But the relationship quickly descended into chaos as Knight unleashed her fury on him, with the jilted lover launching a horror attack which saw Price stabbed 37 times and his decapitated head left stewing on the kitchen stove.
Almost 25 years ago, the cannibal murderess mutilated and skinned her partner just hours after he took out a restraining order against her – warning his coworkers that if he were to ever go missing, it was because his girlfriend had killed him.
In scenes akin to those in horror films, Knight would leave Price’s ‘skin suit’ hanging from a meat hook in their blood-splattered home, as she prepared a dinner for his children made from the flesh left on his bones.
The brutal slaying sent shockwaves through Australia, and resulted in the butcher becoming the first ever female murderer sentenced to life behind bars without parole in Canberra.
Following her arrest, Knight was thrown into the hellhole Silverwater Women’s Correctional Centre in Sydney, where she remains to this day.
Katherine Knight (right) murdered her partner John Price (left) before cutting off his head and skinning his body. She then cooked his head in a pot and served up his body parts on plates set for his three children. Knight was the first Australian woman to be sentenced to life without parole
The making of a cannibal murderess
Katherine Knight was born and raised in Moore, into a dysfunctional family which saw her mother Barbara Roughan cheat on her father Jack Roughan with his co-worker and friend, Kenneth Charles Knight.
Knight had seven siblings and was a twin, and in 1959 when she was just four-years-old, Barbara’s first husband died and his two eldest sons moved in with her mother and Kenneth.
Ken was known to be an extremely violent man who would rape Barbara up to 10 times a day, and in turn, she would share intimate details of her sex life with her daughters and tell them how much she hated intercourse and men.
Later, when Knight grew older, she complained to her mother that one of her partners had requested she take part in a sex act she did not want to perform, and was allegedly told by Barbara to ‘put up with it and stop complaining’.
Knight claimed she was frequently the victim of rape at the hands of several family members, though not by her father, which continued until she was 11-years-old.
Although there are doubts about the details, psychiatrists accept her claims and the events have been largely confirmed by other members of the family.
Apart from her twin sister, the only person Knight was close to within her family was her uncle, Oscar Knight, a champion horseman.
Katherine Knight was involved in a series of relationships in which she was the perpetrator of appalling domestic violence. She viciously assaulted one partner with a frying pan, stabbed him with scissors and slit the throat of his pet dingo pup
She was devastated when he commit suicide in 1969 and continues to maintain that his ghost visits her.
When she attended Muswellbrook high school, Knight became known as a loner and is remembered by classmates as a bully who preyed on younger and smaller pupils.
She assaulted at least one boy at school with a weapon, and was once left injured by a teacher who was later found to have acted in self-defence.
When Knight left school at age 15, she was still unable to read or write, resulting in her finding a job as a cutter in a clothing factory.
Just a year later, she left to start what she described as her ‘dream job’, cutting up offal at the local abattoir.
Knight was quickly promoted to boning and was given her own set of butchers’ knives, which she kept strapped to the ceiling above her bed.
She continued this bizarre habit until her incarceration, in every place she lived.
The hunt for her victim
In what would become a long string of failed and violent relationships, Knight met her first husband, David Kellett in 1973.
Kellett was a heavy drinker and the pair met at the abattoir before tying the knot in a drunken ceremony just a year later.
The couple arrived at the service on Knight’s motorcycle where Barbara dished out some chilling advice to her new son-in-law.
‘The old girl [Knight’s mother] said to me to watch out. ‘You better watch this one or she’ll f****** kill you. Stir her up the wrong way or do the wrong thing and you’re f*****, don’t ever think of playing up on her [cheating on her], she’ll f****** kill you.’ And that was her mother talking! She told me she’s got something loose. She’s got a screw loose somewhere,’ Kellett later said.
Knight married abattoir worker David Kellett when she was 18 and tried to strangle him on their wedding night when he fell asleep after three rounds of sex. Kellett was unable to handle his wife’s mood swings and ran off to Queensland. The couple is pictured on their wedding day
On their wedding night, Knight tried to strangle her husband, later explaining it was because he fell asleep after only having sex three times.
Their marriage spiralled into a vicious, twisted, affair which would see a heavily pregnant Knight burn all of Kellett’s clothes and shoes before smashing him around the head with a frying pan, simply because he arrived home late from a darts competition after reaching the finals.
Kellett fled the home and sought shelter in a neighbour’s house before collapsing with a severely fractured skull. She managed to talk her husband out of pressing charges against her.
Two years after they wed, Knight gave birth to their first child, Melissa Ann.
But seemingly unable to handle the abuse, Kellett left Knight for another woman and moved to Queensland.
The following day Knight was spotted pushing her newborn in a pram down the main street while violently swinging it from side to side.
She was admitted to St Elmo’s hospital in Tamworth where she was diagnosed with postnatal depression and spent several weeks recovering.
After being released, however, she decided to seek revenge on Kellett for leaving her, and so she placed two-month-old Melissa on a railway line shortly before a train was due.
