubby Lee went on the run from the mob, mind you, when he ran an ad promo where a local woman would get picked to get a makeover with, like, products and services from all kinds of local businesses, like a salon and a clothing shop and a makeup shop and stuff. So Dina applied and got picked, which is not surprising, given how pretty and blonde and outgoing she was, and she and Julian hit it off. She liked all the attention he paid her, and she liked it. He worked out a lot, and she liked his Tom Selleck stash and his sick mullet. You know, this was the early 90s. after all. And before

long, while Dina's husband Lee wrangled ski ball tickets and drunk tourists at the Carousel Arcade, 300 miles away in Nuki, Dina and Julian started spending a lot of time together. Before he met her, Julian loved fishing and going to the gym and hanging out with his friends,

but once Dina came on the scene, he just kind of dropped off the map. Everybody noticed it. Dina was consuming all his time and energy. Not long after Dina's makeover for the Gazette, she and Julian, showed up one afternoon on the doorstep of Julian's mom, Rosemary, and announced they were getting married.

Rosemary was shocked, to her core. I mean, Julian had just met this woman in May, and it was August now. They'd known each other a few months. That was it. Yet another couple whose relationship is younger than their latest oil change, planning on tie in the knot. I guess they had a summer love thing going on. If Julian had any inkling whatsoever that his new fiancé was, you know, already married,

He didn't mention it to anyone, I'm pretty sure he didn't. The neighbors were curious, both about where the hell Lee was and who this new guy might be. And I imagine you might be a little curious yourselves, campers, about why a woman who's in fear for her life and the lives of her husband and child terrified all day that the mafia was going to come busting down her door looking for Lee would be dating at all, let alone getting engaged. Well, see, the thing is, Dina had told Lee and the rest of the first of the first of the first of the first, family a little fib, let's call it. I know this is going to shock you, so sit down for a second if you need to, but there was no deal with Disney and no deal with Aer Lingus. And there were

no shadowy, organized crime figures lurking around the corner from the house, waiting to slit anybody's throat if they didn't get their cut of the Sean the Lepricon catch, because there wasn't going to be any. Wait a second. So Whitney, you're telling me that Disney, with their millions and billions of dollars and their own team of character designers and marketing teams didn't want a creepy-looking leprechaun doll made by a random woman from England?

I know, it's a shocker. Because why wouldn't they really? So apparently, all this was just a massive lie and Dina just wanted the hubs out of the way so she could romance this new guy. This leprechaun-based mafia story was the best way she could think of to accomplish that. And bonus for her. While Lee was working his ass off dealing with sugar-mad British children at the arcade,

he was also wiring almost all his paychecks into her bank account. So unbeknownst to him, he was paying for her to go out on dates with Julian. And eventually, he was paying for her wedding to him. All this, while Lee genuinely believed he was running for his life and the lives of his wife and son. Every now and again, he'd call home and ask, is it safe for me to come home yet? I miss you. I miss my boy. I can't stand being away from you both. And Dina would always say, no, Lee, darling, it's not safe yet. Just hold out a little while longer. The months wore on, and in November of 1991, Dina married Julian Webb.

She was a bigabist now, in addition to being a big old liar, liar pants on fire. Julian, as far as we know, had no idea. He was a. smitten with her as Lee was. They went to Florida for their honeymoon. Julian was over the moon about the deep sea fishing, posing for pictures with his biggest catch, having a blast on poor Lee Wyatt's dime. The honeymoon didn't last too long, though. Rain clouds were about to dump their contents all over poor Dina once more. One afternoon, through tears, she told Julian she'd just come from the doctor, and he'd given her some terrible news. She had cancer, she said. She had cancer, she It was terminal.

Her doctor didn't expect her to hang around much longer. Julian was devastated. She was going to fight this, right? He'd be with her every step of the way. Dina assured him she would fight as hard as she could. And soon she started going for treatments. But oddly, she never seemed to be able to schedule them at a time when Julian could come with her. She told him, it was okay.

