Blood Stain

by Peter Lalor

  He types out the word ANSWER and leaves a space for her to respond.

  When it’s presented she gives a three-word reply: ‘I don’t know.’ Lloyd writes it in the space left by Wells. She signs it.

  Up at the hospital Wells and Lloyd talk with the barrister Thraves and the prosecutor writes out a document by hand that will give them consent to take blood samples and medical records. They formerly charge her before a magistrate at 1.30 pm in the same room that she was interviewed in two days earlier. The magistrate orders a psychiatric assessment to be completed before she appears in court again.

  Then a strange thing happens. Knight is refused bail and released from the hospital into the custody of the police. Bob Wells and Phil Lloyd wait while she gets her stuff ready then she gets into the back of their car and they drive her to Maitland Police Station. Knight sits in the back seat with two suitcases at her feet and talks with the prosecutor about the fishing at Glenbawn Dam as they head down the highway.

  On arrival at Maitland things get stranger. Ross Dellosta, the forensic officer, has taken a footprint from the kitchen floor and wants to see if it matches hers. They’ve never done this before and end up putting a piece of A4 paper on the floor of the police station. Two police reluctantly support Knight while they ink up her foot and then she places it down on the paper. One remembers cringing as she leant on him. He’d seen what she’d done with those hands.

  They lock her in a cell and Wells goes upstairs to see how Dellosta is getting on. The fingerprint expert is battling similar demons to Wells, although neither of them quite understand it at this stage. Dellosta stumbled on the Strathfield Shopping Centre massacre in 1991, when Wade Frankum ran amok with a knife and gun, killing six people and himself. It was a horrific murder. His first victim was a school girl he killed with a machete. Things like that knock you around. You never really recover. Dellosta made two trips to 84 St Andrews Street: once while the body was there and once the day after, dusting for prints on knives and light switches and walls. He found Knight’s bloody print pattern on a laundry door, an empty coffee mug and one filled with solidified human flat. Seeing the woman who did those terrible things to Price seems to upset the 51-year-old detective. When Wells walks in Dellosta looks panicked. Ashen-faced.

  —It’s not her footprint! It’s not a match!

  —Jesus fucking Christ. What do you mean?

  —It’s not hers.

  Wells can’t believe it. It’s a bloody nightmare. He walks down the stairs again with the world crashing down around his ears. Was someone else there? Did she have an accomplice? Did somebody else murder him? It’s just the sort of bullshit a good defence lawyer can use to muddy the waters. Handled properly it can create doubt and destroy the police case.

  He goes into Lloyd and tells him the news but as he is talking Dellosta comes bounding down the stairs. It’s all right. Everything is okay. He made a mistake. It is her footprint. Soon after this Dellosta stops working and takes sick leave. He has never been back since. The experience with Katherine Knight was the last straw. He can’t even see his best mates who were on the case because they remind him of that crime. A few of the police involved have found it hard to see each other since. It unsettles them. There’s never just one victim in a murder.

  Lloyd and Wells then put Knight in the car and drive down to Newcastle, tailed by a highway patrol car just in case. They hand her over to the corrective services who take her into custody while papers are prepared for her transfer to Sydney.

  Knowing she is soon to be locked up is some relief for Wells. The bird is in the cage and she has been charged. That night Katherine Knight spends the first of many nights in Mulawa prison, Sydney. Still Bob has a bad sleep. His head pounding so bad it feels like AC/DC are playing under the pillow. More nightmares. The next morning he has an appointment with a forensic pathologist.

  11

  Katherine and Dave Saunders

  1983-90

  Dave Saunders, panel beater and defacto of Katherine Knight, is dead. Kath’s killed him because he left her. She’s broken the news to their two-year-old daughter but the little one doesn’t believe it. She is sure he will come back. He’s just gone away, after all, he’s gone away before and come back. He could walk through the door at any time.

  The finality of death is a difficult concept for any of us to grasp, let alone one so young, and one day while out driving she becomes particularly adamant that her father is alive.

