It’s a no brainer to say that world is obsessed with true crime. We arm chair detectives attempt to understand society’s worst criminals and the reasons behind their evil deeds. But there’s one woman who captures the world’s imagination, Katherine Knight. She undoubtedly tops the list of the worst Australian female murderers of all time.
Katherine isn’t a serial killer but is defined by one gruesome murder. This has immortalized Katherine as one of the most famous Australian convicts in history and the first woman to be sentenced to life imprisonment without parole. But in order to understand how she got that title we must first look at Katherine’s life before the crime.
BACKGROUND
Originally from the town of Aberdeen in New South Wales’ Hunter Valley, Barbara Roughan was forced to move to Moree after beginning a relationship with Ken Knight, a co-worker of her husband Jack Roughan. The Roughan and Knight families were both well known in the conservative rural town and the affair was a major scandal. Two of Roughan’s four children remained with their father while the two youngest were sent to live with an aunt in Sydney.
Katherine Knight was the younger of twins born to Barbara and her de facto partner Ken on October 24, 1955, in Tenterfield, New South Wales. Jack Roughan died in 1959 and the two children who had lived with him moved in with the Knight family.
Barbara’s grandmother was apparently an Indigenous Australian from the Moree area who had married an Irishman. She was proud of this fact and liked to think of her own family as Aboriginal. This was kept a family secret, as there was considerable racism in the area at the time and this was a source of tension for the children. Apart from her twin, the only person Katherine was close to was her uncle Oscar Knight who was a champion horseman. She was devastated when he committed suicide in 1969 and continues to maintain that his ghost visits her. The family moved back to Aberdeen the same year.
Katherine’s father Ken was an alcoholic who openly used violence and intimidation to rape her mother up to 10 times a day. Barbara in turn often told her daughters intimate details of her sex life and how much she hated sex and men (Later, when Katherine complained to her mother that one of her partners wanted her to take part in a sex act she didn’t want to do, Barbara told her to “put up with it and stop complaining”). Katherine claims she was frequently sexually abused by several members of her family (though not by her father), which continued until she was 11. Although they have minor doubts about the details, psychiatrists accept her claim as all her family members confirmed the abuse did happen.
Katherine was by all accounts a pleasant girl who experienced uncontrollably murderous rages in response to minor upsets. When she attended Muswellbrook high school, she became a loner and is remembered by classmates as a bully who stood over smaller children. She assaulted at least one boy at school with a weapon and was once injured by a teacher who was found to have acted in self-defense. By contrast, when not in a rage Katherine was a model student and often earned awards for her good behavior.
On leaving school at 15, without having learned to read or write, she gained employment as a cutter in a clothing factory. 12 months later she left to start what she referred to as her “dream job,” cutting up offal at the local abattoir from where she was quickly promoted to boning and given her own set of butcher knives. At home she hung the knives over her bed so that they “would always be handy if I needed them,” a habit she continued — until her incarceration — everywhere she lived.
Katherine’s violent behavior spilled over to her relationships. She first met hard drinking co-worker David Stanford Kellett in 1973 and completely dominated him, if Kellett got into a fight at the hotel Katherine would step in and back him up with her fists without fail. In Aberdeen she was renowned for offering armed combat to anyone who upset her.
Katherine married David in 1974, at her request, with the couple arriving at the service on her motorcycle with a very intoxicated David on the pillion. As soon as they arrived Katherine’s mother Barbara gave David some advice:
“The old girl said to me to watch out. ‘You better watch this one or she’ll fucking kill you. Stir her up the wrong way or do the wrong thing and you’re fucked, don’t ever think of playing up on her, she’ll fuckin’ kill you.’ And that was her mother talking! She told me she’s got something loose, She’s got a screw loose somewhere.”
On their wedding night she tried to strangle him. Katherine explained it was because he fell asleep after only having intercourse 3 times.
The marriage was particularly violent and on one occasion a heavily pregnant Katherine burned all David’s clothing and shoes before hitting him across the back of the head with a frying pan, simply because he had arrived home late from a darts competition after making the finals. In fear for his life, David fled before collapsing in a neighbors house and he was later treated for a badly fractured skull. Police wanted to charge her but Katherine was now on her best behavior and talked David into dropping the charges.
