BLOOD STAIN-Peter Lalor

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unspeakable act. A mother of four and a grandmother, she seduced and then stabbed John Price thirty seven times. A former abatar worker, she skinned him a loving partner. She cooked him with vegetables, making a soup with his head made gravy, left him on plates for his family. Why Price? He was her de facto and he wanted out.

Knight go way over the borderline. In this unflinching account, he uncovers the lairs of her dysfunction, opening the door of eighty four Saint Andrew's Street and taking us into the lives of Knight's ex partners, her family, and the locals of Aberdeen, North South Wales. Catherine Knight is currently the only woman serving a life sentence in Australia. She

is never to be released. Bloodstained the true story of Catherine Knight, the mother and Avatar worker who became Australia's worst female killer, with my special guest, journalist and author Peter Laylor. Welcome to the program, and thank you for greeting this interview. Peter Laylor, Hi, Dan, good evening, Peter, Thank you very much for joining me all the way from Australia.

mining industrial town, to cover Cather Knight's sentencing hearing. Up until that point, very few people knew much about this crime, a little bit like you anyway, Because of a sort of series of circumstances, it actually hadn't been in the media. One good reason was she was charged with murder immediately

and the details were suppressed. But one of the local newspapers up on the New England Highway reported some of the details, and there was quite there was public outrage that such things would be in the newspaper, and I think that everybody got a little bit squeamish about it. So I went up there covered then and seeing wrote some pieces of newspaper and got a phone call from a publishing house. He said, would you like to write a book about it? My initial response was, who on

earth we want to read that stuff? It is just so awful. They chuckled a little and said, well, you know, we really want to write a book that explores Catherine's life and how she got to that point. I said, well that sounds I'll give that a shot. But here we are, what fourteen years later, still talking about this book. It doesn't go away absolutely.

Now I've got that industry has died. Catherine's parents were from that area. They were abatar workers. They were rough people, very rough people. Barb and Ken got together in very interesting circumstances. She left her husband and ran away with him. They followed work around the Abbatars up and down the highway. Had a number of children. I think there were six children, but they were spread around a little bit. She didn't take her first two children with her when she hooked

up with her new husband. She had twins with him. Catherine's a twin. Her sister's name is Joy. And they settled into a little town called Aberdeen, which is between Muscle Brook and Scone. It's pretty rough little town. Highway runs right through the middle of it. It has two pubs. In Australia we always call them the Top Pub and the Bottom Pub. And they had a full and unfortunate life. They were fringe dwellers, uneducated people, very rough people, hard

drinking people. Catherine grew up in an environment of terrible violence. Sexual violence was a norm in the home. It's not a norm, it wasn't uncommon, and she became a very disturbed little girl. In fact, the psychiatrist think that she possibly developed stress disorder from being sexually assaulted as a child, and that was within the family.

So it was a level of depravity. It's hard to fathom, absolutely hard to fathom, and I think that's perhaps what makes Catherine and her life so fascinating. I think we all of our lives thinking that, you know, most people are relatively normal, they don't stay too far from what's acceptable. We think that mad people commit violent crimes. We don't imagine that there are lives out there like that. We don't imagine what sort of a life Catherine knew as normal.

I mean that was to her what a family was. A place where your father raped your mother, where your step brothers sexually assaulted you as a child, she understood very well. She knew very early in her life that sex and violence were connected. They went hand in hand. You didn't have one without the other.

are terribly brutal places. And you'll find that there are two types of people that work in ambatwires. When you talk to avertwelve workers, there are those that endure it, that put up with it. It's not a pleasant environment in any way. But then there's a very small group of people who actually enjoy their work. They disturb everybody. They are people who have an asterisk next to them, and Catherine was one of these people. Katherine aspired all the life to work in the Abbatwise, she wanted to

kill animals. She talked about nicking the veins in their necks to watch them bleed out. She spoke about her joy of removing the bones out of the flesh. She had a perverse fascination with dying animals and with dead animals, and with the products of dead animals. She also, unfortunately, had a fascination with her knives. She was very skilled with her knives. Avatar workers have very sharp, lethal knives.

