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To the outside world, Katherine Knight and John Price seemed to be the perfect couple – bubbly, charming, and adored by each other’s children.
But the relationship quickly descended into chaos as Knight unleashed her fury on him, with the jilted lover launching a horror attack which saw Price stabbed 37 times and his decapitated head left stewing on the kitchen stove.
Almost 25 years ago, the cannibal murderess mutilated and skinned her partner just hours after he took out a restraining order against her – warning his coworkers that if he were to ever go missing, it was because his girlfriend had killed him.
Knight would leave Price’s “skin suit” dangling from a meat hook in their blood-splattered house as she cooked his kids food made from the flesh left on his bones, a scene straight out of a horror movie.
The butcher became the first female killer to be condemned to life in prison without the possibility of parole in Canberra as a result of the gruesome murder that rocked Australia.
After being arrested, Knight was sent to Sydney’s infamous Silverwater Women’s Correctional Centre, where she is still detained today.
The creation of a murderous cannibal
Born in Moore, Katherine Knight grew up in a chaotic household where her mother, Barbara Roughan, had an affair with her father, Jack Roughan, with his friend and coworker, Kenneth Charles Knight.
In 1959, when she was just four years old, Barbara’s first husband passed away, and his two oldest kids moved in with her mother and Kenneth. Knight was a twin with seven siblings.
Ken was a very aggressive man who would rape Barbara up to ten times a day. Barbara would then tell her daughters about her sex life and how much she detested males and sexual activity.
Knight later complained to her mother when she grew older about one of her partners asking her to perform a sex act she didn’t want to do. Barbara allegedly urged her to “put up with it and stop complaining.”
Knight stated that until she was eleven years old, she was regularly raped by a number of family members, none of whom were her father.
Her accusations are accepted by psychiatrists, and other family members have mostly validated the occurrences, albeit some uncertainties over the specifics.
The only family member with whom Knight had a close relationship, aside from her twin sister, was her uncle, the champion horseman Oscar Knight.
His suicide in 1969 traumatized her, and she still believes his ghost comes to see her.
Knight had a reputation as a recluse while attending Muswellbrook High School, and her peers recall her as a bully who preyed on lesser and younger students.
At one point, a teacher who was ultimately determined to have acted in self-defense injured her after she used a weapon to attack at least one boy at school.
Knight was still illiterate when she dropped out of school at the age of 15, so she took a work as a cutter in a garment factory.
Her ‘dream job’ was to cut up offal at the local abattoir, and she departed after just a year.
Knight received her own pair of butcher’s knives and was soon promoted to boning. She kept them tied to the ceiling over her bed.
She carried on with this strange behavior in all of her residences until her imprisonment.
The pursuit of her victim
Knight first married David Kellett in 1973, the first of what would turn out to be a lengthy series of violent and unsuccessful partnerships.
A year later, the couple married in a drunken ceremony after meeting at the abattoir, where Kellett was a habitual drinker.
Knight’s motorcycle brought the couple to the service, where Barbara gave her new son-in-law some scathing counsel.
“Knight’s mother, an elderly girl, warned me to be careful.”If you don’t watch this, she will f****** murder you. Never consider playing up on her or cheating on her; she will f****** kill you if you agitate her in the wrong manner or do something inappropriate. Her mother was speaking at the time! She informed me that she had a loose object. Later, Kellett remarked, “Somewhere, she’s got a screw loose.”
Knight subsequently claimed that her spouse fell asleep after only three sexual encounters, which is why she attempted to strangle him on their wedding night.
Because Kellett returned late from a darts competition after making it to the finals, a heavily pregnant Knight would burn all of his clothes and shoes before slamming a frying pan around his head. Their marriage devolved into a brutal, twisted affair.
Before passing away with a badly cracked skull, Kellett ran away from the house and took refuge in a neighbor’s house. She was successful in persuading her husband not to file charges against her.
Knight gave birth to Melissa Ann, their first child, two years after they were married.
However, Kellett left Knight for another woman and relocated to Queensland, apparently unable to cope with the violence.
The next day, Knight was seen wildly swinging her infant from side to side while carrying it in a stroller down the main thoroughfare.
After being hospitalized to Tamworth’s St. Elmo’s Hospital, she was given a postpartum depression diagnosis and recuperated for a few weeks.
But after being freed, she chose to exact revenge on Kellett for abandoning her, so she put Melissa, who was two months old, on a train track just before a train was scheduled to arrive.
After stealing an axe, she threatened to kill multiple people and went into the nearby town.
Little Melissa was miraculously saved just before the train started down the tracks by a guy known locally as Old Ted, who was foraging close to the railroad line.
