Katherine Knight: The Abattoir Worker Who Became Australia's First Woman Jailed for Life
On the morning of 1 March 2000, John Price didn't turn up for work. That was all it took for his workmates in Aberdeen, New South Wales, to fear the worst, because he'd told them exactly what it would mean. When police broke in through the back door of his house, they found one of the most disturbing crime scenes in Australian history.
The woman responsible was his partner, Katherine Knight, a 44-year-old former abattoir worker and mother of four. She became the first woman in Australia to be jailed for life with no chance of release.
Quick Answers
Who is Katherine Knight? A former abattoir worker from Aberdeen, New South Wales, and the first woman in Australia to be jailed for life with no chance of release.
Who did she kill? Her partner John Price, a 44-year-old miner and father of three.
When did it happen? Overnight between 29 February and 1 March 2000, at Price's home in Aberdeen.
What was her sentence? Life in prison, with her file marked "never to be released", handed down on 8 November 2001.
Where is Katherine Knight now? Silverwater Women's Correctional Centre in Sydney.
Who is Katherine Knight?
Katherine Mary Knight was born on 24 October 1955 in Tenterfield, New South Wales, one of twin girls. Home was violent and chaotic. Her father, Ken, was an alcoholic who terrorised her mother, Barbara, and Knight later said she was sexually abused by several relatives until she was 11, a claim psychiatrists largely accepted.
The one adult she was close to was her uncle Oscar, a champion horseman. When he took his own life in 1969 she was devastated, and for years afterwards she insisted his ghost came to visit her. The family moved to Aberdeen, a small town in the Hunter Valley, that same year.
At school in nearby Muswellbrook she was remembered as a loner and a bully who stood over smaller kids, and she attacked at least one boy with a weapon. Between the rages, teachers found her a model pupil. She left at 15, unable to read or write properly.
After a stint in a clothing factory she landed what she called her dream job at the local abattoir, starting on offal and working her way up to boning. She was very good at it and was given her own set of butcher's knives. She hung them over her bed, saying they'd always be handy if she needed them.
A marriage that started with a strangling
Knight met David Kellett at the abattoir in 1973. He was a heavy drinker with troubles of his own, having seen his best friend killed in a railway accident. They married in 1974 at her insistence, turning up to the ceremony on her motorbike with a well-oiled Kellett riding pillion. Her mother warned him not to upset her.
According to the story that's followed her ever since, Knight tried to strangle him on their wedding night because he'd fallen asleep too soon.
It didn't get better. While heavily pregnant she burned all his clothes and shoes, then hit him across the back of the head with a frying pan because he'd come home late from a darts competition. He staggered to a neighbour's house with a fractured skull. Police wanted to charge her, but she talked him out of it.
In May 1976, shortly after their daughter was born, Kellett left for Queensland with another woman. The next day Knight was seen in the main street throwing the pram violently from side to side. She was admitted to hospital in Tamworth and diagnosed with postnatal depression.
After she was released, she put her two-month-old baby on a railway line shortly before a train was due. A homeless man known locally as Old Ted pulled the baby clear with minutes to spare. Soon afterwards Knight slashed a woman's face and demanded to be driven to Queensland, then took a young boy hostage at knifepoint. Police knocked the knife out of her hand with brooms.
At Morisset psychiatric hospital she told nurses she planned to kill the mechanic who'd fixed Kellett's car, then Kellett and his mother. When police warned him, Kellett did something remarkable. He left his girlfriend and came back to look after her. They moved to Queensland, had a second daughter in 1980 and stayed together until she walked out in 1984.
The dingo pup and the scissors
Knight went back to Aberdeen, where a back injury in 1985 ended her time on the boning line. The following year she met David Saunders, a 38-year-old miner, who moved in with her and her daughters.
She was fiercely jealous, throwing him out one day and begging him back the next. In May 1987 she cut the throat of his two-month-old dingo pup in front of him, purely as an example of what would happen if he ever had an affair, then knocked him out with a frying pan.
They had a daughter together and bought a house, which Knight decorated from floor to ceiling with animal skins, skulls, horns, rusty traps, machetes and pitchforks. After one argument she hit Saunders in the face with an iron and stabbed him in the stomach with a pair of scissors. He took long service leave and went into hiding. Knight told police she was afraid of him and got a restraining order against him.
Her next partner was John Chillingworth, a former workmate from the abattoir. They had a son together, and the relationship lasted about three years. She left him for a man she'd already been seeing on the side.
