In Cold Blood: The calculating mind of Clayton Weatherston
- Grant McLachlan
- 4 days ago
- 22 min read
I sat in the same finance lectures as Clayton Weatherston. I watched him absorb a lesson on the economics of murder—how killers weigh costs against benefits, how provocation could reduce a sentence, how the average murderer served fifteen years. When he stabbed Sophie Elliott 216 times, was he running the numbers? Eighteen years later, he faces the Parole Board. Everyone miscalculated—Clayton, Sophie, and the politicians who abolished provocation thinking it would save lives.
I. The Nature of Understanding
In 1959, Truman Capote travelled to Holcomb, Kansas, following the murder of four members of the Clutter family. What emerged, six years later, was In Cold Blood—a work that would redefine American letters and create a new form: the non-fiction novel. Capote spent years interviewing the killers, Perry Smith and Dick Hickock, seeking to understand not merely what they did, but who they were. The result was a portrait that humanised without excusing, that illuminated without absolving.
Capote’s genius lay in his understanding that monsters do not emerge fully formed. They are made—by circumstance, by psychology, by the accumulation of small failures and large grievances. To understand a killer is not to forgive them. It is to acknowledge the uncomfortable truth that they are, like us, human. And in that humanity lies both warning and tragedy.
What follows is an attempt to apply Capote’s method to a New Zealand case that has haunted me for nearly two decades—the murder of Sophie Elliott by Clayton Robert Weatherston. I knew Weatherston. Not well, but well enough to remember him. I sat in the same lectures, walked the same corridors, inhabited the same academic environment at the University of Otago. When the details of his crime emerged, I found myself returning again and again to those Finance lectures, trying to reconcile the awkward, smug young man I remembered with the violence of 216 stab wounds.
This week, eighteen years after he killed Sophie Elliott on his thirty-second birthday, Clayton Weatherston will appear before the Parole Board for the first time. He turned fifty earlier this month—on the anniversary of his crime. The question of whether he should be released requires us to understand what he became, and why.
II. A Student of Violence
My education in violence was not confined to Otago’s lecture theatres. While I was a student, David Bain sat in my history class—the young man who would be convicted of murdering his family in Every Street, later acquitted on retrial after thirteen years in prison. Clayton Weatherston was in my finance classes. The Crown Prosecutor in the Bain case was my criminal procedure tutor. When I completed my studies at Victoria University in Wellington, the murders of father and son Gene and Eugene Thomas occurred opposite my apartment window.
While I studied, I watched the murder trials of Scott Watson, Mark Lundy, John Barlow, and David Tamihere unfold in the courts nearby. Each case taught me the same lesson: truth is only ever a matter of evidence. What we believe happened depends entirely on what can be proven, and what can be proven depends on what evidence survives, who presents it, and how skilfully it is contested.
But it was during my overseas experience that I learned to look past the evidence to the person underneath. I spent years interviewing war veterans from my grandfather’s unit and the prisoner of war camps where they had been held. This led me to Japan, where I interviewed the guards, their families, and the locals who had witnessed the war’s brutalities. I met Noboro Shichino—a medical orderly who had been convicted as a war criminal by the American-led tribunal.
Shichino’s case haunted me. Through my research, I uncovered evidence that the tribunal had convicted him knowing he was likely innocent—what the Japanese called “victor’s justice.” The Americans needed convictions to demonstrate that justice had been done. Shichino was convenient. He was also, by all accounts, one of the few guards who had shown kindness to the prisoners.
That experience taught me two things. First, that systems of justice are imperfect instruments, capable of condemning the innocent and excusing the guilty in roughly equal measure. Second, that understanding a person requires more than their worst moment. Shichino was not defined solely by his conviction. Neither, ultimately, can Clayton Weatherston be defined solely by what he did in Sophie Elliott’s bedroom.
This is not to minimise his crime. It is to acknowledge that if we are to make any judgment about his future—about whether he should ever be granted parole—we must first understand the person he was before that day, and the environmental factors that shaped him.
III. The Teacher’s Pet
I first met Clayton Weatherston during the first lecture of Finance 101. I was late—actually, I had turned up early but sat in the wrong lecture theatre in the maze of rooms in Otago’s Geology building. Realising I was the only male in the room, after enduring several pointed glares, a woman subtly asked me, “You realise this is a Women’s Studies lecture, right?”
As I entered Quad 4 lecture theatre, Dr Kate Brown stopped talking. The entire room turned. Clayton Weatherston stood up from the front row, walked towards me, and handed me the worksheets for the lecture. Even before the first lecture had begun, Weatherston was the teacher’s pet.
That moment captured something essential about him. Weatherston always sat in the front row. I sat in the middle of the back row. He was the student who arrived early, who organised the materials, who sought the lecturer’s approval. He was, by all external measures, a model student—dux of Kaikorai Valley High School, winner of multiple athletics titles, treasurer of his school’s student council, achiever of A-plus grades in nearly every university paper.¹
But there was something beneath the surface. His teachers at Kaikorai remembered him as talented, popular, respectful. “Never in your wildest dreams could you imagine something like this happening,” one would later say. “He was just a really good kid from a really good family.”² And yet, by the time he arrived in Otago’s economics department, his more obsessive traits were emerging. “He was the one that had to be always right,” another tutor recalled. An associate professor noted his “natural insolence” in debates.³
Clayton was outwardly shy and anxious. He was a bedwetter who, during high school sporting trips, stayed in motels with his parents instead of billeting with his teammates. He was extremely reluctant to leave his mother, who had to walk him part of the way to school when he was younger. He did not cope well with change—did not want to leave primary school where he was “a big fish in a small pond.” His sister accompanied him on his first day at high school.¹
Besides being quiet, he was smug. For every idiosyncrasy in his personality, he had an opposite defensive mechanism. His mother would later describe a weak, vulnerable, insecure person. Clayton’s counter-mechanism was to be an arrogant smart-arse—a tendency that would prove catastrophic when he took the witness stand in his own defence.
Trying to initiate a basic conversation with Clayton would be rebuked with a quip. He was awkward in social situations but found ways of letting his inner feelings out. He used to dress up as the mascot, Shaq the Cat, using the tail in ways that made observers uncomfortable. His brain was a sponge. He listened intently to everything, and he over-analysed everything.
He had a piercing look about him—a lot going on behind his eyes that he would not let out. I remember thinking there was something coiled about him, something held in tension that never quite released.
IV. The Man of Contradictions
Clayton Weatherston was a walking contradiction. The anxious bedwetter who needed his mother to accompany him to school was also an aerobics instructor—standing before groups, leading them through routines, commanding attention. The shy introvert who could barely hold a basic conversation wore tight t-shirts that drew the eye, as if daring people to look at him while simultaneously being unable to handle the interaction that might follow.
But it was his work with the Otago Nuggets basketball team that revealed another dimension entirely. Clayton served as the team’s statistician, applying the kind of analytical rigour that would later be popularised by Moneyball. This was sabermetrics before most New Zealanders had heard the term—the application of statistical analysis to sport, finding inefficiencies and advantages hidden in the data that traditional coaching overlooked.
His academic work extended this fascination with sport and economics. Clayton became, by some measures, New Zealand’s foremost expert on the feasibility of stadiums. His research examined the economic justifications for major sporting infrastructure—the kind of analysis that would become increasingly relevant as cities debated the costs and benefits of building venues for major events.
Here is one of the uncomfortable truths about Clayton Weatherston: he could have changed sport in New Zealand. His combination of economic expertise and statistical analysis of athletic performance was genuinely pioneering. In another timeline—one where he did not walk into Sophie Elliott’s bedroom on 9 January 2008—his research might have influenced how this country thinks about sporting investment, how teams evaluate players, how we make decisions about billion-dollar infrastructure.
Instead, his extensive body of research sits largely untouched. No one will cite the work of Clayton Weatherston. No journalist writing about stadium economics will quote his findings. No sports analyst will build upon his statistical methods. The name itself has become toxic—so associated with violence that his intellectual contributions have been effectively erased.
This is not a tragedy on the scale of Sophie Elliott’s death. It is not even a tragedy in any meaningful sense. But it is a strange and uncomfortable footnote—that a mind capable of genuine contribution was also capable of such destruction, and that the destruction has consumed everything else.
V. The Economics of Murder
When I heard about the murder of Sophie Elliott, it is funny what the mind does. As more details emerged—that the killer was Clayton Weatherston, that he had been a lecturer who entered a relationship with his student—I could not help but think of my last finance paper.
Dr Kate Brown lectured Finance 303 about economic theory. It was a small class in a seminar room at the Commerce Building. Lectures were like conversations. For one assignment, we were asked to analyse the economic theory of crime. We were to assess the statistical risks of getting caught, the punishment, the potential benefits, and the transaction costs—insurance, police resources, legal costs.
At the time, car theft and burglaries were in the news because police were not investigating crimes or not acting on evidence provided by victims. In one case, a person found his stolen car but police would not arrest the thief. The rational criminal, we learned, weighs costs against benefits.
Then the lecture took an awkward turn. Dr Brown wanted to discuss murder. Factors to consider were the chances of getting caught and the punishment, but in the end the victim is dead and the murderer gets parole. Other factors included manslaughter and provocation—the partial defence that could reduce murder to a lesser charge. For provocation, the acts of the victim were considered a mitigating factor.
At the time, the average time spent in prison for murder was fifteen years.
Clayton Weatherston sat in that lecture, listening intently, as he always did. His brain absorbed everything. The same mind that calculated basketball statistics and stadium feasibility was processing this information too.
When Clayton was arrested, my mind raced back to that seminar room. If Clayton walked into the Elliott home and stabbed his girlfriend 216 times, what was he thinking? Did he think that his ex-girlfriend had set his life back fifteen years? Did he calculate that killing someone was worth it?
Fifteen years was approximately the same time spanning when I first met Clayton Weatherston in 1994 and when he graduated with a doctorate in economics—and killed Sophie Elliott.
The details that emerged painted a picture of catastrophic risk-taking. Clayton was a lecturer who tutored a student with whom he then entered a relationship. Ethically, this was problematic—it exposed Clayton to all sorts of risks with few benefits. The student faced fewer risks, even benefited from the relationship, and could easily claim to be a victim, free of any blame or consequences.
During my fourth year, Clayton shared a postgraduate office with my flatmate. My flatmate shared many of Clayton’s insecure personality traits. He too had felt that he was not getting anywhere at Treasury, so took a postgraduate course. Years later, Clayton would follow the same path, returning to university to complete a doctorate after his own stint at Treasury left him feeling dissatisfied—missing his family, feeling that he was not being taken seriously.¹ It was a pattern: the anxious overachiever, burning out in the professional world, retreating to the familiar safety of academia. For my flatmate, it was a career pivot. For Clayton, it would lead to a relationship with his student in the final six months of his studies—and ultimately to murder.
Clayton had returned to study after his stint at the Treasury to complete his PhD. His career had options in both public and private sectors. Academically, his career was about to begin—he would soon be “Dr Weatherston.” For Sophie Elliott, her career was also about to start. She had a first-class honours degree in economics and a job waiting at Treasury.
Imagine what must have gone through Clayton’s mind when he had a loud argument with Sophie in the stairwell of the Commerce Building. His relationship with a student was outed and ended. His now ex-girlfriend had a job to go to at the same place he could have gone to. But instead, it was now known that he had had an affair with a student. That would taint his academic career before it had even started.
I wonder whether Clayton thought that his life had taken a fifteen-year backward step? He was so close to completing his studies, had so much to look forward to. The one risk that he took had backfired spectacularly.
VI. The Narcissist’s Rage
Dr David Chaplow, New Zealand’s director of mental health and chief adviser to the Minister of Health, interviewed Weatherston after the killing. He found a “vulnerable character” suffering from an anxiety disorder, obsessive and, as a narcissist, prone to “narcissistic rage.” He did not find that Weatherston suffered any “disease of the mind.”⁴
Chaplow testified that Weatherston did have “many positive attributes”—kindness, friendship, looking after students at the university. But these qualities operated alongside a darker tendency. Weatherston’s narcissism operated within a context of “being frustrated within that particular relationship, or being spurned or being threatened.”⁴
Weatherston had displayed an inability to let go. Sophie had alluded to this—the pattern of breaking up and making up. “In spite of advice from many quarters,” Chaplow testified, “he was unable to let go, wanting to have the last word, make his point by humiliation, and so we have the final tragedy.”⁴
Notes from counselling sessions Weatherston had with a psychotherapist revealed that he had problems in the relationship, feeling “powerless and controlled,” had problems saying no, and found difficult people very hard to handle.⁴
Clayton had a history of long-term relationships. Prior to killing Sophie Elliott, one previous relationship had been violent. He would walk away from relationships and start new ones, like Groundhog Day. But something triggered Clayton with Sophie Elliott. Something that was worth risking his new relationship, his new life as “Dr Weatherston.”
He was already in a new relationship when he went to the Elliott home that day. He claimed Sophie attacked him with scissors. His response—216 stab wounds, mutilation—was, by any measure, unjustifiably disproportionate.
VII. The Performance
After Clayton Weatherston was arrested and held on remand awaiting trial, imagine what his mind was processing. He would have been advised of coping mechanisms to adapt to his new environment. The bedwetter with anxiety disorders needed to toughen up and become resilient to those around him.
Meanwhile, there was an unprecedented level of focus on Clayton’s victim. The parents were ubiquitous in the media. They knew their daughter had been in a relationship with a lecturer that went sour. The victim’s parents’ message was amplified by an American-style campaign for victims’ rights, led by the Sensible Sentencing Trust, which eventually led to the forming of a foundation named after Sophie.
When Clayton Weatherston sat through the Crown’s case, to him, the evidence must have seemed very one-sided. Of course, by its very nature, it would have been one sided, like a debate. The victim’s parents’ evidence must have touched a nerve.
And there was one word that would be forever linked with the trial: narcissist. I would bet it was the first time many people had heard the word, and Clayton would become its poster child.
Clayton must also have been aware that those who would give evidence in his defence would speak after him. He did not have the final say. He had to speak in his defence first.
The performance by Clayton Weatherston in the witness stand was a shock to anyone who knew him. In his own defence, he used offence. He was completely out of character. The shy, anxious person became someone else entirely. He became what others wanted to portray him as—arrogant, cold, calculating. Perhaps it was the same transformation that allowed the bedwetter to become an aerobics instructor, the introvert to wear tight t-shirts, the awkward conversationalist to command a basketball team’s statistical operation.
At the same time as Clayton was on trial for murder, another person at the opposite end of the country was also being tried for murder. Ferdinand Ambach successfully used the partial defence of provocation when he killed a man for unwanted sexual advances. The defence worked for Ambach. It did not work for Weatherston.
Clayton gave many reasons for arguing provocation. But the way he behaved on the stand fuelled the campaigners outside the courtroom. His miscalculation probably added years to his sentence.
His parents, Yuleen and Roger Weatherston, retreated to their home in Green Island after the conviction, trying to reconcile themselves to the fact that the son they loved had become perhaps New Zealand’s most reviled man. They insisted his defence team was justified in arguing provocation. They wanted to correct certain “untruths.” They were not yet ruling out an appeal.³
“Clayton is an extremely honest and sensitive person and I am not just making it up,” his mother said. “He is honest, he tells the truth and we tell the truth. This is why this has been so hard. I have battled with what has been reported—there have been some untruths there.”³
When Lesley Elliott tried to embrace Yuleen Weatherston after the verdict, the gesture was not reciprocated. “We were ambushed in the foyer,” Roger Weatherston said. “It certainly was not orchestrated from both parties. We were just leaving.”³
VIII. The Unanswered Questions
There is a phenomenon in forensic psychology known as “overkill”—the infliction of injuries far exceeding what is necessary to cause death. Research consistently links overkill to deep-seated psychological and emotional factors, with forensic literature noting that injuries targeting areas of beauty and femininity indicate something beyond mere killing: a desire to destroy, to defile, to send a message.⁵
Sophie Elliott died from blood loss. Two wounds pierced her heart and one lung. She was, by any medical measure, dead within seconds of the attack beginning. And yet Clayton Weatherston continued. He inflicted 216 separate injuries. He cut off her ears and the tip of her nose. He mutilated her eyes, her breast, her genital area. He cut pieces of her hair and laid them across her face.⁶
When asked at trial why he had systematically mutilated Sophie’s body after she was already dead, Clayton’s reply was simply: “I don’t know.”⁷
That answer has never satisfied me. Clayton Weatherston knew everything. He calculated everything. He absorbed every lecture, analysed every variable, processed every piece of information that came his way. The same mind that applied sabermetrics to basketball, that researched stadium feasibility with forensic precision, that weighed the costs and benefits of crime in Dr Kate Brown’s seminar—that mind did not suddenly go blank.
Here is what nobody asked at trial, what no journalist has explored in the years since: Why did Clayton choose to kill Sophie in her parents’ home, in her bedroom, with her mother downstairs? Why did he lock the door and continue his attack while Lesley Elliott frantically tried to break in? Why did he ensure that Sophie’s mother would hear her daughter’s screams, would force her way in with a meat skewer, would witness the final moments of mutilation?
The location was not incidental. Clayton could have confronted Sophie anywhere. He could have waited until she arrived in Wellington, away from her family. Instead, he chose the one place where her parents would be present, where they would hear everything, where they would be helpless witnesses to their daughter’s destruction.
I have sat through other trials. I watched Gerald Hope walk past the waiting media every day during the Scott Watson proceedings, never using a side door. Hope was a councillor, ran for mayor after Scott Watson was charged, became mayor before the trial, and served one term, and continued to serve a total of 21 years on the Marlborough council.
I was present when the David Bain verdict was read—watched Bain faint in the dock while his family gasped with what seemed less like relief at justice served and more like relief that an alternative narrative had been foreclosed.
These observations taught me that grief manifests in unexpected ways, and that the public performance of victimhood is a complicated thing.
The Hope-Smart case taught me something else. At the time of her disappearance, seventeen-year-old Olivia Hope was publicly portrayed as a head prefect, a gifted musician, about to study law at Otago. But a police personality profile described her as “emotional, spoilt, sexually active and a drinker.” Ben Smart, meanwhile, was the handsome Christ’s College old boy, the twenty-one-year-old civil engineer about to join his father’s firm—so reliable that his failure to contact family was treated with immediate gravity. The media narrative was of perfect victims with unlimited potential. The more complicated realities were suppressed. Any attempt to discuss risk factors was labelled victim-blaming, and so nothing was learned that might protect others.
I see the same pattern with Sophie Elliott.
The way Gil Elliott campaigned after Sophie’s death was, in many respects, admirable. The Sophie Elliott Foundation has done valuable work. The Loves-Me-Not programme has reached thousands of students. But there was something about the intensity of the campaign, the ubiquity of the media presence, the alliance with the Sensible Sentencing Trust, that suggested motivations beyond mere advocacy.
Gil Elliott’s victim impact statement was heavily censored at Justice Potter’s direction. Entire sections were crossed out with a marker pen the night before sentencing. Gil was furious. He told the media he had not been permitted to “have a crack” at Weatherston, that the censorship was “just another way the justice system puts victims down.”⁸ One passage that was removed read: “How dare Clayton Weatherston think he had the right to kill Sophie and deprive us of her future, watching her grow and mature into her chosen career. And maybe have a loving relationship with someone who respected her for who she was, not someone who could abuse and manipulate her for their own ends.”⁹
The judge clearly felt that something in Gil Elliott’s full statement was inappropriate for a courtroom. We do not know what else was removed, or why.
Here are the questions that have never been asked:
Did Clayton Weatherston’s rage extend beyond Sophie to her family? Did he see Gil Elliott as an antagonist—the father who encouraged his daughter to end the relationship, who perhaps saw Clayton as unsuitable, who represented the comfortable middle-class world that Clayton, with his anxieties and insecurities, could never quite enter? Was the choice to kill Sophie in her parents’ home a calculated act of punishment directed not just at her, but at them?
And what of the family dynamics on the Elliott side? Sophie had complained to her mother about Clayton from three weeks into the relationship. She came home upset, distressed, describing his behaviour in ways that clearly troubled Lesley. And yet the relationship continued for six months. When Sophie was assaulted by Clayton in the Commerce Building stairwell just days before her death, she refused to call the police despite the urging of her workmates and her mother.¹⁰ Why?
These questions will be seen as insensitive. They will be characterised as victim-blaming. But they are not accusations—they are gaps in the narrative that have never been filled. If we are to understand what happened in that bedroom, and why, we cannot simply accept the version that has been curated for public consumption.
The academic literature on “moral panic” has examined the Weatherston trial specifically. Legal scholar Shontelle Grimberg argued that the media coverage “triggered a moral panic among New Zealanders over the provocation defence,” and that while New Zealanders were rightly concerned, “society’s reaction as a whole was fundamentally inappropriate.”¹¹ The campaign to abolish provocation succeeded. But at what cost to our understanding of what actually happened?
Clayton became the poster child for narcissism. Gil became the poster child for victims’ rights. Two men, locked in a public performance that has continued for eighteen years, each playing a role that obscures more than it reveals.
