When John Price failed to show up to work on 1 March 2000, his colleagues knew something was wrong. The day before, the miner had told them how he feared that his partner of seven years, Katherine Knight, might try to kill him.
Tragically, John, 44, was brutally stabbed to deathby Knight in their home in Aberdeen in the Hunter Valley of New South Wales.
The now-70-year-old murderer used the skills she’d developed in her “dream job” at an abattoir to skin John and cook parts of his body.
She intended to feed them to his kids. One of the first investigators on the scene, Detective Sergeant Robert Wells, described the scene in John’s home as so gruesome, he’s still trying to eradicate the memories.
A horrifying discovery
“I walked inside and saw the human skin pelt hanging up, completely intact and in one piece,” he said in March 2023.
“John Price’s decapitated and skinned body was lying on the floor in the lounge room. We found his head boiled and cooked in a pot on the stove.”
The woman behind the headlines
Knight has been dubbed Australia’s “female Hannibal Lecter” for her barbaric acts. Yet before committing this shocking murder, those who knew her said she was a normal and hardworking mum of four.
“I don’t know if their relationship was ever perfect, but it was nothing out of the norm,” the couple’s neighbour Rick Banyard insisted in 2020.
Prior to her trial in October 2001, Knight was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder, which experts argued fuelled extreme emotional reactions that made her volatile.
But during the trial, it was found that this diagnosis alone was not enough to explain the gravity of Knight’s offending. She claimed to have no memory of what happened.
A troubled childhood
During the court case, it was revealed that Knight’s dysfunctional upbringing might have played a part.
She had been subjected to extreme sexual abuse by extended family members as a child. There were also warning signs – in 1974, the reportedly knife-obsessed Knight married David Kellett. Theirs was a violent relationship and she allegedly tried to strangle him on their wedding night.
The pair, who had two kids together, divorced in 1984. Two years later, Knight met David Saunders.
A dangerous relationship
A year into that relationship, Knight allegedly cut the throat of David’s two-month-old puppy – and she threatened to do the same to David if he ever cheated on her.
David eventually left Knight and went into hiding shortly after the birth of their daughter in June 1988. Six years later, Knight met John and the couple enjoyed
a relatively calm life together – until John left her just days before his death.
Life behind bars
In 2001, Knight pleaded guilty to murder and became the first woman in Australia to be sentenced to life imprisonment without parole.
“Prison’s been a place where she’s found peace from the demons in her mind,” tells Sydney author Rojé Augustin, who has written a dramatised account of Knight’s life, The Butcher Of Aberdeen: A Story Of Sex, Madness And Murder.
Nowadays, Knight spends her days knitting, painting and mentoring younger inmates in Sydney’s Silverwater Correctional Centre, where she’s affectionately known as “the Nana”.
The Butcher Of Aberdeen by Rojé Augustin ($44, Simon & Schuster).
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