Wife killed, skinned and chopped up lover and served him up to his children | World | News

The evening before John Price, 44, was savagely killed, dismembered and cannibalised, he had warned his colleagues, “if I don’t come in tomorrow, Katherine Knight killed me.”

When Price, described by friends as a “terrific bloke”, failed to turn up for his early-morning shift, a workmate raced to his property and discovered blood splashed across the front entrance.

Authorities were quickly called and, upon entering the New South Wales home in Australia, officers encountered a genuinely horrific scene.

Blood saturated the floors and walls. Suspended from a meathook attached to the kitchen doorframe was a “pelt” of human skin, former Sergeant Robert Wells remembered.

Within the kitchen stood a pot on the cooker. Inside that they discovered Price’s head, boiled with potato, carrot and cabbage, reports the Mirror.

Portions of his flesh had also been plated up, still warm, on the kitchen table with a side of vegetables. Each plate was accompanied by a note bearing the names of Price’s children, who were staying overnight at a friend’s residence.

Finally, on the lounge sofa, beside Price’s headless torso, was Katherine Knight, fast asleep. Following her savage butchering of her partner, Knight is alleged to have consumed portions of his flesh before washing them down with a substantial dose of sleeping tablets.

Knight was hospitalised and arrested. So graphic were the crime scene photographs that the judge on her case offered the jury the option to be excused.

It was established she had stabbed Price 37 times. Justice Barry O’Keefe was so appalled by the gravity of the crime and Knight’s absence of remorse that he sentenced her to life imprisonment without parole, marking the first instance in Australian history where a woman received such a sentence.

He firmly recommended she “never be released” and stated she “did not qualify for mercy”.

During the trial, horrifying aspects of Knight’s life were revealed. Knight’s father, Ken, was a violent alcoholic who would sexually assault her mother, Barbara, up to 10 times daily.

Ken also repeatedly raped Katherine until she reached the age of 11. If she voiced her complaints to her mother, she was told to endure it and cease complaining.

She left school at 15, illiterate, and was remembered by former classmates as a bully. Shortly thereafter, she landed her “dream job” at an abattoir and began a relationship with her colleague, David Kellett.

Kellett recalled Knight as being extremely abusive and sadistic. She attempted to strangle him on their wedding night because they’d only had intercourse three times.

She once set all his clothes alight and fractured his skull with a frying pan.

After giving birth to her first daughter, Melissa Ann, in May 1976, Knight descended into severe postnatal depression and was discovered violently swinging the newborn around in a pram. A few weeks later, she abandoned the child on a railway line.

The infant was rescued just in time by a homeless man known as “Old Ted”, who found her on the tracks mere minutes before a train was due to pass through.

Knight, meanwhile, had ventured into town carrying a stolen axe, issuing death threats to passers-by. Several days afterwards, she assaulted a woman with a butcher’s knife and took a young boy hostage at a service station, threatening to kill him.

This pattern of violence persisted when she began a relationship with John Price in 1998, who was in the midst of obtaining a restraining order against Knight when he was murdered.

Luke Taylor, a former detective, said, “There were so many warning signs, yet none were headed.”

He believes Knight was driven by her hatred of men, which originated from the abuse she endured as a child.

“Knight had endured appalling sexual abuse throughout her youth at the hands of multiple men,” he said. “This led to a series of troubled relationships with men in her adult life.”