Katherine Mary Knight: Australia's Hanna Lecter -- The Crime Library

With the arrival of the new baby, a calm settled over the little family of the mother, three girls and the de-facto father, so much so that Dave put a deposit on a tiny house in Aberdeen which Kath paid off in full when her worker's compensation came through in 1989.

Katherine's house in the middle of Aberdeen, which was boarded up later

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Considering that, outside of her children, the tiny two bedroom weatherboard house on MacQueen Street, Aberdeen, was the first real possession that the feral Katherine Knight had ever owned in her life, it's hardly surprising that she decorated it the way she had always dreamed of. With her passion. Dead animals.

The walls were covered in cow hides, water buffalo and steer horns, old-fashioned fur wraps, cow and sheep skulls and deer's antlers. Prominently displayed was a stuffed peacock and baby deer. Among the other bric-a-brac adorning the walls and hanging from the rafters were a huge wooden fork and spoon, rusted animal traps, leather coats and motorcycle jackets, a rusted rake and pitchfork, a riding boot and crop and a saddle. Every available space was filled with old newspapers, clothes and books. The extensive video collection dealt predominately with horror and death.

It was a museum of Katherine Knight 's fantasies. There's no place like home.

But as blissful as it was in paradise, what with the new baby and the new house filled with Katherine's treasures, predictably it didn't last. In the new bout of exchanges Kath battered Dave over the head with an iron and allegedly stabbed him with a pair of scissors. When he returned to the love-nest after a week in Scone after a horrific fight, he was invited in only to find that she had cut all of his clothes to shreds and taken them to the rubbish tip.

This time Dave Saunders decided he'd had enough. He took his long service leave from the mines and gave all of his old drinking haunts a miss. Despite Kath's frantic efforts to find him she had no luck. His mates knew where he was, but they certainly weren't going to deliver their mate back to the dreaded missus. Running into brick walls everywhere, eventually she gave up.

Months later Dave returned home to MacQueen Street to see his daughter only to find that in his absence Kath had gone to the local police and told them that she was terrified he would return and bash her. She got the cops to issue an Apprehended Violence Order against him to legally keep him away from her and the kids.

It didn't take Kath Knight long to find another lover, and a few months into the relationship she was pregnant. The father was a local knock-about, John Chillingworth, 43, who worked at the Aberdeen meatworks and the baby, a boy named Eric, was born in 1991.

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