Catherine loved hers. She ended up losing the job in the Abatid because she got injured and she ended up on welfare. And you can in Australia live a reasonable life on welfare if you have enough children, which she manufactured. So she was a little bit disappointed about that. But the interesting thing was she kept her knives. Not only did she keep her k eyes, much the horror of her first husband, David Callett, she actually kept them above the bed on the wall, almost a threat to the

men that came in there. And she was a woman of particular violence toward me, as all of her partners discovered, and as all of her partners told me when I was researching this book.

was an intimidating woman. David learned very early on in their relationship that she had certain demands and unless they were met, she responded with violence. Before he agreed to marry her, it was an alcohol wedding. He was so drunk that I think he could barely stand at the ceremony. She drove him there on the back of her motorbike. She actually picked him up from somewhere where he was drinking and forced him to come along and marry her. Her mother said to him, took him aside and said,

you need to be very very careful. Was a person like my daughter. Never ever upset her, never or never cheat on her, because she will kill you. David took it in the Australa. He thought she was a bit fiery. But then on the first night of their wedding, they were very young, they were teenagers. They consummated the marriage and they probably consummated and they had sex a couple of times, David told me, and then he fell asleep because he'd been drinking all day. And that's what me do,

isn't it. The next thing he knew, she had him pinned to the bed with a knife in her hands, and she was in a state of apoplexy. She was screaming at him and she said, my mother told me that on her wedding night they had sex seven times, and she was in this state of fury because he'd let her down and they'd only ever had sex twice.

And she was holding a nice to his throat and he actually thought he was going to be killed on his wedding night and not performing in bed, which almost sounds like a black comed He doesn't it, But the poor guy was scared, scared out of his wits. It was very interesting that the former partners were keen to talk to me, because these are tough guys. I mean, we're talking coal miners, avatire workers, truck drivers, hard drinking

Australian men from small towns, poorly educated, tough blokes. But when I tracked them all down, they all had stories to tell. A terrible domestic violence perpetrated against them. Two of them wept as they told me stories of what Catherine had done to her. It's a very disconcerting experience to sit across from a tough Aussie by crying as he tells you how brutal his wife was to him. I mean, it's done to a degree, it's unbelievable. It doesn't add up, doesn't fit into your realm of experience.

And in fact, that's in many ways how she got away with it, most of a lot, because nobody would ever believe those men when they told their stories. They wanted to tell their stories. They were very teen to take me aside and say, look, this is what I went through. And to a man, they all felt terrible sympathy for the partner that she united, because I think they all saw themselves at one time or another that that could have been then, but they docked that bullet.

be in that situation. Her partner had left her and she'd been holding the baby literally, but her response, her response was so over the top that that detries imagination. She went. She was seen walking down the main street of the town with pushing the baby in the pram, howling uncontrollably and swinging the pram from one side of

the street to the other. Everybody in Aberdeen was frightened of Catherine Knight, frightened of the night, but particularly Catherine Knight, and they just got out of her way and Catherine disappeared. Nobody I don't think anyone stuck their no, isn't it because I don't think anyone one of the consequences of that intruding. Catherine took the baby and placed the baby on the railway tracks, which it's the coal train runs

through Aberdeen and it's down a siding. Nobody goes there usually, and she left and her clear intention was for the baby to be run over by the cold tame. Fortunately for Melissa Well, two veteran who was a little bit of a hobo lived outside the town in a makeshift shack. He was wandering along the train tracks that day and found a baby before the train arrived. Some people say that the train was minutes away. I would they have been

able to confirm that, so he rescued the baby. In the meantime, Catherine was its insane with grief and rage and was picked up by the police and they took her to a psychiatric institution overnight. I spoke to the policeman's wife about the situation. She said she felt terribly sorry for this girl, but her behavior was vile to

her language and her aggression were off the scale. Somehow, she checked herself out of the psychiatric institution and came back to town the following day and she resolved, which she resolved to have a revenge on her husband, who's left her, so she went to the local. First of all, she wandered into the house of a girl she went

to school. It's with a knife. She took the elderly mother, the teenage daughter and the young son hostage, put them in a car and said, you will drive me to Queensland where my husband is up over the border, and I'm going to kill him. They were petrified, naturally. At one point the teenage daughter tried to run away Catherine chaster and threw it to the ground in the front yard and nicked and very sort of deliberately nicked her face with one of these knives that are so sharp,

and said get back into the house. Before she went up the highway, they stopped the car at a service station. There's some dispute about this, but Catherine says that she decided that she was going to kill the mechanic the service station, the local service station, because the mechanic had fixed her husband's car that he'd used to get away

from her, so he was involved in this betrayal. The hostage situation sort escalated quite quickly there, and in the end the police managed arrived, fortunately because the young boy escaped and managed to alert the police in town. She was arrested again, taken back to a psychiatric institution, and committed Strangely enough, David felt very sorry for her when he heard what had happened, and along with his mother, some weeks later, drove down to this psychiatric institution and

checked her out, and they recommenced their married life. With all of the partners, you find that the violence or the excess of casine, they have some sympathy with her.

