I feel the public should be made aware of the female child murderers among us. Information regarding child murders should not be secret.
(Anonymous contributor to Melbourne Age Online Forum, Age, 1 July 2005, regarding abortion.)

This little piece of psychopathia reminded me of a mystery I have yet to solve. Perhaps my perceptive readers could help enlighten me.

On 16 July 2001, Peter James Knight walked into the Fertility Control Clinic in East Melbourne, Vic. and shot dead Steven Rogers, a security guard. Knight was then wrestled to the ground by two men, one of whom was later awarded the Star of Courage, the highest Australian bravery honour for a civilian. It later emerged that Knight, an anti-abortion fanatic, had gone to the clinic equipped to kill everybody inside. After his arrest, Knight refused to identify himself to police and was known for some time as ‘Mr X’.

Margaret Tighe, President of the Right to Life Association (RTLA), was reported in that day’s Melbourne Herald Sun as saying that she did not know the arrested man:

The person was shown on TV, he is not known to us, we have never seen the man before.

On the next day (17 July), Tighe again told the Herald Sun that she ‘did not know’ the gunman. According to the Melbourne Age, however, she made what appeared to be a ’softer’ statement, namely that ‘the man was not attached to her organisation’. By 21 July, Tighe was referring to the shooting as ‘the isolated act of a crackpot who is a stranger to [my] organisation’ (Weekend Australian, 21 July 2001). This formulation also seems weaker than her original assertion that ‘we have never seen the man before’.

Police and media investigations finally identified the offender as Peter James Knight of the Molong area in NSW. The earliest reference I can find to this name was in the Age of 4 August 2001, while the official police identification was not announced until 27 September.

At Knight’s trial for murder in April 2002, Margaret Tighe appeared as a prosecution witness. Tighe told the court that early in 2001, about six months before the shooting, she had been working alone at RTLA’s Brunswick offices when a man she did not know arrived. He had a beard and was scruffily dressed - this is exactly the way that Knight appeared in the television coverage of his arrest in July - and he told Tighe that her group should organise a boycott of Telstra because it allowed abortion clinics to advertise:

(He was) very, very intense, not aggressive … He never said anything of a violent nature, he didn’t even talk about abortionists using strong language. (Herald Sun, 19 April 2002)

Soon afterwards, Knight visited the RTLA offices for a second time, handing over a letter complaining about Telstra and signed ‘Peter Sweeney’. A few months later Tighe heard that there had been a shooting incident at an abortion clinic, and a colleague remarked: ‘Thank God we don’t know the man’. But Tighe ‘later realised’ from photos of ‘Mr X’ that he was the same man who had visited the offices six months before.

I wonder how much ‘later’ this realisation took place.

It was also revealed during the trial that Knight had sent a letter to Tighe a month after his arrest, asking that she reply to ‘Fred Unknown, care of the Melbourne Assessment Prison’, and seeking advice about anti-abortion lawyers. We can surmise that this letter was read by prison authorities and that this is what led to Tighe being subpoenaed as a prosecution witness. She may, on the other hand, have volunteered her knowledge of Knight to the authorities, but as far as I can see she has never categorically claimed to have done this. The whole affair received scant coverage in RTLA News, but the following, written by Tighe, appeared on the front page of the May-June 2002 issue:

I was required to give evidence as a witness for the prosecution … This was because Peter Knight had visited our office some six months prior to the shooting, pestering us about a scheme to boycott Telstra because of abortion ads in the Yellow Pages.

On the two occasions I spoke with Knight I thought he was strange and very persistent. We rejected his scheme. He was never invited into the office. I gave a statement to the police to that effect and so I had to appear in court.

It seems to me that this explanation has a slightly apologetic air about it. But to whom could Tighe possibly be apologising? Clue: some of Right to Life’s supporters are ‘passing strange’. If you don’t believe this, look at my opening quote again.

And doesn’t this all seem a long way from Tighe’s bold statement to the press just after the murder:

The person was shown on TV, he is not known to us, we have never seen the man before.

Feel free to draw your own conclusions.

Filed in: Abortion