Katherine Knight’s half-brother Neville Joseph Knight sentenced over child abuse in Hunter and northwest NSW
He is the half-brother of one of the state’s most notorious murderers and was once mates with disgraced Labor MP Milton Orkopoulos. Now, Neville Knight has learnt his fate for preying on nearly a dozen boys during decades of abuse.
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A former Hunter youth worker, friend of disgraced politician Milton Orkopoulos and half-brother of notorious killer Katherine Knight has been jailed for a maximum 18 years for abusing 11 boys over nearly a 40-year period.
Sadistic pedophile Neville Joseph Knight, who also uses the surname Roughan, will be at least 81 before he is eligible for parole, with the NSW District Court hearing on Wednesday that the now 74-year-old was suffering from dementia and a list of physical and mental ailments.
The former youth worker at a Hunter centre and a boxing trainer at a police boys club in northwest NSW admitted to raping young Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal boys as young as seven in horrific circumstances between 1967 and 2003.
Knight was still a teenager himself when he first preyed on young Aboriginal boys in a NSW town and ordered them to keep the offending to themselves, with Judge Tim Gartlemann, SC, stating Knight had assaulted them while they were vulnerable and sometimes after buying them ice-cream and boxing trunks.
He attacked some of the boys while they slept and raped others in toilet cubicles within the youth centre and was sometimes in a “position of authority”, an aggravated factor in sentencing.
In speaking about one victim who was repeatedly raped and assaulted over several years, Judge Gartlemann said: “He felt as a young indigenous man, he had no rights and had to do what the offender said. [Knight] told him no one would believe him. He never told anyone because of this.”
As Judge Gartlemann found Knight’s early guilty plea and negotiating pleas with prosecutors could attract a total 20 per cent discount on sentence, a member of the Downing Centre public gallery screamed: “You’re a f--king dead man, I am going to have you killed. A f--king 20 per cent reduction.”
A court has previously heard he even took one of the victims to the office of disgraced former NSW government minister Milton Orkopoulos, who has now spent several stints in jail for child sex offences after being arrested and charged by the same detectives who zeroed in on Knight.
Knight is the half-brother of Katherine Knight, who was the first woman in NSW to have her papers stamped “never to be released” after getting life without parole for the horrific murder and skinning of her partner John Price in Aberdeen in 2000.
The court heard on Wednesday that Neville Knight had preyed on the boys both at the police boys’ youth club in northwestern NSW from the 1960s and at a Hunter youth centre after it was established in the early 1980s.
He was arrested by Strike Force Eiraban detectives, attached to Lake Macquarie police district, in 2021 after an investigation into what they uncovered as widespread offending at the Hunter youth centre.
He had sometimes plied the boys with drugs before abusing them, the court heard.
The former president of the youth centre, Roland George Powell, died in a car crash two days before he was due to face a trial over allegations he abused three boys during an eight-year period ending in the 1990s.
His car hit a tree at speed near Wauchope in October last year.
Powell had been arrested by Strike Force Eiraban detectives in late 2021 after an investigation began in November 2020 to investigate the alleged abuse of boys at a series of youth centres across the Hunter dating back to the 1980s.
Knight sat in an audiovisual room from Long Bay Jail on Wednesday as Judge Gartlemann handed down the sentence at the Downing Centre, the disability pensioner appearing to quietly weep and wipe his eyes as some of the abuse was graphically described by the sentencing judge.
He pleaded guilty to a total of 28 charges relating to the 11 boys after continuously pleading his innocence for almost three years since his arrest.
Judge Gartlemann said Knight had shown remorse to several victims, appeared to be “wracked with guilt” when hearing victims give statements in court and referred to psychological reports which said he had shown “intense shame and guilt”.
With the 20 per cent discount – and finding special circumstances for Knight to have a longer parole period because his time in prison would be onerous because of his ailments – Knight was sentenced to a maximum 18 years with a non-parole period of 10 years.
With time already served, he will not be eligible for parole until November 16, 2031.
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