  —That’s Daddy there, Mummy. There’s Daddy. He’s not dead. It’s Daddy… DADDY! DADDY!

  The excitement in her eyes is something else. She wants it so bad she really can see him. And, sure enough, like Lazarus, David Saunders is back from the dead, walking among the good people of the Hunter Valley as if nothing had ever happened.

  Nothing had happened. Saunders wasn’t dead. Never had been. Katherine had announced his premature demise to his baby daughter because he had had the audacity to leave her. It was a last attempt at payback; a desperate twist of the knife. Some people insist on the last word but she insists on inflicting the last wound.

  That day, however, the game was up. With the two-year-old carrying on in the back, Kath reluctantly turned the car around and let the pair reunite, leaving Natasha on hand to supervise. For some reason she never trusted Dave. It was just like that bastard to come back and haunt her.

  * * *

  Katherine’s world got a whole lot tougher after she bailed out on Kellett. The stress of raising two children in a world where your only real support was a dysfunctional family unit took its toll. The following years were spent hopping between meatworks, caravan parks, tough towns and violent relationships. Everything had seemed so nice there for a while. She and Kellett had a little house with a lemon tree out the front, a little baby, and then he left with that teenager and everything was spoiled. Later, even Katherine, with her terror of abandonment, could see that it was time to move on. It showed a degree of maturity she didn’t have when they married. Calling the removalists while he was away driving the truck demonstrated a considerable strength of will. Maybe she was finding her feet.

  Kath initially sent Melissa and Natasha back to her mum and dad’s at Aberdeen, where Ken had bought a small farm block on Rouchel Road near Glenbawn Dam with a payout he got from hurting himself at work. The new place had been subdivided from one of the larger properties after the turnoff to the dam. An idyllic rural setting at the foothills of the mountains that was far enough from town to afford some privacy but close enough not to be inconvenient. Kath stayed on at the meatworks in Dinmore and for a short while at Beaudesert. She drove down to see the kids as often as she could.

  When she first brought the girls down she was worried she might be pregnant. It would be an absolute disaster if she was knocked up so soon after having Natasha. Especially now she was single. It turned out she wasn’t pregnant, so she went back to work. In the meantime the girls got a crash course in being a Knight. Melissa remembers the interlude at Nan and Pops with some of the same wide-eyed horror that her mother displays when she recalls her youth. Melissa saw Pop hitting Nan, Pop hitting Mum and Pop abusing them if they got out of line. Ken seemed to suffer from a lot of frustrations. Barbara used to say that Katherine and her father were too much alike, but in reality Kath had got her nature from both parents and, if anything, more from Mum than Dad. For her part, Melissa, who was old enough to be aware of what was going on around her, was starting to see life through Mum’s eyes. If the girls didn’t have the nature, they were getting a taste of the grass-roots nurture.

  Eventually Kath moved back to Aberdeen and got a job at the meatworks. Eight years after she’d driven away, leaving her mother lying bruised in the dirt and the whole town still talking about the baby on the railway tracks, she was back at the slaughterhouse where it had all begun. To hell with them and what they thought.

  Ken and Barbara must have had some idea of what she was going through; they’d been through the same thing when the
y had left town back in the 1950s. Katherine liked to pretend nothing had ever happened and if she saw any of the family she had bailed up at the service station she looked through them as if they were complete strangers.

  Back at home things took up where they had left off. Ken was still Ken and Kath was still Kath. Kath’s medical records include a note on 4 September 1984 that says ‘Father allegedly hitting pt (patient) with fist last night’. The records show Kath had a bruise over her left breast. She was sent off for X-rays but there were no broken ribs. She would say years later that Ken had assaulted her in 1983, but it could have been the same incident—beatings are like Christmases: they all start to merge into one over the years.

