by Peter Lalor
Delaforce dismisses any diagnosis of a psychotic disorder. He makes a note regarding Knight’s suggestion that Price threatened to kill her children, claiming the story was ‘vague, inconsistent and unconvincing’.
Addressing the legal issues associated with the case, he says he does not support a diagnosis of dissociative amnesia, that a defence of automatism is probably inappropriate and there are no justifications for a defence of mental illness. He concedes she could use a defence of diminished responsibility but the ‘difficulty with a successful defence of diminished responsibility would increase if the facts during the trial showed she wanted to carry out any extremely violent fantasies’.
Delaforce conceded some possibility of a dissociative state in his draft report, but an overlooked piece of the puzzle caused him to change his mind. Executor of John Price’s estate, Laurie Lewis, received a bank statement from Price’s account in November and noticed two withdrawals made on the morning of Wednesday 1 March of $500. It was obvious Katherine had gone out on the night of the killing and robbed her dead defacto of the money. The psychiatrist changed his earlier conclusion slightly, noting that this was the ‘lowest state of her motivation’, demonstrating ‘grubby and malicious intent’.
How informative footage from the ATM would have been. Although it didn’t matter to the overall case, it would have been fascinating to view Katherine in the middle of the crime. What was her demeanour? Was she calm, in the zone, as you think you would have to be to remember somebody else’s PIN number? Was she a zombie in a dissociative state as some suggested, and was she alone? As it turned out that machine did not have a camera.
Katherine appeared to enjoy the experience of talking about herself over two days with the psychiatrist. She took him by the hand at the end of the second interview and with tears in her eyes gave him a sudden hug and thanked him for not being critical of her.
Delaforce then went to see Katherine’s Corrections Health Services file. He had earlier alerted the staff that he had written permission from her solicitor and from Knight herself, but what happened next was very odd. Staff at Mulawa informed him that items had been removed from the file following a request by Dr Giuffrida. Dr Delaforce was astounded; it was highly unusual to remove things from a medical file, and he told the staff that he couldn’t accept this and would take the matter further. He went away to read what he was given when the head nurse appeared and grabbed the files from him, saying he should not be reading them and they were Dr Giuffrida’s notes.
Delaforce told the DPP what had happened and Wells began to make inquiries, taking a statement from one staff member. He headed out with a subpoena to try and get the files himself and got the same run around. Later Delaforce was given an incomplete record with parts of the medical files from prison deleted.
Then in September Giuffrida submitted his report to the solicitor Brian Thornton, who had requested the forensic psychiatrist respond to Delaforce’s findings. Giuffrida thought that a defence of automatism was possible and that Knight was suffering genuine dissociative amnesia. He went to great lengths to find holes in the other psychiatrist’s report and concluded
I would perhaps make the general comment about Dr Delaforce’s report that it is extremely lengthy and seemingly comprehensive. I find it interesting in that it goes far and beyond what I would consider to be the relevant clinical expertise of the psychiatrist in the forensic setting. I rather gained the impression that I was reading a brief prepared by the Department of Prosecutions than a report by forensic psychiatrists. I make no criticism of that other than to say Dr Delaforce makes a large number of comments and conclusions that seem to me to go beyond the relevant skills and expertise of a clinical psychiatrist.
The two psychiatrists were clearly at odds and openly hostile. It was shaping up for a good court battle.
* * *
By this time Bob Wells has hit a wall and taken three months off work. The pills he has been given seemed to make things worse. The medication is changed and he starts to feel better, but the nightmares and anxiety persist. He is starting to think he may never work again. He knows he is in no state to be back in the office chasing crooks. A rehabilitation officer comes to visit him at home and asks when he thinks he’ll be ready to work again. Wells gets tearful. ‘I was just fucked. I was rat shit. I couldn’t go back. I was completely and absolutely worn out.’
