Customer Reviews

Beyond Bad: Library Edition

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Imagine stirring out of a drowsy sleep in the middle of the night to see the silhouette of someone holding a large knife standing in the doorway and just staring at you. This was what Katherine Knight's husband John Price experienced shortly before she actually did murder and cut him up.

I read this book soon after its release a few years ago and the word chilling hardly describes it. There was talk later of Knights story being put on film and titled "The Speckled Hen" which was what the men of the district had come to call her. Red headed and freckled Katherine Knight had started work in the Aberdeen meatworks north west of Newcastle, New South Wales at the age of sixteen. She loved her job and her tools of trade hung above her bed. Volatile, erratic, extremely jealous and not particuarly attractive she was apparently willing in bed but any man that had been involved with her soon wanted out. When John Price made that same decision he paid the ultimate penalty. Found with his head in a pot on a stove, the skin of his body hanging like a wetsuit on a door and slabs of his cooked flesh on plates with peas and mashed potato this is the ultimate in horror stories.

I myself had a chance meeting with a guy about twenty months ago who had previously worked as a prison officer where Knight is or was incarcerated. He had said to me she was the model prisoner. No problem quite and polite.

I wonder if she gets to work in a kitchen.

Set in Australia, Beyond Bad tells the horrifying story of Katharine Knight also knows as Kathy the Cannibal. She was the first woman in Australia to be sentenced to life without parole. Her crime? She slaughtered her lover by not only stabbing him 37 times, she then went on to skin him, decapitate him and cook his remains into a stew that she was planning on feeding his children. If anyone received a just sentence it was her. To this day she has never expressed one iota of remorse.

I dont know if like is the right word to use to express my feelings about such a horrible crime book. I think the book was very well researched and written. The narrator was wonderful considering the material she had to work with. I read a lot of mystery, thriller, suspense that involves murder, serial killers, etc. I also read true crime but I do have to say this book turned my stomach and that is a hard thing to do. I stopped listening a few times to "catch my breath" and try to understand how any human could go what Katharine Knight did!

I give this book a 4/5. If you are interested in true crime novels than you should give this one a read or listen. Be warned, you need a very strong stomach to hear about this murder.