Katherine Knight: Mother and Killer

 Australia's first woman to get life imprisonment without parole

Katherine Knight was born on October 24th, 1955. In her early life Katherine worked in a slaughterhouse and then the animal carcasses. Katherine worked in the boning room and she was good at her job and also enjoyed it. 

While she was working there, she met a man by the name of David K. They quickly got married. However, David was a raging alcoholic and would often try to beat Katherine. But Katherine was a strong woman and she never backed down. If David tried to hit her she would hit him even harder. Their marriage lasted almost 10 years and they had 2 daughters. 

After separating from David K. Katherine met David Saunders and they started dating. After a few months Katherine urged him to move in with her which he didn't want to do because he liked having his own place. But that enraged Katherine. During one of their arguments, Katherine slit their 2 month old puppy’s throat just to show David the lengths she could go to.

Despite all that, they ended up having a daughter together. However, shortly after their daughter was born, they got into another fight and Katherine ended up stabbing David with a pair of scissors. So fortunately, after that they broke up.

After David, Katherine started seeing a man by the name of John Chillingworth. They had a son together. Their relationship lasted for about 3 years and it was rather a healthier one compared to the others. Mostly because during the entirety of the relationship Katherine was cheating on her partner with another man who’s name was ironically also John, John Price.

At first things were going well for them, but then when Katherine asked John for marriage, he refused. Which again enraged her. They started getting into fights which would often resort to her abusing him verbally or physically. Eventually, John ended up calling the police  on Katherine because he wanted her out of his house and she wouldn’t leave. But the police couldn’t do much about it. So John decided to let all of his coworkers know that if anything happened to him, it would be on Katherine.

During one of their fights Katherine ended up stabbing him in the chest. John had finally had enough and decided to go to court to get a restraining order against  her. But Katherine of course decided to ignore it and during one afternoon decided to pay him a visit. Katherine made herself at home, she woke John up, they spent some time together and John went back to bed. After that, Katherine opened her nightstand drawer where she had previously kept a butcher’s knife. Katherine ended up stabbing John more than 37 times. John tried to fight for his life but failed miserably. After taking John’s life, Katherine tried to take her own life too, or at least she tried to make it appear like that, when she took a few pills and lied down.

Fortunately, John's coworkers kept their word. When he didn’t show up to work the other day they called the police. So the police went to John’s place to check up on him. They kept knocking on the door but no one answered. So they broke into the house and the doorframe was covered with an

enormous curtain. When the police pushed through it they found the entire place was covered with blood. When they took a good look at the curtain they realized that it was in fact not a curtain. It was skin. And on the floor there was a headless torso. 

They went further into the house and they found there was blood everywhere. In the kitchen there was some food served on plates. They went upstairs and heard someone snoring. Then they found Katherine sleeping on the bed. They tried to wake her up but she was unresponsive. So they carried her to the back lawn. They went back to the house and discovered some more things. They found John’s severed head in the kitchen cooking inside a stew.

According to the forensics, Katherine stabbed John many times and John tried to run away to save himself. They noticed his blood splatters make it down the hallway. But the further he got the lower the splatters got as he grew weaker. John did make it to the front door as there were more splatters there. Unfortunately, that's the furthest he got because then Katherine dragged him to the lounge area since that’s where most of the blood was found. Then she used her animal butchering skills to skin him and then proceeded to decapitate him. She took his severed head into the kitchen. In the kitchen she cut off a big chunk off of his back muscle. She cut it into 5 pieces, gave the dog one piece and cooked the rest of the 4 pieces. 

They noticed that she set up the table with 4 plates and name plates. The names were of their children. So Katherine had the brilliant idea of feeding the kids their own father. Then around 12 AM John’s bank card was used to withdraw about 1000 dollars. So the police assumed that after committing the murder Katherine went out to take out the money. Regardless they couldn’t find the money later.

So, Katherine was immediately taken under custody. However, she was in a coma for 4 days. After she came to her senses of course she couldn’t remember anything that happened in the past couple days. But eventually she confessed to the murder of John. In her statement, she mentioned that she killed him because of the abuse she was facing from John throughout their relationship. But the police were never able to get a clear story from her.

During the court trial, first Katherine pled not guilty. But later she changed it to guilty without any explanation. The court knew that she would try for the insanity plea later on. 

Throughout the trial she showed no sense of emotions. But then she would start to scream out of the blue to appear insane. However when a psychiatrist did an evaluation on her she was proven sane.

So, Katherine received life in prison without the possibility of parole. She was the first woman in Australia to receive such a sentence. No one to this day knows exactly what happened that night. But many psychologists claim that it was in fact a crime of passion.