Katherine Mary Knight (born 24 October 1955) is an Australian murderer and the first woman in the country's history to be sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.
She was convicted for the murder of her partner, John Charles Thomas Price, in February 2000, and is currently imprisoned at the Silverwater Women's Correctional Centre in New South Wales.
She then cooked his head and parts of his body with the intention of feeding them to Price's children, but was stopped by police after an employee of his went to check on him after he had not been at work that day.
They had four sons before Barbara began an adulterous relationship with Kenneth "Ken" Charles Knight (1927-2009), a friend and co-worker of her then-husband.
[3] When she attended Muswellbrook high school, Knight became a loner and is remembered by classmates as a bully who stood over smaller pupils.
He eventually lost the job due to deteriorating behaviour and performance, but he soon got work at the nearby Aberdeen abattoir and became close friends with Knight's brother.
[3] The marriage proved particularly violent, and on one occasion a heavily pregnant Knight burned all of Kellett's clothing and shoes before hitting him across the back of the head with a frying pan, simply because he had arrived home late from a darts competition after reaching the finals.
In May 1976, shortly after the birth of their first child, Melissa Ann, Kellett left Knight for another woman and moved to Queensland, apparently unable to cope with the abuse.
She was admitted to St Elmo's Hospital in Tamworth, where she was diagnosed with postnatal depression and spent several weeks recovering.
An unsheltered man known in the district as "Old Ted", who was foraging near the railway line, found and rescued Melissa, by all accounts only minutes before the train passed.
The woman escaped after they stopped at a service station; however, by the time police arrived, Knight had taken a young boy hostage and was threatening him with the knife.
[3] Knight was released on 9 August 1976 into the care of her mother-in-law and, along with Kellett, moved to Ipswich, a city west of Brisbane, where she obtained a job at the Dinmore meatworks.
In May 1987, Knight cut the throat of Saunders' two-month-old dingo pup in front of him, for no more reason than as an example of what would happen if he ever had an affair, before going on to knock him unconscious with a frying pan.
After an argument in which she hit Saunders in the face with an iron before stabbing him in the abdomen with a pair of scissors,[4] he moved back to Scone, but when he later returned home to Aberdeen, he found she had cut up all his clothes.
[2] In 1991, Knight became pregnant by 43-year-old former abattoir co-worker John Chillingworth and gave birth the following year to a boy they named Eric.
[citation needed] John Charles Thomas Price[5] (4 April 1955 – 1 March 2000) was the father of three children when he began his affair with Knight.
However, his children liked her, he was making a lot of money working in the local mines, and, apart from violent arguments, at first "life was a bunch of roses.
Although the items were out-of-date medical kits that he had scavenged from the company rubbish tip, Price was fired from the job he had held for seventeen years.
Earlier that day, Knight had bought new black lingerie and had videotaped all her children while making comments which have since been interpreted as crude will.
[citation needed] At 6 am the next day, a neighbour became concerned that Price's car was still in the driveway, and when he did not arrive at work, his employer sent a worker to see what was wrong.
Both the neighbour and the worker tried knocking on Price's bedroom window to wake him, but they alerted police after noticing blood on the front door.
Breaking down the back door, police found Price's body, with Knight comatose from taking a large number of pills.
Price's autopsy revealed that he had been stabbed at least 37 times, in both the front and back of his body, with many of the wounds extending into vital organs.
Sometime later, Knight arranged the body with the left arm draped over an empty 1.25-litre soft drink bottle with the legs crossed.
Bloodstained and covered with small pieces of flesh, it read:[2] Time got you back Johathon for rapping [raping] my douter [daughter].
[citation needed] When the trial commenced, Justice Barry O'Keefe offered the 60 jury prospects the option of being excused due to the graphic nature of the photographic evidence, which five accepted.
[citation needed] On 8 November, Justice O'Keefe pointed out that the nature of the crime and Knight's lack of remorse required a severe penalty.
He sentenced her to life imprisonment, refused to fix a non-parole period and ordered that her papers be marked "definitely never to be released", the first time that this had been imposed on a woman in Australian history.