Blood Stain

by Peter Lalor

  Melissa says now that Charlie discovered his sister being abused by his elder brother and was convinced to join in ‘the game’ by the older boy. Katherine says she told her sister Joy that she too was assaulted in a similar manner. In a statement to police, her twin said this:

  Kath has told me something about being sexually abused when she was very young, about five or six years old. It was by a family member, but I don’t really want to talk about that.

  Dr Milton, who examined her after the murder, casts some doubts on the veracity of Knight’s claims of sex abuse because she cannot remember the details. He believes that victims of sexual assault rarely suffer suppressed memory. In fact, most crave to forget what happened to them. Still, there seems to be enough smoke to suggest that there was a fire.

  * * *

  The Knight family left Moree and made the move back to Aberdeen for good in the late 1960s when the girls were about 13 years old. They moved into a house in 35 McAdam Street when Katherine was at high school. It was a former abattoir property. They kept chooks and a couple of Ken’s greyhounds in the backyard. Kath recalls around this time being belted with the dog lead and protected from her father by her mother, but she also remembers being belted by her mother with a jug cord. One visitor remembers a piece of wood above the door which was referred to as the killing stick. It was for disciplining the children.

  Katherine’s relationship with her father has remained volatile throughout her life. She says he hit her in sixth class and that he was charged with assaulting her many years later. In September 1984 she attended the local doctor with a bruise over her left breast which she claims was caused by her father.

  I know it gets me very emotional where he’s concerned. I can’t handle him … I just remember him violent to Mum … Dad used to bash Mum all the time. A lot of violence there but I can’t remember it. Lots of little bits, and I was always afraid of being raped.

  She said that she has a memory of Ken trying to get into her bed after her mother refused to have sex with him, but she never claimed he sexually abused her. However, her fear of rape, which clearly evolved from these early traumas, seemed to develop into a paranoia that manifested itself on many occasions. Katherine was forever making allegations that men had or wanted to abuse her children. None of these allegations was ever substantiated, but the fears were terribly real in her own mind, no matter how trivial or malicious they looked to anybody else. Katherine viewed all men as possible sex offenders where her daughters were concerned. They rape them. They abuse them. They’re helpless, she told psychiatrists.

  After shifting back to Aberdeen, Katherine had a lot of trouble with schooling. Locals remember she was a bully who stood over smaller kids. She was something of a loner who didn’t fit in well and only mixed with her immediate family. All the kids knew about the Knights and were willing to give her a wide berth. She is said to have assaulted one boy at school with a bamboo pole. One teacher beat Katherine so hard she left bruises and Barbara came to the school to see what was wrong. The mother was sent away with the news that her daughter was uncontrollable, which was no news to her. Barry Roughan says his sister was the wild one of the family. However, she remembers washing the cups for teachers and getting lollies for being good. It appears Katherine didn’t have as much difficulty in her early years at school as her later ones, which Dr Rod Milton, who interviewed her for the trial, said could indicate social rather than intellectual problems.

  Her personality problems were likely to interfere with her ability to concentrate, to relate to teachers and to other students, and resulted in her having very poor scholastic attainments, leading to the impressions that she was intellectually lacking.

  Katherine managed to leave Muswellbrook High at the age of 15 without having learned to read or write, which wasn’t that unusual. If you weren’t a farm kid there was little else to do in Aberdeen than work at the abattoirs and Katherine was keen to follow in the footsteps of her father, her twin sister and older brothers. You didn’t need a lot of education to wield a knife and Aberdeen kids knew that. It was part of the natural flow of things: fill in time at school until you’re old enough to work at the abattoirs. One of Katherine’s brothers learned to read the newspaper during lunch breaks at work, under the tutelage of a better educated colleague.

  Katherine suffered an initial setback when she first applied and failed to get a job at the meatworks, so she took up work as a cutter-presser at a clothes factory for twelve months before finally getting a position in the offal room at the age of 16. She was in heaven, following in the family tradition and doing a job she loved.

