by Peter Lalor
Lloyd Lyne was the local sergeant from 1969 to 1976. He worked a lot of small towns with tough reputations but says that Aberdeen was the worst of the lot. He was always busy with hot-headed kids who, he said, turned to trouble and drugs early. The meatworkers were a tough lot who drank hard and he says the casual employment attracted a lot of passing criminal trade in need of some quick money. The sergeant never had a slow day in sleepy old Aberdeen.
These days Aberdeen is quiet. The main employer, the meatworks, is now closed and once it went there was bugger all left. If you’re driving up the highway, there’s hardly a road sign until you almost reach town and it tells you there are 1750 people living at an elevation of 190 m.
This morning there are 1749. The slaughterhouse has taken one last victim.
As Wells and Prentice drive they pass slag heaps that form their own minor mountain ranges. Coal sidings and conveyor belts follow the road. It’s a strange piece of countryside. Part rural, part industrial. Before Muswellbrook there are two enormous power stations, one on either side of the highway. Their oversized chimneys pump towering clouds of steam into the sky. The mines release poisonous gases into the atmosphere. The locals reckon that their fences and cars rust at twice the rate of anywhere else in Australia because of chemicals in the air. By the side of the road is a permanent protest camp, where miners picket one of the multinational companies.
This morning the two cops are happy to get out of the office. There’s a sense of excitement as they drive shoulder to shoulder with the coal trains. A local copper, John Alderson, has called from Aberdeen and said it looks like murder. Wells is the area’s senior detective, so he has to come up and supervise. Wells and Prentice are keen to get there as quickly as possible. To be honest, they’re going flat chat through the morning. The adrenalin is flowing. You don’t get that many big jobs and a murder is as big as it gets. You don’t join the force to write speeding tickets. This is what it’s all about. The big league.
They phone for directions as they approach town and are told to go over the bridge and take the first right. They hit Aberdeen and are through the town in a minute. They cross the bridge over the Hunter River and can’t find the turn-off.
Shit.
They call the locals again, do a U-turn and came back through town, taking the railway bridge before the top pub. Pretty soon they find what they are looking for.
It’s 9.15 am, give or take five minutes, and it’s getting hot.
Eighty-four St Andrews Street is surrounded by blue police tape. The bunting of death. There are cop cars on the street, cars in the driveway and an ambulance. A small group of people are gathered on the lawn across the street.
It proves to be a morning that none of the cops, ambos or locals will ever forget. A glimpse into the dark, cockroach corners of the soul. A lot of the blokes there that day are never the same again. Even now they have nightmares, angry outbursts, depression. They avoid each other because they don’t want to be reminded of what they’ve been through together. There are murders and there are murders. There are bodies and there are bodies, and then there’s what lies waiting for Bob Wells and the others behind the front door of this little brick house with its blinds drawn and airconditioner working against the oppressive Hunter Valley heat.
As Wells and Prentice get out of the car two ambulance officers close the doors of their van and begin to drive off. Muswellbrook detective Graham Furlonger and John Alderson are waiting. They try and bring the pair up to speed: the suspect’s in the back of the ambulance. A suspected overdose.
—You’re not going to believe what’s going on in here, mate. It’s fucking crazy.
What else could they say? It is fucking crazy. There aren’t words for it. Frankly, Furlonger and Alderson are not even sure exactly what they’ve seen. Furlonger looks rattled. The four men walk down the western side of the house and Furlonger points out something on the grass in front of a Ford Mondeo.
—Check that out, mate.
—Fuck. Is that what I think it is?
—Mate, I told you this was fuckin’ bizarre.
—God!
—You don’t know the half of it.
It is a piece of cooked meat, fatty and dark like mutton.
4
Inside the slaughterhouse
1 March 2000
Inside 84 St Andrews Street are horrors those who stand outside can never imagine.