There’s an irony here: both Knight and Wells have been diagnosed as suffering post-traumatic stress—Wells from his exposure to her crime. It would have been funny if he wasn’t so sick and he is further irritated to hear news from work that he’s letting the side down.
The psychiatric trauma is dredging memories from Wells he doesn’t realise are there. Names of car crash victims from the 1980s just pop up. Images of the carnage. ‘It was like a videotape being replayed. Things would just come back to me.’ A terrible car accident at Collector on the old Federal Highway between Goulbum and Canberra. A car rolled with three kids in it, killing them. Wells was working alone and when he got there one of the girls had her face ripped off by a wire fence. Another died in his arms. Her name just pops into his head like she was an old friend he hasn’t thought about for a while. And all the time he keeps thinking the DPP is going to pull out and accept a plea, that all the work is being wasted. He thought he was going mad.
Then in June of 2001 he meets Mark Macadam for a moment at a police funeral. The prosecutor is climbing into a car, about to drive away, but says not to worry and to meet him the following month. They are going to get her. Wells watches him drive away and is slightly reassured.
A peculiar meeting takes place on 14 July 2001 at 84 St Andrews Street, involving Bob Wells, a trainee detective, Mark Macadam and Kylie Henry from the DPP and lawyers Brian Thornton and Peter Thraves for Katherine’s defence.
The detective walks the prosecutors through the crime scene. Pricey’s house still reflects the residue of murder. There is a hole where a bloody footprint had been cut out of the floor coverings, blood splatters on the walls and smears on the floor. It is still empty. On the kitchen bench are a set of Stay Sharp knives; there is a Mexican hat and a mug that says: ‘To my wife and sweetheart. May they never meet’.
The defence indicate they are happy to cop a plea for manslaughter, that their client is illiterate and of low intelligence. Macadam asks Wells what he thinks. Wells says, ‘It’s your call,’ but is quietly praying they wouldn’t accept. The prosecutor says, ‘No, it’s your call, Bob. It’s your brief. What do you reckon?’ And Bob Wells begins to tell the defence all that has been on his mind, everything that has made him sick to the guts about this.
Mate, some of the most brilliant people in the world that have had major achievements have had low IQs but what this woman survives on is rat cunning, mate. She may be low IQ, but still owns her own home—worth next to nothing—but she owns it. She’s reared two adult children and rearing two others, they were clean, well dressed, she had once been employed and held down a job. Here’s a woman who wasn’t living destitute, mate. You don’t need high intellect or high IQ to be successful in life. I classify myself as average or below average IQ I was never a good student, no good at maths, I did the school certificate and left high school because basically I was told to leave, but I’ve made a reasonable go of my life and she survived with rat cunning. That’s what she was all about. She was never without a bloke, she would have lived to 85 or 90 and been all right as would her kids. I don’t reckon we should cop a plea.
It’s good enough for the DPP and they tell the defence to forget it and to prepare for a murder trial. The job is on.
At a committal hearing in August, Knight’s barrister, Peter Thraves, indicates that despite the meeting the defence will be arguing she was provoked into murder and will be looking at a plea to manslaughter. The defence keep saying this to the prosecution, but the Crown won’t play ball. They will not accept manslaughter. Knight’s defence team keep holding out for them to cave in.
> 18
The trial
October 2001
Up in Queensland David Kellett is on edge. He gets a sick feeling in the stomach every time the mobile phone rings and Bob Wells’ name appears on its screen. Coppers have been calling around with subpoenas, seats are booked on planes but the trial dates keep changing so he’s been let off a couple of times. He doesn’t want to go to court, doesn’t want to see his teenage bride again, doesn’t want to stand in a witness box, doesn’t want to see his in-laws and doesn’t want to cross her one last time, nor does he want his daughters Natasha and Melissa to go through the trial.
