by Peter Lalor
—Thanks a fucking lot, you fucking whore.
She got dressed and started to call him every name under the sun. She really got stuck in and then she said she’d had enough of his jealous bullshit and he was never going to see his boy again. She was going to change his name and make sure it happened. He stormed out to the car and she followed him saying she was going to get the cops. He knew he hadn’t done anything and said so, but it was never going to stop Kath.
In the car Chillingworth began to cry. He got up to Scone and broke down in front of his mum and told her what had happened. Then it was back into the car, Mum begging him to stop, and back to Queensland again. Don’t ask him why, he hasn’t got a clue, he just had to do something. Anything. At Willow Tree, which is about 120 kilometres up the highway, Chillingworth stopped to call his mum and apologise, and she said the police had been there. The old lady was distraught. Chillingworth rang the police and they told him there had been a complaint; if he kept going towards Queensland then they’d let it go. Suited him.
And that was it. It was all over. Kath was gone and she wasn’t coming back.
In the end Chillingworth left the state. She made it almost impossible for him to see the boy and he couldn’t stay in town knowing that he’d lost his missus to a bloke like Price.
At the time he didn’t know how lucky he was.
She was a good party girl and fun to be around, but I didn’t like the violence and temper. She’d call my mum all the filthy names under the sun because she knew my mum was special to me. All this garbage; it used to hurt. I used to try and brush that aside.
I always believe Kath has two sides. Most women get cranky and its over in five minutes. Kath has this hatred deep inside her and she’ll get even. If ever she got out she’d probably get even with me and Dave Saunders and Kellett. We’d be the first on the hit list.
When she left me, she wanted to keep twisting the knife: ‘Fuck the child. You don’t have anything to do with it.’ The mental anguish that woman can put a man through could be enough to kill ya and I know because I’ve been there and she’s done the same to Saunders—to Dave Kellett. I know she treated Saunders like shit. She told his daughter her father’s dead.
When Pricey wanted her out she couldn’t handle it and she couldn’t do any more to him. She’d already got him the sack from the mines, she couldn’t get him the sack from his new job. She couldn’t do any more to him.
—Can you understand what she did?
—I can understand it.
—Why did she do it?
—Hatred. Pure, gutless hatred and the desire for revenge: ‘If I can’t have ya, no other bastard’s gonna have ya’ … She mustn’t have known that she was going to cut him up, but I think she stabbed him and decided to go the whole hog.
—Would she enjoy that?
—Yeah. I think so now.
John saw her in prison six months after the crime and couldn’t believe how calm she was. She seemed at peace for the first time in her life. His mother died in 2002 and Katherine rang him to say how sorry she was. She was crying.
14
Katherine and John Price
1990-2000
In July 1989 Soviet pilot Colonel Skurigin took off in his MiG-33 fighter from the Kolobzreg airbase in North Poland. Not long into the flight the afterburner appeared to fail and the plane began to lose altitude. With his aircraft just 100 metres above sea level the pilot ejected to safety. However, the plane did not crash. In fact it righted itself and began to fly towards the west, the autopilot steering it across northern Poland towards Germany. It passed into and through East Germany and then into West Germany, where a pair of American F-15S shadowed it, ready to shoot it down if it became necessary. It wasn’t. The unguided missile kept flying and the French authorities were alerted to the fact the aircraft was heading in their direction. In north-west Belgium, an 18-year-old man was going about his business at home oblivious to the drama in the skies. He heard a strange noise. It was the MiG-23. After flying over millions of people in four countries, Colonel Skurigin’s plane came crashing through the roof and killed the teenager. As if he had been chosen.
Perhaps John Charles Thomas Price was chosen. Katherine Knight had flown over David Kellett, John Saunders, John Chillingworth, the men of her family and numerous anonymous others before climbing into her van and heading to Price’s home on the night of 29 February 2000.
