Blood Stain

by Peter Lalor

  It’s a telling few minutes on film. The materialism. The discourtesy to the male child. The sense of a last will and testament. The scene ends when the young daughter insists on placing a toy in front of the camera. Katherine gets out of the chair and angrily turns off the camera. Fade to black.

  Natasha thought it was odd that Mum was shouting them Chinese from down the road, but was happy to go along. Mum didn’t usually do this. Naturally, they have a screaming blue in the car, but that didn’t ruin the dinner, although Kath was preoccupied and distracted for most of the meal. She was upset too because the granddaughter was again achingly cute, playing with the drink straws. She should have brought that video camera along. Captured the moment for eternity. Katherine told her youngest daughter that all the children have to stay together.

  Amanda Pemberton ran into them again. She was going into the Valley Motel Indoor Sports Centre near the restaurant.

  Kathy seemed to be a bit different. She appeared to be in a rush, asking me all sorts of questions… I saw her driving away and she was driving real fast. It would have been about 1 o pm by this time.

  It was late and Kath wanted to get back home and watch the video of the grandchild she’d made earlier. It gave her a sense of calm, like when she sat among the dead things at home. She was reluctant to let go. The three kids got in the bath together. Then she did another strange thing. She asked Natasha if the kids could stay with her. They didn’t have their things with them and it was going to be a hassle in the morning. Natasha started to wonder what was going on. Mum was ‘confused, frustrated and tense, although she also seemed relaxed and calm at the same time’. They stopped at the door. Natasha voiced her concerns.

  —I hope you’re not going to kill Pricey and yourself.

  —Oh no no no no. If Pricey starts on me I’ll go to my house.

  —I love you, Mum.

  —I love you, Natasha.

  Kath hesitated, offered her a cigarette, then jumped in the van and drove back towards John Price who was already at home in bed, wondering what the night held in store. Wondering where she was.

  Katherine was tired but she knew she was going to kill him. She’d done all she had to do. Well, almost. She hadn’t seen her sister-in-law Val since her grandchild had been born. She arrived at their place in Aberdeen around 10.30 pm, Barry remembers because he was watching ‘Third Watch’ on television. The two women sat at the table and had a chat. Val was exhausted but pleased to show a video of her new grandchild. Katherine was keen to talk about the bruises. Barry showed her the renovations to the bathroom and she left before 11.30 pm.

  Katherine went home to her place at MacQueen Street again. The neighbours know she wasn’t there at 10.30 pm, but a little later Gerrie Edwards heard Kath open the gate between their houses. She assumed she was putting the bin out. She wasn’t. Kath was just preparing to protect her assets from the forthcoming storm. Like when she moved all the stuff out of Pricey’s before he found out about the video.

  Katherine drove the van back over to St Andrews Street. A curtain opened across the road.

  —The Speckled Hen must be home.

  She lit a cigarette and let herself in. John was asleep, with the airconditioner on. She watched some television. She remembers that ‘Star Trek’ was on the telly.

  * * *

  But memory has failed, or been hidden like a bloody knife in the garbage. Katherine crossed the threshold. She has glimpses. She showers. Slips on the sexy black nightie from the welfare shop. The short one with buttons. Pricey’s asking where the kids are.

  He turned over with his hands across my tummy. He wanted sex so we had it. He was gentle and kind. He undone my buttons on my nightie. He got me on top of him … I came because he was kind. He went to the toilet. He was walking back to bed and that’s it…

  Her memory is in the garbage bin again. Lost among the shit of her life.

  He’s two metres away and the movie cuts and the images jumble.

  Sometimes there are flashbacks.

  She’s walking down the hallway in the nightdress. She’s on the couch and her skin is crawling, like there are maggots all over her. White and wriggling, looking for a corpse. Maggots and hot flushes and sitting on the couch. Looking at a picture of Johnathon. He’ll get his way, get the house and his dad and he abused Melissa—she has to live with that—abused her and yelled out in the pub that he took her up the arse. And Pricey’s going to leave, like David Kellett did all that time before. Leave her alone. It’s terrifying and it’s infuriating. She has to take control. Then a sensation like her waters breaking.