Nobody is looking forward to it. John Price’s family is bracing itself. They already know too much. The brothers are angry and are drinking themselves into tragicomic states of rage. Slurring oaths of vengeance. Katherine Knight’s family is on egg shells, throwing about threats and accusations against fellow family members deemed to be for or against the troubled twin. Tearing itself into ever smaller pieces.
Bob Wells and most of the police are looking forward to their day in court. A chance to prove it has been all worthwhile, but as the date approaches the trauma returns and Wells starts to get crook all over again. The headaches and nightmares are back. He can’t sleep properly.
Katherine Knight has also become anxious and agitated. She breaks down one day in a conference with her lawyers when she realises that she will have to sit in court and look at a video of what she’s done and what she’s been avoiding ever since. She is happy to take a plea to manslaughter so there wouldn’t be a trial, but the DPP has played hard ball and her day in court has arrived.
Justice Barry O’Keefe, a small man who is well respected among his colleagues, is the presiding judge for the trial at the Maitland Courthouse and begins the hearing on 16 October 2001, nineteen months after the murder. There’s a lot of interest in the trial and a degree of reservation among the lawyers over what the jury will be put through. Mark Macadam QC for the prosecution expressed reservations about jurors’ reactions.
The nature of the case and the evidence that is potentially such as will go before the jury [is] of such a horrific nature, and that is perhaps an understatement in this case, being unusual as it is.
Defence barrister Peter Thraves says he too is concerned about ‘undue reactions’. Justice O’Keefe agrees that they do not want people taking ‘ill of fainting or some equivalent’.
The following morning, 60 nervous men and women from the local area are given a pre-empanellment address by the judge.
The evidence will be graphic and grisly. The evidence as to the circumstances of and surrounding the death of the deceased will involve the members of the jury being exposed to quite explicit material; it is material which is quite gruesome and such as to be likely to shock and upset even those who may be fairly pragmatic by nature. It may be capable of causing significant distress to anyone who is squeamish or made ill by the sight of blood or human remains, even in pictorial form, or who may be affected by the graphic verbal description of such matters.
Justice O’Keefe says they may seek to be excused now if they have any concerns. Five take the option and leave the gore and drama to the others. And, because Maitland is only 90 minutes from Aberdeen and is a mining town, a few more are excused when they recognise some of the 60 plus names on the witness list, including one who remembers her son was good friends at school with a young boy called Bobby Wells. She doesn’t recognise the harassed looking policeman sitting a few metres away.
Empanellment is completed but further delayed when, just before lunch and after discussions with Knight’s defence, O’Keefe adjourns the hearing until the following day.
The next morning begins with high drama and anticlimax. The charge of murder is read out and Katherine Mary Knight announces she is guilty. O’Keefe asks her if she understood the effect of the plea.
—Beg your pardon?
—You understand the effect of the plea—that is, that you are admitting to the charge of murder?
—Yes, your Honour.
—You have taken counsel’s advice, have you?
—Yes, your Honour.
—I understand that you have had the opportunity to consider the matter overnight?
—Yes, your Honour.
—And you’re content to lodge the plea. Is that correct?
—Yes, your Honour.
O’Keefe reluctantly accepts the plea and thanks the jury, explaining that he has to be wary of accepting the plea automatically following rulings by the Court of Criminal Appeal, especially in a matter that is ‘the most serious crime in the calendar’. He explains to them that the prisoner may get a sentence discount for a plea because it saves the court money and the jury the ‘horrific details’ of the case. He thanks those who did not take the chance to ‘skip out… That was very public spirited of you.’ Some members of the jury are disappointed and one stays to watch the sentencing, becoming a permanent fixture in the public gallery and striking up a relationship with some of the Knight family.
What the jury doesn’t known is that Knight’s barrister, Peter Thraves, indicated to O’Keefe the day before that Knight wanted to change her plea. The judge arranged for a psychiatric assessment overnight to ensure she was fit to understand the consequences and a local psychiatrist was satisfied that she did. It was an extraordinary change of mind that has never been fully explained. Everything Knight has said and done since the killing indicates she takes no responsibility for her actions, and those around her, particularly her mental health team in prison, have supported her in that belief and her claims of amnesia and dissociation.
Had her legal team indicated they thought she didn’t have a hope? There were major problems with the psychiatric reports, as a few days before the trial the prosecution sought a second opinion from highly respected forensic psychiatrist Dr Rod Milton, a man who had been called on by police back in 1992 to do a profile of the killer in the backpacker murders. His findings wiped out any remaining hope of Knight defending herself on psychiatric grounds. At the same time the defence was having trouble with Dr Giuffrida’s report and in the end did not put him on their witness list, possibly because he may be asked questions that would not help himself or the case. Perhaps there was a belief by the defence that she had no hope of beating the murder charge and that a plea of guilty would at least gain her some discount.
There is some belief that she did not have the stomach for a trial. Her lawyers indicated that she didn’t want the families to go through the trauma, but this does not seem likely to have swayed her. Melissa said her mother had run out of money, but she’d been granted legal aid and would receive it no matter how long the case ran. The most convincing explanation for the guilty plea is that she just could not stand the thought of what she did being aired in public, and particularly did not want to sit through an examination of the gruesome detail. There is some indication of this in her attorney’s later requests that she be excused during presentation of some of the facts, suggesting that she had become hysterical during discussions with her barrister about certain evidence.
Kath was shutting her eyes again. She didn’t want to know. Her guilty plea could well be seen as an act of cowardice to spare herself further distress.
* * *
The change of heart transfers the trial into a simple sentencing hearing and is a great relief to the scores of witnesses scattered up the valley and beyond, none of whom have relished having to cross Katherine, even when she is in the dock.
O’Keefe then says he will give the prosecution time to prepare for the sentencing and in the meantime puts it on record that Katherine Mary Knight is a convicted murderer.
—Would you stand please, Mrs Knight? Mrs Knight, you have pleaded guilty to a charge of murder and I have accepted that plea. As a consequence, I judge you to be guilty of murder and a conviction of murder will be recorded accordingly. Do you understand?
—Yes, your Honour.
Knight remains even toned
and emotionless throughout. In the gallery there is a sense of disbelief. Katherine is led out the side of the court for her first night behind bars as a convicted murderer.
Friday morning the prosecution begins its case and is obviously aiming high. The Crown wants life, the toughest possible sentence, announcing it will first be presenting select witness statements, then two psychiatric reports, a set of photographs and a collection of videos. Free of the need to be circumspect with the graphic evidence, Macadam tells the judge, ‘The photos that I place before your Honour include a large number of photographs that I would not have placed before the jury.’ He continues on about the order and detail of exhibits and statements but O’Keefe seems more interested in the folder of photographic evidence, interrupting to ask, ‘Were the genitals of the deceased intact?’
O’Keefe decides he should watch the crime scene video first but Thraves asks if his client can be excused ‘in view particularly of the experience I had earlier in the week with my client when I gave her certain information’. O’Keefe agrees.
After a short adjournment, the court and depleted public gallery watch one of the most disturbing crime scene videos imaginable. The scenes begin outside the house and become increasingly horrific. The camera goes up and down and up and down John Price’s skin on the butcher’s hook, zooms in on the truncated neck and gaping wind pipe at the end of his skinned torso, and shows a yellow-gloved hand removing the lid from the pot on the stove, revealing his head in its sick soup. That takes them to lunch and court is then adjourned until Tuesday morning, almost as if nobody has the stomach to carry on.
On Tuesday morning Bob Price is causing trouble. O’Keefe begins with a warning.
Ladies and gentlemen, the prisoner has pleaded guilty to a charge of murder and is entitled to have her sentence hearing conducted without unnecessary stress. The law will take its course and no one, whether related to the deceased or otherwise, should even contemplate anything different than the law taking its course. I say no more than that.
