by Peter Lalor
The marriage was ending, she was growing more distant but there was a final strange twist for Kellett in the horror ride that was his marriage to Katherine.
He returned one night from a three-day job in the truck up at Kingaroy in Queensland and noticed something odd about the house. The curtains were missing. Strange, she must be washing them. He went in the door and reached for the light switch. Nothing. The bulb must have gone. He used his cigarette lighter but the little flame failed to illuminate anything. There was just a vacant darkness. He couldn’t even make out the furniture.
She’d done a runner.
While he’d been away she had hired an open truck and had the place cleaned out. Melissa, Natasha and their mother were gone and they’d taken everything in sight. Even his power tools were gone from the shed. But she hadn’t been a total bitch, leaving behind an old couch of his sister’s, two cups, two saucers, two plates and some old Tupperware containers for his lunch.
Two?
Maybe it was a message.
Katherine had become sure her husband was having an affair with a 17-year-old neighbour—a girl they both knew and that he would tease about being the only virgin in town. Kath had found a bra when making the bed and accused him of sleeping with the girl. Kellett swears he wasn’t. Katherine said it wasn’t her bra, it was too small for her.
It was hers. It was Kath’s bra. The girl next-door was 13 stone and Kath was 10. It was too small for her. It was hers … I did end up with the sheila next-door but that was two years after me divorce and it only lasted 12 months.
Kellett says that once he got over the shock of finding his tormentor was gone he went out and got pissed to celebrate. After living in the empty house for a while he tried to make contact to see if the girls were all right.
I rang her parents up and they wouldn’t tell me where she was, they just said she’s down here. Her brothers reckoned they were going to kill me because of what I’d done to her. Charlie and Shane. Charlie’s mellowed over the years.
Kellett and Kath’s elder brother had had a falling out at her parents over the home brew during a visit to Kath’s parents in Aberdeen. They’d been sitting up at the table drinking and Barbara Knight told them to put their bottles away when they went to bed. According to Charlie, Kellett told him to leave them, that he’d do it, but Charlie copped a blast the next morning from his mum because they were still there. In anger he went out and smashed the bottles in the bin. This, according to the elder Knight boy, enraged Kellett who wanted them to put more home brew in. Charlie remains angry about the incident. Things can get pretty petty sometimes. The Knights were like that.
There’d been a few family punch-ups at the Knights’ in Kellett’s presence. He reckons it was ‘hillbilly central’, people drinking and smoking pot and carrying on like idiots. One night he said something to Patrick, who was a union rep, about an industrial dispute in town. Suddenly the eldest Knight leapt across the dinner table and began to choke Kellett.
Katherine says that all of her brothers drank and smoked marijuana and that she tried smoking it on a handful of occasions.
After Kath left him Kellett never found a reason to visit Aberdeen again. He was happy to have survived. ‘I just had no interest in the place.’
Melissa Knight’s second statement to the police after the murder of John Price referred to her mother’s relationship with her father.
From knowing my mother, I can say that her major hang-up during her life which constantly upset her was that my father was being constantly unfaithful. From talking with Mum I believe that her belief in this was the reason that she suffered a low self-esteem in her life. This compounded with being brought up in an exceptionally violent atmosphere seeing her father bash her mother unconscious just for sex. In those days my grandfather was a very violent person which created violence in the family.
8
She’s back
Mid-1990s
—Am I going to be safe?
—As safe as ya’ve ever fuckin’ bin.
The nightmare had returned. David Kellett thought he’d escaped with his life, but almost two decades later Katherine Knight—she changed back to her maiden name after the divorce—was standing at the door of his home in Queensland. Insisting they go for a drive.
—I want to talk to ya about something.
She was agitated. She had arrived without warning, the two youngest kids from two relationships since in tow. She told Kellett the kids would stay in the house while she took him in the car. He wasn’t keen on the idea. In fact, he was shitting himself. Had she come back to settle the score once and for all?
He got in the car reluctantly and they drove off, pulling up on a back road. She turned off the motor and twisted around in the seat to face him. For Kellett this was almost as frightening as the time he woke up with the knife at his throat. He started to wonder if she had the knives under the seat. Shit, what had he done?
—David …
She had never called him David before. It was always Kellett.
Katherine wanted to know why he’d left her twenty years earlier, why he’d abandoned her with young Melissa. She was almost shaking with emotion. It was the first time she’d ever asked. He says he told her that he’d been unhappy. That he was married to her and not her mother and that her psychotic ways, the yelling and the screaming and the swearing and the smashing, had been too much. He said that he thought she needed professional help before she hurt someone. He told her his friends had names, it wasn’t right to call people cunt.
—All men are cunts and you’re no exception.
—Yeah. Yeah.
Then she was calm again. Like a burden had been lifted from her shoulders. She said she’d never loved another man like she loved him. She told him that he was the one who ruined her faith in men. And then she leant across the car and gave him a kiss on the cheek.
—C’mon. I’ll buy ya a beer.
Kellett said that he had some in the fridge and they should get back in case somebody dropped around and found two strange children in his house.