She didn't want him to see her like this. anyway. She needed to concentrate on getting better. I'm sure Julian admired her courage and strength in the face of such terrifying odds, but soon there was more to worry about. Dina said her bosses at the Building Society were threatening to fire her for absenteeism because of her treatments. Julian was furious at this. Disgusting. Yeah. And it would be disgusting. It would be disgusting. It really would if a word of it were true. But it wasn't. See, Dina had gotten herself into a spot of Bada at the Building Society. About 26,000 pounds had gone missing. And Dina was right in the crosshairs of their internal

investigation. Oh, also, we don't have to tell y'all she didn't really have cancer, right? Like, y'all got that already, I'm sure. Yeah, and she was cheating on Julian, too. Her neighbors often noticed some random dude pulling out of the driveway right before Julian game home. There were a few narrow misses. As the investigation heated up at the Building Society, Dina had to come over with some way of slithering out of trouble. So she blamed it on poor Lee. Now, the sources we found weren't entirely clear on how she blamed it on him. Yeah, that was frustrating.

But the impression we got was basically that Dina had told the company and everybody else, else that her, quote, first husband, Lee, had abused her all during their marriage. And even after she left and remarried, he'd started coming around again, threatening her, sending scary letters, and stalking her. So my guess is she tried to convince her bosses that Lee had somehow, like, forced her to take the money, or tricked her into it, or maybe just stole her keys and did it himself. I don't know. Somehow it was all Lee's fault. And we'll get into a little more detail about that in a minute. And there were, in fact, threatening letters.

They had words like revenge, and I am filled with anger. Dina told everybody she was scared to death that Lee would come back and hurt her. Poor Julian's mom, Rosemary, was afraid for her son. What nobody knew, well, nobody besides Dina and Lee, was that Dina had dictated those letters herself. Somehow she'd convinced him that this was one more way to protect their family. from the mob, still hungry for Sean the Lepricon cash and thirsty for blood. Always the dutiful husband and protector, Lee did what Dina asked. He wrote out the letters

and posted them, willingly incriminating himself as a stalker, because Dina told him to do it. There was a threatening phone call, too, the script of which Ms. Dina wrote herself. Lee called the house and said what Dina told him to say, and she recorded it. Dina insisted that all these shenanigans would convince the mob that Lee had distilled distanced himself from her and their son, so they wouldn't come after them as a way of getting to him. Seems legit, right? I mean, who can argue with that logic? That's how the mob works, right? Mm-hmm. Now, this call, if you didn't know it was fake, it would actually be pretty chilling to listen to. In a creepy, sing-songy voice, Lee says,

Roses are red, violets are black. You need a shaggin as a payback. Ugh. Of course, what was really going on was this lion-ass coups was suddenly up to take the fall for that 26k she'd embezzled. Make him look crazy and dangerous and abusive and you've got a much better chance of doing that. God, this bitch is the worst, ain't she? She's giving Dante and Tracy a run for their money and that is not an easy feat. And then she doubled down. One afternoon, Deena showed up at her neighbor's door, disheveled and with her blouse half undone, saying she'd been attacked. The neighbor, bless his heart, was panicking so badly that he called his wife at work to ask her, what do I do? What do I do? Like, dude, call the cops. What do you think?

You know? But anyway, his wife calmed him down and told him to call a doctor, also a viable option, and she left work and went home to help. And when she got there and saw what a mess Dina was, they called the cops in, too. Dina told them it was her ex-husband Lee. He'd been stalking her. And today, he forced his way into the house and attacked her, bashed her head against a wall, put cigarettes out on her back, sexually assaulted her. And lo and behold, she did have a couple of burns that looked like they could have come from a cigarette, plus vaginal bruising and other injuries, all of which the police photographed. And then they went after this monster Lee Wyatt.

So now, Lee was on the lamb from the mob and the police. When he found out the cops were looking for him for an assault on his wife, Lee was completely baffled and upset, obviously. He showed up unannounced at Dina's house to demand an explanation. Unbeknownst to him, Dina's other hubby Julian was asleep upstairs. So, as you can imagine, Dina hustled Lee away as fast as she could, probably shitting herself that Julian was going to wake up and come downstairs in his boxer's shore, just kind of scratching himself like, hey, babe, who's that guy? Now, how she talked Lee into leaving? I don't know. My guess is she worked her weird psychopath, Spengali magic on him and convinced him she'd reported him to the cops to protect him somehow, some way, because, you know, make sense to me. I mean, why would she like? Well, I don't know why she lied, but she did, because fortunately for Lee, he was able to provide a rock-solid alibi for the time Dina claimed he attacked her.