Had Barbara Knight, her mother, foreseen it all those years before when she told John’s wife Colleen Price to be careful around her daughter? Colleen, who professes some psychic ability, says she was twice warned about the demonic nature of Katherine Knight. Once by Kath’s mother and once by a strange force. An intuition. Around 1997 Colleen parked the car outside St Andrews Street. She had come to pick up her youngest who had spent the weekend with her dad. Colleen didn’t have any problems with Kath, but she had no intention of going inside the house. She’d just keep her distance, even though Pricey would often invite her in. It was no place for an ex-wife.
This day Kath came out with something on her mind.
—I heard that Pricey used to hit you.
—What?
Kath repeated it. Said that she heard from some bloke Colleen had driven home from the club that Colleen had said to him she’d copped a belting from Pricey in the old days.
—For a start, Kath, I’ve never given a bloke a lift home from a club because this town is too bloody small, and if he said that Pricey hit me, tell him to come and say it to my face because it is just wrong.
Kath backed off.
—Oh, no, I just heard that.
Colleen remembers that Kath then put her hand on the driver’s side door next to hers as they spoke.
I had this flash. I just knew she was going to do something bad.
I went around and spoke to John and I said, ‘Listen to me, I’m going to tell you something and I want you to look me in the eye and listen.’ I said, ‘She’s going to do something to you, she’s going to do something bad to you,’ and I said, ‘I don’t know to what extent, but it’s going to be something bad. Now listen to what I say.’ And he said, ‘Nah, Col, she’s okay. She’s right, Col. Don’t worry about it.’ I made him look me in the eye. This was three years before she did it.
Three months before it happened I went to a psychic in town and she said, ‘Be there for your girls.’ Rosemary [Colleen’s daughter] was driving to Sydney that day, so I got her sister to ring her and tell her not to go. She [the psychic] didn’t mention Pricey. I misunderstood what she was saying.
Colleen Jones was a 16-year-old tomboy living in Wee Waa with her aunt and uncle when she met John Price outside the local cafe in the early 1970s, about the same time that Katherine Knight and David Kellett first got together. Price was barely 17 and was working on the big earth moving bulldozers over at Cudgewoi. He was a knockabout little guy with curly hair and a cheeky manner. A zest for life. He rode a 750CC motorbike that his parents had driven to Gunnedah to pick up. It fell off the truck on the way back to town, but still went all right and he loved riding. They fell in love.
John came from a rough background. The Price family were boxing in the same class as the Knights when it came to dysfunction. There were four boys and two girls and there were enough fights among this lot to start up their own championship division. John was the happy-go-lucky one; he didn’t seem to fit in with the rest of them. He hated all that shit and just wanted to have a bit of peace and quiet. ‘Just be happy,’ he’d slur. ‘Just be fuckin’ happy, ya silly cunt.’
Sometimes being happy wasn’t that easy. He loved his mother, Cynthia, dearly, and was devastated when she became the innocent victim of an argument between his father and his brother. Bob had become enraged with his dad and grabbed a shotgun, apparently firing off a shot to express his displeasure. At that moment Cynthia happened to walk around the corner and was hit behind the ear. She was killed and Bob was jailed. The Prices are vague about the exact details and whisper th
at it might not have happened exactly that way, but Bob was the one who did the time. John Price was devastated and never got over the tragedy.
Paul Farrell, the Aberdeen Hotel publican, can remember him getting weepy one day when talk turned to mothers.
I asked him what’s wrong and he said he’d give anything to bring his mum into the pub and have a beer with her and show her his life. I asked him what happened to her and he said his brother shot her, but he didn’t mean to. He said he was trying to shoot his father but missed.
If you mentioned his mum he’d burst into tears on the spot. He was a champion bloke and a softie. Just loved his mum.
Pricey didn’t get much education and never learned to read or write properly, but he was driving earth moving equipment before most people had learned to ride a bike. Oversized trucks, cars and motorbikes were his life and his entree card to some of the great sand dumps and mines of Australia. Hard places populated by hard men and hard women. Frontier people. A restless mob who shifted the earth around and shifted around on the earth.
