by Peter Lalor
First published in 2002
Copyright © Peter Lalor 2002
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10% of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.
Allen & Unwin
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Australia
Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100
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ISBN 978 1 86508 878 5
eISBN 978 1 74115 374 3
Cover and text design by Phil Campbell
Edited by Margaret Trudgeon
Typeset by Pauline Haas
The names of children in this book who were under 18 at the time of the event have been withheld.
To my Sue for her wise counsel, faith and beauty.
And to Bob Wells a good copper and a good bloke. Bobby, you won the last rubber!
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
John Price will die today
Where is Pricey?
Bob Wells drives up
Inside the slaughterhouse
Ex-boyfriends and husbands
Katherine grows up and marries David Kellett
Abandoned and anguished
She’s back
The investigation begins
Katherine’s police interview
Katherine and Dave Saunders
Autopsy
Katherine and John Chillingworth
Katherine and John Price
I’ll kill Pricey
The murder
The psychiatrists shape up
The trial
A sentence and a smile
Epilogue
Endnotes
Acknowledgements
Writing a book is like driving a formula one car, you sit down and steer while an enormous team of people build the engines, change the tyres, provide the petrol, wipe your brow and give you a push in the right direction when you spin off the track. I must thank some of them.
My wife Sue’s help was invaluable. She worked double time so I could get a few hours in here and there. She also provided good counsel and emotional support. The kids were fantastic. Harry, I owe you five zillion kicks of the footy and Lucy you’ll get an equal amount of bed time stories, but never this one.
I met Bob Wells in Aberdeen one day while covering Katherine’s trial and remember thinking he was the nicest copper I’d ever met. He is. Bob and his wife Cath were always friendly, helpful and hospitable. It’s an honour to know you.
Thanks to David Kellett and family for their genuine hospitality and friendship. Thanks to David Saunders for the sore heads and all those late nights in the pubs of Scone and Muswellbrook. Also, thanks to John Chillingworth who is an intelligent man and gave good advice.
This book wouldn’t have happened if Liz Deegan (now deputy editor of the Adelaide Advertiser) had not insisted I turn my attention to the case right back in March 2000 or John McGourty who sent me up the valley with Bob Barker to cover the trial and ran the stories.
Sue Hines saw the germ of a book in the Daily Telegraph coverage and I thank her for making the phone call, accepting so many mad phone calls in return and making this as painless as possible. Sue, we got on so well it was almost like I’d met you before. Andrea McNamara provided similar support and counsel. Thanks for that Andrea.
There were so many other people who offered advice and support that are too numerous to name.
Rebecca, you are a great girl and your dad would be so proud of you.
Introduction
At 6 pm on the night she killed John Price, Katherine Knight sat singing nursery rhymes with her granddaughter on her lap, her youngest children at her feet. Round, and round the garden like a teddy bear… This little piggy went to market. She hugged and kissed her children before taking them out to dinner at the local Chinese restaurant. The happy family scenes are captured on a video she made. To watch it is disconcerting, as there is a second video that was made the next day. It shows the indescribable horror of what Katherine does next and as you watch Katherine playing happily at home with the kids you know that the hands that hold the little grandchild will soon pick up a knife and stab john Price 37 times before skinning, beheading and further mutilating his corpse. Those hands then prepare parts of his body, including his head, for his children’s dinner. Each video informs the other in a feedback loop. She looks so normal but will be so evil. She is so evil but can be so normal.
The murder of John Price defied the imagination. After the crime the outside world was drip-fed information via the media, detail by terrible detail, as though it may be too much to comprehend in its entirety. He was beheaded. He was mutilated. He was skinned. He was cooked. Served on plates for the family.
What of the woman who did it? She was his defacto. A mother of four. An abattoir worker. The grandmother who sang about the little piggy and the teddy bears.
And, she must have been mad. Of course she was. The sane do not behave like that. She was a monster. Less than human, less than sentient. Wasn’t she? It seemed important to us that she was because it was too horrible to contemplate otherwise.
Murders are common. Gratuitous mutilation, even cannibalism, isn’t unheard of. In June 1988, as a young reporter I went to a warehouse in South Melbourne where a vagrant had been murdered. For some reason the police invited me inside for a look. It was a peculiar crime and solved a puzzle that had begun weeks before when a penis was found in a hand basin at Flinders Street Station. It transpired that one homeless man had killed another inside the derelict building the month before and had sliced off his genitals. He placed the testicles on a tram track, then he disposed of the corpse in a fire. It was a small fire and it took about a week to burn the man. A week crouched on the dirt floor, in the draughty space with its broken windows and strange light. Sometime during the process the killer had become hungry and eaten slices of his victim’s buttocks, cooking them in a wok. On an old bench sat recently purchased packets of tomato sauce, salt and rice—the condiments. The killer was never tried; he was an escapee from a psychiatric hospital and he was duly locked up again. I have some memory that he was sent back to New Zealand, his home country.