  Kath had photographs she showed Saunders of bruises she said were caused by her dad. She also says he hit Natasha when she was four, which would have been around the same time. There is no record that it was a serious incident, but it wouldn’t have had to be much to become part of the rich, sometimes fantastic weave of Kath and her children’s victimhood. With her return, father and daughter recommenced their life-long war and soon stopped speaking to each other—a stand-off that lasted a couple of years and would be repeated many times over the next twenty years.

  Things were always a little odd at the family home and Barbara became sick around this period. Neville Roughan, who was going through his religious phase and was running a nearby youth centre, gathered the family all around her in a recliner rocker and they laid on hands in some form of Christian healing ceremony.

  Katherine started having back and shoulder problems at work. Like many other members of her family, she found herself suffering a possibly lucrative work-related injury. She had two weeks off in 1984 after falling down the stairs. In January 1985 she was off again with a back injury. A month later she was off again. Kath had originally hurt it up in Queensland in a car accident in 1979 and then in a motorbike accident the year after. In February 1985, after she’d already been placed on light duties because of shoulder and back pain, a tub of meat fell from the line and caught the hook in her belt violently wrenching her back. She was hospitalised for three days.

  These were restless years and the trio of Kath and her two daughters moved around a lot. Melissa remembers moving with her mother into a house in Wells Gully. It’s an out of the way spot on a road that winds out of Muswellbrook. Pretty but isolated. ‘Mum had met a man while we were living at Wells Gully. This man had exposed himself to us, so Mum left him immediately.’ It was becoming a familiar story.

  Melissa remembers having to do a lot of the domestic work because Mum was incapacitated with her back injury. Barbara Knight moved in with them for a while, but things were a little hard for the women. There was an incident with a dog dying under the house after taking a bait. Melissa and Mum climbed under to get it out. There was a bushfire too. The women decided to move back into town to a house on the east side of the railway tracks, near where John Price would later build. Katherine then found a Commission house at 104 Segenhoe Street. A man moved in for awhile. Melissa has been told about him too. ‘He didn’t hit us but Mum said he had sexual intentions towards us kids, so she left him.’

  Another man. Another potential molester. It was becoming a pattern. The divorce from Kellett came through in 1986 but Kath still wasn’t feeling the best and had been seeing the doctor and getting prescriptions for her nerves when David Saunders stepped into the ring.

  Dave, or Saundo, as his mates call him, is another hard drinking Valley boy. He’s a rev head, a former speedway driver who is either in the pub or under the bonnet of a car. He has a friend in every bar and a terrible capacity for the grog. A rough diamond with a puppy-dog look and a soft side that reveals itself, appropriately, in his child-like passion for dogs. A good bloke, maybe a little hopeless. Dave was working down the valley at the mines when they first met, although he was a panel beater by trade.

  At the time he had a mate called Kelvin Dunn who he’d drop in to have a drink with at the Aberdeen Bowling Club on the way home from work. One time they ended up playing cards with this outgoing redhead called Kath Knight. It turned into a long night and they had so much fun they reconvened the next night and the next, before he worked up the courage to ask her out. Kath, Dave, and another couple, Terry and Dawn, headed to the local Chinese restaurant. Everyone had a good time and Saunders could see that this woman was interested.

  The new girl proved to be pretty handy in the sack too. Not many inhibitions on that front. Saunders, an inveterate pants man, looked like he was onto a good thing. He found out she had two kids, but he had three of his own and a former wife, so there was a bit of a balance there. It also turned out he knew her kids and her brother. Like Kellett before him, he’d had a session or two with Charlie and one time got pissed out at Ken and Barbara’s and ended up sleeping the night on a couch outside. Melissa and Natasha were staying with their grandparents at the time.

  Dave remembers Barbara was not that engaging but once he showed an interest in her daughter she asked him, ‘What sort of fella are ya?’ To which he replied, ‘A pretty fair one.’ And that was that. It must have been some sort of vetting process. Ken had bought an old combustion stove and Saunders installed it for him. He fixed up Ken’s Chevrolet Luv too. The perfect son-in-law.

