by Peter Lalor
—If you leave that here I’ll cut its throat.
Just like that.
12
Autopsy
2000
It is not often a corpse’s head arrives in a saucepan, but when John Price’s remains were delivered to the Newcastle Department of Forensic Medicine the packaging spoke volumes about the bizarre nature of his death.
Six days after Price’s death, Bob Wells drove up to visit Dr Tim Lyons, the forensic pathologist at Newcastle just to touch base and clear up a few little details.
The British-trained doctor is the forensic pathologist for the Hunter region and holds an appointment to the Royal Australian Airforce Specialist Reserves as a wing commander with a special interest in aviation pathology. Plane crashes. Lyons is generally not too fussed about whether you use the term ‘corpse’ or ‘body’, but admits that when an airplane makes an unscheduled landing he finds the term ‘human remains’ more appropriate.
He hasn’t always worked with the dead. In a previous career he worked with the dying as an orthopaedic and trauma surgeon in the United Kingdom. At one stage he found himself at the Groot Schuur Hospital in Capetown, South Africa. The place where Dr Christiaan Barnard completed the first heart transplant in 1967, and one of the busiest trauma units in the world. Its emergency ward sees more gunshot wounds than most. The doctor then trained in anatomical pathology in the UK, before moving into forensic pathology and taking up a post in Australia.
Lyons arrived in Tasmania in August 1994, eighteen months before a friendless blonde youth by the name of Martin Bryant walked into the Broad Arrow Cafe at the Port Arthur convict site. By the time Bryant finished shooting, 35 bodies lay scattered around the grounds. The case load for Lyons was so large he had to get help from the mainland just to deal with all the bodies.
Lyons is accustomed to the human form in all manner of disarray and with Port Arthur he experienced it in mind numbing multiples, but John Price’s murder stands out in his mind as the most bizarre he has ever encountered. He was in Sydney the day john Price’s body was discovered and hitched a lift up with the police. Arriving in the afternoon, he examined the scene with Neil Raymond, Peter Muscio, Ross Dellosta and Geoff Maurer, who was shooting a video. He wrote up a report a few weeks later.
The house is a single storey brick build construction. Entry from the street leads into a small cork tiled hallway to the left of which is a lounge area. Access through sliding doors. Through the small doorway and to the back of the house on the left is a kitchen and eating area of [sic] which is a corridor which leads to a bedrooms facing onto the front of the house, a 3rd bedroom facing to the rear of the house and a bathroom and toilet area.
A decapitated and skinned body is situated, lying diagonally through the space from the small entrance hallway into the lounge. The body is lying prone, left leg crossed over the right. There has been complete removal of skin apart from small amounts of skin on both hands and feet and around the left side of the chest. On the anterior aspect of the chest on the left hand side at approximately the level of 5th and 6th ribs there appeared to be two obvious wounds. There is extensive bleeding and smearing of blood over the entire cork tiled hallway and blood is smeared on the hallway wall.
To the right of the body there is extensive blood staining of the carpet and a brown plastic handled carving knife with a blade measuring 170 mm. On a…
The forensics were one more headache for Wells. Early on, there had been talk of treating the corpse as two bodies, as a match between the head and torso was made impossible by the cooking process. This meant that they were running around trying to match dental records. The last dentist Price had seen was in Gunnedah and he was dead, and there were no records. In the end the scientists managed to match the two pieces and that made Wells’ job a lot simpler.
Lyons typed up an autopsy report for the court. Under the heading External Examination, he noted:
This is a headless body which is human in origin and weighs 70 kg and measured 167 cm. Rigor mortis is present. The head has been removed at the shoulder approximately through the level of C3/C4. There has been virtually complete removal of the skin apart from a small amount of flesh remaining on the dorsal and palmar aspects of the hands and feet, anterior left chest area, right shoulder and fragments of skin on the arms and legs.
The head is separate and was received in a large pot with vegetables—both were well cooked. The head and neck were devoid of flesh. Eyes had coagulated and the cartilaginous parts of the ears and nose were attached to the skin.
