'Female Hannibal' about to feed boyfriend to kids when coworkers raised alarm

09 December 2023 , 07:26

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Katherine Knight was found guilty of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment with no chance of parole

When Katherine Mary Knight stabbed her boyfriend John Charles Thomas Price to death with a butcher knife on 29 February 2000, it was branded the "most diabolical, sick and twisted" killing in Australian history.

Price's coworkers raised the alarm the next day, calling the police when he failed to show up for his shift. Having filed a restraining order against Knight earlier that month after an altercation culminated with her attempting to stab him in the chest, he had warned those close to him that were he to disappear under mysterious circumstances, it was because Knight had killed him.

An autopsy together with evidence from the crime scene revealed that the then-44 year-old abattoir worker had skinned Price's lifeless body and hung it from a meat hook on the architrave of a door to the living room. Pieces of his body were cooked in a dish with potato, pumpkin, beets, courgettes, cabbage, squash, and gravy.

In February 2000, Katherine Knight stabbed her boyfriend John Price to death with a butchers knife

Beside each full plate were notes which read her children's names, although the police's discovery of half-discarded food remnants thrown on the back lawn suggested Knight herself couldn't stomach finishing the gruesome "meal".

Such was the macabre nature of the crime that Knight – now known as "Cannibal Kathy" and "Australia's Hannibal Lector" – became the first Australian woman to be sentenced to life without parole, her record marked with the words "never to be released".

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And so graphic was the nature of the photographic evidence that five of the 60 jury prospects accepted Justice Barry O'Keefe's offer of being excused before the trial had even commenced.

Knight made international headlines in 2000 after stabbing John 37 times and hanging his decapitated, skinned body on a meat hook

Having initially pleaded not guilty to the charge of murder, Knight changed her plea to guilty, while continuing to refuse responsibility for her actions. To this day, Knight maintains her innocence and claims no recollection of that night's events.

Her appeal of the life sentence in June 2006 was dismissed by the New South Wales Court of Criminal Appeal, with Justice McClellan writing in his judgement: "This was an appalling crime, almost beyond contemplation in a civilised society".

Knight was born in northwestern New South Wales on October 24 1955 to a family wracked by alcoholism and sexual abuse. Accounts of her childhood vary, though most cast her as a Dr. Jekyll-and-Mr-Hyde figure – simultaneously a model student who often earned awards for good behaviour and a bullying "loner" known to have assaulted a fellow classmate with a weapon.

At the tender age of 18, she began working at the local slaughterhouse, where she was quickly promoted and given her own set of butchers' knives. At home, the knives were given pride of place hanging over her bed so that, as Knight later recalled, "they would always be handy if I needed them".

Mizy Judah Clifton