Katherine Knight killed her partner at Aberdeen, New South Wales in 2000. One victim, not a series, and the entry is flagged as such. She is carried here because of what she did afterwards, and because the sentence she received had never been imposed on a woman in Australia before.
She was born Katherine Mary Knight on October 24, 1955 in Tenterfield, New South Wales, about half an hour after her twin sister Joy. She left school at fifteen, having learned to read and write poorly, and took work as a cutter in a clothing factory. She later moved to the abattoir at Aberdeen, where she boned meat for years and became expert with a knife. That skill is the reason this case is remembered, and it was acquired legitimately over a working lifetime.
Her account of her childhood describes violence in the home and abuse by family members. Her father was violent, and her mother spoke to her children about the marriage in terms they were too young for. The one relative she was close to, her uncle Oscar Knight, killed himself in 1969; she has said since that his ghost visits her. The family moved to Aberdeen the same year. She married David Kellett in 1974 and they divorced in 1984. She had four children.
There was a documented pattern of violence in her relationships before Price, and it mattered legally: the court later admitted that history to assess the gravity of the offence and the risk she continued to present, rather than merely as evidence of character.
The end of the relationship is unusually well recorded, because John Charles Thomas Price left an account of his own fear. On February 27, 2000, after an altercation, he went to police to have her removed from his house and then stayed with friends, telling them he believed she would kill him. On February 29 he applied at the local court for an apprehended violence order against her. He told workmates that if he did not turn up the next day it would be because Katherine Knight had killed him. Then he went home.
She had spent part of that day recording affectionate messages on a video camera, and had arranged a family dinner, sending her two younger children to stay with an adult daughter.
She attacked him in bed late on February 29. He woke and tried to get away; blood through the house showed he had moved through several rooms before he collapsed. The post-mortem found at least thirty-seven stab wounds, to the front and the back of his body.
What followed is why the case is in this archive. She skinned him and hung the skin from a meat hook she had recently installed. She decapitated the body and cooked the head and parts of him with vegetables, and set places at the table with notes bearing the names of his children. The intention, as the court accepted it, was that his children would be served their father. They never arrived. Price's employer noticed he had not come to work, sent someone to check on the house, and police were called on March 1.
She was charged with murder and initially pleaded not guilty, saying she had no memory of the night. On October 18, 2001, three days into the proceedings, she changed her plea to guilty, which ended the hearing without the jury and spared Price's children from giving evidence. She has never admitted the crime in any account of her own.
On November 8, 2001, Justice Barry O'Keefe of the Supreme Court of New South Wales sentenced her to life imprisonment with no possibility of parole. The first time that sentence had been passed on a woman in the state. He placed the murder in the worst-case category, citing its premeditation, the extreme violence, the cooking of parts of the body, and the betrayal of the relationship. Her file was marked never to be released. An appeal against the sentence failed in 2006. She is held at the Silverwater Women's Correctional Centre.
The press in Australia and abroad called her the female Hannibal Lecter, which is the kind of comparison that tends to displace the facts of a case rather than explain them. What the record actually shows is a woman who had told people what she was capable of, a man who believed her and said so to his workmates and to a court, and a system that had an order in hand and no means of enforcing it in time. Australian reporting also called her the Butcher of Aberdeen, after the town.