The skin was received in virtually one piece and had been removed by making the following incisions:
– across the shoulder down the front of the body to the pubic hair line
– around the pubic area and down the front of the legs
– down the posterior aspects of the arms
– across the top of the head
– penis, scrotum/testes, ears and nose were included with this specimen.
Separate pieces of ‘cooked meat’ appeared to be gluteus maximus muscle from the right buttock area.
In order to allow orientation of the pattern of injuries the body was reconstructed.
Lyons had conducted the autopsy in the presence of two assistants, Peter Ducey and Douglas Gillespie, a few days before Wells came up. The crime scene detective, Peter Muscio, sat in on the surreal session and added the grisly play to his store of images from the murder.
The two assistants had the terrible task of rebuilding Price. They placed the head on the neck, slipped the body’s skin back on like it was a jumpsuit and then stitched it all back together again. It was an experience beyond description, even for morgue workers. John Price re-emerged in death. If you had put sunglasses on him to cover the damage to the eyes from cooking he would have looked like an ordinary corpse. Except for the stab wounds. All 37 of them (only 37 could be counted. There may have been more to the neck that were disguised when the head was severed).
To measure the stab wounds properly the forensic pathologists stitched them back together. Price had been stabbed four times in the chest, four times in the stomach, nineteen times in the back and ten times in the buttocks, upper legs and lower back. The wounds are recorded individually in a language clinical enough to almost bleed them dry. Almost.
There are a number of incised stab wounds to the chest and abdominal cavity. These are as follows:
Wound 1 is situated in the left side of the chest. It passes through skin, subcutaneous tissue, pectoralis muscle, enters the chest through the 5th intercostal space, passes through the lateral side of the lower lobe and exits through the 7th intercostal space into adjacent soft tissues of the left lateral side of the body. This wound appears to be at least 16-18 cm in length.
Wound 2 is situated in the left side of the chest. It passes through skin, subcutaneous tissue and enters the chest through the 6th intercostal space passing through the anterior border of the diaphragm, the free edge of the left lobe of the liver and passes in through the anterior border of the middle of the stomach. This wound appears to be at least 15-17 cms in length.
In layman’s language, she stabbed him in the left-hand side of the chest, near the nipple, passing through the fifth and sixth ribs, by the top of the heart and down through the lung before the knife exited between the seventh and eighth ribs. Wound two came in a bit lower and down into the guts.
When Katherine Knight was finished John Price had stab wounds into his left lung, diaphragm, stomach in two places, spleen, liver, aorta, descending colon, or bowel, and kidney.
Lyons listed the cause of death as: ‘Multiple internal injuries secondary to multiple stab wounds. There has also been almost complete post mortem skinning and decapitation.’ There is one chilling line towards the end of the pathologist’s report.
‘There are no obvious defence wounds.’
How on earth could a man be stabbed four times in the chest without defending himself? Had he been asleep? Was he already dead
or expiring by the time she finished him off? Lyons made no findings as to the sequence.
There is another point of conjecture about the pattern of wounds to the upper torso. One doctor suggested that the deep stab wounds to the left of Price’s chest might have had something to do with Knight’s experience at an abattoirs. In an animal such wounds would have pierced the heart but because a human is broader they managed to miss.
Bob Wells probably didn’t need to be reminded of what had happened to Price, but after the conference with Lyons he limped off to the carpark further determined to make sure he gathered enough evidence to convict Katherine Knight. If she was fit enough to stand trial. The detective was already hearing that she would try for some form of insanity plea, which could mean there would never be a day in court. However, until he knew one way or another, Wells had to continue putting together a brief for the prosecutions.
He got the detectives in Muswellbrook to chase up some statements to relieve a bit of the pressure, but nothing was getting rid of the headache that had been dogging him for a week now. On the Thursday, Wells and Detective Muscio took some of the select exhibits down to Sydney. They dropped the tape of the interview with Knight off to the transcription service and then headed to the document examination section, where they hoped to get handwriting checks done to match the notes found at the scene with samples of Knight’s handwriting. They were told it would take months, that the section was understaffed and there were more important jobs in front of them. The analysis was not completed in time for the trial.