It's very difficult to treat, and it makes your life very problematic if you have it. It's often a reaction to post traumatics, to stress, early trauma early in your life. She had post traumatic stress sort of too. They think, what happens is you have this absolute fear of separation, of somebody leaving you, of somebody betraying you, and you

will react in it. You will react with extraordinary emotion to the slightest insult insults being things like failing to ring on time or come home on time, or perhaps talking to another woman in the pub. That's an active betrayal that in Catherine she responds like most people have bought in an boarderline personality disorder are upset by this,

but Catherine responds with violence. Another element of borderline personality disorder is that they will fix on their partner and they will love their partner with a similar sort of extreme passion. They are very very parts. I will do everything for you, Catsain Coked claimed washed she was the perfect sort of housewife in a way, perfect partner if you have looked the violence.

sort of indiscriminate sort of sexual partner's indiscriminate cheating. What she will do, and what people with borderline personality disorder are prone to do, is swap trains. They will be absolutely in love with somebody up until the point they will meet somebody else, and then they transfer all of their affection and emotion to the next person. It's as if the last person didn't exist and they transferred totally.

Catherine did that a number of times as she moved from one partner to another's through life, and yes, she ended up taking well, she left David. I don't think she was having an affair at the time, but very soon after, it's actually hard to pin down the timeline on that. Very soon after she'd taken up with another bloke, another very hard drinking mcman who worked as a mechanic in the coal mines up in the next town a chat by the name of David Saunders. Like Calott, very friendly, likable,

knock about bossie By. Also, like Caltt, Saunders has died. Since Katsin has tended to outlive almost all of her partners, so must all the men in this story are dead or were not in a very good state because of her exposure to her.

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true murder. One word, that's ProFlowers dot Com. On the microphone and type in true murder. Remember Mother's Day is this weekend, so order today and time is running out. This offer expires Friday at midnight. That's ProFlowers dot Com. Now, Peter, we talked introduced David Saunders, her next partner. You talked about him being a hard drinker, also another small town tough guy. Tell us what the differences were with David Saunders, despite,

among other things, his stature. But tell us the differences with David Saunders and this relationship.

mother for a little while. When they got there, they pulled up the car and there was an incident and Katherine's mother saw Carlott in the car and came running out of the house and he was grabbed him. He was in the passenger seat and tried to stroddle him, tried to actually choke him for leaving her daughter, and she wouldn't let God. Catherine got out of the back seat of the car, told her to stop. She didn't stop and knocked her mother out with a single punch.

Bizarre scenes, absolutely bizarre things. Calott's mother, who was from a very nice lady, from a nice background, sat there and had never seen anything like at in her life. She was in the car too. They couldn't get away from there quick enough, but there was just a little slice of life and the things Saunders. Saunders was like Callot, a hard drinking man he loved. He was a little bit taller, so not as physically intimidated by Catherine. Callot

got out of the relationship reasonably lightly. He had his skull fractured by a frying pan for having come home too late from the pub one night. Saunders had a bad habit of coming home from the pub later than he said he would. Catherine's anxiety about separation would kick him.

One night, he came in the front door of her house with a six pack of beer under one hand, and he opened the door with the other hand to see Catherine standing there, and she had been ironing the clothes at that point, and she greeted him with the iron and hand and punched him in the face with the iron as he walked through the door. He told me that he had burn marks with steam holes down the side of his face from the greeting from Catherine, all because he was fifty minutes late from the pub,

which was about two blocks away. He had another terrible incident where she suspected he was cheating on her. She got it into a head that he was seeing another woman. I think he was. She told him that she had enough and she was going to show him what would happen to him if he ever if she caught him cheating, and she walked out the back of the house. He wasn't quite sure what she was doing. He followed her out the back and looked out. It was dark, and

he had a dingo pup. I don't know if you know dingo, said, a native Australian dog, A beautiful dog. He had a dingo pup and she was holding an in her arms, and he couldn't quite understand why, because she had no affection at all for animals Katherine. In fact, there are stories of her swerving the car as they drove to hit cats and dogs. He looked more closely and Catherine had slipped the dog's throat with a kitchen knife as a warning to Saunders, what would happen to

him should he have a cheek on her. Another time, one of his mates told me that he he fronted up to their house to get a lift to at work that morning and said, lookt before we go, you got to help me out if you've got a needle and thread. And the guy said, why you've torn your clothes? What is a mailor you know? We work in a mind. No, no, no no, and opened his shirt and Catherine had stabbed

him in the chest. He didn't want to go to the hospital, so he got his mate to sew him up there and they went to work that day.

