The story of cannibal killer Katherine Knight and her evil act of savagery
Katherine Knight decapitated her partner and cooked his head in a pot with vegetables and gravy. Was it nature or nurture that made her such a monster?
Andrew Rule
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The police officer who took fingerprints at the scene never worked again.
The detective in charge needed a psychiatrist to get through the court hearings.
The judge warned the stunned jury pool that some people might not cope with the evidence and should withdraw rather than risk breaking down.
In the end, the tall woman in the dock pleaded guilty, saving jurors from the nightmare of reliving one of the most evil crimes seen in a civilised country in peacetime.
Her name was Katherine Knight. This month she turns 67 in a high security women’s prison — her 21st birthday behind bars since Judge Barry O’Keefe sentenced her to life without remission in October, 2001.
Knight is the only Australian woman to receive such a sentence. In the decade she was born, people hanged for less than the crime she committed.
So what makes a monster? Nature or nurture?
The slaughterman’s daughter
Katherine Mary Knight was a twin, born half an hour after her sister Joy on October 24, 1955. The girls made seven of an eventual total of eight children born to their mother Barbara, who’d had four boys before taking up with Ken Knight, a slaughterman.
Did the difficult birth affect baby Katherine?
No one knows. The twins were not identical, in any case. But her sister Joy was always smarter and more popular. At school, Katherine struggled, repeating Grade 5.
By the time she left school at 15, she could still hardly read or write and attracted trouble. In the late 1960s, before Ken Knight moved the family from Tenterfield to his hometown of Aberdeen in the Hunter Valley, she was already getting in trouble with police.
Astoundingly, given her violent streak, she wouldn’t be in court again for over 30 years.
Ken and Barbara Knight were “strict disciplinarians”. No one can be sure of all that happened to the twins behind closed doors, though the language Barbara used was as violent as the beatings she handed out. Neighbours pretended not to notice and avoided her — but if anyone needed a hand, Barbara was always willing.
“A sort of split personality” is how one put it, a description later applied to her troubled daughter.
Katherine wore glasses, was tall and gangly, and had flaming red hair — a target for juvenile cruelties on the school bus. But the girl with four older half-brothers always fought back. Her sister Joy would hold her glasses while she took on her tormentors, punching and swearing.
She turned on bullies but turned into one herself. And there was a frightening edge to the rough, raw-boned girl. A schoolmate never forgot the night they were walking along Aberdeen’s main street and a bunch of boys started wolf whistling and hooting.
The other girls giggled and pretended to ignore them but Katherine pulled out a big knife, yelled “Come on, have a go!” and rushed towards the boys, who bolted. The girls with Katherine avoided her after that.
She left school as soon as she could. She wanted to work in Aberdeen’s only industry, the abattoir, with her slaughterman father. When they turned 16, she and Joy started as slicers in a blood-soaked business of long knives and hard men.
Meatworkers supplied their own knives and kept them razor sharp. In a dog-eat-dog hierarchy, the top dogs were slaughtermen, then boners, slicers and labourers.
Katherine was good at the job but her workmates were wary of her. At least twice, she turned on men who teased her and menaced them with her knife.
It’s not true that abattoirs were full of criminals and violent people. It is true that people with bad records often work in abattoirs, desensitising them to blood and suffering.
Such as Ian Brady, Britain’s infamous Moors Murderer (with his brainwashed girlfriend, Myra Hindley). And Raymond “Mr Stinky” Edmunds, sex killer, who carried a butcher’s knife to terrify dozens of rape victims.
In 1974, Katherine Knight, aged 18, married a likeable rogue, David Kellett. On their wedding night, a drunken Kellett felt his bride’s dark side when she woke him with her hands around his throat. She resented that he fell asleep after sex.
A year later, Kellett was growing wary of Kathy’s hair-trigger temper and violent obsessiveness. She attacked him over trivial things.
By the time Kathy had their first baby in 1976, Kellett had left with another woman. The story goes that Kathy put her new baby on the railway tracks. An alert pensioner saved the baby girl before a train came. Kath, meanwhile, was waving an axe around. Police took her to hospital.
Kellett returned but it didn’t help. In late 1976, Kathy slashed an innocent teenage girl on the face with a butcher’s knife while forcing the girl’s mother to drive her somewhere.