John Price’s watch rests on a shattered picture frame, the face smeared with blood, its second hand ticking like a faint heartbeat in a car crash. A photograph of his son lies beneath the shards of glass. Flies on a blood stained knife. An ocean of blood on the cork tiles and a body of raw flesh. A severed neck with gaping windpipe. An arm propped on a softdrink bottle. A pelt on a hook. Bloodied coffee mugs and twisted cigarette butts. Vegetable peels in the sink and a baking tray on the stove. Congealing fat and a cup of gravy. A soup pot on the stove. An airconditioner and a snoring sound. It’s a nightmare swirl of images.
John Price’s death is shocking beyond comprehension. To enter 84 St Andrews Street is to lift the grate and descend to a lower world. Others, like Jon Collison, could choose not to go there, could turn back at the door, but professional imperatives force a small number of people into that home over the course of the day to witness the congealing crimson detail.
After they’d cracked the lock on the back door with a crow bar, Duty Officer Graham Furlonger, followed by Senior Constables Scott Andrew Matthews and Robert James Maude, were the first outsiders to witness this vision of hell. They emerged shaken and horrified, unable to describe or understand what they’d seen.
At 9.10 am Furlonger leads Wells and Prentice inside. Nothing he can say will prepare them.
Outside the March sun is stark and blinding and inside the curtains are drawn and the darkness contained. Bob Wells’ pupils dilate slowly, images emerge like photographs in a developing tank. A nightmare lifting from the nothingness. Reds from the blackness.
—Mate, I told you this was fucking bizarre.
Wells’ heart pounds a crazed drum beat warning. Turn around now, while you can. Get out and don’t look back.
Something hangs in the archway between the kitchen and the living room, contorted and shapeless. Some sort of drape. It’s the first thing you notice. It takes a moment, then you realise. It’s him. John Price. At least it’s his skin hanging like a wetsuit on a nail. A man melted like a Dali clock. A human curtain. The face a sick rubber mask without a skull to give it shape. The eye holes vacant under an exaggerated eyebrow arch. His mouth twisted and distorted, falling in a silent scream. There are his ears, or what remains of them. His scalp is crowned by bloody curls. The rest is slashed and punctured, hanging in porcine strips right down to his flanged feet. A patch of pubic hair offers some orientation.
Price faces the kitchen, the butcher’s hook hung on the lounge side of the architrave and poking into the back of his scalp. There’s an unopened stubbie of beer lying on the floor in front of the fridge. Just out of reach.
Beyond the curtain John Price’s denuded body lies on the carpet, headless and skinless. Furlonger points it out to Wells and Prentice.
A steady drone comes from the eastern end of the house. It is an airconditioner and when the first officers approached, gasping and retching, another sound, guttural and bestial, announced itself. Guns drawn, they had inched past the punch holes in the corridor plaster and generous gesticulatory patterns of blood, searching for the source of the strange noise. They had found her lying on the crumpled bed, clean and oblivious. The bed cover was pulled down and a sheet led from the bed towards the door. Katherine was snoring loudly.
Now she is gone and there is no life save the airconditioner droning on and on. A large bed is squeezed into the small space, a mirrored built-in robe on the west side, a dressing table at the foot of the bed. A pair of thongs on the floor, a packet of Winfield cigarettes on the table, three spent butts and a stubbie cap in the ash tray. There are t
issues, no-name massage oil, baby powder and an oil burner on the bedside table. Clothes on the floor. Female lotions on the dresser, framed photographs of a baby and a young girl. Empty tablet strips. A bedroom in summer disorder.
It must have started here. The first drops of blood on the sheet, fountain and spray above the bed head and onto the mirrored robe. Palm smears by the door and coagulated teardrops on the light switch where a man in the middle of his murder has frantically groped about, trying to turn on a light to protect himself from the homicidal darkness.
The corridor is sprayed with arterial patterns and desperate, lurching smears. Failing to get the light on he has run this way, then turned left into the entrance hall and tried to get out the front door. She’s followed him every step, stabbing and hacking. Relentless.