It was a curious coda to a relationship he had done his best to forget. He felt sorry for her, dragging those two kids around and trying to find out why she was so fucked in the head. Letting that bother her for twenty years without breathing a word.
When they’d got divorced she got the kids and the houses in Landsborough and Aberdeen. Over the years she used the girls as emotional pawns in her battle with Kellett. He never saw Melissa between the ages of 6 and 16 and even the presents and flowers he sent when she turned 13 never arrived. Kellett and his new wife would make plans to take the kids on holidays and at the last minute Kath would change her mind or invent a way to stuff things up. Kids were handy for Kath. Handy for negotiating and tormenting their fathers with. The kids were full of terrible stories about their fathers and the other men Kath lured home. Melissa in particular.
—Mum reckons ya need ya dick cut off, Dad.
Years later in Aberdeen Melissa had come home from school and told Mum she fancied a certain boy of the same age. Kath said it probably wasn’t the best idea to get involved. He was her half-brother.
Kath was in the area when Kellett moved house in Queensland. She came over and helped him pack. It still gives his new wife the creeps thinking about it. Sometimes she picks up a piece of crockery and thinks that Kath has touched it. Her husband’s first wife always spooked her. When she had to do an overnight trip to pick up Melissa and Natasha she’d sleep with a chair up against the door, worried she’d be attacked. She had an irrational fear that future events indicate was a little intuitive, that Kath would use a knife.
Once Kath came up to visit with John Price. He and Kellett went to the club together to have a few beers and it was like some bashed wives support group. They both spilled their guts over a few schooners.
He told me then he wanted to get out of it but he doesn’t know how. She could manipulate ya, you know. Like she’d go off the deep end an
d start smashing things and then she’d start to cry and, you know, and apologise and say sorry and then take you to bed and that made everything better to her; by taking you to bed made everything better.
9
The investigation begins
March 2000
Bob Wells had flown up the road to Aberdeen full of beans, but coming back the New England highway that night he was starting to fade. It had been a long, trying day. Alone in the car, he became aware of a foul odour clinging to his clothes from the crime scene. He wound down the window and pressed on, eager for some comfort and sanity.
Bob Wells is a copper’s son, and as such, the last thing he was going to do was join the force. After a year in a clerical job he realised the old man was right—in those days the super, sickpay and holidays for police were well in front of any civilian job. He did the medicals and interview in 1978 and pulled on the uniform for the first time in April 1979.
Wellsy was a country cop’s son and was destined to be a country cop. He is a nice bloke with no airs, who has no trouble getting on with people. He is the sort of copper you want fronting up when there is trouble, not too young, officious or aloof. The force can wear you down though. The job’s a frustrating political game these days and the working copper is a pawn of governments and talkback radio. Management seems only to be interested in saving money and face. Then there’s all the trauma that is just part of a copper’s day-to-day life. The murders, the distraught parents, the car crashes, the abuse, the fights, the constant exposure to humanity’s ugly underbelly. If you spend too long in the kitchen the smell gets in your clothes.
Bob has had a few tough times in the bush. He’s had a lot of dysfunctional towns out in the west. Places where the residents beat each other senseless every welfare day. Then, on the way to the lockup they’d vomit in your van. Sometimes it has got serious. One January in Moree, with the temperature pushing the high 40s, he was bailed up by a bloke with two butcher’s knives. Wells was off-duty and didn’t have his gun. Later, when they’d nabbed the man he looked at Bob and hissed, ‘I could’ve fucked you today, copper.’ Wells knew how true that was.
There have been plenty of other times like that. In Bourke they celebrated Christmas by rioting and the cops would have to face off angry mobs of drunk fellas throwing rocks and bottles and anything they could get their hands on. They had perfected the art of tossing the missiles high into the night so the cops couldn’t see them coming back down until it was too late. At times the emotional strain of the job is worse than the physical violence. In Moree a cranky doctor insisted he witness the autopsy of a little girl the same age as his own youngest. ‘I sat there and all I could see was my little girl’s face as he cut up this poor kid. It’s the worst thing I’ve ever done.’ There’s been a few ugly car crashes too. Nursing teenagers as they gurgled and expired on a country road. Breaking the news to their parents.
He used to figure it was all part of the job. You did it, you had a few drinks, tried to forget and move on, but after attending John Price’s house in March 2000 those things started to play on his mind. For Wells the investigation was like a journey into a cave. Sometimes it felt like he’d never see daylight again. Every time he closed his eyes he saw the defiled remains of John Price. As the head detective he would live and breathe the case for months on end. It filled every waking thought, pervaded his dreams and fouled his subconscious, dredging up nightmares past and fears unspoken.
This was a huge job and when the homicide detectives drove back down the highway to Sydney he was basically left alone to run a murder investigation. Wells is an experienced cop and from that first morning in March he realised that Knight was probably going to try for some medical or psychiatric defence, but as every day passed and another piece of the story fell into place he knew she couldn’t get off that easily. Deep down he was certain that this 45-year-old grandmother was a killer who knew what she was doing and had been working towards it all her life.
