by Peter Lalor
15
I’ll kill Pricey
29 February 2000
The camera is rolling and for a minute nobody is in the room. Katherine takes the chance to record her thoughts. ‘I love all my children and my grand-daughter.’ She sighs heavily. ‘And I hope to see them all.’ There’s only a few hours left. ‘Pick up all those cups.’ It’s already 6 pm. She’s calm and ready to take this situation in hand. She’s had the knives sharpened, had her last blue with Pricey, and now it is time he got what he deserved. She’ll show him. The dead don’t give you any grief. You can hang them on the wall and they never call you a cunt or the Speckled Hen or take the good years of your life away and then expect you to leave with nothing to show for it. She’s got bruises on her tit and he’s going to pay for that. All the others have got away with hurting her and her kids. And she’ll get away with this somehow. They can’t blame her if she’s mad, and anyway all men are cunts and rapists and they fuck you round. From the first one that climbs into a little girl’s bed, to the last one that tries to stick his dick up your arse and throw you out of his house. They’ve fucked her around, destroyed her life and her confidence. She’s made his bed, cooked his meals, cleaned for him, driven him around and what does she get? Abuse and scorn. Her self-esteem is shot and it’s his fault.
She feels some calm at last. A little tingle of excitement. Time’s running out, she’s got to say goodbye to people.
Earlier she had the boy to do the filming, got him to get the two daughters and granddaughter in frame. The women kissing and hugging. She loves her kids and they’ll all be together again. And it’s been such a lovely day with the granddaughter who has been giving her the biggest smiles. It’s good to get all this packaged up and contained on tape. It’s like preserving the moment in ajar of formaldehyde. Put it on a shelf, sit back and look at it forever. Pricey wouldn’t let her keep the video camera at his place after he lost his job at the mines.
Life has been getting out of control. Kath is brooding. Things turning to shit like they always do. It’s him and his kids against her. She’s collecting grudges against those kids and Pricey’s terrified about what she might do to them.
Things came to a head when the youngest daughter was down again and a jumping castle had been parked in the vacant block next to the house. Pricey had paid the bloke a case of beer to pump it up for the kids in the street. There was a lot of coming and going and Kath was getting sloshed and aggressive. When the youngest came in her eldest sister Rosemary had news for her, ‘You know what this bitch just said? She reckons you’ve been interfering with her kids.’
This was a big call, even for Katherine. She was trying to tell John and his eldest girl that the 14-year-old girl had sexually assaulted her two. Just another chapter in her lifetime of abuse accusations, but perhaps the most ridiculous. It was another piece of grit she would use to nurture a pearl of resentment. And payback. She was in a right mood that afternoon. Drunk and niggling and bitching for all she was worth, but she wasn’t getting far enough so she resorted to a tried and proven method for getting a bloke where it hurts. She turned on his mother. Nobody talked about John’s mum. Everybody knew it was just too sensitive. Kath got the reaction she wanted.
You should have seen Dad. He saw red. Rosemary grabbed him. He wasn’t going Kath, but he was furious and Rosemary got her husband to take him out the front. Then Rosemary grabbed a plate and said, ‘This is a nice plate. Who owns it?’, and Kath said it was hers and Rosemary said, ‘Well, fuck off or I’ll break it over your head.’
Then they went out the front. I took off, but they said she still kept going on and on, and Rosemary kicked her off the porch but she grabbed the pole which saved her.
Then Rosemary said, ‘Get out of me dad’s house or we’ll call the cops’, and she wouldn’t and the cops come, but she was acting unconscious in the front room.
The next morning Kath woke and got breakfast like nothing had ever happened. Except now she had two of his kids down as abusers as well as him. In her head the whole bloody lot of them were at it. Pricey had a harmless game he played occasionally with his grandson and Kath’s little boy. When they got out of the shower or bath he’d make a laughing lunge for their penis with his finger and thumb. Pullin’ their tail. He’d do it in full view of everyone. It was a little coarse but it made the boys laugh and nobody saw it as inappropriate. Except Kath. She got herself right worked up about that and told her daughter and a few others. There were whispers that some of her male relatives had a fondness for little boys. It had caused a lot of grief in the family, but it was another of those dark secrets.