It happened every time there was a serious incident. What policeman is ever going to believe that these men being assaulted by their women, even if they do try and say it, you know, they just haven't got a hope of being believed. He's natural for the police to think, well, we need to protect the woman, not the man, because that's the way these things work. So it was also a reflection the fact that she's a victim. She had constructed a life for herself where she is the victim

of men. It dates back in some ways to being a victim of sexual violence as a child of her You know, she alleges that her stepbrother sexually abused her. He's never denied it. I wrote it in the book, and he had every chance to deny it, but he didn't. So she often spoke about men, men getting their way with her, and how she had to protect herself and protect her children from the sexual violence of men. I actually think she believed it. I don't think she was

cynical about these things. If she assaulted, then she had a very good reason to assault them, and she ran to the police, and she got protected on every occasion. Only once, I think was there a question of pressing charges against her, and that was when she had caved in Callot's skull with a skillet. She actually fractured his skull and he was in hospital. The police attended and said, we think you should press charges against her. He decided

not to do it. But that was the one time in a long history of violence where perhaps the law got the right end of the tale.

was hyper vigilant around her children. I mean, she was terribly, terribly rough with them in the way she spoke to them and treated them. The neighbors shuddered in horror the things that she heard them saying to her children. She was a very stern and stern mother. But in her head, as I said earlier, they were all potential victims of sexual answer. I don't think at any stage where any

of the children sexually abused. Certainly there's no suggestion that Price had, as she accused him, sexually abused the youngest woman. She did leaven note when she killed him, alleging that, but there's no proof, no suggestion from anybody that that happened.

as they described these rages that she was in. But obviously she would calm down very quickly too, to actually assemble the story and get to the police and cover her track as she always did.

But you walked into the courtroom, she was quite an ordinary looking woman. She wore a nice frock, her hair was done, she had a crucifix that she wore around her neck. You wouldn't have thought twice if you walked past her in the street. She could have passed herself off as a librarian. You know. She a very ordinary looking person. And what's difficult for us to actually get our heads around is that somebody who could raise four children, own their own home, lived a reasonably normal life if

we excite the violence. Somebody who operated among us looked like us, perhaps was rougher than most of us, and had some edge about her that unnerved you. But that somebody could commit a crime like she did, that's what's astounding. And that she could have, as you say, she had three partners, she had four children with those three partners, they kept coming back. These guys, I mean the third partner, who we haven't discussed yet children with. He was very

distressed when she left him. He felt like he was driving up and down. He actually became unhinged from the separation. So we're not talking about a monster. We're talking about somebody who managed to get by in an ordinary life and managed to make men love her because they did love her.

strange scene. Or the Toddler when Captain's driving the daughter through muscle book one day and they stop at the light and the daughter starts to yell from the back of the car, Dad, he's not dead, Mummy. There he is. There he is. And there was her father walking along the street, the father that she thought was dead. What sort of cruelty does a woman have to tell her child that her father's dead when in fact he isn't.

But he was certainly dead to Catherine. She was sick of him, and she moved on some chilling lot.

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she did with all of the blokes. That was one way, it's a terrible thing to say, I think of Myst Wilbert. That was a way that she cemented her relationship with the men was by having a child, because she knew if she had a child with them, they would hang around and they wou porter and that would be their responsibility. They had a child very early, a young boy. But they had a violent relationship. But I think that he may have been one of the two who actually gave

back as good as he got with Catherine. It's hard to know. She had him charge once and he was put on an abo in the end again she up and left him. She just disappeared. She jumped trains again and started the last relationship of her life, perhaps the one she'd been building two for all those years through Calott, Saunders and Shillingworth. When she met John Price, who was more her sort of man. I might say he was not a violent man, Pricey, but he was a bloke

spoke as we say down here. He drove big trucks in coal mines. He was a little guy again, nuggety hard drinker, had a couple of children to an earl from an earlier relationship. Still had a very good relationship with his first partner, who loved him dearly. Everybody loved this guy. There are stories that you would pull up people were passing through Aberdeen would stop at the Bottom pub where he drank, meet him and actually stay another night or two in town because they enjoyed his company

so much. He was the light of the pub, a very happy, cheerful bloke. Women loved him. They wanted to mother in. He had a reasonably comfortable life. He had a small house up the road from the pub. Just if anyone's got the book at that's his house on the front cover of the book. Unremarkable house. He had shared custody of his children. His children liked him very much, so he had three children, actually had a son, and