  She’s come at him when he’s lying in bed; the seat’s up in the toilet and his bladder’s empty. He did have a pee. She starts to lay into him with the boning knife. One time. Two times. Blood spraying up the walls with each thumping heartbeat. Three times. Four times. She stabs and slashes and he’s jumped up in a crimson terror and he’s trying to get past her. Trying to get the light switch on but she won’t stop. Five times. Six times. John’s just trying to get away. He staggers down the hallway towards the door and she’s relentless. Seven times. Eight times. Nine. Ten. Eleven … She doesn’t stop. Twelve. Thirteen. Fourteen. At some stage he reaches the front door. Fifteen. Sixteen. And he’s opened it and he’s got a hand outside and she pulls him back in to the hall. Seventeen. Eighteen. Nineteen. And he’s got his back to the wall. Twenty. Twenty-one. Twenty-two. But still he doesn’t raise his arms. Twenty-three. Twenty-four. And still she’s stabbing. Twenty-five. Twenty-six. Big vicious blows through the rib cavities into the lungs and the organs and he’s slipping down onto the floor. Into a pool of his own blood and its all over the place. Twenty-seven. Twenty-eight. Twenty-nine. In his eyes. Spraying on the walls with each fading heartbeat. Thirty. Thirty-one. Thirty-two. And she doesn’t stop. Thirty-three. Thirty-four. She keeps on stabbing. Thirty-five. And stabbing. Thirty-six. And stabbing. Thirty-seven terrible wounds. Thirty-seven blows before she stops. There could have been more. It’s a bit hard to tell.

  And John Price dies on the cork tiles, his body a shredded mess, wounds feeding an ocean of blood. His heartbeat fading.

  She’s got him now. Try calling me a red-headed cunt. Try squeezing my breast. Throw me out of your house. Ya can’t. Ya can’t leave. Ya can’t hurt me.

  But she’s not finished with her revenge. She’s not leaving without money and if he won’t give her the $10 000 then she’ll get what she can. At some stage she’s in the shower, a bloody footprint on the bathmat, hair and flesh in the drain. Washing it all off like you would after a day at the abattoir. The bloody nightie draped over the bath. Back into the denim shorts and sleeveless blue shirt. She grabs his ATM card and then jumps in the car. There’s no machine in Aberdeen so she drives to Muswellbrook, where Natasha is with the children, and she stops at the machine. Punches in his four digit PIN number and withdraws $500 at 2.32 am. A voice says you can get more. You can get $1000 a day. It used to be $500. She puts in the PIN again, takes out another $500 at 2.35 am. Price has $12 456.74 in the account. Enough to pay her off. The $1000 disappears into the night. There are many theories about where it went. Her relatives point fingers at each other.

  Katherine drives back to Aberdeen, on the deserted country highway, a murderess and a robber and a scorned woman, glowing and plotting what to do next. Calm and in control. She drives the van back to MacQueen Street, where she’s left the side gate open in preparation, and slips quietly into the backyard. Right up behind the shed. She never usually parks here, there’s no room to turn and take it out again. It is another possession tucked safely away. She puts her keys inside the house and leaves her empty purse on the floor of the van by an ATM receipt showing her just how much Pricey has in the bank. Then she sets out back to St Andrews Street. She walks past Lisa Logan and her little dog at 3.30 am, never knowing she’s being watched.

  Back inside, Katherine continues her revenge on John Price and has some fun while she’s at it. She strips. And gets the knives a
nd the sharpening stones. Drags him from that sea of congealing blood into the loungeroom where there is room to work. Cuts across the shoulders and down the pubic hair line, around the genitals and down the legs, down the arms and across the top of the head. She begins to peel and tear, pull and roll, and then it is off. John’s death suit. And she has a hook and she hangs him in the doorway between the lounge and the kitchen like the skins that hang in her home. It’s heavy to lift but she’s strong.

  It’s just like being back at work, back at the job she loved. A little like the movies she likes. Like Resurrection, where he cuts the limbs off the living and hangs them up on butcher’s hooks. She likes that one. She’s in control and she’s showing him.