There was also a minor controversy raging over an article that appeared in the Scone Advocate that day spelling out the full details of the crime. The story was printed all over the front page and was accurate in describing what had happened inside the Aberdeen house. Earlier articles in the Newcastle Herald had reported that Price had been decapitated, but stopped there. The publication caused a lot of grief. The Price family wrote to the paper complaining; ABC’s ‘Media Watch’ pontificated about the bad taste of it all and in the process repeated the offending details. Veteran commentator Phillip Adams wrote a column for the national newspaper, the Weekend Australian, about the rights and wrongs of the issue. Adams lives in Gundy near Scone. He had heard talk of the crime around town.
‘Here was a story that had been passed on and on and on. To retell the story allowed people to release a tension, an opportunity to reduce their own anxiety by sharing it.’ He wrote that it was a crime that would have appalled Edgar Allan Poe and ‘humbled the imaginings of a Stephen King’, suggesting it had become as instantly mythologised as Azaria Chamberlain’s tragic death.
The story was becoming big news and it wasn’t long before it had reached the international media as well. Mentions of Katherine Knight began to appear in bizarre corners of cyber space and most European newspapers.
The local superintendent, however, was not happy when the story appeared in the Scone Advocate and an informal investigation was launched as the bosses wanted to know who had told the paper. It blew over when it was pointed out the details had spread like wildfire. Some of the attending police dropped into the Golden Fleece Hotel in Scone after being at the scene that day and were amazed to hear the whole pub talking in detail about what had happened. Still, Wells had to deal with that too. From then on all the police were gagged. The crime scene videos were numbered (there are three) and guarded carefully so that no other officers could see them (partly because the police force was concerned about the impact seeing it would have on other police).
Wells was firing on all cylinders. Attempting to source psychiatric records from Tamworth and Morisset, chasing down family and friends, fielding flak for the cost of the investigation. His head was pounding constantly; he was nervy, agitated and he just couldn’t relax. Couldn’t take a deep breath.
On the weekend he finally took his wife’s advice and went to the family doctor, who referred him to a psychiatrist. On top of the physical symptoms, the emotional episodes and nightmares had not let up.
The psychiatrist, who specialised in working with emergency service officers, diagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder. The symptoms of this include re-living the horror through nightmares or flashbacks, increased arousal, irritability, sleeplessness, distress and impairment of function. Another aspect of post-traumatic stress is avoidance of exposure to reminders of the event. Some of the attending police found they couldn’t even speak with their mates who were at the scene because they reminded them too much of the horror. There were days in this period where Wells could not function at all. He took two weeks off. He avoided taking the prescribed medication, but he could not avoid the case. Not for a minute.
He flew to Brisbane to interview David Kellett. When he laid eyes on the little bloke he noted that Price, Saunders and now this one were all much shorter than Knight. Back down in the valley he found Saunders’ mates were keen to help. Wells was amazed to discover that these tough talking miners were frightened.
They were just hard working coal miners with good families who were just very lovely people and they were saying, ‘Mate, you’ve got to get this mad bitch for me’, because they were shitting themselves.
The whole town was shitting itself that she would never get convicted, that one day she’d be released, go back to town.
They were terrified of her—still are—and they kept saying things like ‘Bobby, you’ve got to do this.’ I felt all along like I was taking on a responsibility—they were good blokes, genuine, nothing special about them, always cooperated at difficult times, lovely people, but they always used to finish with: ‘Get this fucking bitch, Bobby. We don’t want her out’.
It was like: we’re two rubbers all, Bobby, and you’re playing the fifth set of the Davis Cup and you’ve got to win it for us, you know.
I felt like I was their last hope.