Catherine took up with him. That was the cause of much of amusement among the town's folks, who sort of said him, do you really know what he was getting yourself employe? And of course he did. Everybody knew the Night family, and everybody had heard tales about Kastrine. But he was initially charmed by her, as everybody.

don't think he was willing. He was ready for her to move into his house, which she wanted to do, and in fact, by stealth, she did move in to his house when she had a house not more than two kilometers away on the highway, so she had her own home. And I think at some point we should talk about her home. But she believed that she had a relationship with him, and because she had a relationship with him, his house was her house. When push came to shove and he said, listen, honey, that's your house.

This is my house. Let's call it quits. You know, you moved back home. I'm going to stay here. It's all over. She was incensed because she had this strange sense of entitlement, and she said, well, no, this your home is partially mine, by own half of it. She knew that he'd left it in his will to his children. She resented his children, the affection he had for them. She resented the fact that they would get the house. She resented the fact that he would not give her

the house. And they squabbled for some time along these lines. I mean, and it's completely bizarre. She she has no legal right to this house at all, but in her

mind she does. And then she started to demand a sum of money to go away, and he was desperate to get rid of her, but found it difficult to make the break, and she would reappear in his life, you know, sliping in the middle of the night, and he would be drunk and they would have sex and it was all very good, and she'd make him breakfast in the morning and go to work, and then he think, how am I going to get her out of my

house again? You know, it was a very difficult situation and he became very stressed over it and by her behavior.

very high paid job in the coal mine. She had no qualms about doing this because he had upset her by wanting wanting her to leave, so she got back at him. That was one of her first acts of revenge towards him.

He worked very hard. He was a very reliable employee, never missed a day's work in his life. But he started to get very concerned about her behavior. She was saying, if you don't give me this money, I won't go away. She was then threatening violence against his children. He knew as well as anybody that she was capable of extreme violence, and one night they end up having a fight. They rolling around on the floor in front of the television,

scratching and clawing and god knows what. At some point he has grabbed her breast and bruised her breast with his fingers. At another point, she grabs somehow goes. She gets up, grabs a knife and chases him out of the house with an ice. He goes to report this to the police, but unfortunately he's been She has also gone to the police. She has photographs. She's very good

at documenting any evidence or we don't know. She made it up a lot, but in this case, she had photographs taken of the finger marks on her breast as proof of the violence against that he traded against her. He took we have a thing called an av oh here, I'm not sure if you have them in America apprehended violence order, which you can get taken out by the police or a magistrate to have somebody kept away from you.

He tried to get one taken out against her because he, by this stage was convinced that she was going to kill him. There was some confusion and it ended up that the AVO was served against him, not her. He'd had a very very disturbing experience after the incident was the knife where he had woken up and she was standing at the end of his bed staring at him with her hands behind her back, and he knew that she had a knife behind her back, and he believed

that she was possibly contemplating killing him there. And then he became so frightened that about this that he told a couple of people. He took a day off work. They were very worried about him. At work, his boss, he told his boss what was going on. His boss said, you can stay there's an apartment at the earth moving business, or you can stay at my house. You've got it. You can't go back to your home. He said, I have to go back. I can't If she doesn't get me,

she'll get my children. He took the day off work. He went to the magistrate to try and sort out the avo. The magistrate said, the clerk there said, look, you know you're going to have to come back two weeks. This is a difficult process. He sort of took it on the chin, had a laugh at the bloke. He said, I don't know if I'm going to live that long. Coal He ran into his neighbors across the road, Collison's. They he went in there, the husband and wife. The wife there was very fond of him. He had a

few drinks there that night. She could see that he was very disturbed. She said, what's going on. He told then the story of what had happened, with her being chased out of the house with the knife, and then waking up with her at the end of his bed with a knife. They told him not to go home. He said, I have to. He'd also told some people in the pub that night, and he went home the next morning. That night they heard her car pulling up,

and they heard some movement around the place. They didn't think too much of it, but the next morning they woke up and they looked out and his truck was still in the driveway, his work boots were still on

the front porch, and he hadn't gone to work. They would have been more surprised if the sudden hadn't come up, because he was a guy who was extremely punctual, as I said, And they became very concerned at this moment that something was wrong in the house across the road, and calls his work were ringing trying to find out where he was. It was most unusual. Another neighbor was contacted and people started to gather. His friends started to gather at the property just see what was going on,

and they knocked on the door. There was no answer. They could hear the air conditioner ringing, and then they noticed blood around the doorstep, and I think they all knew immediately that their mate was in and they banged the place.

