Sophie’s Legacy

by Lesley Elliot

  What Ablett-Kerr said about me and Sophie was sickening and didn’t alter the fact Weatherston killed Sophie and it was premeditated. His defence put a slur on Sophie and me. If it’s not true or not proven, why is it allowed to be said in the first place? I think she stepped over the line. She pulled all the bits together for the summing-up and delivered it totally uninterrupted.

  The prosecution sticks to the facts. They don’t hint at things or suggest things they haven’t proven. They don’t play on emotions. If they did I’m sure they wouldn’t get away with it.

  If the system actually hurts people as was done to me, counsel will say, ‘I’m just doing my job.’ Isn’t it up to lawyers themselves to advocate for change, for a better, fairer system that seeks the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth? At one stage after Greg King had so vigorously cross-examined me, he passed me in the corridor and said, ‘Gidday, how are you?’ I was stunned.

  Can’t the accused’s points of view be put forward in a non-threatening manner? Can’t the defence say, ‘My client alleges you did this or that. What do you say?’ But they don’t. They hint, goad, and unsettle. Why does it have to be so aggressive?

  At the trial Weatherston wouldn’t look at me. During tea breaks I had to walk within feet of him. Shouldn’t the court be configured in a way that this does not happen? While he wouldn’t look at me, it was different when Chris Haig was on the stand. He glared at her, clearly trying to intimidate.

  The loss of Sophie, a student whom I had a lot of respect for, was enough to bear. To have to give evidence twice was a difficult experience. But to be made the scapegoat for a murderer’s premeditated actions, and be unable to adequately defend my own reputation, makes me lose faith in the system we call justice.

  Before Sophie’s death I thought I knew something about narcissism — that grandiose superiority and belief of being the best. I also knew that the term narcissism came from an ancient Greek myth of the youth Narcissus, who was so self-absorbed by his image reflected in a pool he fell in love with himself and spent hours staring at his own reflection. This arrogance off ended the gods and they turned him into the narcissus flower. I now realise I knew very little of this disorder and understood even less.

  After researching narcissism I developed a greater knowledge about the condition, but I still didn’t really understand. I didn’t understand what attracted Sophie to Weatherston, or why, after he’d been so cruel to her, she would allow their relationship to be rekindled. Ever since the terrible killing of Sophie took place I’ve struggled with how someone, supposedly intelligent and successful, could do such a dreadful thing. I simply couldn’t comprehend what happened. What I didn’t appreciate at the time, and I hope to dispel one misapprehension about the true narcissist, is that they can be extremely dangerous.

  To help me understand I sought the opinion of Dr Stephanie du Fresne, a psychiatrist who has considerable forensic psychiatry experience and training as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist. Perhaps the best way to describe the kind of personality disorder Weatherston has is to look in the diagnostic manual of personality disorders that psychiatrists rely on. With narcissistic personality disorder the diagnostic criteria is quite straightforward.

  A pervasive pattern of grandiosity in fantasy or behaviour, a need for admiration, a lack of empathy beginning by early adulthood and present in a variety of contexts as indicated by five or more of the following:

  A grandiose sense of self-importance, e.g. exaggerates achievements and talents and expects to be recognised as superior without commensurate achievements.

  Preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty or ideal love.

  Believes he or she is special and unique and can only be understood by, or should associate with, other special or high-status people or institutions.

  Requires excessive admiration.

  Has a sense of entitlement, i.e. unreasonable expectations or especially favourable treatment or automatic compliance with his or her expectations.

  Interpersonally exploitative, taking advantage of others to achieve his or her own ends.

  Lacks empathy. Is unwilling to recognise or identify with the needs and feelings of others.

  Is often envious of others or believes that others are envious of him or her.

  Shows arrogant, haughty behaviours or attitudes.

  Dr du Fresne is of the opinion that, regardless of the checklist, the system for determining a personality disorder is still imprecise. The fact someone has a number of the criteria set out in the diagnostic manual does not mean they are easily categorised, and different clinicians can come to differing conclusions. Simply categorising someone like Weatherston is fine but you are not saying anything about causality. ‘Many psychiatrists will say let’s not even try and define personality disorders because the classification system we have is essentially flawed. It’s not consistent between people and not consistent with clinicians over time. There is so much overlap it becomes meaningless.’

