by Peter Lalor
And Bob Wells could feel a knot forming in his gut, a tightening in the temples that started to beat an urgent rhythm in the relentless March heat.
5
Ex-boyfriends and husbands
1 & 2 March 2000
Dave Saunders and a mate were heading down the New England Highway towards Muswellbrook early that Wednesday morning. They had just passed Aberdeen when Dave saw two cop cars go flying past. ‘Something must be on,’ he said. They got to town, did their business and were heading back up the road when Saunders saw one of the cars headed back in the opposite direction. ‘It couldn’t have been too much, here comes one of ‘em back.’ They kept driving to Scone and his mate headed off. It was still early, about 9.30 am.
They were heading out to do a few things but his wife Jenny hadn’t had a shower yet. While she did that Dave went outside to start up the Falcon. Listened to it run. Just then a copper came walking down the driveway. A highway patrol bloke.
—Are you Dave Saunders?
—Yeah. What have I done?
—Do you know where your daughter is?
—No, she should be at school. Why?
—Well, she’s not at school.
Dave had a daughter to Katherine Knight from a relationship a decade before. He knew that Kath would send her to school come hell or high water. These kids would have to be at death’s door before they’d be allowed to stay home for a day and mess up their mum’s routine. Saunders started to panic. At first the cop wouldn’t say anything, but he could see the fear in the father’s eyes.
—What’s Kath done?
—We think she’s done Pricey in.
—Well, where’s me daughter?
—We don’t know. Can you give us any names to ring and check?
—Oh, no.
Saunders was terrified. He ran in and got some numbers. He yelled to his wife to get out of the shower.
—We’ve got to go and look for the girl. I think Katherine’s killed Pricey. No one knows where the kids are. C’mon Jen, we’ve got to go!
He asked the copper to ring him on the mobile if they found her. Saunders drove around for the next four hours. Up and down the highway. From town to town. Place to place, panic rising. His mind going a million miles an hour. He knew Kath was violent. She’d killed one of his dogs, hit him with an iron and a saucepan, even stabbed him with scissors, but he never thought she’d go this far. Where’s my little girl? What’s she done to her?
By early afternoon he’d run out of places to look and rang the cops back. They told him they’d found the girl and she was okay. They’d found her a couple of hours before. Nobody had bothered to tell him. He was pissed off but relieved. Then he began to think about Pricey. He was a top bloke. They were mates. He’d been chatting with him on Saturday night at a party. Kath had been giving him a hard time. Poor bastard, he didn’t deserve that.
* * *
John Chillingworth, father of Katherine’s youngest son, was in his cab just outside the Gold Coast Hospital when his mum called on the phone telling him to pull over. She had some news.
—It’s Dad, isn’t it? What’s happened to Dad?
—Nothing’s happened to your father. Pull over and I’ll tell you.
—Yes, Mum.
He keeps driving. As you do.
—John, Katherine’s killed Pricey.
Christ almighty, that was one out of the blue. He should have pulled over.
—Killed him?
His mum said something about not being able to find the kids and that’s when Chillingworth started to panic. It was just momentary confusion. The shock of the news, the mobile phone, an elderly woman. His mum reassured him that Katherine’s daughter Natasha had called and the boy, his son, was with her. He was okay. A crossed wire, but still Chillingworth was frightened.
—He should be with you, Mum. Why haven’t you got him?
After she got off the phone, his mum drove from Scone with Chillingworth’s sister and picked up the boy from Natasha’s place. Chillingworth dropped the cab off, went back home and hit the highway as fast as he could, driving with an intensity he hadn’t experienced since making a similar trip six years earlier when she’d first taken the boy from him. He had plenty to think about on the way down. He figured what happened wasn’t that surprising. He always believed Katherine was always going to kill or maim somebody, but he was beside himself with worry about what the boy had seen. What had he been through? Poor little bugger.