This time she was sent for psychiatric treatment — but not charged. She claimed postnatal depression. A psychiatrist diagnosed borderline personality disorder sparking intense anger and revenge fantasies over real or imagined wrongs.
A short temper was one thing. But when Kathy’s mother-in-law saw that she kept two butcher’s knives next to her bed, she was stunned.
When the older woman asked why she had knives within reach, Kathy replied: “Just in case I need them.”
Soon after, Kathy put Kellett in hospital with a head injury. What terrified him most was that when he regained consciousness, she’d straddled him with a knife to his throat and hissed: “See how easy it is.”
One night in 1983, Kellett came home from the pub and she hit him so hard with a sharpening steel that bits of his scalp stuck to it. He didn’t press charges because he feared what she might do to their daughters.
Soon after, he came home to find the house stripped bare. She’d taken everything, even his tools, and moved to her parents’ scrappy farmlet outside town.
Kellett was relieved. “I thought ‘Jeez, there is a God’,” he said later.
John Price was not so lucky.
‘Pricey’ lured into volatile relationship
John Charles Thomas Price was 26 when he arrived in Aberdeen in 1981. Hard worker, easygoing husband to his wife Colleen, kind father to their two children.
The Prices lived in a big caravan towed from job to job. “Pricey” was a machinery expert, driving everything from bulldozers to graders and loaders, never short of work.
After he got a steady job on good wages at a local mine, they built a house in Aberdeen in 1984 and had their third child the following year.
Katherine Knight, meanwhile, was back at the abattoirs. But she hurt her back, which forced her to quit the only real job she’d ever had.
But the injury didn’t blunt her appetites. In late 1986, she brought home David Saunders. It was fine for at least two months but then Kathy “went off her bean”, Saunders would tell writer Sandra Lee, a News Corp journalist who wrote a best selling account, Beyond Bad.
Knight abused Saunders the same way she had abused Kellett. Her voracious sexual tastes attracted men but once she had them, she was erratic, suspicious and violent.
In 1987, she picked a fight with Saunders, lying that she was pregnant then accusing him of kicking her. She raced into the backyard and came back covered in blood. She’d cut the throat of his eight-week-old pup.
The police took no action. Just another “domestic”. Next day, Saunders found she had vandalised his car.
It didn’t stop him fathering her third child. And that didn’t stop her stabbing him in the stomach with scissors, causing him to flee to a mate’s house.
The inevitable reconciliation ended permanently when she cut his face and burned his clothes.
She picked up her next de facto, John “Chillo” Chillingworth, in a pub. He remembered seeing her working at the meatworks as a teenager, years earlier. “Always had that violent streak,” he would recall.
He soon realised that underneath the veneer, Katherine’s weapons were revenge and sex. He feared she’d castrate someone with her knives. He just didn’t want it to be him.
Luckily, she was already cheating on him, which made it easy for him to escape without risking vengeance.
And so John Price drew the short straw. Her new man was a nice enough bloke set adrift after his wife Colleen decided she wanted to see more of life than Aberdeen could offer.
The pattern of violence repeated, of course. But the amiable “Pricey” always let her lure him back. The fact he earned $100,000 a year and owned a new house made him extra desirable to the penny-pinching Knight.
The volatile relationship lasted six years, until the summer of early 2000, by which time Price told workmates he genuinely feared her. Price was right.
Some time before going to bed on February 29, she hid a knife within easy reach. When he got into bed they had sex. Price went to the bathroom. When he returned, she stabbed him frenziedly, 37 times.
But what Katherine Knight did after her lover staggered towards the door, bleeding to death, turned murder into an act of savagery that would reverberate around the world.
The first police found a headless corpse, expertly skinned, in a sea of blood.
Price’s skin hung on a steel hook. His head was in a pot on the stove, cooking with vegetables and gravy. Knight had set the table for his children, a grotesque touch of evil that haunted all who saw it.
The killer was fast asleep in the bedroom. She had first showered and taken Price’s bank card to withdraw $1000 cash.
Never to be released
Katherine Knight is in the most secure unit of Silverwater Correctional Centre in Sydney. She will never be released.
Insiders say she soon settled into the rhythm of prison life. For years, she got to clean the Governor’s office and to work in prison industries, assembling headphones.
The one job she has never had is in the jail kitchen, near the knives.
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