He was at work at the arcade, 300 miles away, which meant, much to the shock and confusion of the detectives, that she must have inflicted those injuries on herself, and they were not insignificant injuries, so that is some major commitment right there. Now, look it, we want to say something here. When we cover lady baddies false assault accusations sometimes come up because these are manipulative hosebags and manipulative hose bags are going to do bad things. But we want to make something crystal clear. Fake accusations of rape and assault are very rare. Okay. There's this whole like damaging mythos that they just happen all the time and they absolutely do not. Like the percentage is in the low single digits.

But when it does happen, it's incredibly harmful to real victims who already face an uphill battle to be believed and supported. So, fuck you, Ms. Dina. Y'all can't see us right now, but we're both flipping her off. We sure are. Go to hell, Dina. In a handbasket. So all of this was going on in the background when Julian's birthday rolled around on June 30th, 1992. His mom Rosemary always called him on his birthday,

but when she called that evening, Dina told her Julian couldn't talk right then. He wasn't feeling well. She said it was a couple of things. He'd gotten too much sun that day, and he'd had too much to drink. Now he was sick as a dog, throwing up a lot, and he needed to stay in bed.

This struck Rosemary as pretty odd. Julian was an avid fisherman, and he was always careful about wearing a sun hat and sunscreen and stuff. And he hardly ever drank to excess. But, you know, if that's what his wife said happened, Rosemary had no reason to doubt it. She figured she'd talked to him when he felt better.

And Rosemary wasn't the only one trying to reach Julian. Several friends had called him over the past week or so, and Dina had told all of them he couldn't come to the phone. She told some people he was sick, others heard he was depressed, which really didn't sound like Julian. Later that night, Dina once again showed up at her neighbor's door in a panic. It's Julian, she said. I can't wake him up.

She said she'd called an ambulance. Would they wait with her? The neighbors were shocked. The last time they'd seen Dina, she'd told them Julian had the flu. Now he was unconscious? What the hell was going on? He took some pills, Dina said. When the EMTs arrived, they found Julian Webb unresponsive.

When they hooked him up to a heart monitor, they didn't get a rhythm. They rushed him into the ambulance, and as they hustled around to climb in, one of them told Dina to come sit in the front with them. Much to her neighbor's shock, Dina's face lit up like an excited child. Like, oh, wow, I can sit in the front? She was like a kid getting to sit on the pilot's lap on the plane. Oh, wow, way to fly under the radar there, Dina. Smooth, girl.

Wait, they let kids sit on the pilot's lap on the plane? Because that does not sound safe to me. Yeah, I don't think they do it anymore. But they used to, I'm pretty sure. Like in the like the 70s, maybe, the 60s and 70s. Lord have it. It's a wonder anybody survives a clip in 70s between the serial killers and the laissez-faire parenting and the fucking apparently kids just sitting on the pilot's lap on the plane. We should all be dead. The pilots were inevitably smoking too, right? Like, oh, of course. Everybody was smoking. I remember when they had ashtrays on planes. Some of them still do. Crazy. Actually, they all still do.

The bathrooms do because they figure if somebody's going to... But you can't smoke in there anymore. Like I'm saying, I remember when you could smoke on a plane. Oh, you're... Yeah. I'm just saying there's a fun fact about why they have ashtrays in the bathroom of planes is because they figure if somebody's going to do it, it's better that they have a safe place to throw out the butt

than the trash can where it will light the plane on fire. That's a very depressing, like, acknowledgement that people suck and are going to do whatever the hell they want. True. Regardless of safety or other people's rights to not breathe in, their gross secondhand smoke. Well, regardless of airplane etiquette, when they arrived at the hospital, doctors quickly realized there was nothing they could do for Julian. He was pronounced dead. An autopsy would later reveal the cause of death as an overdose of antidepressants and aspirin. and the Sussex police quickly ruled the case a suicide.