Pricey came across as a tough sort of bloke. He had an enormous appetite for ciggies and beer and a voice that could scrape the mortar from a brick, rasping and guttural. Maybe he spoke like that to compensate for his relatively diminutive stature. He was a short arse, measuring only 167 cms (5 foot 6 ½ inches) from his thongs to his curls, but he could swear like he was ten fuckin’ foot tall and he could drink for Australia. Still he was more diamond than coal, a bloke who was more likely to cry than fight. More likely to help you than hurt you.
Pricey’s drinking was legendary. Once he fell onto the railway line and broke his leg taking a shortcut home from the pub; another morning he woke up further up the highway in Narrabri after apparently deciding to hitch 500 m home from the pub. The life of any party, he wouldn’t leave until he’d made friends with every single person in sight.
Still, there was this gruff front which you had to get used to. His youngest daughter remembers riding up to the front of the St Andrews Street house one day with a mate when Pricey came out and launched into a tirade at her overweight friend.
—Get ya fat fuckin’ arse off that poor fuckin’ horse. Ya gonna break it in fuckin’ half.
Pricey’s daughter was horrified. Any mention of the girl’s weight usually ended in tears, but this time the girl laughed and laughed—it was just Pricey being Pricey and he seemed to be able to get away with it. You had to know that about him. He could abuse you like he hated your guts, but in true contrary Australian style it just meant he liked you more.
He fell deeply in love with Colleen. The tomboy and the hard but light-hearted little guy. They were meant for each other and knew they would get married. Only problem was they had to wait until he turned 18. When he did they had a big slap-up wedding in Wee Waa. She was pregnant, but that wasn’t the issue. They were in love and straining the leash to start a family, create the loving environment they both craved. The newly weds initially lived with his parents but decided to get away from that and moved into the local caravan park. A few years after the first child, Johnathon was born, they had a second child, Rosemary. They moved up to Queensland chasing work and for a while lived on the mainland while John worked at Stradbroke Island, before putting the van on a barge and shifting across. It wasn’t a refined life, but it was a lot of fun.
The company he was working for folded in 1974 so they decided to take the opportunity and hit out north to Darwin. It was a real frontier town in those days and it appealed to the adventurous spirit in the pair. The family planned to be up there in the week before Christmas, but a couple at the Caboolture Caravan Park told them there was no work that way so they travelled back home to the Smith’s Caravan Park where they’d lived before. In the early hours of Christmas day that year Cyclone Tracy hit Darwin, killing 65 people and destroying 70 per cent of its buildings. A caravan wouldn’t have had a hope.
Pricey and Colleen thanked their lucky stars, but were wondering where the next job would come from. Somebody said they were looking for drivers. Colleen and John left the kids with his parents and headed to Muswellbrook and he got a job at the Howick mine.
After three weeks at a council caravan park in Denman the new family found a permanent site at the Aberdeen Caravan Park. They had a big van, with a $3000 annex, tinted windows and all the mod cons. Pricey loved caravan parks, because he had a readymade audience at hand. He revelled in the open community living, the beer and country music. The mateship. There was always somebody to have a drink with or somebody who needed something done to their car. Colleen loved the parks even more than John. There’s a bit of gypsy in her. She enjoyed the freedom, the way you weren’t concreted to the spot. The parade of people.
The family stayed there for the next decade, before deciding, reluctantly, to move on. Pricey’s parents reckoned a family should have a home and he was determined they should get one, especially after the third child, a girl, arrived. With $12000 she’d saved from Johnathon and Rosemary’s child endowment—she did all the paper work and saving for the family—Colleen organised a loan from the bank and they bought a block of land on a small subdivision in Aberdeen on the eastern side of the railway line. A few blocks south of the abattoir. Just up the street from Ted Abraham’s camp. In those days housing was at a premium in Muswellbrook, Scone and Aberdeen because the mining boom had dumped hundreds of wealthy miners and their families in the area. Rents and housing prices went through the roof. It was the area’s first real estate boom since the abattoir had opened 80 years earlier.
