Mr Fixit

Nigel Latta. Photo / Supplied

In all likelihood, Clayton Weatherston is sitting in a prison cell fuming. The jury were fooled (and are fools), he'll be thinking. The public just didn't get it, no one understands the truth except him. He will be feeling no remorse.

The mind of such a brutal, narcissistic murderer is necessarily an unpleasant place. Probing inside it takes a certain courage for any psychologist.

As Weatherston sees it the truth is that it was all Sophie Elliott's fault. She drove him to it. And, with his superior intellect and self-assured confidence, he cannot understand why he could not outsmart the Crown prosecutors. He's probably already started writing a book to tell the "real" story.

All this is supposition on the part of Dunedin clinical psychologist, author and TV host Nigel Latta – but it is informed supposition.

Latta, better known for cheerily advising us how to potty train our kids, has spent the past year counselling Sophie's family, especially her parents Lesley and Gil.

Lesley Elliott says the couple went through "a pretty bad patch there", and Latta gave them endless time and energy.

They talked through their worst experiences – "and obviously, seeing Sophie being killed was the worst thing ever" – and he helped them through the other side.

"A few days later, I texted Nigel and said, 'the sun's shining'," Lesley says. "He's just been magical, to be quite honest."

Latta closely followed Weatherston's trial – which ended this week with a murder conviction – and, like others, was sickened by the displays of arrogance, smugness and an attitude bordering on amusement.

Here was a man who, in January last year, went to his former girlfriend's home, with a knife hidden in his bag, and proceeded to stab, cut and mutilate her 216 times.

The Crown said the attack was intended to disfigure Sophie, a young woman described by friends and family as bright, vivacious, outgoing, a young honours graduate about to embark on a bright new life and career. It was that success that Weatherston, consumed by his narcissistic tendencies, would have been unable to endure.

Latta was reluctant to do this feature interview. He agreed to it after the trial only out of a sense of fury over the provocation defence. He was appalled by that line of defence and the muck-raking through Sophie's reputation.

Latta's reluctance obviously stems from a worry that some might accuse him of springboarding off the Weatherston trial to gain exposure for himself. But, with or without the trial, Latta already has that exposure.

The son of a builder in Oamaru, he was educated at rugby-mad Waitaki Boys' High. He went to Dunedin to study zoology, then marine sciences, at Otago University, where he met his wife, a dentistry student.

But he found he was bored by marine sciences – and intrigued by people. "At the end of it, I thought, I actually do have to have a job. So I went back to psychology, and moved to Auckland because my wife was from there."

He worked for some 17 years in Auckland in drug and alcohol rehabilitation, sex offender treatment programmes, family therapy organisations and agencies like Probation Services. He moved back home to Otago four years ago, where he has a private psychology practice in Dunedin.

There have been low points. Specifically: "6.30am, sitting in the middle of a stream in the Kaimais, surrounded by adolescent sex offenders, eating breakfast cereal out of a tin cup with little bits of twig and dead insects in it, with a splitting headache, and thinking, 'what the f*** am I doing and why aren't I home?' "

His 2004 book, Into the Darklands, was the inspiration for a television documentary series called Beyond the Darklands that has been produced and screened in New Zealand and Australia. Looking at some of our nastier crimes, the book and TV show draw on his work as a forensic psychologist.

Into lighter, brighter lands, his three no-nonsense parenting books are best-sellers, a fourth – Mothers Raising Sons – has just been released, and he's working on a fifth.

"My 6-year-old gets annoyed when I tell stories about him in my parenting talks, but he doesn't have a lawyer yet, so there's not much he can do about it."

Indeed, Latta's reluctance to pose for new photos isn't just because he's worried about showboating, but also because he wants to spend quality time at home with his two sons, aged 6 and 9.

Fair enough.

The younger one was playing soccer yesterday, and won, to his dad's delight. Admittedly, the opposing team members were a year younger. "So it was a bit of a hollow victory, but it was a victory. We'll take it."

He wrote in the Listener this month that children are growing up in a world where they can go online and watch a live webcam of the Amazon rainforest but aren't allowed down to the park at the end of the road in case they get hurt.

Yesterday, on returning home from the soccer ground, Latta says it is important to let children take risks.

"If anyone had a reason to be paranoid and scared for their children, it would be me, because I've seen people who do bad things to kids. But you have to put all that aside and say, 'actually, it's not my life, it's their life. So let them go off and do stuff'."

His new Politically Incorrect Parenting Show pulled in more than 600,000 television viewers last week and a delighted TVNZ says it has been "swamped" with feedback from people who love the show, in which a face-pulling, wacky Latta dishes out old-fashioned, back-to-basics parenting advice.

On Wednesday, less than an hour after appearing on Close Up with Lesley Elliott to talk about the Weatherston jury's murder verdict, Latta was back on TV One with the parenting show.

The producers filled a decent-sized auditorium for the show. That, with the big television viewing audience on Wednesday nights, indicates that Latta is offering the sort of common sense tips that many people are looking for.

