ONE of Australia's most notorious murders will become a film with plans under way to dramatise the story of Katherine Knight, the abattoir worker who stabbed and skinned her husband before cooking his flesh.

Titled The Speckled Hen, the project is in development although a production date is yet to be set.

Producer Bruce Dawson is working with the families involved in the case to receive their blessing for the project.

Knight, 51, is serving a life sentence for killing her de facto husband John Price in February 2000. She is the first female prisoner in Australia to have "never to be released" stamped on her criminal file.

The title of the film comes from Price's nickname for his de facto, who had red hair and freckles.

The gruesome nature of the murder at the family home at Aberdeen, in the Hunter Valley, gripped the community and Australia at large.

Knight had sex with the 44-year-old father of two before stabbing him, skinning him and hanging his remains from a meat hook in the living room.

She then cut off his head and boiled it in a pot and baked pieces of his buttocks to serve with vegetables and gravy to his adult children.

In 2001, the mother of four was jailed for the term of her natural life after pleading guilty to a murder described as "horrendous" by the sentencing judge, Justice Barry O'Keefe. Although she appealed against the severity of the sentence, she lost her appeal in 2006.

In February this year, Knight's half-brother Patrick John Roughan, a former president of the Swansea branch of the Labor Party, was cleared of two charges of sexually assaulting a nine-year-old girl at his Hunter Valley home.

His son, James Patrick Roughan, last year won the right to a new trial after being sentenced to life imprisonment for the 2005 murder of a teenage boy whose head was cut off and used as a bowling ball.

Roughan and his co-accused, Christopher Clark Jones, were found guilty in the Brisbane Supreme Court in April last year.

Source: The Sun-Herald

(For those who are wondering, yes these are the very same people that many in the industry knew - ed)