a normal, loving grandmother. But when she was alone in the room, she put the video camera on top of the television and sat in a chair and began to make a video of what sounds like a last will and testament. It's telling the children that they own this, and don't they own that, and don't let anybody take you know. It's this again, this sense of entitlement. Don't let anyone take this off you or that off you, you know, and said, I love my children very much

and I hope to see them again one day. And then somebody walks in the room and she turns off the video came and that's the end of that video. They go out for dinner, they separate, the go home. She goes back to her house earlier in the day, she's gone to a local charity shop and she's bought a black neglige, a black lacey underwear type thing, and she goes around to Price's house and she puts on this black neglige and looks into his bedroom and they

have sex. We wonder what's going on in John Price's mind at this stage. He's told everybody he can in the town that he believes that Catherine's going to kill him at some point. Instead, she arrives and she walks into the bedroom and has sex with him. He has nowhere else to go. He can't run away because he's worried that she will track down his children, not her children, and kill them, as she's threatened to. And she's actually accused his eldest daughter of raping her son, which is

an extraordinary accusation. She's done to very young herself, this girl. And from there we know from the forensic evidence. Oh, we know from some evidence in fact, that they have sex, and that John is lying in bed, probably on his back. She goes out, she goes to the toilet. She comes back with a knife and she proceeds to attack him in I don't know how much they tell you want me to go into it. Do we have squeamish listeners?

massive blood sprays down the hallway. Sometimes she stabs him with such violence that the knife, it's a big knife, actually passes right through his body. Wow. She continues to stab him. He reaches the front door. He opens the front door. He actually gets outside the house, but she pulls him back in and continues to stab him until

we presume he dies. There were thirty seven puncture wounds between the bedroom and the front that he's suffered between in the bedroom and the front door, and he bleeds to death. He dies just in the little hallway behind the front door of this brick suburban country home. But she's not finished there. And it's a murder in two parts, and it's sort of this is perhaps what's interesting about her.

The stabbing was angry, it was revenge, it was violent, it was heated, it was it could have passed for a murder of passion, of an inflamed passion of anger. But what she does next is what makes Catherine so fascinating. Her anger stated, the fact that she's killed him. She becomes very calm. I believe the judge refers to the

calmness of what she does next. She actually decides to indulge all those perverted fantasies that she's had all the life, but which she lived out at the Avatar in particular, and she goes back to work on his body. She skins him. She skins him cleanly with an incision down the back, down his spine, peels the skin from his torso in one piece. The forensic evidence was said it surprisingness that it probably weighed about fifteen kilos the skin. She hung the skin on a butcher's hook in the

doorway of the lounge room. She's moved the body sorry by this time, into the lounge room. She decapitates him. The forensic signers say that this she did this with It was an anatomical dissection. She did it very carefully. It would have taken some time. She's not and I told you what I'm saying. You know, what the judge is saying in the fens of science is that this isn't There's no frenzy involved anymore. The frenzy is gone.

She is calm, she's collected, and she's very purposeful and at times evidence suggests that she stops for a cigarette to sort of survey the work that she's doing. But she's not finished because she decides to make a meal from her lover. She removes the head, She puts it into a large pot with onion vegetables and makes a soup from the head. She removes part of his buffets and nice meal with the meat. She claims vegetables, she

cooks marrow and pumpton and potato. She makes gravy, and then she sets out the table with two plates, two plates with the mate, the vegetables, the gravy, and she is roughly written place maps America.

a shower, she's changed, and she's in the bedroom. She's taken a token overdose of pills, not enough to kill her. In no way would they kill her. And when they end to the crime scene, which is absolutely horrific as you can imagine, they can hear a noise from the master bedroom and it's Catherine snoring in bed. So they have and this is a very calculated act by her

because she has decided she's planned this murder. She's hinted that she would do that, she would murder him and get away with it because everybody will think that I'm mad. It's the phrase she uses, because she's indulged this sick fantasy, you know, saying people don't behave like this, do they? And she hasn't tried to flee the scene. She's acted and she pleads that she has some sort of amnesia about what's happened, that she was lads and she believes

that she will get away with this crime. She doesn't need to run away.