After Pricey had lost his job at the mine, Kath got in her head that she might need to get ready to play hard ball with him. In her mind he was now a threat to her because he had good reason to be. Later, after the job was done, she said he threatened to kill her. Which is highly unlikely. She said lots of things. He smeared shit on her face. He stuck his foot up her vagina. He wanted to have sex with other blokes and make her participate.
She often thought of getting even. A year before, Kath contacted her nephew, Jason Roughan, and there was talk of breaking Price’s legs or burning his car. She told Roughan he called her a slut and bought other women drinks to scorn her. She’d considered putting a snake or spider in his bed, but she gave up on that idea. She and Jason discussed throwing battery acid in his face so he could know how she felt. Scarred inside. The conspirators went over and over their plans. Jason had taken on Pricey once before. Went him and Shane for abusing her. ‘She loved me like a mum. I wouldn’t let anyone hurt her.’
Katherine was forming a plan but it was no state secret. She dropped down to her brother Charlie’s place in Muswellbrook and said she was going to kill Pricey. She’d said this before, but this time she added she’d kill Pricey and the two kids. Charlie took her to mean her two kids and told her to wake up to herself. He was angry. She said she’d get away with it because she would pretend to be mad. Charlie’s daughter Tracy was there and remembers her aunt saying that if she couldn’t have him nobody could. She remembers her saying about how she’d get away with it by feigning madness.
She was creating problems everywhere she went. She was in her mid 40s now, might even be menopausal. She’d had lots of problems with skin cancers and lumps and a reddening of the face. She looked older than her years, but she’d been trying to keep fit. Almost every morning she and Joy and their half-brother Barry and his wife Val would get together at the top of the street and go for a long walk toward the garbage dump. The family roaming the outskirts of town. Sticking together. Wandering out the back of town, past the colliery on the meatworks side of the railway line.
There were a few people just wandering around. Aberdeen’s going to the dogs. It wasn’t uncommon for the abattoirs to shut during quiet periods but in 1999 it closed down forever. After a century the meatworks was gone. Four hundred people lost their jobs. Apparently the bottom had fallen out of the overseas market. There’s not much call for local killers now that the animals are exported live. It tore the heart out of the little town. For 100 years the slaughterhouse seeded the district with meatworkers and their families. It brought them to town, in some cases gave them housing and then gave their kids and grandkids jobs. And now nobody has to put a bullet through the beast’s head, or cut its throat. Nobody need hang it by a hook and open its guts, strip off its skin and cut the meat off the bones. Put it in neat little vacuum packs.
It hurt the town. Housing prices dropped dramatically, people had to look further afield for work. Some of the men starting commuting to Newcastle and even Sydney. The women struggled to find casual work, especially in a town where there’s only a handful of shops and two pubs. There’s no bank, no hospital, no industry apart from the tannery and the coal mines down the road which weren’t interested too much in hiring the locals—they were a union crowd. Aberdeen still doesn’t even have a McDonald’s and probably never will. After the pub closes you’ve got to dri
ve to Muswellbrook to find an ATM.
Early in 2000, Natasha and Kath’s granddaughter left MacQueen Street and moved to Muswellbrook, although it appears she took some convincing. The kid was in no hurry to leave but Kath wanted her out. It wasn’t that Kath didn’t love her granddaughter. She had made a video of the child when she was born. She made her a little squaw’s outfit out of chamois-like material for her christening, but she couldn’t put up with Natasha around the house any longer, even if she was paying rent. She and the baby left for the big town down the road.
Natasha wasn’t married when her daughter was born and there had been issues of paternity involving two brothers. A blood test proved conclusively that one of the contenders was indeed the dad. The daughter was a chip off the old block. She would tell people that she loved knives more than her mother. She has a blood chilling temper and a foul mouth.
Before Katherine’s trial, Donna Page of the Newcastle Herald caught up with Natasha at her Muswellbrook home, the journalist was offered an exclusive insight into the mother-daughter relationship and the murder.
Pricey was always a good fella [but] he started to change a bit. I never saw him hit her, she told me it was more of a mental abuse.
She was a good mum and there is no doubt about that. I could not have asked for a better mother. I used to get smacked hard, Mum grew up that way so that is the way things were. With the younger kids she started to change. Mum was starting to learn as we got older that things were different in terms of discipline and punishment.
She made sure we never went hungry. Mum was never the person to help with homework and she hated sports. She had trouble reading and so couldn’t help with school work and stuff like that but I remember once we had got to Maitland or Newcastle for a soccer game and we stopped off at McDonald’s. There was a whole bunch of us in a van and Mum shouted us all.
It was great, she was always thinking of someone else. I just thought she was under a lot of pressure. You would have to hate someone to do something like that.
Natasha wasn’t surprised by the details of the murder.
If that is what you’re trained to do then of course that is how you would kill someone if you were going to do it. If there were three knives used they all had a different purpose. So I would have to say that she would have stabbed him, cut his head off and skinned him. Is that what happened?
Page thought that Natasha felt some guilt about her mother, she told the journalist ‘Mum was asking me for help and I did not click on’.
The second daughter said her mum was a bush girl who loved camping.
My mum really wanted to kill me once. I was teasing her real bad, calling her stupid names and things and she just went off. Mum was always very sensitive, she always followed her heart. She fell in love fast. It’s hard to understand why she would have done that. There is no excuse for it. I think that one day the bottle got that extra bit full and the lid came off. It was a whole heap of shit really.
Natasha believed her mother would do her time in jail and come home to live with her, saying ‘once she gets out I would like her to come and live with me, because I would do anything for my mum. If somebody hurt her they would have to get through me first.’
* * *
During the day Kath would try to keep active, sewing and visiting mates, but there were so many hours between the time the kids went to school and when they would come home again. It was starting to get her down and she was starting to spend a lot of time at MacQueen Street by herself. A lot of time with her dead things, all those inanimate objects. Stuffed wombats and peacocks and fawns, a plaster collie, spurs, cowboy boots, leather jackets, skins and skulls. An electric organ and an antique pram her mum had given her when she was 11. Dust falling from the ceiling and the rumbling from beneath the foundations. She would sit in one chair then another to get different views, she was having nerve troubles again and was on antidepressants. The dead cheered her up. She described it as her dream home. Those things helped to keep the past as a future …I loved all of that. I loved it. That was my escape… Just looking at everything on the wall. I’d swap sides on the lounge and watch the old things I had there. Time stood still and I owned it… I didn’t see the peacock killed; it was beauty and the horns…
It was at times like these that Kath really missed Barbara, but she had her spirit in pictures and mementos and she could arrange them and sit with Mum in a peace rarely experienced during Barbara’s life. The dead lived in totems. It gave her control of her environment that she’d never had when things weren’t dead.
German psychiatrist Eric Fromm says that this behaviour is consistent with necrophilous, a form of necrophilia, or the love of the dead. He says that certain personality types, the narcissistic and anal, who gain control over their threatening environments with violence, can worsen over the years. They discover a sadistic joy in hurting and eventually killing. Beyond this comes a love of handling death, dealing with it. Transforming the living into the dead. Carrying a sticky, skinless head from the lounge to the soup pot. Hanging the skin on a butcher’s hook.
Katherine had always been somewhat sadistic. She controlled her environment with violence. She loved the abattoirs because it was a place where the living were turned into the dead. She loved scraping out the carcasses. She was obsessively materialistic, collecting things and nailing them to the walls. Collecting mementos of people living and dead. Hoarding things.
According to Gordon Burn in his book Happy Like Murderers, English mass murderer Fred West showed a similar fondness for things over people. He preferred inanimate objects. They turned him on sexually. His home was populated by the pieces of the many people he had murdered and he got comfort from that. He liked the deadened and dehumanised over the alive and responding. He loved to video things. Package them and put them on a shelf. West also had dealings with abattoirs, collecting skins and hides in his van. He used a sharp knife to dismember and behead his victims, working carefully and cleanly.
V S Naipaul wrote about the casual cruelty of English farmers who could tenderly raise a calf all the time knowing the hand that reared it would one day cut its throat. An abattoir worker only knows one end of this equation. Katherine’s and Fred West’s cruelty knew no boundaries. She would slash the throat of a rabbit out of necessity, a puppy out of anger. The next step was to kill a man and when she did it, she found it wasn’t enough. There was further to go.
Kath was getting down in the dumps. She’d get quiet at times like this and would bury herself at home with the videos and the television. She had an enormous collection of videos. That video collection was something else. She loved the horror ones. The bloodier the better. They were all carefully catalogued in a little diary and the family—Shane and Barry and Joy and Natasha and a few others—would dub them off and pass them around. Even Barbara had liked a good horror flick. They had hundreds and hundreds. Their video collection was probably the biggest in town. Some of the movies were extremely disturbing. Some days she’d watch the soaps too. Her favourite was ‘The Bold and the Beautiful’.
Come Sunday 27 February 2000, John Price has three days left to live. Three days and two nights. It was hot and bright. Mid summer in the valley Aberdeen is a long way from the cooling breezes of the coast. Kath had a stye on her eye and she couldn’t stand the light. They’d been at a party the night before and that had ended up in a screaming match—something about her dancing and, of course, his mum. Dave Saunders had been there too and Pricey came up and told him he just wanted to get rid of her.
Ronny Murray and Pricey got together for their Sunday constitutional just before lunchtime. They parked themselves on the small front porch that looks across at Keego’s place and had a couple to clear the cobwebs. They used to have their Sunday drink at the top pub but the new owner, who hasn’t fitted in that well with the locals, doesn’t open early enough so the boys drink at home. Ronny stuck his head inside and saw Kath lying on the lounge, wearing a small eye mask. She came out later and
asked how they were going before ducking back inside because the glare and the dry summer winds were hurting her eye. Ronny left at about half past one after they’d had about four beers. He liked Kath. She’d been caring to his wife who had lost her speech faculties because of a brain tumour, and had come up to her with a woman’s magazine step-by-step guide to sign language, and showed them the intricate American eagle she’d stitched onto a bedspread. She ran him around to the pubs and he’d never really seen them fight. It was something John didn’t talk to him about.
Johnny Collison came over later and Kath had gone to the pub to buy a carton of Tooheys stubbies. Pricey had complained because they cost $30 not $27. It was shitty weather, windy and hot and the two kids were there along with a niece and when Collo left the couple started to fight. They were tired and irritable and who knows how it started. There’s only one left to retell the story. This is how Kath described it to Bob Wells.
—He was rubbishing me having different fathers for my children again, and I just said to him, ‘Hang on’, I said, ‘You said last night at a party that your parents were married and they’re, they weren’t,’ and he just went off his brain and said, ‘Don’t say anything about my mother.’ And then he attacked me.
—Can you tell me how he attacked you?
—He stood up beside the, in between the two lounges, the big lounge and the little lounge and that’s when he grabbed me by the throat and on the breast.
—Right. Can you recall about what time that was?
—No, I don’t. It was still daylight.
—All right. Do you recall what John did after that?
—He, I got away from him and went out to the kitchen and when I was going out there I noticed my necklace was broken. I then grabbed his smokes and broke ‘em all up. He told me to get out and I told him to get out and he went.