It was a macabre murder, but easily dismissed as the work of a madman. Nothing too disturbing.
Katherine Knight was not mad when she killed John Price. She was sane according to the measure of our justice system. She planned it and she did it knowing that it was wrong. She wasn’t mad either when she used her abattoir knives to remove his skin and head. She was of right mind when she cooked him with vegetables. Made a soup with his head. Prepared the gravy. It was all about revenge. And possibly even pleasure. She had dressed in a black nightie and had sex with him beforehand. She turned the night into a performance. And that is what makes this murder so worthy of examination.
How can somebody be so bad? So immoral? And yet not be mad?
You know Katherine Knight the mother. Four kids from three blokes. You’ve parked outside her home, seen her emerge red-faced and furious. Move ya fuckin’ car, ya stupid cun
t! Ya can’t fuckin’ park there! Unreasonably angry over the slightest thing. You’ve seen her battling with a gaggle of children, a smoke dangling from her mouth as she ushers them into a van. Seen the family unit at caravan parks and country RSL clubs, or queuing with forms at the welfare office, clutching duplicated doctors’ letters to prove her incapacity. Stood behind her at the counter as she counts out change for white bread and milk. Cringed as you watched her thump one of the kids a little too hard, thought of saying something but backed off the moment you saw that look in her eye. Totally uninhibited. Couldn’t give a fuck what you thought. Katherine would swerve the car to hit cats or dogs that strayed onto the road and cackle herself silly. She’s like a stray dog herself. You can’t tell if she’ll bite or lick.
You don’t know the world in which she was raised. The Petri dish of dysfunction which nurtured her badness. Katherine Knight is a woman who left the family home with few basic moral constructs beyond a sense of justice. An understanding that if you erred you must be punished. One psychiatrist referred to her ‘primitive conscience’. The red-headed twin cowered in the dark while incest, violence, paedophilia and rape stalked the corridors of her childhood. She knew more about sex and violence than she ever did of love.
In Katherine’s world an absence of love enabled evil to take root and murderous resentments to flourish.
She wasn’t a total monster by any means. Katherine had a heart of gold. Dressed her kids up and sent them to Sunday school. Sewed dresses for friends’ babies. Visited the sick. Ran people around in her car. She would do anything for anyone, her family say. You just didn’t cross her.
To examine her past is not to give her an excuse. Katherine is one of eight children and the only one with a serious criminal record. The others have their demons and their failings, but nothing in Katherine’s league.
Katherine suffers from a serious borderline personality disorder and there are suggestions of other personality disorders, but that was not why she killed John Price. She had been sexually and physically abused as a child, which seems to almost inevitably cause problems in people, but that is not why she killed him either. Katherine killed her lover and did those terrible things in that long, vile night because it was her nature to go one step further. To go over the borderline.
1
John Price will die today
29 February 2000
Tonight Katherine Knight is going to kill John Price. She’s had her knives sharpened, she has everything ready, but she’s not in any hurry. She’ll take her time, and anyway, she’s got something to prove first. She’s been to the welfare shop and bought a black nightie with buttons down the front and she’s going to surprise him, wake him up and seduce him. They can never say no to sex. None of them. Sex and violence have always gone together in Katherine’s world. They’ll do it slowly and gently, one last time. Then, when they’re finished, when he’s lying back and listening to the airconditioner droning away, she’ll make her move. She will have her justice. She’ll force some order on this emotional chaos. And, as he screams and runs for the door, as the knife plunges in and out and his blood sprays up onto her face, he will be every man who has ever crossed her. Katherine will have her payback. She’ll settle the score against them all. Against John, for casting her aside; against the siblings who soiled her with saliva on their groping fingers; against the violent father who forced sex on her poor mother. All of them. Even the no-good husband who took off up the highway 25 years before and left her scared and alone with a baby, locked up in a cold concrete psychiatric ward so drugged out any man could take her. She’d always been abandoned. Abused and abandoned. And they’ve always been fumbling under her clothes in the night. Getting their way. I was always afraid of being raped… I picked the wrong ones. They‘re all drunk and violent.
And, when her anger is done, when the frenzied stabbing and slashing and chasing is over, when John is lying in a congealing crimson pool, she’ll take a rest. Smoke a cigarette, put on the kettle, listen to the coal trains that pass through town, and think about happier times. The thrill of the slaughterhouse. I always wanted to follow my father’s footsteps… scraping the congealed blood out of them, the marrow out of their body … I loved doing all that. Loved being young and free in a place where the animals screamed and died, where the hides were peeled from the bleeding carcasses and long razor knives sliced through sinew and flesh, transforming the living into the dead. Where the red meat was packed in vacuum packs and the white of the bones exposed.
The abattoir has been closed for nearly a year, but Katherine will go back to work tonight. Just for the hell of it.
She has been so upset for so long; she’s been taking pills for her nerves. John wants her to go and the thought is terrifying. She is calm now. She knows what has to be done. She’s waited her whole life for this.