  Her job was towards the end of the chain or line and involved cleaning congealed marrow and blood out of the carcasses and cutting the animals into smaller pieces. Later she became a boner and the story is she was a mean hand with a blade. The best bit about the abattoir was she got her own set of knives. They were her pride and joy.

  And it’s here, among the blood and guts and gumboots that Katherine met the lovable rascal, David Kellett.

  The young girl that set out on her first serious relationship brought with her a sordid collection of family images. And the teenage girl that rode to the courthouse with her husband on the back of her trail bike was spiritually and psychologically corrupted. She was anxious, tortured by phobias about sex and violence; she could not connect with the real world; she didn’t understand love; she could never be stable in a relationship or deal with her problems. She was prone to violence and discord. Even though she would send her children to Sunday school and care for sick neighbours, she was a girl with the brittlest moral constructs. Katherine grew up with a void where love should have been; a place where evil could take seed.

  Poor David Kellett. He was too drunk to realise.

  Kellett was a hell-raiser in his younger days, a pint-sized torpedo they called Shorty or Ching, because he looked Chinese (it was short for Ching Chong Chinaman, a relic of less politically correct times). He was cute and could charm your pants off in a blink. Had a few run-ins with the cops, and the old sergeant still shudders when he hears the name, but that was par for the course for a young country bloke in those days. Hell, it was the 1970s. A time of weed and rock festivals, rootin’ and cutting loose. He’d hit Aberdeen full of testosterone and an energy that possibly verged on the self-destructive. A little bloke with swagger and a job on the railways. He had been shunted down the tracks for falling asleep and derailing too many trains up around the Coffs Harbour area. They were glad to see the back of him. Dave was a long hair. A troublemaker.

  He’d had a rough time in the job before he got to Aberdeen. At Grafton he’d supported the crushed body of one of his best mates who had got caught between the couplings of two carriages in a shunting accident. He was still conscious but was not in a good way. They brought the bloke’s wife down, but when they pulled the carriages apart the man died. Another time he was just knocking off at South Kempsey railway crossing when a train hit a school bus at 4 pm, 9 December 1968. Kellett spent the next hours pulling school girls’ broken bodies from the wreckage. Six were dead. Looking back he thinks the shock of the accident might account for the amount of drinking he did as a young bloke.

  You’d go to sleep and you’d hear the crash … the sound of screeching brakes would scare the wits out of you. After that I just drank so much, sometimes I’d even drink after a shave. There was no counselling in those days, they just gave you a week off.

  The railway job at Muswellbrook fell through because he got into trouble with the cops once too often, so he got himself a job at the abattoir in Aberdeen. There was nowhere else. At work Kellett fell in with a local, Charlie Knight, and they’d get on the piss big time on the weekends. Three-night binges, starting on Friday and staggering through until Monday morning, when they’d have to get their shit together for another stint in the slaughterhouse.

  One night Charlie took him home for tea to his parents’ place. His twin sisters, Kath and Joy, were 16 at the
time. All four started to hang out together. They’d have big nights at the Muswellbrook Workers Club, where there was pool, darts, music and all the limited fun of a country town on the weekend. The girls knew how to have a good time. Both of them swore like troopers and liked it a bit rough. There was nothing pony club about the Knight girls. Kellett had been shacked up with another girl around this time and when that dissolved young Katherine was there waiting. ‘People said I got her on the rebound and I guess I probably did.’

  Kellett was as close to Joy as he was Kath and would often go out with one or the other. Even when he and Kath started dating it was nothing to spend the night dancing with her sister. One night Kellett got locked up for being drunk and disorderly and found out in the morning from the copper that his future sister-in-law had been in the next cell for doubling on her motorbike.

  Other times the four would head out to the Glenbawn Dam and camp, go after the catfish at night or maybe do a bit of shooting, get a rabbit or a ‘roo. Sometimes they’d take potshots at a passing train, although there’d been a bit of trouble over that. It’s strange how things that seem funny when you’re pissed really get up the cops’ noses. One time somebody knocked off a steer and Kellett cut it up with a chainsaw for a barbecue. Kath insisted he skin it too; she was keen to have a cow hide and loved all that sort of stuff: hides, skulls, horns. When the farmer found out he called the cops and it got serious. Kellett was on a bond over another incident and he was going to go down but the local copper gave him a break and didn’t inform the magistrate about the bond. That way he had one over Shorty and could maybe keep him under control a bit.

