In 1973 Katherine fell in love with 22-year-old truck driver David Kellett and as soon as she turned 18, she moved in with him. In 1974 they were married. A local rumor was that Katherine attempted to strangle her husband on their wedding night when he wouldn't repeatedly make love to her.
Later in their marriage Kellett worked at the abattoir with Katherine and was in charge of killing the pigs. From time to time she would drop in and watch him at work dispatching the animals with a stun gun.
Shortly after their first child, Melissa Ann, was born in May 1976, Kellett, unable to cope with his wife's possessiveness and violent, moody behavior, took off with another woman.
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| Katherine Knight |
Deeply depressed and revengeful at her spouse's departure and with no one to take her grievances out on, Katherine Kellett chose the closest thing to her. One day shortly after David had left, she walked down to the local train lines and left two-month-old Melissa in the middle of the tracks to be run over by the next train that came along. Fortunately the infant was rescued by a man foraging nearby who heard her crying.
Later that same day Katherine took an axe from a nearby backyard and, swinging it wildly about her head, threatened at random to kill several people, including an old man. She was apprehended by police and taken to St Elmo's Hospital in Tamworth where she was diagnosed with postnatal depression and released.
A few days later Katherine slashed the face of a woman she knew with a butcher's knife while demanding that she take her to David Kellett in her car. Bleeding profusely, the woman only escaped when she pulled into a petrol station. When police responded to a frantic call from the petrol station owner they arrived to find Katherine holding a little boy by the front of his shirt and waving a knife in the air.
The officers managed to drag the terrified child away by attacking Katherine with a couple of brooms that were handy and grabbed her when she dropped the knife and let the lad go. On the recommendation of a local doctor, she was admitted to Morisset Psychiatric Hospital for treatment and detained under supervision while her baby daughter was placed in the care of her grandparents Barbara and Ken Knight.
Police notified David Kellett, who was working as a truck driver in Queensland, that his wife was locked in a psychiatric ward under heavy sedation in the most notorious mental institution in New South Wales. With his mother Jean, Kellett drove the hundreds of kilometers to be with his troubled wife who sparked up the minute she saw him.
On August 9, 1976, Katherine was released into the care of her mother-in-law on the condition that Jean see to it that she take her medication. They collected little Melissa along the way and within a couple of weeks Katherine and David were back living together in a rented bungalow in Woodridge in Queensland where David drove trucks and Katherine took a job boning at the Dinmore meatworks in Ipswich.
The reunion turned out to be stormier than ever with Katherine regularly flying into violent rages over nothing in particular, assaulting her husband with her fists, kitchen appliances and anything else she could lay her hands on. Yet, astonishingly, on March 6, 1980, they had another daughter, Natasha Maree.
Copyright 2003, Paul B. Kidd Publications. All Rights Reserved
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