Colleen and John built a modest, rectangular three-bedroom brick house and over the next few years the street began to fill up with other miners and their families. Their youngest girl was two when they shifted into the home Pricey had always wanted his family to have. Colleen missed the caravan. She wasn’t too keen on the house and she was even less keen on the fact that Pricey always had somewhere else to be, something else to do. It was the usual domestic complaint. She had to run the house and raise the kids and he wasn’t around to give a hand. Always had somewhere else to be. A mate needed his driveway laid, or car fixed. And there was always the pub. She buttered his toast and put the sugar in his coffee and then one day she left. Colleen was in her early 30s and figured she still had a chance at the life she wanted.
I know he loved me but he couldn’t come home from work and have a cup of tea and say, ‘What did you do today, Col?’ All the years I was married with him he’d be best mates with so many people. At the caravan park he was always off with somebody, helping them out and socialising with them. He was never with me and the kids. He associated with everyone, he gave himself to everyone else but he just didn’t give enough to me and that was it.
Anything we wanted we had, but the only thing I never had, I never had his love. I had him but never had his love. He never knew what my favourite colour was, my favourite number. He never knew anything like that. He never got into my circle with me.
She took $7000 to buy a car and moved the three kids into a flat in Aberdeen. A lawyer said she could probably hit him for $30000 or the house, but she wouldn’t have a bar of that. He worked too hard to make money and she wasn’t motivated by those things. It wasn’t too acrimonious, but things got a bit tough for a while when she took up with another bloke. That eventually blew over and they got back on an even footing. Stayed mates. Later Johnathon moved back in with his father. He didn’t get on with his younger sister and wasn’t happy that his mum had left his dad. Pricey wasn’t happy either, but he learned to live with it.
It was January 1988 when Colleen left, two years after they’d built the house. For the next twelve years the place didn’t change that much. It had the same curtains, the plates were in the same cupboards, his shirts were where she had hung them and while Pricey had built a shed outside and she had started a garden, the work seemed to stop there.
I used to go down there and I’d say ‘Pricey, if I was here I’d have a carport on the side now and a c
ement path out to the mailbox and I’d have such and such out the back’ and he’d say, ‘If you come back you could do it’ and I’d say, ‘No, if I came back nothing would change, Pricey, would it?’ and he’d say, ‘Maybe, for a little while, ha ha.’ We were still able to laugh about it.
Pricey had always been a man of habit and he didn’t like change. He would work, go to the pub, come home, have a few more beers and then say, ‘I’m off to bed, Col’, putting his watch, ciggies and lighter in the same place every night. And she’d ask him if he had a hangover in the morning and he’d deny it with a big ‘Nooooo’, or confess with a ‘Fuckin’ oath, I fuckin’ have’, but he was always cheery. A happy drunk. There might have only ever been two arguments in the whole marriage and he never stopped loving her. In the early 1990s she went on a holiday to Perth and found he’d slipped $600 into her bank account. Another time she asked to borrow $300 to buy a second-hand fridge and he drove all the way up the highway that same afternoon towing a new one. By this time Colleen and his youngest had moved to Tamworth. ‘Be happy, Col,’ he’d say. ‘Be happy.’
With no women in the house, Pricey and Johnathon were lone males on the tear in Aberdeen. John stuck to his routine, the pub or the club, work and the mates.
Pricey’s house became a bit of a local institution. He had a pool table in the lounge for a while and it all got a bit blokey round at St Andrews Street. It needed a woman’s touch and so did John. He had a few girlfriends over the years, but couldn’t seem to find the right one.
On 8 October 1994 Katherine Knight gave John a card to mark their first anniversary. It’s got candles, flowers, store bought sentiment and these hand-written words: