Paul Holmes: Chance encounter with a grieving father

Gil Elliott. Photo / Herald on Sunday

It was last Saturday afternoon. I'd done my radio programme, gone home to the apartment, and driven to the airport about three quarters of an hour before my flight to Hawkes Bay. Down at the regional end of the airport I thought dammit, and I bought a pepper steak pie and a coffee.

As I sat down to start the pie I became aware of a stocky fellow about my height making his way towards me. I was having one of those days. I just wanted to eat my pie in peace.

That's all I wanted. To read my book about Howard Hughes and see if the pie was any good and if it was, to enjoy it. So much for that.

"Are you Paul Holmes?" asked the man.

"I am," I said, taking a bite of pie.

He held out his hand. "Gil Elliott. Sophie Elliott's father."

It took me a few seconds.

"Oh my God," I said. "Very nice to meet you, Gil. How are things going?"

Or something like that. I was quite taken aback to be meeting this man out of the blue, this man who in his recent life has been tested beyond endurance.

Sophie Elliott, you will recall, was the lovely young Dunedin woman who was the victim in 2008 of one of the most brutal, most hateful murders this country has ever known.

Her former boyfriend, Otago University academic Clayton Weatherston, came to see her at her parents' home with a knife.

Within minutes Sophie was dead in a sea of blood, Weatherston, in an unstoppable frenzy, having stabbed her 216 times, paying particular attention to the disfigurement of certain parts of her body.

It turned out Gil was off to Hawkes Bay for a do at Garth McVicar's (spokesman for the Sensible Sentencing Trust) place, way up on the Napier-Taupo road.

Gil turned out to be a generous conversationalist, very easy to talk to, and an excellent travelling companion. The seat next to me was spare, so Gil came and sat with me for the flight.

We had started talking as I ate the pie - he remarked that it looked like a good pie, and indeed it was - and we didn't stop talking until he was met by his ride at Napier airport. Like so many who are victims of serious crime, Gil is less than happy with the justice system. Gil doesn't know what prison Weatherston is doing his time in. "They don't tell you."

Gil is a medical laboratory scientist. He runs the lab at Dunstan Hospital. Lesley, his wife, is a specialist nurse in the neo-natal section of Dunedin Hospital. She used to work full-time. Now she can manage only a few days a week.

Gil lives in a flat in Clyde during the week and drives the two-hour journey home at the weekends. He says the drive is a bit of a pain.

He asked about my daughter. I was very touched by this. I said I felt terrible telling him - such was his loss - that mine is doing beautifully now. The girl I knew has come back completely and I'm so proud of her. "But," I said, "all that stuff those few years back, it was like a death, in a way. We still grieve."

He very kindly said that he understood.

As I listened to him telling me his family's story I wondered how he and Lesley survived it all.

The crime happened in Dunedin. The High Court decided the trial should be in Christchurch. I asked if the courts covered the costs of his and Lesley's attending it. No, he said, they give you a few hundred dollars' allowance. What did it cost you? I asked Gil Elliott. "About $50,000," he told me.

No wonder he's grumpy about the justice system.

When it came to the sentence, well, no doubt if someone murders your daughter by stabbing her 200 times and mutilating her as well, no sentence is going to be long enough. "Defence wanted 12 years," he tells me, "the prosecution wanted 19 years. Justice Potter said she agreed with the 19-year sentence. So she gave him 19. Then she knocked a year off because it was his first offence."

It was the reduction of the sentence by a year because it was a first offence that so confounds Gil Elliott. I think it insulted him. First offence indeed! But what an offence. What nonsense, Justice Potter, says this columnist.

It was the family's living arrangements that made the murder more possible. When Gil went to run the lab at Dunstan, he put security locks on Sophie's and Lesley's bedroom doors. So when you closed the door at night to go to bed, you simply pressed a button and no one could open the door from the outside. So Sophie is upstairs packing the day before leaving for her job of a lifetime opportunity at the Treasury in Wellington. Weatherston arrives at the door and tells Lesley he'd like to talk to Sophie.

Incredible, isn't it, I think to myself, as Gil tells the story, how little we ever know of what's round the corner in our lives?

Lesley calls up to Sophie. Sophie appears at the top of the stairs and tells Weatherston she's busy packing and if he wants to talk to her, he should come up to her room. He does so. Ten minutes later, Sophie comes downstairs and tells her mother that Weatherston is just sitting on her bed saying nothing. Something is weird.

Sophie goes back upstairs and instantly Lesley hears screaming. She rushes upstairs. Weatherston has locked the door. Lesley is hearing mayhem on the other side of it. He refuses to open it. She rushes downstairs, calls 111, finds a "skewer", Gil calls it - I assume some kind of a barbecue tool - rushes back upstairs, pokes the skewer into the lock and the door opens. Weatherston is still frantically stabbing an obviously dead Sophie.

Lesley goes downstairs to let the police officer in. Upstairs again. Weatherston's locked the door. "Open up or I'll boot the door in," shouts the policeman. Weatherston opens the door. He is standing over Sophie. "I've killed her." He says.

"Do you know, Paul," says Gil, as we begin the descent into Hawkes Bay, "do you know, the prosecution couldn't use that statement in court - 'I've killed her' - because the officer hadn't read Weatherston his rights".

To Gil Elliott, that was just barmey.

Yes, says Gil, he and Lesley have thought of moving well away from Dunedin but the murder happened in their home. How do you get good value for a murder house?

No wonder Gil was off to see Garth McVicar. He had a delicious bottle of Central Otago pinot noir in his bag for Garth. Gil told me this week that there were about a hundred people up at Garth's place. I imagine they were all a great help to each other, in many ways.