John Price, the man she killed
John Charles Thomas Price, known as Pricey, was born on 4 April 1955. He was a miner and a father of three, described as a "terrific bloke" who was liked by pretty much everyone. His marriage had ended in 1988, and his two older children lived with him in a three-bedroom house he owned in Aberdeen.
He knew Knight's reputation when she moved in with him in 1995. For a while it worked. His kids liked her, he was earning good money, and life, as one account puts it, was "a bunch of roses".
It soured in 1998 when he refused to marry her. Knight filmed some out-of-date first aid kits he'd salvaged from the company tip and sent the tape to his boss. Price was sacked from a job he'd held for 17 years. He threw her out the same day, then took her back a few months later, though he wouldn't let her move in again. Most of his friends drifted away because of her, and the violence got worse.
"If I don't come to work tomorrow"
In February 2000 a string of assaults ended with Knight stabbing Price in the chest. He finally threw her out for good, and at the end of the month he went to Scone Magistrates' Court for a restraining order to keep her away from him and his children.
That afternoon he told his workmates that if he didn't show up the next day, it would be because Knight had killed him. They begged him not to go home. He went anyway, afraid of what she might do to his kids if he didn't.
Knight, meanwhile, was making preparations of her own. That day she bought new black lingerie and filmed her children on a video camera, making comments that have since been read as a crude sort of will. She also made sure Price's children would be out of the house, sending them to a sleepover.
The murder of John Price
Price spent the evening with neighbours and was in bed by 11pm. Knight let herself in while he slept, watched a bit of television and had a shower. She woke him, they had sex, and he went back to sleep.
Then she attacked him with a butcher's knife. Blood evidence showed he woke, tried to reach the light switch and made it as far as the front door before he collapsed in the hallway. He'd been stabbed at least 37 times, front and back.
Around 6am a neighbour noticed Price's car was still in the driveway, which wasn't like him. When he failed to turn up for work, his boss sent someone round. The two of them found blood on the front door and called the police.
What police found
Officers forced the back door at about 8am. Knight was on a bed, snoring, deep in a stupor from the pills she'd swallowed. The rest of the house was a scene that Detective Sergeant Robert Wells later called one of the worst he'd ever witnessed.
Hours after Price died, using the skills she'd picked up at the abattoir, Knight had dragged his body into the lounge and skinned it, a job Justice Barry O'Keefe would later say was "carried out with considerable expertise". The skin was hanging from a meat hook in the doorway. She had then beheaded him and cooked parts of his body with vegetables. The pot on the stove was still warm.
On the dining table were two plates of meat, baked potato, pumpkin, zucchini, cabbage, squash and gravy. Beside each one was a note with the name of one of Price's children. A third serving had been left out on the back lawn, for reasons nobody has ever explained.
She'd also left a bloodstained note accusing Price of terrible things. The accusations were found to be groundless.
The trial that lasted a day
Knight offered to plead guilty to manslaughter, which was rejected, and she was charged with murder. Her trial opened in October 2001 before Justice O'Keefe. He warned the pool of 60 potential jurors about the photographs they'd have to look at and offered to excuse anyone who couldn't face it. Five took him up on it.
Her lawyers planned to argue that she'd been in a dissociative state and had no memory of the killing. Psychiatrists agreed she was sane, and two concluded she had borderline personality disorder. Then, the next morning, she changed her plea to guilty. The jury was sent home. No explanation has ever been given.
Even then she never accepted responsibility. Her lawyers asked for her to be excused from hearing some of the evidence at the sentencing hearing and were refused. When a witness described the skinning and beheading, she became hysterical and had to be sedated.
"Never to be released"
On 8 November 2001, O'Keefe jailed her for life and ordered her file marked "never to be released", the first time that had happened to a woman in Australia. "The prisoner showed no mercy whatsoever to Mr Price," he said. He added that the last minutes of Price's life "must have been a time of abject terror for him, as they were a time of utter enjoyment for her".
In 2006 Knight appealed, arguing that life was too harsh. Three judges dismissed it that September, with Justice Peter McClellan describing the crime as appalling and almost unimaginable in a civilised society.
Where is Katherine Knight now?
Knight, now 70, is held at Silverwater Women's Correctional Centre in Sydney. Reports from 2017 described a model prisoner with no record of violence inside, who had taken on a leadership role and mediated disputes between other inmates.
The case often gets filed alongside cannibal killers like Albert Fish and Joe Metheny, though nothing was actually eaten in that house. What makes it so hard to shake is how many warnings there were. A fractured skull, a baby on a railway line, a dead pup, a stabbing, a court order. John Price saw it coming and said so out loud. He went home anyway, for his children.
