After She Stabbed and Skinned Her Husband, Police Found a Gruesome Stew on the Stove — and Plates Set for His Kids

Katherine Knight’s story reads like the plot of a horror movie.

The first woman in Australian history to be sentenced to life in prison, Knight was arrested in 2001 after police found her passed out alongside her slain husband John Price, whom she had brutally stabbed to death before skinning him alive with intentions to serve his remains in a stew to his two children.

It’s fitting, then, that Knight was dubbed “Australia’s Hannibal Lecter,” according to the Australian Broadcasting Company and news.com.au. 

PEOPLE is looking back at the horrific 2001 murder case and the warning signs that investigators said preceded Price’s gruesome death, all of which were documented in the book Blood Stains by journalist Peter Lalor a year later. 

Warning Signs from Knight’s Past

Before the murder, Knight carried a certain reputation in her Aberdeen, New South Wales, community for being “a very proficient meatworker,” neighbor Rick Banyard told ABC on the 20th anniversary of the murder. But Knight also had a short fuse, according to former detective Luke Taylor, who told news.com.au that she had a penchant for being “violent” that originated “from an abusive childhood.”

The outlet reported that Knight claimed she was sexually abused by different men in her family throughout her childhood, leading to a string of troubled relationships with men throughout her adult life. “There were so many warning signs yet none were heeded,” Taylor said. 

Lalor’s book on Knight explores some of these incidents: She was remembered by childhood classmates as a bully who once beat up a boy. She tried to strangle her first husband, David Kellett, on their wedding night and later fractured his skull with a frying pan during a domestic dispute. She also once killed another partner’s dog and stabbed him with a pair of scissors.

“She was a horror movie in the making,” Taylor, the former detective, said.

Price’s Murder

Knight and Price’s relationship seemed like “nothing out of the norm” to neighbors and coworkers, Barnyard told ABC. “I think, basically, nobody sort of expected any significant drama at all, let alone the crime that became recorded as one of the worst pieces of history in Australia,” he said.

But Knight was abusive, and once stabbed Price during an argument, leading to Price getting a restraining order against her. But the couple briefly reconciled, according to the outlet.

After another particularly tense dispute at home, Price reportedly warned coworkers that if he didn’t show up for work the next day, they should call police and come look for him.

Neighbors phoned officers the next morning, March 1, 2000, after becoming concerned about blood stains on the couple’s front door. Police arrived and soon found Price’s body mutilated inside the home, while Knight was found passed out nearby, news.com.au reported.

“By the time I got to the scene, Katherine was leaving in an ambulance. She had taken some pills. Not enough to kill her, but they made her sleepy,” former Sergeant Robert Wells told the outlet earlier in 2025, 25 years after the gruesome killing. “I walked inside and saw the human skin pelt hanging up, completely intact in one piece. John Price’s decapitated and skinned body was lying on the floor in the loungeroom. We found his head, it had been boiled and cooked in a pot on the stove. There were a number of slices of rump, taken off his human rump, baked in the oven with some vegetables and put on plates, with the name of two of his children on them.”

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Knight was sentenced to life in prison without parole in 2001 and later lost an appeal in 2006, according to The Guardian.

“The last minutes of [Price’s] life must have been a time of abject terror for him, as they were a time of utter enjoyment for her,” supreme court justice Barry O’Keefe said at Knight’s sentencing, according to the newspaper. He was stabbed 37 times before Knight began cutting up his body.

Knight is the first woman in Australian history to receive a life sentence without parole. She remains in custody at Silverwater Women’s Correctional Centre.

If you are experiencing domestic violence, call the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-7233, or go to thehotline.org. All calls are toll-free and confidential. The hotline is available 24/7 in more than 170 languages.