Later that night, Julian's mom, Rosemary, glanced at her window and saw the police car pulling up her driveway. And with that mother's instinct, she knew immediately why they were there. She felt the floor give out underneath her. Julian was gone. On his birthday. He was only 31 years old. The next morning, a couple of Julian's co-workers

at their office building to find a weird spectacle sitting on the front steps. A woman dressed in a nightgown and bathrobe, crying, theatrically. One of the co-workers thought it was somebody in the midst of a mental health breakdown. But as it turned out, it was Dina, Julian's wife. She stood up to greet them, suddenly tear-free in all business. Julian's dad, she said. I want to see the advertising manager about the insurance money. Wow. Yeah, I'm just imagining that moment for Julian's. co-workers, you know? Like, it must have just given them chills. Dina talked freely about Julian's death, telling everybody who would listen that he'd taken his own life. This came as a total shock

to everyone who knew him. As far as anybody knew, Julian had never had any health problems, either mental or physical. He definitely didn't seem depressed. When Rosemary asked where Julian had gotten the antidepressants that he'd overdosed on, Dina said they were hers. She didn't know how he'd gotten hold of him, she said, but she kept him in a drawer. It's not like were locked up. To Rosemary, Dina seemed disturbingly unaffected by Julian's death. She was way more interested in the 35,000 pounds. She thought she stood to gain from his insurance policy at work. But unfortunately for Dina, that didn't quite work out. Julian's mother, Rosemary, was the beneficiary, not her. I guess he'd never bothered to make the change after he married her.

So, just let the Schadenfreude of that wash over you. Can you imagine how pissed she was? aw. Rosemary, of course, was shaken to her core by her son's death, and she was taking her time making the funeral arrangements, because, you know, she's a human being, and human beings have feelings, Dina. This irritated, Miss Dina. She wanted to get the guy planted already.

This was taken forever. Finally, she told Rosemary, if you don't get on with it, I'm going to have him cremated. Robo bitch. Homegirl couldn't keep her normal person with empathy mask on for long enough for him to be buried. Where's the fucking fire, Dina? Yeah, and it gets worse.

At the funeral, Dina showed up smiling and waving at everybody, wearing a short black leather miniskirt and a blouse with a plunging neckline. Because apparently, this bitch thought she was cosplaying as a rich widow from soap opera or something. While Julian's friends and loved ones packed the church on the right, there was nobody but Dina on the left. She hadn't invited any of her own people, apparently.

She sat through the funeral, completely expressionless, just looking more bored than anything else. The pastor who did the funeral service noticed that a ton of Julian's friends and sent beautiful flower arrangements and wreaths with heartfelt condolences on the cards. This was a well-loved guy. I mean, some of his friends spoke about him in a documentary on the case, and you could tell years later how much they respected him and loved him and admired him. In contrast, grieving widow Dina showed up with a paper grocery bag. full of flowers she had clearly just stolen from the cemetery on her way in the door. Like, could you phone it in any worse than that? And the card said, quote, to Julian, because you loved me so.

You loved me. Not I loved you. You loved me. Yikes. As for Julian's mother Rosemary, if she hadn't been sure before the funeral, she was sure as hell after. Dina had murdered her son. But the case had been closed. It was a suicide, and there was nothing Rosemary could do about that. At the moment, anyway. So, Dina was newly single now. And with other hubby Lee still on the run from the mob, she was ready to mingle, too. Hmm. Is single the right word here? I mean, she already had a husband. This is true. Maybe Swingle would work better?

Slingle. Smingle. That doesn't... Swingle insinuates consent from the other party. But I got no other rhyming words. I'm sorry. So before long, her house became a revolving door of dudes. One of these was a guy named Robert Waite,

one of Dina's co-workers at her old job. Dina had always fancied him as the British slang goes, and back when she'd worked with him, she and another co-worker, Mandy, were always competing with each other, trying to get him into bit. Hadn't worked, though. They just stayed friends, but now years later, Robert rolled into town to visit his mom and found himself wondering what Dina was up to. So we gave her a call. I expected her to be excited to hear from him, but she surprised him. She sounded distant,

maybe even a little bit upset. But she invited him to dinner anyway, and when he showed up to pick her up, she wasn't any friendlier, and he was shocked by how much she'd aged. It seemed like she'd lost all her vibrancy, all of her spark, as he put it later. Over dinner, he slowly began to understand why, as Dina spun out her tale of woe, the abusive first husband Lee, the dead second husband, poor woman had been through the ringer. Robert felt awful for her. The next morning, his and Dina's old friend slash co-worker Mandy got a call from a smug-sounding Dina. Robert and I went to bed together last night, she said.