  Having said this, Dr du Fresne’s explanations in layman’s terms began to make real sense to me. This is how she explained narcissism:

  The roots of the notions of narcissism come from early psychoanalytic thinking, which was that babies need to (and clearly do) feel that they are the centre of the universe. They are totally in control of everything and everyone dances to their tune. So a baby needs to feel mother, father or somebody thinks they are the most gorgeous creature in the world and will drop everything to attend to them as soon as they make their needs known. Narcissism as a beginning state for personality development is necessary and children who are so badly treated that they don’t experience that do badly in life. The notion that the idea of being special and admired by everybody and having unlimited power to make happen what you want to make happen is a normal phase of development. Some people fail to move on in significant ways from that way of being or, having moved on, return to it. So this is very different from the checklist of qualities in a manual. The person has essentially become stuck at a level of development that is normal in an infant but quite abnormal in an adult.

  What psychotherapists believe is that for various reasons, some infants, in the early stages of development, move away from a relationship with any other person. They end up relating to only themselves. This leads to an extraordinary way of living in the world because we are designed to have relationships. Mothers are primed, either through pregnancy or expecting a child through adoption, with sophisticated skills to help a child build relationships from the beginning.

  What happens to people with narcissism is they simply don’t use that relationship skill most of us have. They stay in this mode, believing they are entitled to everything and can make happen everything they want to happen.

  Perhaps a good analogy of the narcissist is to think of them as the scriptwriter and director of a play. Everyone else is an actor. Everyone will therefore do what you want and if they don’t you figuratively sack them. The narcissist is in charge. It’s their play, their script, in their world. If people don’t do as you want them to do, they are of no value.

  Narcissists are often charming in the same way a baby is charming. We all fall for babies and naturally want to protect them. The baby captures people and is meant to, for that is part of the equipment they come into the world with. It helps them survive. Narcissistic people often have that kind of charm and people will be drawn to them. Some people, especially after a longer acquaintance, begin to recognise a ‘creepiness’ in the narcissist but other people don’t get these warning signs as easily. Psychiatrists don’t know why some people are more vulnerable than others to narcissistic charm. It’s not even a matter of naïveté — some people are warned off while others are attracted. So often the narcissist can get others to dance to their tune, to help them fill out their fantasy, to be the admiring audience. People eventually pick up on the disturbing behaviours and move away or refuse to go along with it.

  When people the
narcissist thinks have been recruited into his play are no longer playing the part as he wants them to, his rage can be extreme. The rage isn’t held back by relationships and this is a critical key. Relationships are what contain violence in all of us. We are so programmed towards relationships that we automatically think, ‘If I do that he won’t like me.’ It’s the quality from relationships that contains and modulates our propensity for violence.

  All the groups who have major deficits in relationship skills, i.e. people with autism, psychopathy, narcissistic personality disorder etc, are much more violent because those things that hold us back are not holding them back. There is simply no capacity to put themselves in other people’s shoes.

  In narcissism the rage and violence is largely hidden until someone disappoints them. Occasionally the narcissist works out for themselves that their behaviour keeps turning people away, so they seek or are referred for treatment. Because the doctor is viewed by the narcissist as being someone who can help, they tend to get not physical violence but verbal violence. The narcissist is likely to say, you are a stupid doctor, you don’t know anything and I don’t believe you’ve even got those qualifications. There is a contemptuous, dismissive, rageful, verbal attack. The narcissist will likely coerce the doctor to comply with their wishes so they will get what they want. They might say, ‘If you were a proper doctor you would know that I really need those sleeping pills that you’re not willing to give me.’ This is the sort of coercive aggression often seen, along with the contemptuous and critical demeanour. In other words it’s an attempt to pull the doctor back into line, to play the role the narcissist has determined they will play.

  When psychiatrists talk to people who have been in a relationship with the narcissist, they usually describe endless put-downs and criticisms and of being made to feel useless, worthless or stupid. That way the person will follow the narcissist’s lead. If you follow the lead, the charm switches on. Then you become the most wonderful person and the narcissist wants to be with you. The charm that is switched on is a baby’s charm — absolutely captivating. This is a powerful way the narcissist has of training a person vulnerable and susceptible to that charm.

  If we think of a group of people who have psychopathy or sociopathy, we think of the grossly violent men who repeat domestic violence over and over again yet the woman keeps going back. These men don’t switch on charm, they switch on need: ‘I’m sorry, I’ll never do it again, I can’t think what came over me, I had too much to drink. I can’t bear it if you leave me, I’ll have to kill myself.’ They switch on neediness.