Chillingworth arrived in the early hours of Thursday morning, shaking and agitated. Back in his old stomping ground. He was just so happy to see the boy, but of course things turned to shit the next day, as was usual from his experience of past dealings with the Knight women. He just wanted to get his son away from the place, but the kid had to make a statement to the police and it took an hour and a half. Then they couldn’t leave because Knight’s daughters and family were making trouble about him taking the boy’s things back with him. Making appointments and changing their mind. They were Kath’s relatives allright. Always worried about what was theirs. The women finally agreed that he could pick the boy’s things up from Kath’s house early on Saturday morning. Then they insisted he find a justice of the peace to sign a statutory declaration about what he took and they filmed him taking the things. Usual shit.
And, in the middle of it all, there were bits and pieces of news floating around the place. People were saying to him that she’d cut him up, but he didn’t believe it. Johnny Hinder, who was married to Katherine’s twin sister Joy, had a chat with Chillingworth on the Friday night and passed on some of the detail.
—What really happened to him?
—Just imagine in your wildest dreams what anyone could do to a man with a knife and that’s what happened.
—What, she hacked him up?
—Worse than that.
—Shit, she couldn’t have done what I’m thinking.
—Mate, it’s ten times worse than what you’re thinking.
Chillingworth thought that the mother of his son had cut off Pricey’s penis. God knows she’d threatened similar things many a time.
—No, she fuckin’ skinned him and cut his fuckin’ head off.
—You’re joking.
He didn’t say too much more because Joy was there looking daggers. Chillingworth couldn’t get out of that town fast enough.
* * *
David Stanford Kellett was the last of the fathers to find out. The news drifted back through time and relationships to him. He was her first real boyfriend and the man she had married when she was still a teenager. Kellett was driving to his in-laws’ place on Thursday morning with his second wife and their two kids; a thousand kilometres and nearly two decades on from that wild red-headed woman who had fractured his skull, burned his clothes, bore him two children and left him.
His wife was reading the local paper. Something caught her eye.
—David, there’s been a murder in Aberdeen. What was the name of Kathy’s boyfriend?
—Pricey. John Price.
—God, David. It says here a woman in Aberdeen has killed him. He’s been beheaded and mutilated by his girlfriend.
—What?
Kellett wasn’t sure if Kath was still with Price, but he was sure there was only one woman capable of doing that. He’d been on the wrong end of her knives once or twice himself. When they got to his parents-in-law’s place Kellett called Ken Knight, his former father-in-law, and asked him if it was true.
—Yeah, that’s fuckin’ right, Kellett. Buy yourself a lottery ticket, son!
Kellett rang the Muswellbrook police, told a policewoman he was Katherine Knight’s first husband and she put John Alderson on the phone. They spoke for a while and he learned a little more. He’s never slept right since. On reflection, Kellett knew, or thought he did, every second of Price’s miserable last minutes. He knew Pricey; they’d had a beer together a couple of years before and the poor bastard had told him he was having troubles with
her, that he wanted to get out of the relationship.
Two years later, sitting in a club, eating a steak sandwich, Dave Kellett’s voice starts to break.
I get so close to tears every time I even think about it. I don’t know, I get so emotionally upset, not to think that it could happen to me. Probably because she was the mother of my children. I was married to her for the first ten years of our life. Holidays we went on together, things we did together. I try to hide everything, always have. I get emotionally … I could sit down and cry sometimes when I think about it. What he’s gone through. I can actually see her doing it, I really can. I can see what she’s doing, I know how she’d go about it and I can see her talking to herself and talking to him and abusing him as she’s doing it. I can see her abusing him. To hold a knife at my throat like she did … If something comes on the TV about a murder I don’t sleep that night, still don’t because I think of her. I even wake up some nights and I can hear the knife going into the flesh, I can hear that noise that happens when you tear the skin off a rabbit.
Kellett has an unlisted number and doesn’t let anybody know where he lives. He thinks that she’d come for him next. The thought terrifies him. All three think that. Each man feels as if he has been given a guided tour of hell and somehow found the way back.
