Paul Holmes: Card-carrying psychopath

He is a deeply weird creature, Clayton Weatherston, who was convicted this week for the crazed, unbelievably frantic and bloody murder of his ex-girlfriend, Sophie Elliott. The relationship had ended and Sophie was moving on, but there was enough left there, enough restless niggle left in it, for them both to have remained aware of each other.

The ending had been hard and disturbed them both greatly. We can see some of this in the entry in her diary, which shows while she knows it was right to end the relationship and he was bad for her, she nevertheless wonders why she still wants him. Probably many of us have had relationships that were bad for us, where love has gone bad and peters out and lingers long after the souring. It is painful stuff.

But that does not mitigate things for Weatherston. He is a premeditated killer. The nation was horrified by this attitude and by what he said and how he said it and how he comported himself in the High Court. We watched him in disbelief as we imagined the crime and the scene it left.

The disconnect between his gloating, his grinning and his lack of remorse and the way he killed Sophie were deeply disturbing every night on television during the days of his testimony. He was the personification of inappropriateness. It occurred to me that after what he did to Sophie Elliott, he should never smile again, that his crime forbade smiling, certainly in that forum, with Sophie's parents and brothers sitting there in the High Court.

My talkback callers had no doubts about him. He is a psychopath, which is another thing. Psychiatry seemed at a loss to explain him. It is all very well to say that someone has a narcissistic personality disorder. That is a very murky description. What does it mean?

The psychiatrist who examined him could only point to certain characteristics. He got terribly anxious. He was weird about spectacles. It was even suggested that it was when Sophie knocked his glasses off that he went into the blind rage. He was academically brilliant but got physically sick before external exams. When he went to live in Wellington he lost 15kg before going back to his mother. He was neurotic about the size of his penis. He went into a tailspin if he scored less than A+ in any assignment or examination.

Yet, there was a deterioration in recent years. He began to be violent. He had assaulted a former girlfriend. And, a couple of weeks before he murdered Sophie, he held her down on the bed screaming that he wished she were in a plane and it crashed. That is a most unusual and graphic thing to imagine and to say in anger. It is to say you want them dead.

But again, while he was known by a previous partner to have a mean and nasty side, no one would have imagined an intelligent, highly educated economics lecturer to walk to a young woman's home, with her mother downstairs, with a knife in his bag, walk upstairs and slash her to pieces, stabbing her 216 times everywhere, especially in the areas of her body that tormented him.

Psychiatry could not really get a handle on him. Indeed, psychiatry found Weatherston had no serious mental illness. But can you do what he did and not have a serious mental illness? Certainly, in his testimony he seemed entirely rational, except when he got to the act of killing, where there seemed to be very little memory. Perhaps Weatherston is simply a class-A, card-carrying arsehole.

Sophie Elliott was beautiful. Photographs of her show a face full of life, delight, intelligence and fizz. In the end the only way he had to control her was to kill her.

In his testimony he said coldly and callously, "I was in a relationship and I wasn't going to be controlled. So I left it. That's all there is, there's nothing more to it. And now I'm free of the relationship." Good God, you certainly are now, Clayton. But you were not when you went to Sophie's house intending to kill her.

And look at what he went there to ask. He says she had been to Australia and slept with someone there. This must have consumed him. I have known terrible jealousy in relation to matters to do with love in my life, not always, but I have known it. It is a miserable, sleep-depriving, obsessive thing. It is a bad place to be. It has nearly destroyed me a couple of times. But if I had gone to see Sophie in that state, as Weatherston obviously was, I would have pleaded and would have asked, "Why, Sophie? Why?" My first line would not have been, "So, should I go and have an STD test?" This is one manipulative customer.

You have to feel deeply for both families before the trial, during it and forever more. Sophie's mother was in the house when Weatherston wielded the knife. She saw the blood-soaked room and Sophie's body. She will live with those images all her life. Her composure on the witness stand earned the admiration of the nation. The Elliott family have lost a talented, beautiful daughter. I imagine it still defies belief.

And we have to feel, too, for the Weatherstons. His parents and siblings will never be free of what he did that day, they will never forget the revulsion for him being expressed around the country. They will have to watch as he spends the best years of his life in the lonely horror of prison. We do not know what Justice Potter will decide as a suitable sentence. But Clayton Weatherston's file will not be something to concern the Parole Board for a very long time.