The Katherine Knight Cannibal Murder Case
In the small Australian town of Aberdeen, New South Wales, the year 2000 began like any other. Neighbors waved, barbecues smoked, and life moved at the slow, dusty pace of the outback.
Then came February 29th — a leap day that would never be forgotten.
Katherine Knight, a 45-year-old slaughterhouse worker and mother of four, had just married John Price, a 44-year-old miner known to friends as “Pricey.” Their relationship had been volatile from the start — explosive arguments, police call-outs, restraining orders, and chilling threats whispered in the dark. Yet somehow, they walked down the aisle. Everyone hoped this was the fresh start they both needed.
They were wrong.
The morning of March 1, 2000, John Price didn’t show up for his shift at the coal mine. Co-workers, worried because he had never missed a day without calling, asked police to do a welfare check at the house on St. Andrews Close.
What officers discovered inside would become one of the most infamous crime scenes in Australian history.
John Price had been stabbed repeatedly — more than 37 times — in a frenzied attack that began in the hallway and ended in the bedroom. But that was only the beginning. Katherine Knight had spent hours meticulously skinning his body, hanging large sections of his flesh from meat hooks in the living room like a grotesque butcher’s display. She had cooked pieces of his body, prepared vegetables, and set the dining table for two — with place settings for his horrified children, who were due to arrive later that day for a family meal.
On the stove sat two pots: one containing his head, the other containing parts of his body, slow-cooking in gravy.
She had even written handwritten notes to his children and left them beside the plates — notes that would haunt detectives and jurors forever.
Katherine Knight was arrested at a friend’s house later that day, still wearing the blood-soaked clothes she had slept in. She showed no remorse. Instead, she calmly told police she had “just lost it.”
The trial that followed shocked the nation. Jurors heard evidence of her decades-long history of extreme violence: stabbing an ex-partner, threatening to cut off another’s penis, slaughtering his puppy in front of him, and once holding a knife to her own infant daughter’s throat. They saw crime scene photos so disturbing that many had to leave the courtroom.
In November 2000, after the shortest jury deliberation in New South Wales history for a murder trial, Katherine Knight became the first Australian woman sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.
She remains behind bars to this day — Australia’s most notorious female killer — and the only woman in the country ever denied any chance of release.
Was this a crime of passion gone mad? A calculated act of revenge? Or something far darker — a woman who, after years of working the killing floor, finally brought her butcher’s trade home?
One thing is certain: the images from that house in Aberdeen have never left the minds of those who saw them. And the question still lingers in the quiet streets of that small town…
What kind of darkness can live inside someone for so long before it finally steps into the light?
Be sure to check out Mark & Amy’s other brand new companion podcast, “The Husband Did It”!!
https://thehusbanddidit.com