Obviously he has this adverse, very dramatic reaction to what he sees in that house, doesn't he?

He's not, but he's seen enough in his life. But everybody is standing and as pale, and there is not one person, not one person associated with the police who attended that crime scene, who is the same person when they leave it. Many of them didn't go back to work. A forensic scientist submitted his paperwork that afternoon, drove home and never returned, never spent another day in the police force. Almost every one of them's been diagnosed with some psychiatric

reaction to what happens. And I suppose this is what makes Bob such a compelling figures that the homicide aren't interested in the case because the woman's pled. They've got They've got the woman straight away, it's cut and dried. There's he has no support. He's a lone police officer, and he's told you go you, you do the report for the coroner. You do the report, and when it gets the trial, be cut and dried. It's all yours. But he's very concerned that she won't be convicted of

murder because it looks like an act of madness. And that's what at some point in his investigation he finds. He discovers that prices as there's one thousand dollars been taken out of Price's bank account after he's murdered on that night. So at some stage we presume she's had a shower, she's driven to the next town, which is about twenty kilometer drive, she's gone for an ATM and she's taken out five hundred dollars, which to that point in time was generally about the limit of what you

could take out from a tower machine. She's then two minutes later gone back to the tower machine and taken out another five hundred dollars. This intrigues me, this act because it suggests to me that perhaps she wasn't alone, and that perhaps another member of her family is with her and has driven her to the tower and told her that no, no, no, you could get a thousand dollars out of his account. Maybe I'm reading too much into that, but there is a suggestion that somebody else

was involved at this point, not at the murder. But this is critical evidence to the police because this and to what they present to the judge, because this proves that she's thinking very clearly. She's not a woman in some sort of psychological fob who's disassociated from her actions. Here is this is another act of revenge. The defilement of the bo is an act of revenge, but the stealing of money is an active revenge and gets to that point I've made a few times about her sense

of entitlement. She couldn't get half the house, she couldn't get the ten thousand dollars she was asking. She couldn't break his relationship with his first wife and children, so she killed him. But she did get a thousand dollars, so you know, I think that made her quite happy. We don't actually know what happened to the money either, which has further to that theory that perhaps she dropped it off to another family member.

But at the same time, you talk about how ridiculous it it would seem to anybody like ourselves that she would be considered insane by the standards. Once she's in the hospital, she's sticking with this amnesia and there's a doctor the pronunciation you'll have to help me out with. But he is taught is buying into what she is saying, so, tell us a little bit about this psychiatrist for the defense that speaks to her and seems to be believing her story.

This really upsets Wells takes this case personally. I think Wells in a way identifies with Price. He can't he can't get it out of his mind, the fear and the horror of what happened to Price that night. He particularly, he can't get out of his mind the crime scene. Every time he closes his eyes he sees the crime scene. He's a man in a terrible psychological trauma after that,

But he was. The more he research is the case, the more he becomes convinced that it follows an arrhis that I've given you because very much I followed in Bob's footsteps that she was a woman, she was a woman, a violent, evil woman, that she planned to kill her husband because she told she told her family members that she'd killed him and getting away with her, and the

family member told that. To Bob Wells, there was a critical piece of evidence, and he really felt felt like he had to do the right thing by John Price and make sure that this woman was convicted of murder and didn't get away with it, just as she got away with her violence, her her whole life. And it became, you know, it became a quest for Bob. He was suffering from He wasn't very healthy at all at the time.

I've forgotten the words that she said when you get had a very sore foot, so I forgot the name of this disease was thank you. He was walking without one without a shoe on. He was driving here, he was driving there. He'd become quite maniced. I became I spent a lot of time with him and his wife at the time after the murder, and I had a conversation with her a few years ago because eventually their marriage broke down and she said to me, you know, Pete,

Bobby never came home that day. She said, that man that you know now wasn't the man that left the work that day. He was forever changed by what he saw and haunted by it. You know, she still had a lot of affection for him, but that scene, and this is not uncommon with police officers to have post traumatic stress disorder, and it's you know, it is one event that will tip them over the edge, but it's a compilation of things that they've endured through their careers.