There was a distinct Neiner, Neener, Neiner quality to her voice. Mandy was just bewildered, like, okay, congrats. Like, I literally haven't heard from you in years. Like, who gives a shit?

Dina, y'all haven't been competing over this dude for like a decade. But it was really important to her that Mandy find out she won. Apparently. Good gravy. Yeah, good game, Dina.

You sure showed her. Dina's smugness over Robert didn't last long, though. After a week or so of seeing each other, he told Dina, she didn't really, quote, ring his bell. Damn, dude, harsh. Not that we don't support any and all attempts to be mean to this bitch because, like, she deserves it.

This is true. Most of us would be like, oh, all right, and move on with our lives. Maybe spend a few days in our jammies, eat an ice cream, and listen to sad music. But not our girl. Like all master manipulators, Dina had a whole bag of tricks for turning a no into a yes. Oh, yeah. A day or two after Robert told her he wasn't really into her romantically. Dina dropped a bombshell on him. She had cancer, she said. It wasn't looking good. She'd been through radiation therapy, but it hadn't really worked. Robert felt stuck. How do you abandon an old friend who might be dying.

Dina told him one of the biggest things on her bucket list was to go to Florida, and Robert, somewhat reluctantly, told her he'd take her, let her live out her last days in the sun. One night, Robert was sleeping next to her in her hotel in Florida when he woke up to a sharp jab in his side. Startled, but a bit groggy, he noticed that Dina was bright-eyed and wide awake, looking at him intently. He said, what was that? Nina said, oh, I'm sorry, I just rolled over and scratched you.

Later, in the Channel 4 documentary Black Widow, Robert said he thinks he lost at least the entire next day after that. No memory of it whatsoever. He said, I think I lost a day, and I don't really want to think about those hours that I was unconscious. I don't blame him. Yeah, bless his heart. What a horrendous violation.

There's just literally no low that this woman will not sink to. shortly after this Dina pieced out on Robert told him she had to go to New York I shit you not to be a witness in a mafia trial bitch what you can't make the shit up

except apparently you can because that's what Dina did and this bitch left and she did not come back poor Robert was stuck in a hotel room in Florida without a penny to his name Dina had taken

all the money and, unbeknownst to Robert, flown her happy ass all the way back to England. Jesus. So here was poor Robert, no food, no money. He was so hungry he was curling up in the fetal position to sleep at night, just to try and soothe the pain in his stomach.

Oh, God. Finally, he ended up getting arrested for being there past the allowable time, I guess. It wasn't really clear in the sources we saw and deported back to England. Once he got there, he went to Deena's house to try to and figure out what the ever-loving

fuck had happened and found out that she'd come back to England to stand trial for embezzlement and she got convicted so now she was cooling her heels in prison so guess she just wanted one last hurrah in the States

before paying the piper I don't know I find a lot of this woman's behavior is just completely bizarre and even more bizarre stuff came out during her trial remember those threatening letters Lee Center the ones Dina scripted herself and dictated to him to write and try and make him look like the kind of unstable

asshole who'd steal that 26K from Dina's work? Well, turns out Dina's embezzlement M.O. had involved creating a fictional woman named Christina Duke. She opened a checking account in that name and all the money she stole went right into it. In the letters from Lee, he explained all about how he and this Christina Duke had been involved and taken the money so they could run away together. In fact, Lee mentioned the stolen money in every single threatening letter he sent her, which I freaking love this. It's so dumb. It's like, bitch, I'm going to cut you. I'm going to make you wish you'd never been born. I'm going to eat your babies. And then the next paragraph, she's like, so then my mistress, Christina Duke and I withdrew all the money in cashier's checks and closed the account. Our brilliant plan had come to fruition. Ha ha, ha, ha. Just, Dana, you are such a twat. It's like a seventh grade writing assignment. so is. I just imagine that's what the monologue in her head is like. Like, ineffectual threat, ineffectual threat, then, and my business henceforth shall be crime, crime, crime, cramity, crime, crime. Crime to crime. So it came out in the trial that Dina had done all this herself, and poor Lee had

only gone along with the threatening letters because she'd convinced him it was the only way to get the mob off their backs. Lee hadn't known anything about the embezzlement, and he was completely stunned, when he realized that the whole mafia thing was a lie. Even more stunned when he figured out she'd married a whole other guy while he was working as arcade jockey Colin Matthews over in Newkey. And by the way, that went on for three years. Three years. So just deal with that for a second.