The uncomfortable truth is that we still do not know why Clayton Weatherston did what he did. We do not know why he continued after Sophie was dead. We do not know why he chose that location, that moment, that method of destruction. And as long as we allow the narrative to be controlled by those with the loudest voices and the most media-savvy campaigns, we never will.
IX. The Question of Parole
Weatherston was sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum non-parole period of eighteen years. The Crown had sought nineteen; the defence submitted that twelve would be appropriate. Justice Judith Potter settled on eighteen.¹²
Statistics released at the time of sentencing showed that only three offenders serving life sentences were granted parole at their first Parole Board hearing between 2004 and 2008. Criminologist Greg Newbold said the Graeme Burton case had made the board more cautious. Burton had been paroled after fourteen years of a life sentence, only to stab a man seven months later.¹³
“Burton had a big impact on the psychology of the Parole Board,” Newbold said. “They are being more careful about lifers getting released.”¹³
For me, this is an uncomfortable situation. I have watched other killers navigate the parole system. John Barlow was released on parole after 15 years, saying that his time in prison was “like going into retirement” and hasn’t changed him a bit. Mark Lundy was granted parole in April 2025 and released in May after serving twenty-three years.
Gil Elliott, Sophie’s father, spoke to the media ahead of Friday’s hearing. “I hope that they will keep him in,” he said. “Narcissists don’t change—they are wired back to front. Once a narcissist, always a narcissist. They are like leopards; they don’t change their spots. I consider that he is unpredictable, and it would be a danger to the public if they let him out.”¹⁴
He believed Weatherston should have received a harsher sentence. “One could say that the sentence he got was manifestly inadequate. I don’t think eighteen years was enough for what he did to Sophie at all. After all, he defiled her as well when she was dead.”¹⁴
“Sophie got the life sentence,” Gil Elliott said. “That’s the bottom line. She got the life sentence. He didn’t.”¹⁴
Lesley Elliott died in 2022. After her daughter’s murder, she became a vocal advocate against intimate partner violence, setting up the Sophie Elliott Foundation to raise awareness of warning signs. She wrote a book about her harrowing experience. Her husband is grateful she will not have to live through numerous parole hearings.
X. The Miscalculations
Gil Elliott asked the question that haunts this case: “We never knew why he did it. Does he know why he did it, really?”¹⁴
I keep returning to that seminar room at the Commerce Building, to Dr Kate Brown’s lecture on the economics of crime. We learned that rational actors weigh costs against benefits, risks against rewards. What strikes me now, all these years later, is how many miscalculations were made by everyone involved.
Clayton miscalculated when he entered a relationship with his student. He miscalculated the consequences of that public argument in the Commerce Building stairwell. He miscalculated catastrophically when he went to the Elliott home on 9 January 2008. And he miscalculated again when he took the witness stand and transformed into the very monster the prosecution portrayed him as.
But Sophie Elliott also miscalculated. The economic theory of crime we learned in that lecture assumed that in a lecturer-student relationship, the risks were all one-sided—that the lecturer faced professional ruin while the student faced few consequences and could easily claim victimhood. That analysis was incomplete. Sophie did not recognise that she faced risks too. The risks were not all on Clayton’s side. A man capable of narcissistic rage, a man who could not let go, a man with a history of violence in relationships—these were risks that proved fatal.
Clayton also miscalculated the legal consequences. If he thought, as that economics lecture suggested, that murder meant parole after fifteen years, he was wrong. He will not be out of prison in fifteen years. Based on Gil Elliott’s testimony, the family will oppose parole at every opportunity. Based on Parole Board statistics, first-time release is rare for lifers. Clayton Weatherston should not be out at eighteen years, and likely will not be.
Perhaps the greatest miscalculation of all was made in the aftermath. In response to the public outrage over Weatherston’s provocation defence, Parliament abolished provocation as a partial defence to murder. Politicians and advocates celebrated this as a victory for victims. But here is the uncomfortable truth that the economics of crime forces us to confront: removing the defence of provocation does not make potential victims any safer.
The victim is still dead. The killer still lives. Changing the legal landscape after the fact does nothing to alter the calculation before it. If anything, it removes a factor that might have encouraged potential victims to consider their own conduct in volatile relationships—not because they are to blame, but because they face real risks that no change in the law can eliminate.