Saunders told me about how she used to flog him and about the dog and cutting up his clothes and his other injuries and I said, ‘Now, let’s get down to the nitty gritty. Either she’s telling bullshit or you’re telling bullshit. If we’re going to get this sheila I need corroboration.’ That’s when he gave me names of the blokes from the car pool and one said to me: ‘We used to laugh when we’d pick him up in the car. We’d wonder which piece was missin’. He’d have a whack in the ear or two black eyes …’ Things were coming together for me and I started to realise I was on the right track with the investigation.
In April, Wells finally got posted back to Newcastle and started a job with the Target Action Group, but he had to finish the brief he started at Singleton. That was the deal with the boss up there. He’d had a falling out with her over the transfer and a few other issues and felt he was being punished by having to keep working on the brief alone, but at least he wasn’t driving a couple of hours to work every day.
I was really getting crook at this stage and I mean really crook, I was looking to get as much done as I could, but there were new names popping up all the time. I started to deal with Ray Price and these sorts of people. Ray was the brother. It was a real problem dealing with Ray and Bob [another brother]. They were violent people and just plain difficult. Ray wouldn’t sign statements and they were giving me the run around.
Wells was fascinated by the pieces of jigsaw that were falling into place. Meeting the former boyfriends and husbands was an eye opener. Kellett was a nice bloke. Up in Queensland, Chillingworth had left the room in the middle of his story about a fight in the car and come back with a twisted up pair of steel-rimmed glasses. A souvenir of the good times.
While getting his brief together, Wells heard about a woman called Elaine Gill who lived out of town in one of the cabins out at Glenbawn Dam, outside of Aberdeen. He was told she might have some relevant information. He figured it was worth a look and drove out there to find a skinny woman already well into the drink at 11.30 am. She’d been seeing Charlie Knight and said that Kath had spoken about killing Price in the past.
She wasn’t going t
o be much of a witness so Wells got Victor Ford to go down and get a statement out of Charlie who lived at Muswellbrook.
Charlie Knight’s an invalid pensioner in his late 40s with a moustache and few chooks in the backyard. He saves his money for birthdays so he can put in a big one at the RSL, feeding the pokies from early in the morning until his daughter picks him up when it’s all gone. Charlie reckons his sister is a stupid bitch and the stress of the murder means he can’t sleep unless he gets on the piss. He liked Pricey and he was fairly frank with Ford.
In the past ten years I have not been real close with Kathy. Kathy would have probably come to visit me only about twenty times in the past ten years.
Over the past few years Kathy has said to me that she was going to kill Pricey if he kept going the way he was. On these occasions she wouldn’t say why. She always appeared unhappy and I would tell her just to leave him. She has said to me that she was going to kill John several times. It could be three, four, five, six times.
About three to five weeks before Price was killed, Kathy came to my home in Muswellbrook. Kathy appeared really depressed and said to me, ‘I’m going to kill Pricey and the two kids too.’ By the kids, I knew she was referring to her two small children … I said to her, ‘Wake up to yourself. The kids have done nothing to you.’ I was angry at her as this was getting beyond a joke and I yelled to her, ‘Don’t come back till you wake up to yourself.’ Kathy then left my house. I then just slammed the door. I have not seen Kathy since.
I can recall a time before this. It was about five months ago. I was at home with my cousin Brian Conlon. Also there was my daughter Tracy and her boyfriend Jason Wilson. Kathy arrived with her daughter Natasha and her baby. I remember being in the kitchen at the kitchen table. We were all having a beer and during the conversation Kathy said, ‘I’m going to kill Pricey and I’m going to get away with it.’ She also said, ‘I’ll get away with it ‘cause I’ll make out I’m mad.’
While Charlie is in the best position to judge which two kids his sister meant to kill with Price, later events indicate she might well have meant two of Price’s children. Wells was waiting for Ford to fax up Charlie’s statement and was over the moon when he saw it. Not only did it shore up the suggestions of intent, it also went some way to taking the wind out of any insanity defence. Two months later, Charlie changed his statement. He decided his sister may have said she would pretend to be mad in the second instance and not the first.