Crimehub: A True Crime Podcast · Crimehub Studios

The Butcher of Aberdeen: Slaughtered, Skinned, and Served Up

·1 hr·3 clips

Katherine stabbed John Price as he slept, then skinned and cooked parts of his body.

Aberdeen feels normal at dawn and wrong almost immediately after. A truck still sits in the driveway. John Price has not turned up for work, and the warning he gave the day before keeps echoing: if he did not show, it meant he was dead. His co-workers do not shrug that off. His boss sends a co-worker to check on him at home. A neighbor joins in, and the front door gives the first hard answer when they see blood on it. Police are called, and once officers get inside, it is clear this is not a routine welfare check. The episode then steps back through John Price himself. He is described as a 44-year-old father known around Aberdeen as likable, generous, kind, and down-to-earth. He had separated from his wife in January 1988 after 15 years of marriage, and she later said he had never been abusive or violent toward her. Even after the breakup, he still provided for her and the children. Katherine Mary Knight enters with a very different history. She had married John Chillingworth in March 1991, and by December 1993 that relationship had fallen apart. Katherine has since claimed that Chillingworth assaulted her on several occasions, but she has not been able to prove it. The episode presents the breakup more plainly as the end of a relationship and a move toward John Price, with whom she had been having an affair. By the time Katherine became involved with Price, he knew she was unstable, vindictive, vengeful, and extremely violent. Even so, he let her move into his home, where two of his children also lived. What follows is a relationship that could look ordinary from a distance and corrosive up close. Friends remember screaming matches, but they also remember a strong bond, vigorous sex, and a period when Katherine seemed happy. That did not last. Over the next four years, the relationship fell apart through repeated breakups and violence. The episode treats the morning discovery as the moment all of that private damage finally becomes public evidence.

As heard by us

A cold, carefully built account of domestic dread and a house at the center of the horror.

The episode stays strongest when it keeps close to the domestic detail: a truck left in the driveway, a missed shift, a front door smeared with blood.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

You want a grim, cinematic case from Aberdeen where dread builds before the front door is forced open.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Play clips from this episode More from Crimehub: A True Crime Podcast