  In those days Kellett, like most young blokes, figured he was indestructible. Maybe he was. Easter 1973, he, Charlie and another local were out shooting rabbits on a belly full of grog. Bullets starting flying everywhere. The details are sketchy, but it seems the other guy shot Kellett, smashing his shoulder blade and depositing shrapnel just above the heart. Charlie and the other bloke wrapped him up in a blanket, put him on the back seat of the car and rushed to the cop shop to get help. Kellett lay on the back seat, bleeding like a stuck pig and asking for beer and a cigarette. The copper, a sergeant called Lloyd Lyne, told him he’d been watching too many cowboy movies. To this day Kellett remains a big john Wayne fan and still keeps the piece of shrapnel close to his heart—the doctors weren’t game to remove it. He’s got a full set of John Wayne commemorative plates on display in his home too.

  He recalls another time when he and one of the local coppers got pissed and played Russian roulette with a pistol. You can be pretty stupid as a young bloke, stepping up to the edge and poking the hereafter in the chest. Have a fuckin’ go! Then, when the years have passed and it’s stalking you, you lie in bed at night and think about the hammer falling and break into a cold shiver.

  Somehow Kellett and the young cop survived that stupidity.

  Young Katherine Knight stood by him as he raised hell. After all, her brothers were pretty wild and you wouldn’t expect her to take up with the local bank teller. She got pretty worried when he was sentenced to five years in East Maitland Jail around 1972, but celebrated when he got out early on appeal. Years later, when she was jailed herself, their daughter showed him a scrapbook his young wife had kept of his brushes with the law at the time. He’d never seen it when they’d been together. She adored Kellett. Loved his notoriety and cheeky attitude.

  Later Katherine told people they weren’t in love when they got married; it was just that she didn’t want to be left on the shelf. People grow up fast in country towns, babies have babies, and at 18 Kath was older than a lot of others. However, Kellett knew how to treat a woman well; he’d been brought up by his mother to show respect and on occasions did. It was something of a novelty to Katherine who’d never heard a bloke sweet-talk a woman before. Where she came from they demanded a root and got it. Five times on the wedding night, for God’s sake! Dave had a gentle side and she liked that. She’d buy him presents, chocolates and beer. From the day they were married she took over the finances and she was real careful with their money. Still, there was room for the odd little treat. Sometimes he got a bottle of cheap scotch.

  Kellett had worked on the killing floor when he first landed at the abattoir but got bumped from there for growing marijuana under the manager’s office. He was transferred to the offal room. It was a foul place where the bags, or stomachs, came down the chute and needed to be inverted and cleaned. He’d much preferred the other job where he was responsible for stunning the animals before their throats were cut. That was a real buzz.

  Katherine loved the knives and the camaraderie and the death. She had been happy to skin a rabbit when they went camping, like one of the boys, and the blood, guts and noise of the abattoir didn’t worry her one single bit. And while she didn’t have many mates there, all the Knights worked alongside each other. It was a family affair.

  Later, she told a psychiatrist she loved talking to an old man whose job it was to stick the pigs with a knife and bleed them to death.

  The slaughterhouse isn’t for everybody, but some people get a kick out of that work. Young Dave Kellett certainly enjoyed it.

  I was in charge of killing pigs for about twelve months. I had a big stun gun, a glove that fitted on your hand. It was leather with a trigger and two prongs and the pig would come down the race and you’d put it behind the ear and you’d keep it on until it knocked them out. If I had a pig that was giving me the shits I’d keep it on until it killed ‘em, then they’d get shackled up before being stuck with a big knife.

  Sometimes they’d shake off the shackles if I hadn’t stunned them enough. You’d have to push ‘em back with pipe and use the endless chain and then they go to the big boiler, but [Katherine] was in the next room over in the boning and slicing room.