6
Katherine grows up and marries David Kellett
1955-74
Katherine Mary Knight and David Stanford Kellett were married in 1974. The big day could have been a Bruce Springsteen song. There was drinkin’, marryin’, lovin’ and fightin’. A slaughterhouse couple at the courthouse. The roguish little groom wore a purple paisley shirt, purple flairs and tortured bangs; the bride looked sweet, if a little gawky. A tall, thin 18-year-old girl with wireframed spectacles in a sleeveless pink dress, a bow hanging from the bodice and a man on her arm. She is a fiery, good-time local lass with a dark history and a darker future, as her new husband would discover before the night was out.
The couple arrived at the Muswellbrook courthouse on Katherine’s Honda 250CC trail bike, Kellett hanging on desperately to the back. He’d recently lost his licence and anyway he was smashed. Profoundly pissed. He’d been out all night and kept drinking into the morning. It was almost 10.30 am and they were half an hour late because his mates had tried, vainly, to sober him up.
This was no Woman’s Weekly white wedding. The two abattoir workers had opted for the $20-20 minute slap-up with a few friends from work in attendance. Kellett says the fact that he was actually marrying her had most of the town whispering that this must be a shotgun affair. She’d asked him during a lunch break at work, just as years later she’d buy a ring and announce that John Price was her fiancé. Despite their predictions she was not pregnant.
Kath and Dave made a shambolic picture standing in front of the justice of the peace. Him swaying as if the ceremony was held on a yacht, her nervous and tall. A good head taller in fact. Her height gave her an advantage, if he tried to kiss her she could lean her head back and he was left puckered up and stretching. It also meant, as he was to discover, that she could lord it over him physically. When the justice of the peace was all done, however, she leaned down to kiss him and it was official. Man and wife. Kellett and Kath. Till death, or serious physical assault, do they part…
From the courthouse the couple wove their way—Knight hardly ever drank and was supporting her diminutive groom—to the pub across the road, where they spent their first hours as Mr and Mrs David Kellett. There was no honeymoon. In fact, they had to be back at work the next day.
Knight thought she was in love, Kellett wasn’t so sure but went ahead with it anyway. He thinks now he may have caught her on the rebound, that she raced him to the altar because there was a chance he’d get back with his ex. Still, she was a good girl, who knew how to look after a bloke, and they got on well together. She seemed to like fishing and shooting as much as him. She could skin a rabbit as good as any bloke and wasn’t too fussy about his drinking or wild nature. She stood by him if things turned nasty in the pub, sometimes stepping up front and telling people to fuck off and leave her bloke alone. She was ready to back it up with her fists if necessary. A chip off the old block, Kath. A roughrider’s daughter.
The wedding day dragged on. And on. Later that night, at their rented flat, the groom was called on to perform his conjugal duties and says he made a reasonable go at it. They did it three times, but the new Mrs Kellett wasn’t satisfied. Her mum and dad had done it five times on their wedding night. Her mum told her that and what her mum said was gospel to Katherine. Kellett was buggered, all that rooting and 24 hours of drinking had exhausted the little fella and he rolled over to go to sleep.
—Geez, three times was enough with her!
Still, they had gone for it like rabbits during their romance. ‘Ten times a day was nothin’; behind the chook shed, in the car …’ They’d even run back to her parents’ during lunch break at the abattoir, stripping off their overalls and rolling around in a lusty frenzy, shrouded in the sickly sweet smell of blood and dead animals. Bucking like bunnies. Kath had her first orgasm with Kellett and the experience frightened her a little.
But the night of their wedding her new husband was asleep and as she lay there listening to his laboured breathing she started to get worked up. It just wasn’t the way the world was meant to be. Mum and Dad did it five times and she was bitterly disappointed. The new Mrs Kellett’s blood was starting to boil. He knew she had a bit of temper, she was a redhead after all, but that was half the fun with Kath. She could be fiery.