In the heat of that Aberdeen morning he’d got the ball rolling. There were search warrants to organise, statements to take and leave to be cancelled. The police found Knight’s two kids safe and well at Natasha Kellett’s and got her to make a statement. Knight’s wild-eyed second daughter was a good starting place. Mick Prentice got her statement on paper at about 3 pm. She gave them a little background about her life: being born in Nambour, moving back to her grandparents when Mum split from Dad, a housing commission home in Aberdeen and the string of blokes that filled the gap—every one of them violent towards her poor suffering mother. Natasha had a baby daughter, who she was struggling to raise by herself. She was starting to understand some of her mother’s pain.
I can remember feeling very helpless when Mum was being abused because I was so young and scared and I couldn’t help her … Mum spoke to me about her problems when she was young. She told me that she had been molested by her brother when she was growing up. I was 15 at this time.
Natasha left home at that age and moved to Queensland, before moving back in with her mum. She got her own commission house in Muswellbrook just two months before all this went down. She clearly wanted the cops to have some sympathy for Kath but couldn’t keep herself from telling them about a feeling she’d had the previous night when Kath came around for dinner.
Mum seemed really quiet and placid and usually she is more bubbly and happy. It seemed as though Mum was thinking about a thousand things at the one time …
When Mum was leaving I sensed that Mum was unstable within herself. I said, ‘I hope you’re not going to kill Pricey and yourself.’
Mum said, ‘Oh no no no.’ Mum was very calm and quiet when she said this.
I said, ‘I love you, Mum’.
She said, ‘I love you, Natasha’.
Mum then offered me a cigarette and drove away in her car, a red Toyota van.
It was great stuff and Mick Prentice knew it. It got better too.
I said these words to Mum about her killing Pricey and herself because there had been an occasion in the past when we’d had a conversation about this. This conversation took place within the last sixteen months and Mum was driving me to Newcastle at the time. Mum and I were talking about her being abused by Pricey and the stressed [sic] that it caused her. It was after Mum and Pricey had split up for a little while and then they’d get back together. During that conversation, Mum said to me something like, ‘I told him that if he took me back this time, it was to the death.’ This didn’t surprise me because I knew the anger and hurt that she felt by being abused throughout her life.
Mum also said to me something like, ‘If I kill Pricey, I’ll kill myself after it’.
… About 9.30 am this morning my cousin Tracy came to my house and said to me, ‘Your mum’s killed Pricey’.
I said, ‘Has she?’
Natasha Kellett signed the bottom of the brief six-page statement with an artless signature that dropped her mum in it big time. Her evidence pointed clearly to intent and that goes a long way towards getting a murder charge up over manslaughter and makes it difficult to suggest temporary insanity. Kath knew it too, because later when her second daughter visited her in prison she told her she could murder her before the prison wardens made it across the yard.
Joy Hinder also came down to the station late that Wednesday. Kath’s twin gave her occupation as housewife. She lived up the road from Pricey in St Andrews Street. A solid red-faced woman with grey hair, she wasn’t in much of a mood to be talking to the police. She’d been in Newcastle with Val Roughan that day taking her dad, Ken Knight, to the doctors. Barry Roughan, Joy’s half-brother, had called with the news. He said she reacted hysterically. When she got back she was tired but the police insisted on an interview. She told the cops a little bit about Kath being locked up in Morisset Psychiatric Hospital in 1976, about Kellett and the other blokes. ‘All the men that Kath had been with were drinkers and it was when they were drunk that Kath would get assaulted.’
She said that
Pricey and Kath had a lot of fights.
They just seemed to blue all the time and then they would be friends. Kath told me, when we were walking, that the morning after the blue on Sunday that Pricey had got up the next morning to go to work and he had kissed her goodbye. That was just the way they were.
I have told both Pricey and Kath to just let it go, go your separate ways, but they just got back together.
She signed the statement in the presence of John Alderson.
In the meantime Wells was running back and forward from the house to the station. He was at St Andrews Street when the forensic boys went through. Andrew Dellosta had to get a fingerprint from Price’s thumb—there was a bit of skin left. Wells watched as they put the pot with Price’s head in it in a plastic bag and tied it up for the trip to the morgue. It was a filthy place and disgusting work. The scientific officers wore booties and gloves and made sure they got plenty of fresh air.
Back at the station, Wells got a phone call from a woman claiming to be Melissa Kellett, the daughter of Katherine Knight. She said Natasha had called her and said Mum had killed John Price. ‘Is this some sick first of the month fucking joke?’ The detective was guarded: as far as he knew it could be anyone on the phone. Told her Katherine Knight was in hospital being treated and she should come in to give a statement when she got to town. Melissa lives in Queensland.
The other police had fanned out from St Andrews Street, canvassing the neighbourhood and getting statements from the group collected outside the home that morning. A few doors down from Price’s they found Lisa Logan, who told them about the sighting of Knight in the middle of the night. That was to prove important later, but at this stage didn’t fit anywhere. Why had she taken her car home in the middle of the night? It didn’t make sense.