  Saunders and his dingo pup moved down from Scone to 104 Segenhoe Street with Kath and the kids and for a while there things were just dandy. He was working long shifts at the mines and putting in equally long sessions at various pubs. He was in great demand as his panel beater’s eye made him one of the area’s better pool players. It didn’t take long until this started to annoy Kath. Saunders was mates with every second person in the valley and had a lot of socialising to do.

  Saunders is one of those blokes who hates being alone, maybe hates being home and he is way too fond of the grog, even by his own reckoning. A lot of the time Kath left Melissa in charge of the kids while she accompanied him from one pool table to another, one pub after another.

  She was feeling pretty good about herself again. The new bloke wasn’t a bad catch—miners earn a lot of money—and she was back in her own town. Then, in December 1986, not long after the couple moved in together, they got a phone call telling them to get around to her parents’ place straight away. Her mother had collapsed and was very sick. They raced around to Rouchel Road and found an ambulance there with Barbara in the back. Kath climbed inside to be with her but she was too late. Barbara was dead. It was terribly traumatic for Kath—her mum was not a pretty sight.

  She had all of this stuff coming out of her mouth and it stunk… I couldn’t understand why she died and left me. I don’t know why God took her and left me in pain. I hated her for dying too.

  Kath was devastated. And angry. She came out of the ambulance and launched into her father. Shouting that he had killed her. Him and his violence. It had to be somebody’s fault. Things got ugly and fraught. It was a terrible scene, all the yelling and swearing and distress. Death is hard for any of us to accept, but for somebody like Kath it was doubly confusing and frightening. The family went up to the hospital that night to view Barbara, but nobody had prepared the body. She was still an awful sight, lying in a hospital blanket, contorted as if still in pain, her tongue poking out obscenely. Everybody was shocked by what they saw. Mum didn’t seem at peace.

  The following day Kath became so upset Dave took her to Scone hospital. She was sedated and sent home. The death of her mother left her vulnerable and alone. A frightened child without protection. She had been abandoned again and it felt like she was dropping into a dark hole. She loved her mum. Loves her. Wants to be with her. Despite the beatings, her mother had been her protector at home. The one who made it a bit safer. It was Barbara who picked up her skirts and trudged off to the local school when Kath was being belted by the teachers. She was the source of all her daughter’s knowledge about the world and men.

  For the whole family, but Kath particularly, Barbara’s passing spelt a terrible finali
ty. Now there was never any chance of having the love they craved. Joy was equally upset, as were Barbara’s sisters. In Katherine’s mind somebody had to be at fault. The circle of blame grew. Sometimes Kath says that she had just told her mother about Ken hitting Natasha and other times that she had just told her about the sexual abuse from her brothers. She seems to see some connection between the knowledge and the terrible death and feels guilt over this. She lost her faith in God. At times she just craved to be with her mother. Hated her for going, but wanted to follow. There were thoughts of suicide. She even seemed to reject her own children. If she’d been abandoned they could be too. Times like these are dangerous for the dependants of somebody who is terrified of independence. When Kellett had left her she blamed Melissa and seemed to want to take it out on her. This time her father Ken seemed to wear most of the blame.

  Saunders says that in the midst of her turmoil Kath was left to organise the wake. He felt like the family had abandoned Kath, but Barry Roughan says he doesn’t think it was like this. He says Joy was the apple of her mother’s eye and Kath was not the sort to organise things, which isn’t to say she didn’t see it differently in her mind. Another brother says it is more likely that Kath did the work; she was the connecting point for the dysfunctional group. Roughan says that his half-sister was affected by the death for a long time to come.

  The funeral was held in the little church in Aberdeen and was a hysterical affair. Barbara’s sisters were distraught and at least one threw herself on the coffin. Neville did a reading and battled through a eulogy. Barbara was cremated and her ashes were spread in the mountains outside town as she had wished.

  And then she was completely gone: no grave, no memorial, just a few possessions, a number of which Kath kept and surrounded herself with. The death of Mum triggered another downward spiral in Katherine and her new relationship. Another plank collapsed.