Australia’s Female Hannibal Lecter: Katherine Knight

After years of abusive relationships, a monster tries feeding her boyfriend’s flesh to his children after brutally taking his life and displaying parts of his skin around their home.

Before Katherine Knight was even born, her family was deteriorating because of her mother’s infidelity. Barbara Roughan (née Thorley) was married to Jack Roughan and living with him and their four sons in Aberdeen, New South Wales; things were reportedly happy. That’s until Barbara met Ken Knight, her husband’s friend and co-worker at the time. The pair began an affair but were quickly chased out of town when their peers heard of their adultery.

Despite fleeing a town and abandoning her family for Ken, the relationship wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows; in fact, Ken was a violent alcoholic who would rape Barbara up to ten times a day. Without anyone else to rant to about the abuse, Barbara turned to her young daughters and told them the gory details about her sex life and how much she hated it, how much she hated men, but in particular, how much she hated their father, Ken.

It’s reported that when Knight was older, one of her partners had wanted her to partake in a sex act she didn’t want to perform, and when Knight complained to her mother, Barbara told her to “put up with it and stop complaining.”