Suddenly he was wrenched from sleep. She was at him, hands around his throat. Choking and shaking him. She was well worked up. Fuckin’ furious.
My parents did it five times!
She was shaking the shit out of me. I was pissed. Asleep. What do you expect? I’d been drinking all fucking day.
Five fucking times!
She was shaking him like he was one of the dolls she used to play sex games with as a little girl. ‘Five times!’ He was shirking his duty, undermining the order of things. And at that moment they were like Katherine’s mum and dad.
He had to get it together fast. Get the voice down into those sweet, apologetic tones. He eventually got her calm, but he had been warned: much of their ensuing marriage was dictated by what Katherine’s mother, Barbara, said. In fact, Barbara Knight had given him a little advice before they fronted the courthouse.
The old girl said to me to watch out. ‘You better watch this one, she’ll fucking kill ya. Stir her up the wrong way or do the wrong thing and you’re fucked—don’t ever think of playing up on her—she’ll fuckin kill ya.’ And that was her mother talking!
She told me she’s got something loose, she’s got a screw loose somewhere.
Her mother used to tell me things, the crazy things she used to do, so headstrong and just crazy, not playing with a full deck.
Barbara told Kellett how the red-headed twin daughter could snap like a dry twig. She was prone to murderous rages that began without warning and blew over just as quickly. You had to watch that one, she had the Thorley gene that had come down from the women on Barbara’s side of the family—Barb was one of the Thorleys of Muswellbrook. A tribe, like the Knights, not to be taken lightly.
Kellett wasn’t the only person Barbara Knight warned about Katherine. Many years later sitting in her kitchen with Colleen Price, she offered a similar assessment. Barbara knew that this one was capable of unimaginable anger and unspeakable acts.
My daughter Rosemary was about nine, I went out there to pick her up. She was playing with Joy’s kid, and we went in for a cuppa and a chat. Barbara used to make these gorgeous cakes and scones, and right out of the blue, we were talking about nothing, she said, ‘Whatever you do, keep an eye on Kathy. Don’t cross her’. Kathy was always weird. We were both only young then. Her birthday is the 17th, I’m the 10th.
* * *
The personality problems demonstrated in the history
of Ms Knight’s life are not in my view psychiatric diseases—they are her nature. These personality problems did not stop her from knowing what she was doing, or whether it was right or wrong. Nor did they stop her from exercising control of her actions … The main effect of Ms Knight’s personality probably was to cause difficulty for others. I question whether that should be regarded as an ‘aberration of mind’ and think, or believe, it is not, but it is probably an issue for the court to decide.
Dr Rod Milton 14.10.2001
What she did on the night was part of her personality, her nature, herself… It is probable that she thought about doing things like that for a long time, perhaps many years … It is more than just stabbing, cutting, the knife going in and out many, many times. The skill, the time, the focus that must have been required…
Dr Robert Delaforce 26.10.2001
Despite the warning from his potential mother-in-law, David Kellett had little hope of knowing what sort of a girl he had married in those wild and woolly days. She was fun, she was devoted, she was sexually compliant, and she was also damaged goods. Seriously damaged. A time-bomb that would explode violently, time and again, without warning. Even before she turned 21 the path of Katherine Knight’s adult relationships was laid out clearly. She would fall in love suddenly and totally, and fall out of it with equal haste and venom. It was almost guaranteed that she would have a string of kids to a string of partners. She would react with inappropriate anger to minor upsets, was impulsive and restless. Any man who took her on was in for a rollercoaster ride marked by violent outbursts, suicides, love and hate. A lot of hate and dreams of revenge.
When Barbara Knight warned Kellett about the consequences of doing the wrong thing by her little girl, there was every chance that she was speaking with more than just a mother’s intuition. She knew this twin child like she knew her own damaged self. To understand her daughter you don’t have to dig very deep or travel very far. The red-headed girl’s secrets and fears lay buried in a shallow grave in the family’s backyard, covered by a sprinkling of earth that could be disturbed by the slightest wind.
