John Price told the men he worked with that if he did not come in the next day, it would be because Katherine Knight had killed him. He said it on February 29, 2000, the day he went to the local court and applied for an apprehended violence order against the woman who had lived with him on and off for years in his house in Aberdeen, a meatworks town in the Upper Hunter Valley of New South Wales. Two days earlier he had asked the police to remove her from the house. They declined and told him to get an order. He did what he had been told, and then he went home.
When he failed to arrive at work on the morning of March 1, his employer sent someone to the house. Police were called, and what they found there is the reason the case is still discussed in Australia a quarter of a century later. Price's skin, removed from the body in a single piece that included the head, face, ears and legs, was hanging from a meat hook on the architrave of the lounge-room doorway. His headless body lay nearby. In the kitchen his head was in a pot with vegetables, and it had been cooking into the early hours of the morning. Pieces cut from his buttocks had been baked and set out on plates with vegetables for his son and his daughter, each with a note addressed to them. A third piece had been thrown onto the back lawn. Several experienced crime-scene officers later took stress leave.
Price was forty-four, born on April 4, 1955, and the father of three children; after his marriage ended in 1988 the two older ones lived with him and the youngest, a daughter, stayed with her mother. His house was what he most wanted to keep for them. That fact would matter at sentencing. By the account the court later accepted, the relationship was ending on his terms: he meant to put Knight out of the house, and he had refused to share his assets with her, above all the house itself. She had moved in with him in 1995, when his children liked her and he was earning well in the mines. In 1998, after he refused to marry her, she videotaped items she said he had stolen from work and sent the tape to his employer. They were out-of-date first-aid kits he had taken from the company dump, and he lost the job he had held for seventeen years. He put her out that day, took her back some months later, and for a time would not let her move in again. By then most of his friends had stopped seeing him.
The killing had begun in the bedroom. The autopsy found at least thirty-seven stab wounds to the front and back of his body, made with a butcher's knife, and they reached the aorta, both lungs, the liver, the stomach, the colon, the pancreas and the left kidney. He did not die where he was first attacked. Blood showed that he had got off the bed and along the hallway and managed to get outside the house, and that he was then dragged or went back in, falling in the hallway near the lounge-room door. After he had been dead for some time, she dragged the body into the lounge room.
Justice Barry O'Keefe, who sentenced her, described the skinning as work done with considerable expertise and a steady hand. The pathologist said that after the autopsy the skin could have been sewn back onto the body. The one area she left untouched bore an old knife scar, a wound she had given Price herself during the relationship. She had decapitated the body and arranged it, with the left arm draped over an empty soft-drink bottle and the legs crossed. The court found that the scene echoed a video she had watched, the horror film Resurrection, in which a body is skinned, hung on a meat hook and beheaded, and that this gave what she did a copycat quality.
None of this required improvisation from her. Knight had worked for years as a boner in the abattoirs of the district, and her skill with a knife was a working skill, learned on carcasses in the trade that employed much of Aberdeen. She was born Katherine Mary Knight in Tenterfield, New South Wales, on October 24, 1955, one of twin girls, to Barbara Roughan, who had left her husband and four sons in Aberdeen for his co-worker Ken Knight, a violent alcoholic, in a scandal that the small town did not forget. She married David Kellett, a co-worker at the abattoir, in 1974, at her own insistence, and divorced him in 1984. She had four children: two daughters with Kellett, a third daughter with David Saunders in 1988, and a son, Eric, with John Chillingworth in 1992. Price was the last of those partners.
Her earlier relationships had been violent, and the sentencing court went through them in detail because they bore on the risk she presented. On her wedding night she tried to strangle Kellett. Later, heavily pregnant, she burned his clothes and shoes and hit him across the back of the head with a frying pan, fracturing his skull; the police wanted to charge her, and she talked him out of it. With a later partner, David Saunders, in May 1987 she cut the throat of his two-month-old dingo pup in front of him, as a warning of what would happen if he strayed, knocked him out with a frying pan, damaged his car, took an overdose and was admitted to a psychiatric unit. She also took out apprehended violence orders against Saunders, and the court could not settle who had been the aggressor between them. She smashed the false teeth of a later partner, John Chillingworth. Men who had lived with her described the same warning, given more than once: if you leave me, I will cut your balls out. None of it had produced a criminal record.
Price had heard enough to be afraid, and so had her family. She told one of her daughters that if he took her back this time, it was to the death. The court accepted that the decision to kill was made about forty-eight hours before the attack, that the murder was premeditated, and that she had planned it in a way that might lead people to think she was mad.
She was charged with murder and on February 2, 2001, was arraigned in the Supreme Court and pleaded not guilty. Her position, then and afterward, was that she remembered nothing of the night. The trial was set for July 23, 2001, and adjourned because her counsel was ill. It was listed again for October 15, 2001, and even then it did not begin on time: the court had to enlarge the jury panel because of the nature of the evidence the jurors would see. At that point the defense and the Crown asked for a short adjournment to discuss a plea of guilty.
Justice O'Keefe would not simply take it. Given the injuries and the volume of psychiatric evidence the parties had planned to call, he required an up-to-date medical assessment showing that she was fit to plead before he would accept a guilty plea to murder. The examination found that she understood the effect of the plea and its possible consequences. On October 18, 2001, she was formally charged again and pleaded guilty. The plea spared Price's children from giving evidence at a trial. It was not a confession: she maintained that she had no memory of what she had done, and the court did not accept the amnesia as an explanation.
Three psychiatrists gave opinions for the sentencing hearing. Two described a borderline personality disorder and treated her violence as a feature of her nature rather than the product of a psychiatric illness. Nothing in the evidence reduced her responsibility.
On November 8, 2001, O'Keefe sentenced her to life imprisonment. In New South Wales that sentence carries no non-parole period and no parole, and it had never before been imposed on a woman in Australia. He placed the murder in the worst category of the offense, pointing to the premeditation, the savagery of the attack and what she did afterward, and to the calm and skill her actions displayed. He found that she had taken pleasure in the defilement of the body and that the motive was resentment: at being rejected, at being put out of his home, and at his refusal to give her a share of what he owned. He directed that her papers be marked never to be released. She was never charged over the treatment of the body itself. The offense of misconduct with a corpse under the state's Crimes Act carried a maximum of two years, and what she did to Price after his death went to the gravity of the murder instead.
She appealed against the severity of the sentence. On September 11, 2006, the Court of Criminal Appeal dismissed the appeal. Chief Justice McClellan, with Justice Latham agreeing, held that the life sentence was open to the sentencing judge. Justice Adams dissented on the sentence and would have imposed a term of forty-five years with a non-parole period of thirty-three, which would have made her eligible for release at seventy-seven. The majority decision stands. She is held at Silverwater Women's Correctional Centre in western Sydney, where by 2017 she had no record of violence and no prison charges, and where, in the account of James Phelps's 2020 book on women in prison, Green Is the New Black, other inmates call her the Nanna.
The press called her the female Hannibal Lecter and Australian reporting called her the Butcher of Aberdeen; two books followed within a year of the sentence, Peter Lalor's Blood Stain and Sandra Lee's Beyond Bad, both in 2002. The judgments have drawn their own scrutiny. The legal scholar Penny Crofts, writing in the Griffith Law Review in 2012, examined how the sentencing and appeal courts reached for the language of wickedness and monstrosity, and argued that the judgments constructed Knight as a monster in a way that set her apart from the ordinary run of domestic murder. The record underneath that language is plainer and harder to dismiss. Price had named his killer to his workmates, had asked the police for help, and had applied to a court for protection on the last day of his life.