by Peter Lalor
When Katherine throttled David on their wedding night because he didn’t make love to her five times, she was revealing so much about her past and her future. Like all the Knight children, she knows the details of her parents’ sex life because her childhood was set against a backdrop of physical conflict, overt sexual behaviour and violent sexual demands. Fucking and Fighting were never far apart and sometimes there didn’t seem to be any distinction.
little Katherine Knight grew up in a home where Mum and Dad didn’t lock the door and make love on Sunday morning. For a start there was very little love. And unlike most 1950s Australian families, the Knights didn’t treat sex as a secret, or something to be ashamed of. Katherine’s childhood memories are painful and vivid. She told psychiatrists she remembers her dad, Ken, chasing Barbara around the house demanding sex, using violence and intimidation to get his way. The kids grew up watching their horny slaughterhouse father bailing Mum up with a broom. They would see fists fly in drunken, randy rages and black eyes in the morning. There was no discretion. One visitor remembers going around to the Knight house in the 1970s—after Katherine had married and left home—and seeing Barbara with bruises on her face. ‘The old cunt knocked me out for sex again’ the mother of eight explained in a bitter flat tone.
Barbara wasn’t the retiring type either; she could stand up for herself. And Barbara, it seems, confided in her daughters. She told Katherine how much she hated men and sex. The brutal demands. And later, when Katherine’s time came and one partner upset her by insisting on anal sex, she turned to her mother for advice. Barbara told her to put up with it. Stop complaining.
Inevitably, the charged sexual atmosphere of that dysfunctional household filtered down to the children, and the boys, who began to eye their developing little sister with that same horny look Dad had. The girls began to fear the night. Katherine clung to her mother’s skirts and her twin sister’s hand; the only two women who could understand her fear in an aggressive, testosterone-charged male world.
Katherine Knight has two words for her childhood: sad and bad. She has attempted to draw a curtain across it, but the sinister shadow play has continued her whole life. These aren’t memories that are easily suppressed. Like most victims of childhood trauma she spent the first half of her life trying to forget them and the latter half trying to deal with them. Time and again after the murder she hints at the troubles. Opens the door a crack and then closes it again.
Barry Roughan, Katherine’s half-brother and Barbara’s fourth child, understands something of the landscape that nurtured Kath’s darkness. Driven out of Aberdeen after his half-sister, Joy, ran off with his wife, Barry offers an opinion about this slaughterhouse family’s history.
—If you dig deep enough it’s as grubby as all shit, our family. As grubby as shit. Mate, the family is rotten to the core.
* * *
Katherine Knight’s mother was born Barbara Thorley, a tough talking, dirt poor Muswellbrook girl who escaped from the deprivations of home when she moved up the road to Aberdeen and married the hard drinking abattoir worker Jack Roughan in the 1940s. Every small town has a family like the Thorleys and they always have a daughter like Barbara who marries a bloke like Jack and the relationship sticks to the script as surely as water flows down a hill.
Barbara had a hard childhood. Her father left when she was young and she was raised in a small, crowded house with an extended family. They were poor and her mother struggled to put food on the table. One of Kath’s siblings remembers Mum saying that as a child she was never ‘loved or cuddled or nursed—her mum was busy and there was no time or room for affection or love’. There is a suggestion that Barbara was sexually abused by relatives. At one stage she found herself in a home for wayward girls. The traumas of Mum’s youth were something her kids were aware of, but not something Barbara went into great detail about. There was too much sadness.
Barb was hurt so much as a child and a teenager. She had some very bad things happen to her within her wider family; she was abused and she was in a girls’ home and was run around a bit. She never talked about it much. She mentioned it sometimes in passing, but you knew it was always there.
Locals remember Barbara as highly strung and foul mouthed. She was a woman you didn’t cross. She was physically sturdy, but mentally fragile. On a number of occasions she was hospitalised for her ‘nerves’. She told her children (and others like Colleen Price and David Kellett) that there was a madness running through the female side of her family. It was something she recognised in Katherine.
Barbara would say, according to her moods, that she was part Aboriginal. Sometimes she told the family they were descended from a Maori princess. Other times Mum would tell the kids that their great-great-grandmother was an indigenous woman from the Moree area and their great-great-grandfather was an Irishman. ‘When she was feeling good we were Aboriginal. She knew all along, she just didn’t say. There was a lot of racism in those days. It was a secret if it was in your family.’ Even today in Aberdeen, people might whisper to you that so and so has got a bit of Aboriginal blood, as though it might explain certain behaviour. When Katherine’s first granddaughter was born the family sat around and made jokes about her ‘little boong nose’. Somebody even suggested they call her Little Boong.
Barbara’s first husband, Jack Roughan, was the manager of the Aberdeen abattoir’s pig farm—a job he’d inherited from his father. When the pig farm closed Jack got a job inside the abattoir. He was older than Barbara and sired four boys with his young bride in the first ten years of marriage. Old-timers can remember the family being raised in the barracks, an extended boarding house type arrangement for the meat-workers.