Knight apparently recovered and was released the next day after being arrested and again sent to St. Elmo’s Hospital.
A few days later, Knight used one of her butcher’s knives to cut a woman’s face and then ordered her to go to Queensland so she could find her husband.
After they pulled over at a service station, the woman was able to get away from the furious Knight, but by the time the police showed up, she had already taken a small kid hostage and threatened him with the knife.
Knight told nurses that she had planned to kill the mechanic at the service station because he had fixed Kellett’s car, allowing him to leave, and then kill her husband and his mother when she got to Queensland. Knight was disarmed by police when they attacked her with brooms and was admitted to Morisset Psychiatric Hospital.
Kellett left his fiancée and returned to Aberdeen with his mother to help Knight after police told him about the event.
Four years after giving birth to her second child, Natasha Maree, Knight left Kellett in 1984.
She met David Saunders two years later, but their relationship descended into violence and rage once more. She would frequently eject him from the house before pursuing him and pleading with him to come back.
In 1987, Knight knocked Saunders unconscious with a frying pan after slitting his two-month-old dingo pup’s throat in front of him as a warning of what would happen to him if he ever had an affair.
After Knight gave birth to her third daughter, Sarah, the next year, the couple paid a deposit for a house that she later embellished with rusty animal traps, leather coats, old boots, machetes, rakes, pitchforks, skulls, horns, and animal skins. The ceilings and every other area were covered.
She used a pair of scissors to stab Saunders in the abdomen after striking him in the face with an iron during a quarrel.
Knight fell pregnant with John Chillingworth, a former employee of an abattoir, in 1991.
Before she left him for John Price, a man she had been having an affair with for a while, the couple had a kid named Eric and had been together for three years.
John Price’s murder
Before his marriage ended in 1988, John Price had an affair with Knight, who later moved into his house in 1995.
Although he was aware of her violent past, he chose to ignore the concerning behavior because his kids enjoyed her.
Knight brutally retaliated by filming things he had reportedly stolen from work and mailing the tape to his boss after he refused to marry her.
Price was sacked from his seventeen-year work, despite the fact that the items were outdated medical kits that he had scrounged from the company bins.
He evicted her from his house that same day as word of her actions circulated around the community.
It took him several months to rekindle their romance, but he now forbade her from living with him.
While he was with Knight, the fighting increased even more, and many of his friends stopped communicating with him altogether.
However, nothing could have prepared Price for what would happen in just two years.
After Price was stabbed in the chest during a string of assaults, he became irate and sought a restraining order against Knight on February 28, 2000, to keep her away from him and his kids.
He informed his coworkers that very day that Knight had killed him if he did not report for duty the next day.
When his coworkers pleaded with him not to go home, he allegedly said he was afraid she would kill his kids if he didn’t.
When he got home at about eleven o’clock at night, he found that Knight had sent the kids off for a sleepover, and this would be the last night Price would be alive.
Given Price’s recent warning, a neighbor became worried at 6 a.m. the next day that he had not turned up for his shift and that his car was still in the driveway.
The worker and the neighbor attempted to wake Price by knocking on the window of his bedroom, but when they saw blood on the front door, they called the police.
When police arrived on the scene and broke down the back door, they were confronted with a scene that would stay with them for decades.
According to the blood evidence, she had stabbed her boyfriend with a butcher’s knife while he was asleep. He woke up and tried to switch on the light before attempting to escape the room while Knight pursued him throughout the house.
He made it all the way to the front door and was able to escape, but he either fell or was pulled back into the hallway, where he eventually passed away from major blood loss, according to the blood splatters and trails on the walls of the house.
Later, Knight went to Aberdeen and used an ATM to take $1,000 out of Price’s bank account.
According to Price’s autopsy, the ruthless Knight had stabbed him at least 37 times, in both the front and rear of his body, with several stab wounds piercing his vital organs.
Knight skinned Price alive a few hours after his death and hung his skin from a butcher hook at their living room’s entrance.
After decapitating her boyfriend, she cooked parts of his body and served the meat in two settings at the dinner table with baked potatoes, carrots, pumpkins, beets, zucchini, cabbage, yellow squash, and gravy. Each plate had a note with the name of one of Price’s children on it.
For reasons that are still unknown, a third meal—a cooked portion of Price’s left buttock—was thrown into the garden, and it was assumed that Knight tried to eat it but was unsuccessful.
Price’s body was discovered with his knees crossed and his left arm draped over an empty 1.25-liter soft drink bottle, while his head was discovered stewing with veggies in a huge boiler pot.
Knight had also left an image of Price, smeared with blood and dotted with bits of flesh, with a handwritten inscription on top.
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