This morning, in the pre-dawn stillness, she stood at the end of his bed, her hands behind her back. Just stood there smiling and cold, savouring the moment, knowing she could finish it here and now. And John sensed it, felt the gooseflesh form on his skin even as he slept. He almost died of fright when he opened his eyes and saw her there. He jumped up and ran for his life, convinced she had a knife and this was it. Sick bitch.
And John knows he is about to die. He has seen his murder rehearsed, heard his death foretold. It’s been coming for so long now and it is a wicked torment. The police can’t help. He can’t tell his mates. It was too much for them when he took her back last time after she’d got him the sack from the mines. They’d lost respect for him. Now he’s trapped. She told him back then that if she took him back there was only one way out.
Today is a leap day, the 29th of February 2000. The last day of his life.
He’s got a job now with Bowditch and Partners Earth Moving and it’s turned out well. He was out of work for a while and drank like a bastard, but then this came up. They made him a supervisor after twelve months. He eased off the grog.
He can’t get out of his home quickly enough this morning. His heart’s still pounding as he drives down the New England Highway past Muswellbrook to Bowditch’s. With the early morning wake-up call he’s arrived even earlier than usual, and when the crews and work are organised for the day he sits down in the office with Geoff Bowditch, the young boss, and Peter Cairnes, one of the managers. Pricey’s always been one of the boys and management hasn’t come naturally to him, especially as he can’t read or write, but today he feels that maybe these two are removed enough from his life to let him open up a little. He’s rattled and he’s got to talk to somebody about this shit. A bloke can’t keep it bottled up forever.
He tells them how things are difficult at home. How he wants Kath—he calls her the Speckled Fucking Hen (she has red hair and freckled skin)—to get out of his house, but she won’t go. He tells Cairnes and Bowditch about a vicious blue with her on Sunday. She’d gone for a knife and he’d run for his frigging life. The cops came and he asked them if they’d get her out of his house, but they weren’t interested. Then, last night, they came around and served a bloody apprehended violence order (AVO) summons on him for assaulting her. He tells Bowditch and Cairnes she has form, a history of violence. She’s a sick bitch and capable of anything. There was an incident with an axe and a baby years ago. Her eldest. She’d put her on the railway tracks. She’d cut the throat of a bloke’s dog. She can throw a punch as good as any man. She’ll just snap and God help you if you are in her way. She’s a fucking maniac when she gets worked up. Strong as a man.
It all comes pouring out. Bowditch and Cairnes take a while to catch on to what Pricey is saying. They’ve seen her around; she’s a little strange, but nice enough. Doesn’t she run him round to the pubs, look after his house? Surely she’s not that bad. It’s not the usual early morning chitchat, but as they listen they realise the little fella is dead serious. He says he’s even keeping in contact with a mate down the coast, telling him what’s going on at home—In case something happens to me, so
mebody’ll know.
Cairnes has only worked with Pricey for two years and is surprised that this rough little bloke is so rattled by a woman.
—Has she had a go at you, mate?
Pricey opens his shirt and shows them a scar on the right side of his chest where she stabbed him a few months ago. He’s never shown anyone before, just stuck a bandage on it and let it heal by itself. It wasn’t so bad, but it shows you what she’s capable of.
He’d lost it on Sunday night, she was pushing and pushing and when she said something about his mother he cracked and tried to throttle her. Had her by the tit and was twisting and she was clawing at his face as they rolled around on the couch in front of the telly. Her kids and a niece were cowering in the bedroom. It was so fucking pathetic. Then she went for the knife.
He tells Cairnes and Bowditch about waking up that morning and thinking she was going to stab him.
—Ya don’t know what to fuckin’ do. You’re half awake and half asleep and the mad bitch is just staring at you. What sort of woman stands at the end of your bed in the middle of the night looking at you, anyway?
She’s driving him out of his mind. Anyway, the cops reckon if he wants to get her out he has to go to the courthouse and see about getting an order against her. He wants some time off, if it’s okay with the boss. Of course it is. Bowditch likes Pricey and is horrified by what he’s just heard.
Pricey drives up to the courthouse at lunch time. The bloke he speaks with, Glenn Dunning, is the one who dealt with the AVO from Sunday night’s fight. He recognises the name. Pricey says he needs to get her out of his house. Dunning tells him he’ll have to wait until the original order goes to the court in three weeks’ time. Pricey figures he’ll probably be dead by then. He wants the bloke to know how bad it is and shows him the stab wound. It’s a mark of how desperate he is. Up until that day nobody has seen it—Dunning is the third person now in a few hours. Pricey says he’s worried that if she doesn’t get him she’ll get his kids. The court officer isn’t going to be any help. Realising how futile it is, Pricey lightens up a bit and jokes that she’s threatened to cut his old fella off. Says it’s caused him a lot of trouble in the past but he’d hate to lose it. Dunning remarks later that he found him ‘friendly and likeable’. John Price’s charm was not muted by his fear.