Dad was murdered and served for dinner!
Sunday 14th September 2008
There was a happy buzz round Dad's kitchen table, as we tucked into our roast chicken dinner.
'We went to the zoo yesterday, Poppy,' my little boy, Nicholas, announced.
'Poppy' was his nickname for my dad, John Price, then 43.
'Sounds brilliant,' Dad smiled, winking at me. 'Let's go into the garden and you can tell me all
about it.'
It was 26 February 2000, Nicholas's 4th birthday, and he, my daughter, Maicey, 2, husband, Bradley, 32, and I were at Dad's place in Aberdeen, New South Wales, for dinner. Dad was a lovely man and he and I had always been very close.
'Love everyone,' he'd always tell us. 'Never hate.'
The old softie. No wonder my kids adored him.
'Thanks for dinner,' I said to Dad's girlfriend, Katherine Knight, 43, as she began clearing the plates.
'That's OK,' she replied, giving a tight-lipped smile.
Dad had been with Katherine, a mum of four, for seven years. With her glasses and wiry, red hair, she was mumsy-looking, but there was more to her than met the eye. For a start, she worked in an abattoir, not your usual job for a woman.
'Rumour has it she attacked her last boyfriend,' my mum, Colleen, 45, had sniffed.
Truth was, I didn't really like Katherine. Nor did my brother, Jonathan, then 27, or sister, Bec, 14. She had a foul temper on her.
'You idiot!' I'd once heard her scream at Dad when he cheekily slapped her bum.
Dad wasn't worried, though.
'That's just Kath,' he'd shrug, whenever she had one of her rants.
Six days later though, on 1 March, my home phone rang. It was Mum.
'You've got to come over,' she insisted. But she wouldn't say why.
I was halfway down the path, when Bradley came running out.
'Your mum's just rung back,' he babbled. 'Katherine's stabbed your dad to death.'
Dad? Dead? In shock, I jumped into my car and sped to Mum's.
'Jonathan's girlfriend just rang and told me,' she cried.
I couldn't believe it. So I dialled Dad's number at the earth-moving company where he worked. Pick up, I prayed. But as the receptionist answered, I heard her whisper to someone
else: 'I'm not telling her'. And that's when I knew. It was true. I fell to my knees sobbing.
How could this be happening? Stunned, Mum and I drove to Dad's, to find his house cordoned off. Jonathan was standing outside.
'They brought Kath out earlier,' he told us.
Too shocked to drive home, I went to my friend Daph's place. That night, I sat numbly, trying to take it all in. The police wouldn't tell us anything. But in the morning, Dad's picture was on the front page of the local paper. John Price's decapitated body was discovered yesterday, the story read. He's believed to have been stabbed several times.
Hysterical, I couldn't face anyone. I even refused to see Bradley and the kids, and hid away at Daph's for the week. That's where I read all the gory details. And they were more horrific than I could bear. After stabbing Dad to death, Kath had used her abattoir skills to skin him like an animal, suspending his 'pelt' from a meat hook she'd hung on his living room door.
I gagged as I read she'd chopped off Dad's head and boiled it in a pot on the stove. She'd also baked his buttocks with vegetables, before laying the table as some kind of sick last supper for his family. How could she? And why? It got worse.
In one final act of wickedness, she'd laid Dad's skinned body on the floor in his living room, with his legs crossed and his arm draped over a soft drink bottle. Daph watched helplessly as
I howled like a wounded animal. No, no, no. I spent those next days numb with shock. My head was a whirl of pain and confusion.
'I should have done something,' I sobbed to Mum. 'You told us she was violent.'
'None of us could have stopped this,' she insisted, hugging me.
But I was plagued with guilt. Dad had died a gruesome death, alone, without his family. And now his house, the one I'd grown up in, was being torn apart by the police.
I have to water his lawn, I thought wildly, when I heard the police had finally left, days after the murder. Crazy, but nothing made sense. Arriving at Dad's, I went around the back. The door was unlocked. Pushing it open, a sudden fear gripped me. What would I find?
Stepping inside, I gasped. There were bloody handprints everywhere, and the cork tiles were soaked in the stuff. But the most gut-wrenching thing was seeing the bloody footprints leading to the front door. He almost got out, I realised, breaking down.
After that, life moved in slow motion. At the funeral on 10 March, I sobbed as Dad's coffin was carried into the church. Although his skin had been sewn back on, none of the family had been able to see him to say goodbye.
'It's for the best,' the police told us.
So many mourners attended, we needed speakers outside the church for the ones who couldn't fit inside.
'Poppy's in heaven,' I told my children afterwards.
Back home, I tried to get on with life. But each night, I'd wake up screaming with horrific nightmares. Perhaps I should have had counselling, but I couldn't face it. I didn't want tablets either. Instead, I tried to blot out everything and kept myself busy back at the supermarket where I worked. But I was a shell of my normal self. I couldn't smile or laugh, could barely even face talking. My only bit of joy was giving birth to my daughter, Lara, on 15 May 2001.
Finally, that October, Katherine appeared at the Supreme Court of New South Wales, and admitted murder. Justice Barry O'Keefe warned jurors the evidence would be grisly. But I steeled myself.
'I have to face Kath,' I told Mum.
Despite her guilty plea, we had to sit through all the evidence. My heart broke as I heard Dad and Katherine had had sex shortly before the murder. As Dad had snoozed on the bed, Katherine had fetched a long-bladed butcher's knife, and stabbed him somewhere in his torso. As he'd tried to flee, she'd stabbed him a further 37 times. Dad had managed to get out of the front door, but Katherine had dragged him back inside, leaving him to die on the hall floor.
My stomach churned as I heard how she had then mutilated him.
'His skin, including that of the head, face, nose, ears, neck, torso, genital organs and legs, was removed so as to form one pelt,' the judge said.
I glanced over at Katherine in horror. But there was no remorse. She just glared back, stony-faced. The court heard this wasn't the first time she'd been violent. She'd stabbed a previous partner with a pair of scissors and slashed his 8-week-old puppy's throat, killing it. She'd also knifed Dad once before, slicing the left-hand side of his chest.
Just two days after we'd last seen Dad, he'd woken up to find her hovering over him with what he believed was a knife, threatening to cut off his penis. Terrified, he'd fled to a friend's and the next day, the day of the murder, he'd applied for a court order to prevent her from entering his house. So why sleep with her again? Was he too scared to say no?
It was small comfort when the judge said Katherine had never intended for Dad's remains to be eaten. She'd still served up his baked buttocks, along with the vegetables, and left vindictive handwritten notes for my brother and sister under two of the plates. Why she didn't write one for me, I've no idea. She was jailed for life without parole.
But after the trial, I was so traumatised, my marriage fell apart. I've tried to get on with things and I'm with a new partner, Jules, 37, who is hugely supportive. Katherine appealed her sentence, but she didn't succeed. It's hard, but I refuse to hate her. That would go against everything Dad believed.
'Never hate,' he used to say. If I can do that, a little bit of him will live on.