There are roughly five litres of blood in the human body. On this corked floor behind the front door John Price has bled to death. The scale is profound. He appears to have lost almost every drop. There is just so much blood here. Just so damned much of it. Now it’s darkening from the outside in and reflecting the light bulb above it. Here, on the wall, are the butterfly smears of John Price’s last struggle and dying fall. Wide bloody sweeps at shoulder height, repeated as he slipped down. Delicate arterial sprays and long dying drops.
Perhaps the pool seems so confrontingly large because it is empty. Drag marks lead towards the loungeroom but you do not have to peer in to know what’s there, for his skinless legs protrude into the entrance hall with the left crossed over the right. Casually reclined.
Tiptoe around the sticky pool.
John Price lies on his back with his head towards the kitchen; his body like one of those anatomical illustrations you see stripped of skin so that students of life can study the major muscles. The clean anatomical detail is destroyed by the presence of yellowing fat, drying flesh and gaping puncture wounds.
John Price has no head. A certain blood pattern near the neck on the carpet suggests he has been dragged from the hall and beheaded here.
His left arm is propped up on an empty 1.5 litre bottle of lemon soda squash. By the body is a large plastic handled knife that has scratch marks on the blade as if it has been recently sharpened. Part of the knife edge is missing, it has broken off during the attack. Later, when the crime scene video zooms in on this knife a fly lands on the blade as if this were some strange Hitchcock film.
Nearby a small piece of hairy flesh lies alone. It must have been cut free from the skull in a clumsy moment of savagery. A sharpening steel with a dark black handle sits on the cushion of a chair near the knife with a packet of Winfield cigarettes.
Across the room is the coffee table with two framed photographs that have been smashed. One is of Price’s son, Johnathon. A photograph of his youngest daughter has been similarly vandalised. Under it is a piece of tissue paper that contains random hastily scrawled notes, written with an obviously bloody hand. The ticking watch.
Then there is the kitchen. Hell’s kitchen.
There is an empty stubbie on the servery, a pack of cigarettes, a Walkman, an ash tray with two butts, a paring knife and a sharpening stone. Details. There are also empty pill packets and a wallet. A bloody coffee mug is filled with fat.
A meal has been prepared and served on two plates, but whoever cooked it has worked hastily and not cleaned up. There are vegetable peelings in the sink, a small cutting board, a bloody knife. Two used bowls. The microwave door is open and his thermos flask is on the bench next to an electric kettle with blood smears on it.
A metal roasting tray sits on top of the cooker, filled with uncongealed fat. Nearby are two plates with a heavy and unappetising meal on them. Coarse chunks of zucchini, potato, squash, cabbage and big cuts of dark, fatty meat. The meals are lying on towelling paper with the names of his two children on them, some sort of hasty name card for a place setting. It is only later that the true horror of this begins to sink in. The cold, calculated spite. The layers of payback. The fact that she has done all this and then cooked and served him for his children.
Then there is a cup of gravy that has not been poured. On the stove is a still warm aluminium cooking pot. Inside is a skinless head, the flesh detaching into a fatty, soupy stock of onions and vegetables. One cooked eye looking up. It is just so sick.
Pricey’s work bag is on the table with a cap and a work shirt. There’s also a strange little gorilla sitting there. It’s a cute touch.
To this day Bob Wells can reel off every detail of the scene in perfect recall. It could be considered an advantage for an officer heading up a case, but for Wells it is a terrible burden he cannot shake. It’s as if somebody has downloaded the images onto the hard-drive of his brain. Too many times he has closed his eyes and been transported back into that darkness. The skin and the pot and the skinless torso. An ocean of blood, a continent of flesh. Cigarette butts and gravy cups. Wells was catching a giant wave that day. He was the senior investigating officer and one of the few to see the crime through from start to finish. He lived and breathed the savagery of Katherine Knight from this first morning of March 2000 until the end of the following year when she faced a court. He never stopped, limping around on a gout-swollen foot, a screaming pain in his temples, insomnia and nightmares that wouldn’t go away. One cooked eye looking up.
