Bowling ball head killer had grisly family history

THE nephew of a woman who skinned her partner before cooking his flesh was yesterday found guilty of cutting off a teenager's head and using it as a bowling ball.

A Brisbane Supreme Court judge yesterday sentenced James Patrick Roughan, 27, and Christopher Clark Jones, 23, to life imprisonment for the murder of 17-year-old Morgan Jay Shepherd.

Both were also sentenced to two years jail for interfering with the teenager's corpse.

With the case complete, Roughan's connection with one of the most ghastly murders in Australian criminal history can be revealed.

He is a nephew of Katherine Knight, an abattoir worker who stabbed her de facto husband, John Price, 37 times in the NSW town of Aberdeen, northwest of Newcastle, in February 2000. She then skinned his body, cooked his flesh with vegetables and made a soup out of his head.

Roughan and Jones were once close friends but sat well apart in the dock as evidence was delivered during their trial. The court heard they were drinking with Shepherd in the back yard of Roughan's home in the north Brisbane suburb of Sandgate on the evening of May 29, 2005, when an argument erupted.

Shepherd was bashed, repeatedly kicked in the head, stabbed 133 times and decapitated with a saw and an axe.

The next day the two men wrapped the body in a carpet, put the head in a plastic bag and drove to farmland near Dayboro, north of Brisbane, where they buried the headless corpse in a shallow grave.

Jones and Roughan both pleaded not guilty to murder but guilty to misconduct with a corpse.

Both gave contrasting versions of what happened on the night of the murder, Roughan to a neighbour and Jones to police. Roughan told Tracey Hore that during the drinking session, he had walked inside the house and came back to see Jones "punching the shit out of" the teenager. He said Jones, in a "psychotic frenzy", stabbed Shepherd about 50 times with a knife before decapitating him.

In an interview recorded on video, Jones told a detective Roughan had "stomped" on the teenager's head several times, stabbed him and decapitated him.

He said Roughan had threatened to kill him if he told anyone about the murder.

Jones told the detective that before Shepherd's body was buried, Roughan had rolled the teenager's head down a hill "like a bowling ball".

Jones told friends that after the teenager had been decapitated, Roughan stuck his hand inside the head and played with it like a puppet. He also stuck the head on the stump of a paw paw tree, spun it around and laughed at it.

Sentencing them, judge Ros Atkinson said it was hard to describe the horror of their crimes.

"Certainly I have had no experience of a murder so horrible," Justice Atkinson said.

"It was a murder completely without motive which visited the most horrific violence on a 17-year-old boy who had done nothing to deserve it."

Shepherd, an itinerant who grew up in Grafton, in northeast NSW, and moved to Brisbane about six months before his murder, was described by witnesses as friendly and well-liked.

Roughan showed no emotion when the verdict was announced. Jones smiled grimly and shook his head.

Later, Jones told the court: "I'm truly sorry for what happened to Jay (Shepherd). Until the day I die I will always regret my involvement in the matter."