Smacking? He'd like to see the legal definition tightened up, but sees no need to outlaw it entirely. "I've never advocated smacking as a disciplinary technique, because I don't think it's particularly effective – but I don't think it does the harm that people say, either. A complete ban is a bit pointless, a bit nanny state, a bit dumb."

He's a disciple of the pragmatic school of parenting. "The world knocks all of the bullshit out of you, really," he says. "You do something for long enough and you figure out which things work and which things don't."

The response to TVNZ was overwhelming. "Not only was he right on the money but he showed us that psychologists are not all dry and humourless and that we take life far too seriously at times," emailed Angela Donaldson of Dunedin.

"That is one of the best, if not THE best show ever produced in NZ," wrote Leigh Wilson from Auckland.

In the media business, it's called "news you can use".

Yes, it is okay to let your toddler cry herself to sleep rather than constantly fussing. No, your primary age children won't starve if you don't give them the junk food they demand. Keep serving that broccoli, and eventually they'll get hungry enough to eat it. A few meals later, they might even learn to like it.

Intuitive stuff, really, but all parents can do with a bit of endorsement, a bit of reassurance that they are on the right track with their kids.

How, asks Latta, did parenting ever get this hard? How come our parents just got on with it yet we worry about every last little thing? And why do modern children seem to think that the world really does revolve around them?

This all seems a far cry from his involvement in the Sophie Elliott murder case – aside from one common factor. Clayton Weatherston really does believe the world revolves around him.

Latta says Weatherston was a narcissist who was more likely to be violent because of an inflated sense of his own superiority and sense of entitlement to special privileges.

"People who are highly narcissistic tend to be unpredictable and when they are violent, tend to be extremely violent." And Weatherston was.

For every day Weatherston was on the stand, the nation's feeling of loathing for him increased.

The bloggers made their feelings known while the trial was still in progress and once it was over they let rip.

"Clayton Weatherston is a dead man walking"; "the world will be a safer place with this animal off our streets"; "he makes my skin crawl".

It was the contrast between the images of Sophie, and the arrogant, smirking, thoroughly dislikeable man who seemed to be revelling in his moment in the spotlight that Latta says fuelled that loathing. Sophie Elliott was everyone's daughter, sister, niece, "just a lovely kid".

Why, the nation wondered, would someone like Sophie become involved with a "creep" like Weatherston in the first place?

Latta says narcissists are adept at being extremely manipulative and exploitative. Weatherston would have portrayed himself as being a "confident, capable, interesting bloke".

"He was cunning enough to use the fact that Sophie was a nice person, to kind of guilt-trip her. This is where I think people like Weatherston are so dangerous.

"It's almost like a landmine in the sense that you don't know, and no one could have predicted that he would have done what he did."

Like others, Latta was appalled by the defence of provocation and worried when the jury retired for the night without a verdict. "In my opinion the whole thing was planned from the very beginning."

Weatherston's intention that day was to kill Sophie and make the murder look like a "frenzied, out-of-control-attack".

"I don't know any middle-class academics who carry carving knives around in their bags for protection. Maybe if it was the South Bronx but it's bloody Dunedin."

Weatherston wanted to portray himself as a man who had lost control, who had gone crazy, Latta says. When Sophie's mother came through the door he pushed her out, locked the door and kept going.

"He was quite deliberate in what he did. Almost the first words out of his mouth when the first [police] officer walked through the door was his defence."

As Sophie Elliott's killer dug himself into a deeper hole during his testimony, the jury could scarcely keep the look of dislike off their faces and observers wondered why Weatherston's defence counsel had allowed him to testify.

Latta has two theories: the first that the defence team figured that his performance would convince the jury of his narcissistic personality disorder and give weight to the argument that he lost control under provocation; the second, that Weatherston himself insisted that he take the stand.

That he was relishing his moment in the spotlight was obvious. "He took joy in pitting himself against the prosecution," Latta says.

"'I'm far superior to everyone else and I will outwit them with my clever reparte and everybody will see how wonderful I am and they'll let me off.'

"At the point where he called the Crown prosecutor a liar he did this little 'look how clever I am' shuffle with his feet. His facial expressions are very self-indulgent, smug. He took great pleasure in what he was doing. He was revelling in it. He loved it."

The defence's argument of provocation was "obscene", says Latta.

"It appals me that it was available as a defence. Even if someone calls you every mean name they can think of, and even if they do stab you with a pair of scissors – and she didn't – it doesn't justify killing someone."

Now Latta says he is "done" with Clayton Weatherston. He hopes that Weatherston gets a very, very long non-parole sentence "because the things that are wrong with him are things that in my opinion are pretty much unfixable".

Weatherston will undoubtedly be a model prisoner, but he is unlikely to emerge from prison a changed man. Frustrated by the outcome, he will want the world to know he's right. "If he's not working on his book I'd be amazed. No one will ever publish it but I'm sure he'll be busy writing it."

And, as part of his narcissistic trait, he will continue to believe in himself. Latta: "'I am the most beautiful, intelligent thing in the universe, look at me, how I shine'. And he's not. He's such a long way from that it's incredible."

Additional reporting Carolyne Meng-Yee