Wells becomes agitated as he recalls the events. He shifts in his chair, the eyes glaze up a little and he begins to speak faster and faster, the ideas running off at tangents.
The blood they’ve all encountered so many times before, but it was the skin that really made the initial impact.
At first I sort of saw it and I was going …
It wasn’t until you go up to have a look at it that it…
And I just, mate, I don’t know how I felt. I’ve done a few murders and that sort of thing, especially out west and violent Aboriginal situations, stabbings, things that are easy to work out. This human skin, mate, with the hair, hanging from the architrave by a butcher’s hook on the other side and it was hanging right down. The scalp, the hair, right down and just touching the floor.
It just took a while to register and I thought that this is something right out of left field, right out of the ordinary.
I looked around the kitchen and there was the pot. I think Furlonger had brought it to my attention along with the drops of blood on the floor and he said, ‘The body’s in there, but there’s no head’, and so I looked in, brushed past the skin and I could see Price’s skinned body and I said, ‘Mate, this is just…’ You sort of lose your senses for a minute or so.
You didn’t have to be a brain surgeon to work out where the head was.
Three days after Christmas, 1989, Newcastle was rocked by an earthquake which flattened parts of the city and left thirteen dead. Wells was in Maitland prison interviewing a prisoner. Later, he says the feeling of the ground lifting in waves, the terrible noise and the complete incomprehension were much like what happened inside 84 St Andrews Street that morning. You knew something was happening, but your senses were overwhelmed. You couldn’t find a nail to hang the sensation from. How do you comprehend the earth twisting and tormenting itself? How do you comprehend what was inside that house?
He came and went many times that day. Standing there with the others, bouncing about theories, piecing together a jigsaw. And there was the smell. Human death has its own odour, it’s not like a butcher’s shop. Cops will tell you that a dead human smells different to a dead animal. And in St Andrews Street the whole thing was complicated by the last supper that Katherine prepared. As the day dragged on it started to get very ripe. Some of the crime scene boys say it is the most profound memory and they’ve smelt death more than most.
What saved Wells initially was the need to behave like a policeman. To do his job no matter what was going on.
You reel a bit then reality kicks in and you say, mate, this is a major crime scene and I’m in charge.
‘I want everybody out of here.’ This is not our job a
t this stage. ‘I want nothing touched until the crime scene blokes get here’—they were on their way—so my concern was to preserve that crime scene.
On leaving the house Wells learned that Knight had two children. He sent the other police off to check around town with a sinking feeling. To have a dead bloke was one thing; a couple of dead kids would have really topped off what was already a shitty day.
Fortunately they found the pair safe at Natasha Kellett’s place in Muswellbrook. She was Katherine Knight’s second daughter and a fine piece of work herself.
Then the cavalry arrived. The boss, Superintendent Blanche, showed up along with the crime scene guys, Senior Sergeant Neil Raymond and Peter Muscio, and Wells gave them the guided tour. They spent a lot of time inside, trying to fit together the pieces of the crime. The video unit came up from Sydney with the forensic pathologist in tow and started to make a crime scene film that will go down in the annals as one of the worst anybody is ever likely to see. Crime agencies also came up, two homicide detectives, but they weren’t too interested. The homicide boys would have jumped in if there was no suspect or at least not one in custody; as it was they offered a bit of advice and headed home.
The cops had a conference outside the house. The moment has been captured by a photographer for the Newcastle Herald and was published the next day under the headline ‘Slaying of a Battier’. You can see it was getting really hot and uncomfortable. There’s an air of unease in the way the police are arranged, some with hands to heads, others staring at the ground. They worked out a plan of attack.
Wells and the other cops started to talk to the crowd of friends and picked up straight away that Knight had threatened to kill Price, that he had been in fear of his life. Didn’t look like this case was going to be too hard to solve, but that didn’t mean it was going to be easy either.
The investigation began.
You have got to get stuck in straight away, get people on paper because, mate, it was bizarre, just bizarre, I looked at it and knew this brief was going to be something, it was going to be something. Everything was pointing at her. I knew that it was on.