What that poor man had to go through. And he had a child with this woman. A child he'd barely gotten to see for the past several years because of Dina's big bag of bullshit. I mean, all of this. just musta knocked him flat. So after 18 months in jail, Dina, who apparently has no shame,

returned home to the same house, the same neighborhood, much to the side eye of her neighbors. But that didn't seem to faze Dina, and now that she was free again, she was back on the prowl. Phil Trott met her at an embroidery shop, where he'd gone to get a logo,

put on the shirt for himself and his employees at his landscaping business. She overheard him talking to the lady behind the counter about what he wanted, and she introduced herself. I'd do cross-stitch, she said, I could do this for you easy. After that, it didn't take long for them to start seeing each other.

Dina was apparently a bit of a firecracker. She had a thing about having sex in public and, quote, flash in her bits. This, by the way, is really interesting to me that she was an exhibitionist. I mean, obviously, we can't diagnose anybody. We're not qualified to do that, but Dina does seem, to my amateur opinion,

to display a lot of the traits that we see in psychopathic personality. one of those is a tendency toward boredom and another is a desire to take risks court danger chase that adrenaline rush flashing your tits in public places and having sex on park benches in the middle of the day that's the kind of thing you do if you want to get your adrenaline pumping so that really caught my eye as i was researching dina and before y'all send me angry emails i'm not saying that anybody who likes to take risks or bump butts in public is a psychopath obviously i'm talking about a whole cluster of trade in Ms. Dina, that is just one of them. Oh, Whitney, the first email has just been drafted and sent. Before the episodes even out, I can feel it. But seriously, with Dina, it's like connect the dots and the image is just Hannibal's face mask. It's true.

So, Dina, he thought she was a great catch at first. They had fun together. She even taught him how to cross-stitch, which I think is freaking adorable. I love me a man who sews or knits and Phil was a natural at it. He was a landscaper and she told him she could help his career, put him in touch with a friend of hers in Florida who could give him a huge lucrative contract. So, Kaching, right? But as was the case with all Dina's relationships, soon there was drama.

One day while they were hanging out, Dina coughed into her hand and when she looked down at her palm, she said, oh no, not again. Phil glanced over and her hand was full of blood. What is happening? Is she some sort of Victorian wave? Like, oh my, I'm about to expire of the vapors. Go and fetch the leeches. I need to be blood.

Phil asked what was wrong. Dina said, I can't tell you. It's personal. But he pressed the issue and eventually he, got it out of her. I have throat cancer, she told him. She didn't really. No, I know. I know. That's going to shock you that Dina would tell a fib, but she did not have super ultra-bad Victorian cancer. She also didn't have a friend in Florida who could give Phil a job, but whatever. She lies as easy as breathe in.

Mm-hmm. So, poor Phil now had to worry about his new girlfriend's health. I can only assume she did this to lay some preliminary, feel sorry for me, groundwork in case what was about to happen, happened.

A few months after she told him about her non-existent cancer diagnosis, Phil realized there was quite a bit of money missing from his wallet. Then it happened again. Then he noticed his credit cards were missing. One afternoon, he went rummaging through Dina's purse, looking for something, and he found the missing cards and cash.

He couldn't believe it. Dina was stealing from him? He called up one of his friends, and his friend said, changed the locks. Damn right, Phil's friend. He did. And that evening, Dina came home to a locked door, and that was the end of that relationship. But, campers, I think we all know, you can't keep a good con woman down. And Dina never had any trouble finding a man. The next poor bastard on the chopping block was a guy named Richard Thompson. She met him through a lonely heart's ad, and they hid it off fast.

They got married in Florida at a holiday inn. They didn't have anybody with them, so the hotel manager and front desk clerk had to serve as their witnesses. That's beautiful, man. You're right? I'm getting reclumpt over here. Super intimate ceremony. By the way, what is with this bitch in Florida? I mean, it's nice at all, sunny and beechy, and there's like manatees and shit. But there are other states here, Dina. God.