  I enjoyed doing it, I loved doing the pigs, watching them shake like shit, frothing at the mouth and [their] eyes rolling in the sockets.

  We’d go rabbit shooting, me and Kath and her brother Charlie, just behind Ken’s place and we’d come home with a dozen or so rabbits and she’d sit down beside us and skin ‘em. She’d skin ‘em as good as anyone, pick ‘em up by the legs and pull. It was animals first and then she graduated to humans. She never did skinning at the meatworks; all she did was cut the fat off.

  It was a marriage made on the killing floor and consummated in a night of fucking and fighting. Little Kath was over the moon. It was all she’d ever dreamed of. Almost.

  7

  Abandoned and anguished

  1974-81

  Katherine’s wielding a crutch at a one-legged man. She’s got a suitcase full of knives and scissors and bandages and money boxes. She’s smashing windows and she says she’s gonna kill the family huddled inside the service station. Whimpering among the broken glass. Says she’ll cut them up because they ran away. If only she could have found the gun. The boy with asthma is watching from across the road. Petrified.

  —The crazy lady is going to kill us. Where are the police? Somebody please help us.

  The gun was on the verandah but it’s not there now. Where the fuck is it? She’s already slashed the girl. There’s so fucking many of ‘em. Nicked her cheek like she nicks the arteries of animals and watches them bleed. Yesterday she took on the town with an axe. That had them running for cover. She’ll get this mob, cut them up. Get the one-legged prick too. He fixed the car. He knew the bastard was leaving her. The knife was under the blankets in the bassinette. The girl ran, stumbled and then ran for her life. She told the nurses at the hospital she was going to do the job right this time. She’s gonna get Kellett’s mum too. She’s got a knife and she’s got this bug-eyed little fellow by the footy jumper and the police are coming at her now with broom sticks. She’s planned this. Lain awake at night plotting. Made sure nobody was home to hear the cries for help. If only she could have found that rifle she’d have been away by now.

  David Kellett is gone. Done a runner. And Katherine’s distress
comes in hot waves of anger and anguish. She’s unhappy and unhinged. Incensed.

  Everything is just so out of control.

  There’s been sirens and police and psychiatric hospitals and there’s a southbound train coming down the railway line and the baby is lying in its path. Lying there where a few decades later a young bloke loses his life after a night on the grog. They say he was asleep, or he fell and hit his head. Anyway, the train just came and ran him over. This time old Ted’s wandered down and found the little thing lying on the tracks. little Melissa. Ted picked her up and saved her life.

  Ted had a plate in his head and worked at the abattoir for a while. Everybody in the town remembers old Ted and everybody in the town knows the story of Katherine putting her baby in front of the train. Just a few months old she was. Some say her mum tied her down. Everybody in town knows the story except Kath, who says it’s not true. Maybe she took her by the ankles and spun her round and round. She don’t remember, but that’s what they reckon. They also say she put her pram in front of a parked truck.

  And now the police are here again.

  —Let the boy go. Drop the knife. Kathy, drop the knife.

  —Don’t take me back to the hospital again. Please don’t take me back to hospital. I won’t go.

  Melissa has slept through it all, through the screaming and smashing glass, unbearable sorrow and madness. Years later, when she wakes up and hears the story, Mum denies it, starts to talk about pyjamas and anything but trains. Melissa knows when her mother is lying.

  Everything is just so out of control.

  Everything is just so bloody sad and tragic and veiled behind a crimson curtain of rage, so it’s hard to see where it all started and where it all finished. Hard to know whether to cry or kill. The only thing everybody knows is that hell has no fury like Katherine scorned and Katherine has been scorned. Just when it all seemed so perfect. A nice little house, a nice little baby, a nice little loving husband. Got a job and place of her own and she wasn’t left on the shelf like she feared. She’s even been learning to cook a little. Got away from home and started on her own. Now this. Home is where the heartbreak is. There’s nothing more certain. She’s not even 31 and she’s been abandoned. A single mother. She hates that baby. That’s why he left. He wanted a boy. If only she were dead things might be right again.