In May 1976, shortly after the birth of their first child, Melissa Ann, David left her for another woman and moved to Queensland, apparently unable to cope with Katherine’s possessive, violent behavior. The next day Katherine was seen pushing her new baby in a pram down the main street, violently throwing the pram from side to side. Katherine was admitted to St Elmo’s Hospital in Tamworth where she was diagnosed with postnatal depression and spent several weeks recovering. After being released, Katherine placed two month old Melissa on a railway line shortly before the train was due, then stole an axe, went into town and threatened to kill several people. A man known in the district as “Old Ted”, who was foraging near the railway line, found and rescued Melissa, by all accounts only minutes before the train passed. Katherine was arrested and again taken to St Elmo’s Hospital but, apparently recovered, signed herself out the following day.
A few days later Katherine slashed the face of a woman with one of her knives and demanded she drive her to Queensland to find David. The woman escaped after they stopped at a service station but by the time police arrived Katherine had taken a little boy hostage and was threatening him with the knife. She was disarmed when police attacked her with brooms and she was admitted to the Morisset Psychiatric Hospital. Katherine told the nurses she had intended to kill the mechanic at the service station because he had repaired David’s car, which had allowed him to leave, and then kill both her husband and his mother when she arrived in Queensland. When police informed David of the incident he left his girlfriend and along with his mother, they both moved to Aberdeen to support her.
Katherine was released on August 9, 1976 into the care of her mother-in-law and along with David, they now moved to Woodridge, a suburb of Brisbane, where she obtained a job at the Dinmore meat works in nearby Ipswich. On March 6, 1980, they had another daughter, Natasha Maree. In 1984 Katherine left David and moved in, first with her parents in Aberdeen, then to a rented house in nearby Muswellbrook. Although she returned to work at the abattoir, she injured her back the following year and went on a disability pension. No longer needing to rent accommodation close to her work the government gave her a Housing Commission house in Aberdeen.
In 1986 Katherine meets her second man which is 38-year-old miner David Saunders. A few months later he moved in with her and her two daughters although he kept his old apartment in Scone. Katherine soon became jealous regarding what he did when she was not around and would often throw him out. He would move back to his apartment in Scone and then she would invariably follow and beg him to return.
In May 1987 she cut the throat of his two-month-old dingo pup in front of him for no more reason than as an example of what would happen if he ever had an affair before going on to knock him unconscious with a frying pan.
In June 1988 she gave birth to her third daughter Sarah, which prompted Saunders to put a deposit on a house, which Katherine paid off when her workers’ compensation came through in 1989. Katherine decorated the house throughout with animal skins, skulls, horns, rusty animal traps, leather jackets, old boots, machetes, rakes and pitchforks. No space, including the ceilings, was left uncovered.
After an argument where she hit Saunders in the face with an iron before stabbing him in the stomach with a pair of scissors, he moved back to Scone, but when he later returned home found she had cut up all his clothes. Saunders took long service leave and went into hiding. Katherine tried to find him but no one admitted to knowing where he was. Several months later he returned to see his daughter and found that Katherine had gone to the police and told them she was afraid of him. They issued her with an Apprehended Violence Order (AVO) against him.
That relationship ended and Katherine moved on to John Chillingworth. John was former co-worker and together they had a boy named Eric. Their relationship lasted three years before she left him for a man she had been having an affair with for some time, John Price.
MURDER
John Price was the father of three children when Katherine had an affair with him. Reputedly a “terrific bloke” liked by everyone who knew him, his own marriage had ended in 1988. While his two-year-old daughter had remained with his former wife, the two older children lived with him. Price was well aware of Katherine’s violent reputation and she moved into his house in 1995. His children liked her, he was making a lot of money working in the local mines and, apart from violent arguments, at first “life was a bunch of roses”.
In 1998 they had a fight over Price’s refusal to marry her and in retaliation Katherine videotaped items he had stolen from work and sent the tape to his boss. Although the items were out of date medical kits that he had scavenged from the company rubbish tip, Price was fired from the job he had held for 17 years. That same day he kicked her out and she returned to her own home while news of what she had done spread through the town.
A few months later Price restarted the relationship although he now refused to allow her to move in with him. The fighting became even more frequent and most of his friends would no longer have anything to do with him while they remained together.
