The True Crime Hour

Background

She was born on October 24, 1955. She was born and raised in irregularly and broken family environment. Her mother (Barbara Roughan; 1930-1986) had been married to Scottish-born John “Jack” Roughan and lived with him in the small village of Aberdeen in New South Wales’ Hunter Valley. They had four sons before Barbara began an unfaithful relationship with Kenneth “Ken” Charles Knight (1927-2009), a friend and co-worker of former husband.

When Barbara and Ken was obligatory to move to Moree, none of her sons move with her; the two eldest boys carry on living with their father and the two younger sons were shipped to be bring up by an aunt in Sydney. Barbara had four other children with Ken, including twin girls born in 1955 in Tenterfield; Knight was one of these twin daughters. In 1959, when Knight was four years old, John Roughan passed away and his two older sons moved in Barbara and Ken.

Ken was a vicious drunk who would sexually assault Barbara up to 10 times per day. Barbara (consecutively) often told her daughters private details of her sex life and how much she loathes sex and men. Later, when Knight bleated to her mother that one of her partners wanted her to take part in a coition she did not want to execute, Barbara told her to “put up with it and stop complaining.” Knight claims she was regularly sexually assaulted by multiple members of the family (though not by her father), which carry on until she was aged 11. Although there is uncertainty about the facts, psychiatrists ratify her claims, and the events have been generally established by additional members of the family.

The family moved back to Aberdeen in 1969.

When she attended Muswellbrook high school, Knight became a hermit and is recalled by classmates as a bully who hovered over smaller pupils. She attacked at least one boy at school with a weapon and was once injured by a teacher, who was eventually found to have taken action in self-defense. By comparison, when not in a wrath, Knight was an exemplary student and frequently earned awards for her good behavior.

Upon quitting school at age 15, lacking in having learned to read or write, she obtained employment as a cutter in a clothing factory. 12 months later, she quit to start what she mentioned to as her “dream job”: cutting up offal at the local abattoir. There, she was rapidly advanced to boning and was given her own set of butchers’ knives. At home, the knives were hovered over her bed so, as Knight said, that they “would always be handy if I needed them”, a routine she continued – until her imprisonment – all over the place where she lived. Townsfolk in Aberdeen later recalled Knight for bodily threatening anyone who angered her.

Relationships and Marriage

Katherine first encounters a co-worker and first husband David Stanford Kellett in 1973. David betrothed in heavy drinking which come from two traumatic incidents from his preceding railway job in Coffs Harbour (first – when his best friend was killed in front of him in a shunting mishap; and second, when he rescued wounded occupiers of a school bus in Kempsey which had been hit by a train, killing six children). He ultimately no longer had the job due to worsening behavior and performance, but he shortly got work at the close by Aberdeen abattoir and became close buddies with Katherine’s brother. Katherine married David in 1974, at her petition, with the couple appearing at the service on her motorcycle with a very inebriated Kellett on the pillion. On their wedding night, Knight attempted to strangle Katherine; she later described it was because he fell asleep following only having intercourse three times. The marriage demonstrated extremely violent. In May 1976, shortly after the birth of their first child, Meliss Ann, David abandon Katherine for another woman and moved to Queensland, seemingly unfit to manage with the abuse. David abandon his girlfriend and moved to Aberdeen with his mother to aid Katherine after Katherine told the nurses (which she was admitted to Morisset psychiatric hospital) she had deliberated to kill the mechanic at the service station because he had repaired David’s car, which had authorize him to leave, and then kill both her husband and his mother when she appeared in Queensland. She was acquitted in August 1976 into the care of her mother-in-law and, along with David, moved to Ipswich (a city west of Brisbane), where she acquired a job at the Dinmore meatworks. On March 6, 1980, they had another daughter (Natasha Maree). It is unknown when Katherine divorced her husband – it is likely between 1978 and 1984 (due to her abuse).

Katherine met David Saunders (who was a 38-year-old miner at that time) in 1986. A short period later, he moved in with her and her daughters. In June 1988, she gave birth to a third daughter, Sarah, which caused David to put a deposit on a house.

In 1991, Katherine became pregnant by 43-year-old former abattoir co-worker John Chillingworth and gave birth the following year to a boy named Eric. Their relationship continued three years before she left him for a man, she had been having an affair with for period of time, John Price.

John Charles Thomas Price was the father of three children when he started his affair with Katherine. John was well informed of Katherine’s violent character when she moved into his house in 1995. In 1988, they fought over his denial to marry her.

Murder of John Price

In February 2000, a sequence of attacks on Price peaked with Knight stabbing him in the chest. Eventually fed up, he kicked her out of his house. On February 28, he went into strive to retain her away from both him and his children. That afternoon, Price informed his co-workers that if he did not come to work the following day, it would be because Katherine had murdered him.

At 6 am the next day, a neighbor became worried that Price’s car was still in the driveway, and when he did not show up to work, his employer sent a worker to see what was missing. Both the neighbor and the worker attempt to knock on Price’s bedroom window to wake him, but they notified police after observing blood on the front door. Demolishing the back door, police found Price’s body, with Katherine unconscious from taking countless pills. She had impaled Price with a butcher’s knife while he was unconscious. According to the blood evidence, he woken up and attempted to turn the light on before trying to escape while Katherine pursued him through the house. He accomplished to open the front door and get outside, but he either staggered inside or was pulled back into the hallway, where he finally died after exsanguinating. Price’s autopsy disclosed that he had been stabbed at least 37 times, in both the front and back of his body, with numerous of the wounds expanding into vital organs.

Many hours after Price had died, Katherine skinned him and dangled the skin from a meat hook on the pilaster of a door to the lounge room. She then beheaded Price and cooked parts of his body, dishing out the meat with baked potato, carrot, pumpkin, beetroot, zucchini, cabbage, yellow squash and gravy in two fixings at the dinner table, along with notes beside each plate, each having the name of one of Price’s children on it. She was arranging to serve his body parts to his children. Price’s head was discovered in a pot with vegetables. The pot was still warm, specifying that the cooking had occurred early in the morning. Sometime later, Knight set out the body with the left arm draped over an empty 1.25-liter soda drink bottle with the legs stretches across. This was claimed in court to be an act of degradation displaying Knight’s scorn for Price.

Trial

Katherine’s first offer to plead guilty to manslaughter was denied, and she was charged on March 2, 2001, with murdering Price – to which she entered a plea of not guilty. Her trial was originally fixed for July 23, 2001, but it was delayed due to her counsel’s sickness, and it was re-secured for October 15, 2001.

Without no reason has ever been given for the guilty plea, and regardless of giving it, Katherine still declined to accept responsibility for her behaviors. On November 8, Justice O’Keefe mentioned that the details of the crime and Knight’s unremorseful required a harsh penalty. He sentenced her to life imprisonment, declined to fix a non-parole period and instructed that her papers be marked “definitely never to be released”, the first attempt that this had been forced on a woman in Australian history.

Prison

It has been reported that Katherine has held a leadership role midst prisoners at Silverwater Women’s Correctional Center and a arbitrator of conflicts. It was shared in July 2017 that to that mark she did not have a record of violence in prison and haven’t given any additional prison charges.