  Don’t rush. There’s plenty of time before the sun comes up and there’s more payback left yet. She’s going to get that daughter and son. They won’t let her have John or his house. Well, she’ll show them. She peels and slices the vegetables. She cuts through the flesh of the neck, working the blade through the vertebrae and carries the sticky, skinless head to a soup pot. Katherine’s favourite cut of meat is a rare rump steak and she takes a few from John, bakes some in the oven. Throws one outside for a bit of a laugh. There’s plenty of time so she makes some gravy. His youngest always liked gravy. John’s watching from the doorway. Mute and twisted.

  She serves up the dinner on plates. Vegetables and meat and gravy. She makes out a note for his eldest son and youngest daughter, and a little PS for Pricey too. She smashes their framed photographs. Collects the fat in a coffee mug. Has a coffee and a cigarette. Gets a bit of blood on the kettle. Puts the bloody faced watch on the shattered glass. Something for them to squabble over.

  The morning is approaching and she washes, takes a selection of pills from the bedroom and the kitchen, puts her day clothes back on and lies on the bed waiting for them to come. The airconditioner droning away. She is satisfied. John is no longer a threat. He’s a souvenir. A trophy. Dehumanised and diminished. And she has had her revenge against him and his children. She snores for the last time ever in the home she thinks should be hers. And she keeps her eyes tightly shut until it’s safe to open them again. Whenever that is.

  And the dinner goes cold on the bench. Fat begins to congeal, the gravy gets a skin and the soup cools.

  * * *

  Mass murderer and abattoir van driver Fred West had a fascination with exploration of the insides of the human body. In prison he recorded his memories of beheading one victim. ‘I run the knife around the neck through the skin, and then just twisted the head round. And whatever bits was left, just cut that off.’ In this case, he was referring to the mutilation of his daughter, Heather.

  Dr Tim Lyons was impressed by the way Knight had skinned and cleanly severed John Price’s head. It was almost an expert job. Right between the vertebrae. No knife marks on the bone. Like she was trained to do it.

  Or born to.

  17

  The psychiatrists shape up

  March 2000

  Katherine won’t open her eyes. Pricey’s not dead. He’s not. He’s not. For the six days she is in the Muswellbrook and Maitland hospitals she pretends to have no knowledge of what she’s done. She’s told he’s dead. She says he’s not. She talks of going camping on the weekend. Kath monitors and manoeuvres. She claims no memory beyond John making love with her and a nurse waking her in the hospital, but somehow she is able to inform medical staff about which drugs she overdosed on. She tells the psychiatrists her partners have been abusive. She can see enough to know she has to start weaving a defence. Search for sympathy and mitigation. John’s not dead, but she has to work hard to make sure she doesn’t get nailed for what happened to him.

  After being charged on the Monday, Katherine is taken to prison and locked up for the first time. It’s not as bad as she thought it might be. A bit like the time Lloyd Lyne had her in the lockup at Aberdeen and Mrs Lyne came out with her lunch. Everybody seems concerned for her welfare. She quite likes that. It’s been the same in hospital, the family milling around her bed, lawyers, doctors and nurses fussing about. They didn’t let her watch television in the ward because they didn’t want her to know what she’d done. One night she dreams that the doctors were trying to kill Pricey—he was wrapped in bandages.

  A staff member at Mulawa remembers her arriving at the jail. She is notorious after the newspaper stories and they all want to see the abattoir worker who cooked and skinned her defacto. They’re struck by how ordinary she is. Polite too. She doesn’t seem that hard. She is referred to the prison psychiatrist Dr Michael Giuffrida. The staff are told not to inform her of her crime for fear she may have a psychotic episode. She settles well into the swing of prison life and reports back to her family that she loves it. She is the centre of attention and everybody is caring for her. I’m happy for the first time. I love it here, it’s exciting, I like helping people. Of course, you wouldn’t want to spend your life here either, but she’s in the Mum Shirl Unit and they let her work as a sweeper and she does lots of craft and the like. It’s unlikely she’d be put on kitchen detail.