In February 2000, a series of assaults on Price culminated with Katherine stabbing Price in the chest. Finally fed up, he kicked her out of his house. On 29 February he stopped at the Scone Magistrate’s Court on his way to work and took out a restraining order to keep her away from both him and his children. That afternoon Price told his co-workers that if he did not come to work the next day, it would be because Katherine had killed him. They pleaded with him not to go home but he told them that he believed she would kill his children if he did not. Price arrived home to find that Katherine, although not there herself, had sent the children away for a sleep-over at a friend’s house. He then spent the evening with his neighbors before going to bed at 11pm. Earlier that day, Katherine had bought new black lingerie and had videotaped all her children while making comments which have since been interpreted as a crude will. Katherine later arrived at Price’s house while he was sleeping and sat watching TV for a few minutes before having a shower. She then woke Price and they had sex after which he fell asleep.
At 6 am the next morning the neighbor became concerned that Price’s car was still in the driveway and when Price did not arrive at work, his employer sent a worker to see what was wrong. Both the neighbor and worker tried knocking on Price’s bedroom window to wake him but after noticing blood on the front door alerted the police who arrived at 8 am. Breaking down the back door police found his body with Katherine comatose from taking a large number of pills. She had stabbed Price with a butcher’s knife while he was sleeping. According to the blood evidence, he awoke and tried to turn the light on before attempting to escape while Katherine chased him through the house, he managed to open the front door and get outside but either stumbled back inside or was dragged back into the hallway where he finally died after bleeding out. Later, Katherine went into Aberdeen and withdrew $1,000 from Price’s ATM account.
Price’s autopsy revealed that he had been stabbed at least 37 times, in both the front and back of his body with many of the wounds extending into vital organs. Several hours after Price had died, Katherine skinned him and hung the skin from a meat hook on the architrave of a door to the lounge room.
She then decapitated him and cooked parts of his body, serving up the meat with baked potato, pumpkin, zucchini, cabbage, yellow squash and gravy in two settings at the dinner table, along with notes beside each plate, each having the name of one of Price’s children on it; she was preparing to serve his body parts to his children.
A third meal was thrown on the back lawn for unknown reasons and it is speculated Katherine had attempted to eat it but could not and this has been put forward in support of her claim that she has no memory of the crime. Price’s head was found in a pot with vegetables. The pot was still warm, estimated to be at between 40 and 50 degrees Celsius, indicating that the cooking had taken place in the early morning. Sometime later Katherine arranged the body with the left arm draped over an empty 1.25 litre soft drink bottle with the legs crossed. This was claimed in court to be an act of defilement demonstrating Katherine’s contempt for Price. Katherine had left a hand written note on top of a photograph of Price. Blood stained and covered with small pieces of flesh the note read:
“Time got you back Jonathan for rapping [raping] my douter [daughter]. You to Beck [Price’s daughter] for Ross — for Little John [his son]. Now play with little Johns Dick John Price.”
Yes, that’s how it sounds as you remember Katherine dropped out at age 15 and struggled with reading and writing skills.
The accusations in the note were found to be groundless.
THE TRIAL
Katherine was charged with murdering John Price in 2001, but she initially pleaded not guilty, claiming that she remembers nothing from that night. She later changed her plea (without giving a reason), and the jury was dismissed. Despite entering a guilty plea, Katherine did not admit to the crime she committed.
On November 8, Justice O’Keefe pointed out that the nature of the crime and Katherine’s lack of remorse required a severe penalty; he sentenced her to life imprisonment, refused to fix a non-parole period and ordered that her papers be marked “never to be released”, the first time that this had been imposed on a woman in Australian history.
In June 2006, Katherine appealed the life sentence, claiming that a penalty of life in jail without possibility of parole was too severe for the killing. Justices Peter McClellan, Michael Adams and Megan Latham dismissed the appeal in the NSW Court of Criminal Appeal in September, with Justice McClellan writing in his judgement “This was an appalling crime, almost beyond contemplation in a civilized society.”
In 2016 it was announced that a film which would document the life of Katherine, who was then in her 60s, had been picked up by a Hollywood production studio (Netflix). Today Katherine remains in jail and not much has been reported on her since.
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