Later, they moved to a small worker’s cottage near the abattoir. Barbara became increasingly unhappy. Her husband, they say, drank too much and gambled away his money. The last two boys, Neville and Barry, were born in quick succession. Raising four kids in a rough cottage was not easy and the marriage ended in sensational circumstances. With the youngest, Barry, only a few months old and Neville not even two, Barbara took up with another tough young abattoir worker, Ken Knight.
The Knights were legend in Aberdeen. Ken’s father, Charlie, maintained the council’s water supply before the Glenbawn Dam was built and rode about town on a horse to do his job. There were a lot of sons and most of them, Ken included, became well-known roughriders, hurling their bodies about on the backs of buck-jumping horses and rodeo bulls. The old family home sat like a pimple on your nose in a hollow next to the outdoor cinema on the main street of town, across from the barber, tailor and pool hall. The Knight boys were a tough lot and you didn’t mess with them.
Some say that Barbara Roughan was driven into Ken Knight’s arms by Jack Roughan’s drunken, neglectful ways. Others say they just fell in love. It depends on which side of the family you listen to. Even today adultery still manages to raise an eyebrow in most circles, but in old-world rural Australia, in a fly-speck community like Aberdeen, the affair between Barbara Roughan and Ken Knight was an enormous scandal. It’s a town small enough for everybody to know everybody and the story of Ken and Barbara’s elopement is still remembered half a century later. Katherine and her siblings grew up knowing there was talk about them and scandals past. Katherine acted like she didn’t care, but in truth she always carried baggage about issues of paternity and fidelity.
It must have been impossible for Ken Knight to keep working at the same place as Jack Roughan and so he and Barbara decided to get away from the heat and headed up to Gunnedah where he got a job as a butcher in the meatworks. The Roughan family was tom apart by their mother’s affair. Some say the church stepped in and forced Barbara to hand over her two youngest to Jack’s family; others says she just left the four behind. Whatever happened, Barbara’s four boys were split up. Patrick and Martin were left with their dad and ran wild, raising hell around the paddocks and streets of Aberdeen. Barry and Neville were raised in Sydney by an aunt on his father’s side and were s
chooled in the Roughan contempt for Barbara. Barbara was soon pregnant with a child to Ken. Kenneth Charles Knight (he was obviously named after his father and grandfather, but they called him Charlie) was born less than a year after his half-brother Barry Roughan.
Joy Gwendoline and Katherine Mary were born in Tamworth Hospital in October 1955. Two girls to complement the five older boys. In just over five years Barbara had given birth to five children in quick succession.
In June 1957 Jack Roughan died. On top of his drinking, Jack, like many in those days, consumed Bex Powders with abandon. Family lore is divided over whether it was the grog or the medicine that killed him. He died of hypertension, leaving his two motherless sons, Patrick and Martin, now fatherless. With Jack’s death, the two Roughan boys moved back to be with their mother in Gunnedah, while the two younger boys remained in Sydney. Barbara Knight suddenly had five kids on her hands, with two more farmed out to relatives. Katherine says that her mother told her Ken was an alcoholic in those days, which can’t have made family life any easier. To make matters worse, he didn’t seem to appreciate the stepsons being around.
After the twins, Barbara Knight gave birth to one last son, Shane, and was done. The eight kids had taken a toll on her nerves and life with Ken and the kids around the house was always a little fraught. Both parents were strict disciplinarians and had nasty tempers. According to two of the sons, Ken was especially hard on Patrick and Martin, his two stepsons. Patrick had worked in the abattoir at Gunnedah and then did his national service before coming back to Moree.
Around this time Neville Roughan came up to visit his mother from Sydney and decided to stay. He and his brother Barry had never had much to do with her during the first fifteen years of their lives. Although Ken was a little more receptive at this time to the children of his wife’s first husband, one friend remembers him punching out Neville after he gave his new stepfather a bit of lip. The roughrider was never shy with his fists when it came to the boys or Barbara, but according to the kids she gave back almost as good as she got. There was constant sexual and physical tension between the two from the time they met until she died. Ken demanded sex like it was a bad debt. One visitor remembers him chasing his wife up and down the corridor in the last year of her life. ‘Give us a root, come on, fuck ya, give us a root.’
The kids had to keep their heads down while the parents went for it. Hammer and tongs.
Barbara was the softer one, but she could be equally hard on the kids and didn’t put up with any nonsense. She told you something once and if you needed to be told twice you suffered the consequences. She liked a neat house and the children all had to make the beds so tight that a five cent piece could be bounced on them. If the five cent piece didn’t bounce she stripped your bed and you had to start again. It didn’t take long to learn the lesson.
Barbara wasn’t an affectionate woman. She was damaged and, like her mother before her, she couldn’t show the children much love. A son remembers her cringing away from his hugs. It frustrated the children. Especially Katherine, who craved her mother’s love and complained that she didn’t get it. She always believed that Joy was the family favourite.
When Katherine has spoken about her childhood, she hasn’t recalled the good times. She remembers her childhood through a fog of misery and violence. I used to get belted a lot but I can’t remember the beltings.
Katherine says she does not remember her parents saying they loved her. Family members recall she would become depressed at times, worrying and fretting. She had a vicious temper and had to be held back when she lost her cool. At other times she and Joy were carefree and self-contained. The kids stuck together. Life can’t have been all bad and children are pretty resilient. Living in the country they made their own fun. The older brothers paid the girls to clean their rooms and would look out for their sisters. The girls remained best friends all their lives—young Katherine failed to make many strong relationships outside the family.
The Knights lived in a run-down old home on Boston Street in Moree that had been divided into two flats. They lived in one half, with rough furnishings and not enough rooms. The verandahs had been converted into extra bedrooms when somebody nailed up some timber and corrugated iron to keep the weather out. It was a forbidding place and the kids who went to school with Katherine and Joy can remember the home had a chilling atmosphere.
Her mother and father weren’t loving, they didn’t seem to care for the kids or take any notice of them. Even if there wasn’t an argument going on in the place you could still slice the air in there with a knife. You could smell the violence. It was a terrible atmosphere. There just seemed to be no love.
As a small girl, Katherine was close to Ken’s brother Oscar Knight, another champion roughrider. In 1969 Oscar shot himself. He was only 34 years old. Katherine was devastated. It was her first experience of death and it terrified her to think someone she loved could be taken away from her. Later she said she wished it had been her father because she loved Oscar more. She has kept items owned by the uncle with her all her life and says he appeared to her as a ghost. Sometimes she says he was an angel.
People who knew the twins said they would do anything to gain some attention, good or bad, because they were neglected by their parents. When they started at Moree High School the two long, thin, red-headed girls immediately attracted attention for their violence.
If there was a fight in the playground it was usually either Kathy or Joy, but it was more likely to be Kathy and she would fight anyone. She wouldn’t go looking for fights but she never ever backed down.
The twins used to fight each other with a viciousness that left the other kids at school cringing in fear. Katherine never seemed happy and always wore a threatening frown. One school mate remembers an argument between Katherine and Joy over who would ride and who would push their one bicycle.
Suddenly, they were at it, throwing punches like men. It was frightening. They were always together because they didn’t have a lot of friends, but they fought like cats and dogs … but if somebody fought Kath, Joy would be in there to help out and vice versa.
Katherine was a nightmare for her class teachers; she refused to do anything she was told and was always in trouble.
Katherine claims in interviews that she was the victim of repeated sexual abuse from within the family and some of the psychiatrists who have treated her accept this, although there is room for minor doubts. Most of the incidents appear to have happened when the family lived in Moree. She says two of her brothers abused her. She says the older brother would spit on his fingers and rub her vagina. She has trouble remembering the exact details.
She told the psychiatrist Dr Leonard Lambeth she remembered his body climbing on top of me, and that’s all. He reckons he stopped when I was six, but I remember him touching me when he was in the Army, which apparently makes her seven or older.
I grew up all my life knowing them two have touched me.
Psychiatrist Robert Delaforce spent two days with Knight in June 2000. She painted a bleak picture of her youth. Although everything she told the psychiatrists in this period has to be seen as self-serving others confirm elements of what she says. Katherine was eager to portray herself as a victim. She claimed little memory of her childhood and found it difficult to discuss it, but she said her childhood was spoiled by physical violence and sexual tensions. Ken, she said, was brutal to all the children and her mother, forcing her to have sex with him. She says her father accused her of procuring men for her mother.
Katherine wet the bed until she was 11 years old—around the time the sexual abuse stopped. She was afraid of the dark and kept a doll that protected her.
One doll used to protect me. I was scared at night, they wouldn’t let me have a light on.
I thought there was something wrong with me and that all boils down to my brothers touching me … I played with my dolls and things like that a lot. I had one doll I carried everywhere with me. It used to protect me … Mine wa
s like gold to me. It meant more to me than anything in the world, I suppose.
In the late 1990s Kath’s cousin, Brian Conlon, moved in with her brother Charlie in Muswellbrook. Brian is almost a member of the family and has known the Roughans and Knights for most of his life. Kath’s kids call him uncle Brian. He remembers Katherine dropping into her brother’s for a chat about once a month. On one occasion she came by with her second eldest daughter, Natasha, and started asking Charlie if he knew anything about her being molested as a child.
Conlon thought that his cousin didn’t know if she had been or not. Charlie told her she had. Today Charlie admits his family has dark secrets. He wanted $50 000 to tell the story, ‘because what I know will mean I got to leave town’. Another sibling was also reluctant to talk about sexual abuse in the family. ‘I can’t really say. That’s one of those questions I won’t answer, it cuts too deep, just explaining it would …’ The sentence was too hard to complete.
Katherine’s eldest daughter, Melissa, was willing to relay what her mother had told her about the sexual abuse she suffered as a child. She told the police:
I can recall from talking to Mum when I was 12 years old, she told me that she had been sexually molested by her half-brother … Mum told me that this abuse was constant from when she was between the ages of five to nine years.
I also recall talking with Mum when I went to see her in Sydney about two weeks ago. I confronted Mum about things that I had been told by other family members. I told Mum that I had been told that Uncle Charlie Knight had also molested her when she was young. Mum said to me, ‘Don’t blame Uncle Charlie. He was too young. He was brought into it by …’ This was upsetting for Mum and she did not want to talk about it further.