I don't know, man. I feel like she and Florida were just made for each other. You know, she's a Florida woman, and she just got a fancier accent. Thank God she never discovered bath salts. Right. She and Richard wanted to move down there, actually. And guess what? That was going to be no problem.

Because Dina told her new hubby, she'd just won 300,000 pounds in the national lottery. They could use the new money to make a new life in the States. God. Richard was over the moon. He'd always wanted his own boat to captain, so he signed up for sea school while they were in Florida. And he was a natural, passed the course with flying colors. This was a big deal for Richard, the fulfillment of a lifelong dream. And when he told Dina about it, she was just like, oh, okay.

way to be a supportive partner there d real nice a little bit of relationship advice campers when you're significant others excited about something get excited for them okay even if you're not remotely interested in whatever weird shit it is like they're obsessed with like synchronized underwater basket weaving or whatever and you just don't see the appeal that's fine but you know what you love them and you need to be the loudest cheerleader on their team i let my husband know i'm proud of him all the time and he does the same thing for me and when he brings me some like like miniature, you know, that he's painted or whatever, I am all over that shit. It's like, oh, that's the best beholder I've ever seen.

It's beautiful, man. But, of course, the key difference here is I didn't marry him just to kill him off for life insurance. So I guess it's different for Dina. So, anywho, they went back to England to renovate Richard's house and get it ready to rent out while they were getting set up in Florida. One afternoon, Richard was installing a disposal in the sink, and Dina said, so, um, does this thing get rid of It seemed like an innocuous question at the time. Richard was like, no, you know, it's not that powerful. Only later would it take on a more sinister cast. And there were other little moments of foreshadowing, too. When they first got together, Dina had bought Richard a German shepherd dog named

Odin. Richard loved that dog so much, and he was the main one who fed and walked him, so Odin was pretty much a daddy's boy. One night they were sitting around after dinner, playing with the dog, and Dina said, I wonder what Oden would do if I pretended to attack you, like if I really went after you. Let's try it. Richard was like, sure, you know, it just seemed like a fun little joke to play on the doggos. So Dina went after him, kind of fake punching him and yelling. And Odin went for her like she was made out of chew toys. He lunged right for her and bitter like, don't you touch my dad. Sweet boy. Such a good boy. I know. And again, Richard thought nothing of it at the time, but later.

Richard was scheduled to fly back to Florida to get some stuff prepared for the move. The day before his flight, Dina drew him a hot bath. As he was splish-plashing around, he heard her take Odin by his collar and shut him in his kennel. Once Richard was out of the bath, Dina gave him a little flirty smile. I've got a surprise for you, darling, she said, but you've got to lie down on the floor. So, of course, Richard's thinking, oh, ha, ha, it's sexy time. and he did what he was told. Dina said, all right, we need to tie you up for this.

Huh. That was something a little new, but Richard was up for it. He was leaving for the States the next day, so maybe Dina just wanted an extra special little last hurrah before his trip. So he let her tie his hands behind his back, tape his ankles together, and put a towel over his face, and then he lay back down on the floor and waited for his big surprise. And a few moments later, the world exploded.

Richard felt a blinding pain in his head as something hard struck him over and over again. Next, he felt a searing pain in his shoulder as a carving knife stabbed through him. Fortunately for him, he was bleeding so badly that Dina slipped in the blood and fell. And in that moment, Richard was able to wrestle his hands free of their bonds. He grabbed Dina by the back of the head and shoved his thumbs into her eyes, and he said, You give me that knife, or I'll pop your eyes out. And I guess she could tell he meant it, because Dina gave him. even without any struggle and Richard called the police. As he waited for them, he noticed the

bloody baseball bat on the floor. This woman had clearly been trying to kill him, and she'd made sure to put Odin up before she did it. So Richard would have nobody to defend him. I feel so sorry for that poor dog, by the way, like it must have been so scary for him and awful to like hear his daddy screaming. Poor baby. The police put the habeas scrabbus on Dina. They charged her with attempted murder, plus a slew of fraud charges for financial scam she'd run on Richard and several other former lovers. Obviously, she'd never won any lottery money. She'd just been stealing a shitload of money from Richard the whole time they were married. And you'd think that would have been it for her, right? But Dena always has a trick up her sleeve. And she told the court she'd attack