She then stole an axe and headed into the local town while threatening to kill several people.
Knight kept her butcher’s knifes and other sharp weapons attached to the ceiling above her bed
Knight and Price had lived at Aberdeen, a small township on a hillside in the New South Wales Hunter Valley between Muswellbrook and Scone, about 270km north of Sydney. The town’s largest employer was the local abattoir
Miraculously, a man known in the area as Old Ted was foraging near the railway line and rescued baby Melissa just moments before the train made its journey down the tracks.
Knight was arrested and again taken to St Elmo’s Hospital, but she reportedly recovered and discharged herself the next day.
A few days after, Knight slashed the face of a woman with one of her butchers’ knives and demanded she drive her to Queensland to track down her husband.
The woman managed to escape the enraged Knight after they stopped at a service station, but by the time police arrived, she had already taken a young boy hostage and threatened him with the knife.
Knight was disarmed by cops when they attacked her with brooms and was admitted to Morisset psychiatric hospital where she told nurses she had intended to kill the mechanic at the service station because he had repaired Kellett’s car, which had allowed him to leave, and then kill both her husband and his mother when she arrived in Queensland.
When police informed Kellett of the incident, he left his girlfriend and moved back to Aberdeen with his mother to support Knight.
Knight left Kellett in 1984, four years after having her second baby, Natasha Maree.
Two years later she met David Saunders, but the relationship again spiralled into violence and anger and she would often throw him out of the house before following him and begging him to return.
John Price pictured around the time when he met Katherine Knight. The couple moved in together in 1995 but her violent episodes caused him to leave her in February 2000 which prompted her depraved revenge
In 1987, Knight sliced the throat of Saunders’ two-month-old dingo pup in front of him in a warning of what would happen to him if he ever had an affair before knocking him out with a frying pan.
The following year, Knight gave birth to her third daughter, Sarah, which prompted the couple to put down a deposit on a house which she later decorated with animal skins, skulls, horns, rusty animal traps, leather jackets, old boots, machetes, rakes and pitchforks. No space, including the ceilings, was left uncovered.
During a fight with Saunders, she hit him in the face with an iron before stabbing him in the abdomen with a pair of scissors.
In 1991, Knight became pregnant by John Chillingworth, a former abattoir worker.
The pair had a son named Eric and spent three years together before she left him for a man she had been having an affair with for some time – John Price.
The slaughtering of John Price
John Price began his affair with Knight before 1988 when his marriage ended, and she later moved into his home in 1995.
He was aware of her violent reputation but as his children liked her, he decided to overlook the worrying behaviour.
When he refused to marry her, this led to a brutal retaliation from Knight who videotaped items he had allegedly stolen from work before sending the tape to his boss.
Although the items were out of date medical kits that he had scavenged from the company bins, Price was fired from the job he had held for seventeen years.
That same day, he kicked her out of his home while the news of what she had done spread around the town.
John Price was recently separated from his wife when he fell for Katherine Knight’s supposed charms, despite him knowing about her violent past
A few months went by before he restarted the relationship, although he now refused to allow her to move in with him.
The fighting became even more frequent and many of his friends refused to have any contact with him while he was with Knight.
But nothing could prepare Price for what would unfold just two years down the line.
On February 28, 2000, a fed-up Price took out a restraining order on Knight in an attempt to keep her away from him and his children after a series of assaults resulted in him being stabbed in the chest.
That very afternoon he told his colleagues that if he did not show up to work the following day it was because he had been murdered by Knight.
His co-workers begged him not to return home but he allegedly stated he feared she would kill his children if he did not.
Upon arriving home at around 11pm, he discovered Knight had sent the children away for a sleepover and this would be the final evening Price spent alive.
At 6am the following morning, a neighbour grew concerned that Price’s car was still in the driveway and that he had not shown up for his shift – especially given his recent warning.
Both the neighbour and the worker tried knocking on Price’s bedroom window to wake him, but phoned the police when they noticed blood on the front door.
Cops rushed to the scene and smashed down the back door where they were met with a sight that would haunt them for decades.
Police found Price’s body, with Knight passed out after taking a large number of pills.
Paramedics suspected Katherine Knight had tried to kill herself after murdering her partner as cops found her comatose after taking a large amount of pills
Knight dragged Price’s bloody and severely wounded body down the hallway where blood splatters were later found covering the walls
The enraged woman stabbed her partner at least 37 times as he attempted to flee the horror house
She had stabbed her boyfriend with a butcher’s knife while he was sleeping and according to the blood evidence, he awoke and attempted to turn on the light before trying to flee the room as Knight chased him through the house.
Trails and splatters of blood on the walls of within the home indicate he made it all the way to the front door and managed to get outside, but he either fell or was dragged back into the hallway, where he finally died from severe blood loss.
Later, Knight travelled into Aberdeen and withdrew $1,000 from Price’s bank account at an ATM.
Price’s autopsy revealed that bloodthirsty Knight had plunged the knife into him at least 37 times, both in the front and back of the body, with many stabs puncturing his vital organs.
