2001: Katherine Knight: the First Woman in Australia Sentenced to Life Without Parole for a Meat-Hook Murder
John Price's workmates watched him grow afraid of the woman he could not quite leave. In a town in the Hunter Valley region of New South Wales, Knight had already stabbed him once before, and on 28 February 2000 he took out a restraining order against her, warning colleagues that if he failed to turn up for work the next day, it would be because she had killed him.
He was right. Knight stabbed Price more than thirty times as he slept, then skinned him and hung the skin from a meat hook in the hallway. She cooked parts of his body with vegetables and set two places at the dinner table, each marked with the name of one of his children, as though preparing him to be eaten by them.
Knight first offered to plead guilty to manslaughter, then switched her plea to guilty mid-trial, prompting an overnight psychiatric assessment to confirm she understood what she was doing. On this day in 2001, she was sentenced to life imprisonment with no parole period at all, her file marked never to be released, the first time any woman in Australia had received such a sentence.
Knight never explained why she changed her plea, and even then she denied responsibility for what she had done, insisting she remembered nothing of the killing.