  At times Katherine is glowing. She tells visitors she is being complimented for the first time in her life and it’s just so wonderful. She tells people how bad her life was and how bad John Price was. She tells somebody she wants to donate her Aberdeen land to the local soccer club. The last claim would appear to be an absolute lie but gives an indication of how hard she is working to spin her story. Katherine’s cunning, always working an angle.

  She is being treated with kid gloves and has to prepare for a mention at Muswellbrook Court in early April. Prison staff are told that she is to be watched closely, apparently she became hysterical, throwing a sort of fit when an inmate informed her that not only was John Price dead, but that she had killed, skinned and decapitated him. It’s all a thousand times worse than she thought.

  The day at court—back in the town where she married David Kellett—dissolves into farce. She doesn’t make it into the courtroom because police are worried about her safety. Two of Price’s brothers, Ray and Bob, are threatening to kill her and cause a disturbance out on the highway, stopping cars and lashing out. To get Katherine away from the place safely a dummy prison van is sent out and a compliant television journalist pretends to interview the Price brothers while Kath is hurried into another van. Prison psychiatrist Dr Michael Giuffrida provides an assessment to the court, saying she is suffering amnesia and dissociation and was suffering dissociation on the day of the murder, although she has shown no signs of psychosis.

  She’s fit for trial, but he’s indicating she’s not guilty of murder because she was in a trance-like state at the time. The Daily Telegraph newspaper reports the next morning that

  a woman accused of the decapitation murder of her 44-year-old defacto smiled as she was led away from Muswellbrook Local Court… She was transported to Muswellbrook from the psychiatric ward at Long Bay Jail but not taken into the courtroom … due to security fears.

  She has told visitors at prison she will never return to Aberdeen again because his family would hunt her down. She could be right, but John Price’s daughter Rosemary Biddle and some of the other relatives want to see her because they want to know why. What happened?

  While John Price’s brothers drink and plot a revenge, Katherine Knight’s family realise they are going to have to pay her legal fees and decide that the house in MacQueen Street needs to be sold, along with the caravan out the back, which had housed her nephew Jason Roughan. Melissa seems to be coordinating the sale, while Barry Roughan moves her things out of the house.

  Geraldine Edwards pays $25 000 for the home, with some cladding that was in the back shed thrown in, but she has to pick up the conveyancing and legal fees for both parties in the deal. She wants to convert it into a cafe. Gerrie gets some idea of just how high passions are in the town when somebody comes in and abuses her for financing Katherine’s lawyers in the court case. She also gets an idea of how materialistic the fami
ly is when she realises that they’ve taken the insulation out of the ceiling when cleaning the place out. It is returned after some inquiries are made. Gerrie’s defacto buys the caravan for a few hundred dollars but its rotten and ends up being taken to the tip. The money for legal fees gets eaten up before Knight gets to the final court hearing and she ends up being granted legal aid.

  Katherine had hoped for more money from the sale and is upset to lose her home. There is some irony, perhaps justice, that by feeling so entitled to a share in Price’s house her actions have resulted in the loss of her own dream home. Her possessions are packed into a trailer and taken up to Queensland to Melissa’s. The elder daughter takes just about everything, keen not to let the undeserving fathers of the two younger siblings get their hands on anything that might be Mum’s, which means a lot of the kids’ gear disappears over the border.

  Despite being informed on a number of occasions about the details of John’s death, Katherine continues to close her eyes and profess ignorance. Anyway, life is too nice in prison to let it be ruined by such thoughts. Visitors note that she is content and calm. She tells them she loves it here. The kids call and occasionally visit and she sends them money and gifts. At Christmas she sends out cards and presses a big lipstick kiss on the back. Ken says he loves her. She’s overjoyed.

  In the meantime, Wells is still limping around, running here and there, and all the time worried the case will never get to court. He becomes aware from the mention at Muswellbrook that she has a sympathetic psychiatrist in Mulawa. It’s at this hearing that he first meets David Saunders and starts to understand that any argument of battered woman syndrome by the defence will be easy to counter. Saunders can show them the scars if they like.