And you know, Bob told me stories of the terrible road accidents that he'd attended on country roads where he sat holding victims, you know, skull together for an hour, waiting for an ambulance to camp and being chased by men with knives. I mean, it wasn't just this crime that had got the bold, but it was this crime that tipped him out of the edge, and he ended up needing a lot of psychiatric help.

one I watched it back in the day. It's called Resurrection, where a serial killer goes around and hangs people on butcher's hooks and dismembers them, and Dalla Force believed that there were some there was some correlation with the crime there, with the butcher's hooks and the skin hanging on the from the butcher's hook. He basically said, she knew exactly what she was doing and she was having a very good time. He believed that she'd actually planned for months.

She dreamt of killing him. And one of the key Captain was that I mentioned earlier. She owned her own home. It was an old weatherboard, it was a shop front on the highway, nothing fancy. But she loved her as most people will. And she didn't love her home because she planted flowers and had birds in cages and there were doilies and you know, pretty pictures on the wall.

She loved her home because she felt calm there. And why she felt calm, she had decorated almost every surface inch of the living area with dead things, with things that were related to death. There were skulls, there were pelts, there were horns, there were knives. It was, as Delaforce says, a place of death and destruction. This was how she decorated the place where she felt the safest. She said, you know, this was a place where I felt calm.

Sitting among there were stuffed animals. She found some. It was almost like a necrophilia. She was comforted by death and by being around death, and by killing things, by seeing living things become dead things. And that's why she enjoyed so much that defilement of John Price's body on the night. That's why she did it. But it had a double purst It had a dual purpose. She fulfilled the fantasy and at the same time, she's very cunning woman. She was constructing a defense for herself.

was a victim herself and she was protecting herself. And this is this is a story that she's this is a story that she has was for herself and for members of her family if they want to, if they want to accept that story and get along with her. There are others there. I have some communication with some of the guards who looked after her, and they tell me that she is a dangerous, frightening woman who does appear calm, who at one point she was very keen.

I mean, she made her own clothes, She was very you. She was a dressmaker of sorts and amateur dressmaker. She made very sexually outfits for herself. She was very fond of short skirts and hot pants, and she was a very sexual woman. And she's very she's very into craft in the prison, but they've had to be very wary of what tools she uses because they do not trust her in the prison system. Somebody obtained for me some paintings that she'd done, which at first glance are not

very remarkable. She paints clowns, but if you look very carefully, very very disturbing clowns. These are evil clowns they have. She's quite skillful. These bloodshot ouryes, these evil eyes setting to a sort of normal crown size. There's a series of these tintings. It looked like something out of a horribley, very very disturbing.

and maybe even enjoyed it. What was Catherine Knight's demeanor at trial, well, at the sentencing, I should say, because she's pleaded guilty, so well.

to plead guilty. And she pled guilty. And we believe she pled guilty because she did not want to be confronted by the evidence of what she did. At one point where she seems at times she seemed absolutely fascinated by the psychologist's evidence and their accounts of what happened to her and her life of her childhood. She wet the bed as a child because she lived in fear

of the dark. I mean, she was a traumatized child, you know, and how that led to the broaderline personality disorder and what was going on when she put Melissa on the train. Tax She was fascinated by this evidence. But when evidence of the crime was presented and they played the crime scene video to a closed court, she began to scream hysterically and have a fit and throw herself about. That happened on at least one occasion and

she had to be removed from the court. But the fit passed very quickly when she was given a cup of tea with sugar in it and she calmed down. And O'Keefe really wasn't buying this from Catherine and said, it's put on. I don't care how she carries on. She's sitting there. We're getting through this. The crime scene video, which I've seen, is the most terrific video you have

ever seen in your life. I know you can imagine a skinned torso, the skin the At one point, the forensic detective takes the lid off the pot on the stove and John Price's John Price's head is looking at John Price is looking up at you. His head there, his eye is staring at the camera. This goes on and she sound guilty. She is given a sentence never to be released. We don't have the death sentence in Australia. She has appealed against this on two occasions, the appeals

being rejected. So she's going to spend the rest of her life in jail. In a funny way as you asked earlier. She finds jail a little bit comforting because of the routines and strangely enough, the security of it all. Her life's ed and organized, but there's there's no doubt. She also thinks that she she was a victim protecting herself from a violent man, from a string of violent name and poor old Price was the one who paid for all those that came before him.