The Sophie Elliott Foundation was established to educate people about the warning signs of abusive relationships. This is valuable work. But empowerment without risk awareness can be dangerous. Teaching people to recognise the signs of a narcissist is important. Teaching them that their own actions carry no weight in the equation—that the risks are all on the other side—may give them a false sense of security that proves fatal.
Sophie Elliott would have been forty this year. She would have had a career, perhaps a family, perhaps grandchildren for her parents. Instead, she has a foundation in her name and a grave that her father visits, thinking about what might have been.
Clayton Weatherston is fifty. He has spent more than a third of his life in prison. Whether he spends the rest of it there is a question that will be answered, at least provisionally, on Friday.
I do not know what the answer should be. I only know that truth is a matter of evidence, and evidence is always incomplete. What I remember of Clayton Weatherston is a fragment—a young man handing me lecture notes, eager to please, full of potential. What he became is something else entirely.
That gap—between who we appear to be and what we are capable of—is the darkness that Capote explored in Kansas, and that I have tried to explore here. It is a darkness we all carry. Most of us never act on it. Clayton Weatherston did.
For that, he must answer. For Sophie Elliott, there are no more answers to give. Only the cold calculation of a life that ended too soon, and the question of whether anyone learned the right lessons from it.
Endnotes
Kay Sinclair, “Success accompanied by stress: Weatherston,” Otago Daily Times, 10 July 2009. https://www.odt.co.nz/news/dunedin/success-accompanied-stress-weatherston
“Weatherston’s family: ’He tells the truth’,” Herald on Sunday, 25 July 2009. https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/weatherstons-family-he-tells-the-truth/LBGN6DX5NO6WAY2E5Q53J2Q34Q/
“Weatherston’s family: ’He tells the truth’,” Herald on Sunday, 25 July 2009. https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/weatherstons-family-he-tells-the-truth/LBGN6DX5NO6WAY2E5Q53J2Q34Q/
Jarrod Booker, “Court told of Weatherston’s ’positive attributes’,” NZ Herald, 15 July 2009. https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/court-told-of-weatherstons-positive-attributes/UUOYJZ2MAVKVA4Q3F4ZXJ6WNOY/
Chopin, J. and Beauregard, E., “Patterns of Overkill in Sexual Homicide,” Journal of Criminal Psychology 11, no. 1 (2021): 44—58. See also Douglas et al. (2006): “Generally, the more evidence there is of overkill, the closer the relationship is between the victim and offender.”
Lesley Elliott and William O’Brien, Sophie’s Legacy: A Mother’s Story of Her Family’s Loss and Their Quest for Change (Longacre, Auckland, 2011), p. 19.
“Sophie Elliott’s killer up for parole 18 years after her murder,” 1News, 19 January 2026. https://www.1news.co.nz/2026/01/19/sophie-elliotts-killer-up-for-parole-18-years-after-her-murder/
“Court stopped Elliott dad ’having crack’ at Weatherston,” Otago Daily Times, 14 November 2009. https://www.odt.co.nz/news/dunedin/court-stopped-elliott-dad-having-crack-weatherston
“Sophie’s father says judge censored him,” NZ Herald, 12 November 2009. https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/sophies-father-says-judge-censored-him/52ZMKTGLKYLP3YBE6XW2X427QQ/
“He loves me— he loves me not,” Grapevine Magazine, interview with Lesley Elliott. https://www.grapevine.org.nz/articles/he-loves-me-not/
Shontelle Grimberg, “Moral panic: the Weatherston trial and the demise of the provocation defence,” New Zealand Public Interest Law Journal 4 (2017): 29. https://www.nzlii.org/nz/journals/NZPubIntLawJl/2017/2.html
“Weatherston jailed 18 years for Elliott murder,” RNZ News, 15 September 2009. https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/15404/weatherston-jailed-18-years-for-elliott-murder
“Release in 18 years ’unlikely’,” Otago Daily Times, 15 September 2009. https://www.odt.co.nz/news/dunedin/release-18-years-unlikely
Anna Leask, “Sophie Elliott murder: Dunedin killer Clayton Weatherston’s Parole Board bid for freedom,” NZ Herald, 27 January 2026. https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/sophie-elliott-murder-dunedin-killer-clayton-weatherstons-parole-board-bid-for-freedom/YCA7SDYFTZFV3HSW3NSZWOXWR4/bid-for-freedom/YCA7SDYFTZFV3HSW3NSZWOXWR4/