Several hours after Price had died, Knight skinned him alive and hung his skin from a meat hook at the entrance of their living room.
She then decapitated her boyfriend and cooked parts of his body, serving up the meat with baked potato, carrot, pumpkin, beetroot, zucchini, cabbage, yellow squash and gravy in two settings at the dinner table, along with notes beside each plate, each having the name of one of Price’s children on it.
A third meal – a cooked piece of Price’s left buttock – was thrown into the garden for reasons that remain unclear, and it was speculated that Knight had attempted to eat it but could not.
Price’s head was found stewing in a large boiler pot along with vegetables, and his body was left arranged with his left arm draped over an empty 1.25litre soft drink bottle with his legs crossed.
Knight had also left a handwritten note on top of a photograph of Price, which was bloodstained and covered with small pieces of flesh.
The first inspector on the scene found Price’s decapitated head boiling in a pot on the stove along with vegetables
The mum-of-four tried to serve cooked pieces of Price’s body to his kids. Pictured: A reconstruction of the horror meal from a documentary on the case
As police officers moved through Price’s house they caught the smell of cooked meat in the kitchen (pictured)
John Price was recently separated and the father of three children when Knight moved into his house (above). The honeymoon period soon ended and was replaced by insane violence
It read: ‘Time got you back Johathon for rapping [raping] my douter [daughter]. You to Beck [Price’s daughter] for Ross – for Little John [his son]. Now play with little Johns d*** John Price’.
The accusations in the notes were found to be groundless.
Cops at the house that day were eventually able to wake Knight and walked her back down the hallway that was covered in blood stains.
A detective who worked the case on the fateful day in February 2000 told The Sun: ‘There was a lot of blood in the hallway, which started high and then ended up low because obviously she stabbed him and she then chased him down the hallway, stabbing him’.
‘I saw Price’s body on the floor with the head missing,’ Detective Wells told the newspaper in 2022.
‘I saw his complete pelt, what you’d call skin, complete in one piece with a butcher’s hook through the top of his scalp and through the hair and hanging, hooked over the architraves of a doorway from the dining area into the lounge room.
‘He was hanging down’.
Knight would later tell police that she had no recollection of what happened and claimed she was the victim of domestic abuse – something Detective Wells ruled out after speaking to her ex partners.
Knight’s trial
Knight’s initial offer to plead guilty to manslaughter was rejected, and she was charged with the murder of Price on March 2, 2001, to which she entered a plea of not guilty.
When the trial began, Justice Barry O’Keefe offered the 60 jury prospects the option of being excused due to the graphic nature of the photographic evidence, which five accepted.
The following day, Knight changed her plea to guilty and the jury was dismissed.
O’Keefe ordered a psychiatric assessment to determine whether Knight understood the consequences of a guilty plea and whether she was fit to make such a plea.
Although psychiatrists considered the killer sane, two concluded that she suffered from borderline personality disorder.
But despite pleading guilty to the grotesque murder, Knight still refused to accept responsibility for her actions.
At the initial hearing, Knight’s lawyers requested she be excused from the courtroom to avoid hearing some of the grisly facts, but the application was flatly declined.
On November 8, O’Keefe highlighted the nature of the crime and Knight’s lack of remorse towards it, which in his eyes required a severe penalty.
Knight fatally stabbed John Price an estimated 37 times, chasing him down a hall and dragging him back inside the house when he tried to escape. After he died in the hallway Knight skinned and decapitated his body
It was at this house at Aberdeen in the NSW Hunter Valley that Katherine Knight carried out her final act of violence against men on February 29, 2000 when she stabbed her partner John Price 37 times. After flaying his body Knight hung Price’s skin on a meat hook
It was said that Knight showed no remorse for her actions and was sentenced to life in prison without possibility of parole
He sentenced the cannibal to life imprisonment, refused to fix a non-parole period and ordered that her papers be marked ‘definitely never to be released’, the first time that this had been imposed on a woman in Australian history.
‘The prisoner, Katherine Mary Knight, does not qualify for mercy,’ Justice O’Keefe said. ‘She engaged in cruel, vicious behaviour to Mr Price.
‘She showed him no mercy. She has not expressed any contrition or remorse. If released, she poses a serious threat to the security of society.
‘I’m satisfied beyond any doubt that such a murder was premeditated. I’m further satisfied in the same way that not only did she plan the murder, but she also enjoyed the horrific acts which followed in its wake as part of a ritual of death and defilement.’
In June 2006, Knight appealed the sentence, claiming that a penalty of life imprisonment without possibility of parole was too severe for the killing.
Justices Peter McClellan, Michael Adams and Megan Latham dismissed the appeal in the New South Wales Court of Criminal Appeal in September, with Justice McClellan writing in his judgement, ‘This was an appalling crime, almost beyond contemplation in a civilised society.’
The mum-of-four maintains her innocence and will spend the rest of her life at the brutal Silverwater Women’s Correctional Centre in Sydney.