Cutting Edge: The Black Widow (C4); How Clean Are the F*lthy Fulfords? (C4): THE first indication Richard had that his wife was a psychopath was when he was hit over the head with a baseball bat.

You may have thought his suspicions would have been raised when she tied his hands behind his back, put tape around his ankles and placed a towel on his head, promising him a surprise. It was indeed a surprise, but in truth Richard was not the only person taken in.

Richard was Dena Holmes' third husband. She got rid of the other two, the first by persuading him that the Mafia were after him and that he had to disappear for a while; the second she poisoned by lacing his curry with prescription drugs.

Cutting Edge: The Black Widow told the story of a seemingly ordinary woman who possessed an extraordinary power to captivate men. Quite what she had was hard to discern from the photographs, and a brief snatch of her voice on a police tape, but whatever it was proved irresistible.

Dena moved with her first husband, Lee, to a village in Sussex. Pretty soon it was obvious that his presence had become irksome, so she concocted a story about leprechauns and the Mafia and told him to go into hiding in Cornwall.

This gave her the freedom to take up with lover Julian Webb, who became her second husband. But neighbours soon noticed that while Julian was at work, Dena was entertaining a succession of men.

She told Julian she had a terminal illness and was about to be sacked from her job in a building society, when in reality, she had been suspended after £26,000 went missing. Perhaps it was when it became apparent that this lie was unravelling that she decided to kill him.

She poisoned his curry, then claimed he had taken an overdose. Without any evidence to the contrary, police believed her story. At Julian's funeral, she wore a black leather miniskirt.

After serving nine months in prison for stealing from the Woolwich, she married her third husband, Richard. As well as hitting him with the baseball bat, she stabbed him in the shoulder, but he managed to escape.

Although a jury acquitted her of attempted murder, she pleaded guilty of 15 cases of deception, against Richard and former lovers. This set police minds racing, and they exhumed Julian's body, although in the end most of the evidence against her was circumstantial. This time the jury did convict and she was sentenced to life.

It was a horrifying tale. As one of the interviewees said: "There are people out there like this, but you don't expect to find them in Mill Hill," but the real story is surely how so many men were so bewitched that they would do whatever she told them.

In How Clean Are the F*lthy Fulfords?, Kim and Aggie arrived at the Devon home of the Fulfords, the eccentric toffs whose colourful language featured in a Cutting Edge documentary last year. Their 50-room mansion would have been a tall order even for the dust-busting duo, but wisely they confined themselves to just three rooms.

There was a lot of talking down to the Fulfords as though they were simple, and a few cleaning tips that won't come in useful to anyone without family silver and oak staircases. What must have seemed a good idea at the time - pitting the fastidious Kim and Aggie against the foul-mouthed Francis Fulford - turned out to be not much of a hoot at all.

Published: 30/06/20054