Warning: steer clear of this paragraph if you've recently eaten.
It's one of the most horrific crime scenes Australian police have ever confronted. In March 2000, an abattoir worker stabbed and skinned her lover, dismembered the corpse, and put the remains into a stew. Katherine Knight claimed insanity, but most experts agreed that she had planned the crime and knew exactly what she was doing.
The majority of Australians have never heard Knight's story. The media deemed it too gory for people to read over their breakfasts. But Libby-Jane Charleston aims to fill you in. Her true crime book Fatal Females covers 13 crimes committed by women, from the gory to the unbelievable.
Charleston, a journalist, was living in WA and closely following the Birnie murders—the case of David and Catherine Birnie, who murdered four women. A friend confided in Charleston that apparently Catherine was more crazy than David.
“It was all the more shocking that a woman was involved, because usually, horrific crimes like that, you just think 'it's the bad guy'. It just got me thinking [about] that whole fascination of female criminals and how women are supposed to be so loving and nurturing, but the reality is that women can be just as bad and men, and I think that's the big surprise for most people.”
Charleston says that there is a misconception that all women who commit crimes are insane.
“If a woman's found guilty of a crime, it's actually easier for society to accept by saying, 'oh she must be crazy', even if she's actually sane. It then gets into the whole 'bad versus mad' issue, where a man is more likely to be seen as bad, but a woman committing the same crime is usually written off as being mad. It's just easier for people to say, 'oh yeah, she must be crazy'.”
Read a few of Charleston's chapters, however, and you'll soon start to see a pattern of senseless kills without any satisfactory reason behind them. It's these stories that Charleston finds the hardest to shake.
“I think the ones that stick with me are the ones that were so senseless, where the perpetrator shows zero remorse, or gives no explanation.”
One such case was that of The Collie Killers. Two teenage girls decided one day to murder their friend and bury her body beneath the house they were in. The two eventually turned themselves in, but their motivation remained unclear.
“Those girls, the only explanation they ever gave—and it wasn't really an explanation—is they chose strangulation because it's the least messy method, and after all she was [their] friend. So that's the closest they came to any sort of remorse. And you think of the family of the poor girl who died. You know, a lot of people just want to know why, and sometimes there is no reason.”
Charleston spoke to criminal psychiatrists and pored over court transcripts to piece together the often shocking crimes that make up the book. It's not all gore and horror though. There's the incredible story of Lucy Dudko, a librarian who hijacked a helicopter to break her lover out of prison, and prison officer Heather Parker, who fell for an inmate and assisted him in a daring escape.
“The good thing about a book like this is at least people can look at the index and choose which chapters they want to read,” says Charleston.
“Some people might want to avoid some of the more gruesome ones. And I get a mixed response: some people only want to know about the murders, and some people only want to know about the relatively non-violent crimes. There's a good range of stories there. But the other thing about it is most of these women are not mad, they were not found to be insane, and that's what I found surprising because you almost expect a woman to be insane if she does something really, really bad.”
Any misconceptions about what women are capable of will be quickly corrected by Fatal Females.
“It's funny,” Charleston muses. “Because I even tell my kids [and] people always say, 'ooh, watch out for bad men trying to get you in a car'. And someone once pointed out to me, 'well, no, it's actually often the women who will get the kids and take them to the bad man'. I know when I was a kid and we were told stranger-danger, it was always men you'd look out for, but the reality is women can be [just as bad]. It's still rare to find a woman as bad as a man, but it's not unheard of, of course. And that's what I've written about.”
As for the Knight case, it's one that Australians may be grateful has been kept out of the public eye.
“One of the cops apparently still receives trauma counselling, you know, years later,” says Charleston.
“Things like that would just live with you forever, I think. That was probably my least favourite to write about. And I had to put in some gory details but I actually left out a lot of gory details. Writing a book like this makes you think that being the journalist is the easy part.”
Libby-Jane Charleston's Fatal Females is out now for Hardie Grant Books.