Richard in self-defense. We were arguing, she said, he came after me. And Cambers, The jury, apparently a British version of the Casey Anthony crew, bought it. They acquitted her of the attempted murder charge, which must have been unbelievably painful for Richard and his family. How in the name of all that is holy? Like, this woman tied him up, hit him with a baseball bat, stabbed him in the shoulder. Like, you don't tie somebody up in self-defense? God's sake, like I think that she tried to say they were having like bondage sex. But even so, if he's tied up, how's he coming after you? makes no sense to me. Yeah, Richard said he felt like a criminal after that.

Like, people were looking at him like a monster. It's disgusting. Oh, guy. God. Fortunately, though, they did convict her of most of the fraud charges, and she was sentenced to three years, nine months in prison. At their sentencing, the judge read Dina the Riot Act. He said, you stole property from vulnerable men, all of whom in their way had become

enamored with you, and Mr. Thompson went so far as to marry you. You are someone who is irredeemably dishonest and driven by a desire to defraud people of their property. And it got worse for our girl after that. The Sussex police had been paying attention to her trial. And the attack on Richard was enough for them to reopen Julian Webb's case, something his mother Rosemary had been hoping for for years. They hauled Dina in for questioning. She denied having anything to do with Julian's death, of course,

but she told so many conflicting stories that she's told on herself anyway. Yeah, first it was he hadn't eaten anything in days, and then I made him his favorite hot curry that night. First, it was Julian never drank. Then he drank himself stupid. All highly suspish. They exhumed Julian's body in hopes of finding some new evidence. But unfortunately, there wasn't anything to shed any new light on his cause of death. As far as we know, it was an overdose on prescription antidepressants and aspirin, just like the original coroner said. But by 2003, prosecutors felt they had enough strength. circumstantial evidence to go through with a murder trial. Their theory was that hoping to cash in

on a 35,000-pound insurance policy, Dina poisoned Julian's favorite hot curry. Because the curry was so spicy, he couldn't taste anything wrong. Dina maintained her innocence, of course, but this time the jury saw right through her. They convicted her of Julian's murder, and she was sentenced to life in prison with a minimum term of 16 years. As for the fraud, police estimate that her victims number in the low teens at least. She took a lot of dudes for a lot of money over the years, and by the way, she's admitted to a lot of that. And there's one more creepy little PS to the story. In the late 70s and early 80s, Dina lived in Bulgaria for a while, trying to train to become a gymnast. Now, obviously that didn't work out, but while she was there, she dated a man named Stoyan

Kostov. And at some point, in the early 80s, while they were still dating, Stoyan disappeared. hasn't been seen since. As of 2010, according to the website westbritten.com, the police were launching a new investigation into the case. But I couldn't find out if anything ever came of it or if Stoyan's disappearance has just gone cold again. But for his sake and the sake of his family, I hope not. Obviously, I don't know whether Dina was involved,

but I sure as hell wouldn't put a pastor. And I'm sure neither would Richard Thompson, who's lucky to be alive. The people involved in Dina's case have had a lot to say about her. The lead detective and prosecutor both said she was the scariest bitch they'd ever come across. Not in those words, obviously, like, in a classy, English-sounding way. And I feel like she's up there for me, too. Like, what do you think, Camper's, who'd win in a cage match between Dina and Dante Soutorious?

What about Tracy Richter? How would she hold up? Let's know what you think, because we haven't been able to decide. So that was a wild one, right, Campers? You know, we'll have another one for you next week. But for now, lock your doors, light your lights, and stay safe until we get together again around the True Crime Campfire. And we want to send a grateful shout out to a few of our lovely patrons.

Thank you so much to Gina, Courtney, Abby, Mary, Katie, Lily, and Amy. We appreciate you to the moon and back. And y'all, if you're not yet a patron, you are missing out. Patrons of our show get every episode ad-free, at least a day early, sometimes two, plus an extra episode a month. And once you hit the $5 and up categories, you get even more cool stuff. A free sticker at $5, a rad enamel pin

while supplies last at 10 virtual events with Katie and me. We will do live streams. We will show you our pets. And we're always looking for new stuff to do for you. So if you can, come join us.