  But narcissists switch on this infantile charm, e.g. ‘You’re gorgeous because I’m feeling gorgeous again.’ The narcissist uses a different lure and while some people recognise something isn’t right, others don’t pick up these messages. It’s probably subtle things in our own personalities that either attract or repel us from the narcissist.

  Narcissistic violence is different from standard domestic violence, which is coercive in a different way. In most domestic violence, men usually use the threat of violence, e.g. ‘You make my dinner or you know what will happen.’ Narcissists on the other hand can erupt when their level of disappointment goes beyond a certain threshold. They may not even rant and rave because you only do that if you are trying to persuade another person. In cases of narcissistic personality disorder, it is much closer to very early developmental difficulties like autism. People with autism can do appalling things to other people because they have no sense it is a person — it’s an object. It’s akin to smashing a radio or putting a foot through a computer screen. The object is to destroy it. You only yell and scream if there is somebody listening but with narcissistic personality disorder, the person isn’t really a person in reality. They are more of a stage prop, an object that can be moved around as a director in a play physically moves actors around.

  What Dr du Fresne had to say fits in perfectly with what I now know about Weatherston. I also found her explanation of infantile charm interesting and recall the time he first came to our home for a meal. He did have a certain charm although it didn’t take long for me to detect a certain undercurrent about him. When I consider what people like Robert Alexander and Chris Haig had to say about Weatherston, it is clear that they too had concerns about him yet others in the economics department believed he was a wonderful rising star. Perhaps they, like Sophie, succumbed more easily to the narcissist’s charm than others — a charm that can be a powerful magnet.

  Another thing was the way Weatherston was critical of Sophie’s advantages. He’d often demean her by saying she had been to a decile 10 school, had a good car and had parents who cared about her while he didn’t. Dr du Fresne had a good explanation for that side of the narcissist’s behaviour.

  The diagnostic manual would say these people are quick to envy intensely. For example, ‘You had all those good things and it’s not fair because I should have had them.’ Or to feel they are envied, ‘People don’t like me because I’m so wonderful.’ They cannot see that people don’t like them because they are creepy or disturbing.

  We all envy others, wishing we too had those looks, or possessions or position etc. But the narcissist’s kind of spoiling envy of ‘you’ve got all those good things and you are a worse person because of it’ is an infantile level of envy as opposed to a grown-up level of envy and is quite inappropriate in an adult.

  I’ve often wondered what part jealousy played in Weatherston’s determination to kill Sophie. He may have found it immensely difficult that Sophie had got a job he had once aspired to. In people with narcissistic personality disorder, jealousy becomes very significant. Sophie was accepted into Treasury in a position Weatherston had always wanted. I’ve no doubt that he resented Sophie getting what he believed was his due. People with narcissistic personality disorder, when in competition with someone else, find it impossible so they either need to spoil it or try to justify things. For instance: ‘The job was rubbish anyway and I chose not to take it; they didn’t get rid of me and I could see through them and left.’ That’s called narcissistic reasoning.

  Dr du Fresne believes the mutilation of Sophie was his attempt to make her ‘unbeautiful’, to destroy what he couldn’t have. She also believes Weatherston’s wish to discredit Sophie at trial came later. People with narcissistic personality disorder are very good at rethinking things. Weatherston probably had an original thought that people would be so in awe of him that the usual consequences for what he did wouldn’t follow. However, when the consequences do start to happen, the narcissist rethinks the situation in such a way to keep themselves in a better light than everyone else. That’s what happened when he went to mediation over the joint authorship problem at the university. He had to think of a strategy that would allow him to come out looking the best. So little disappointments get turned around. Dr du Fresne said that this reshaping of reality in the narcissist’s mind is to keep alive the notion that they are in charge and incapable of failing. I’m sure it was this kind of reshaping that led to Weatherston’s preposterous contention that Sophie attacked him with scissors. Dr du Fresne’s explanation of narcissistic reasoning and reshaping events fits perfectly with my belief about what happened.

  For Weatherston to have succeeded in his defence of provocation, Sophie would have had to be an intolerable person to such a degree she could drive a person to commit murder. She was nothing of the sort. Try as they might, the defence could not paint Sophie in such a light but in attempting to do so they attacked her reputation, quite viciously in my view, and what was said was very hurtful to us. I found the besmirching of Sophie’s reputation very hard to take.

  I have often wondered about the degree insanity played in this dreadful tragedy. In strictly layman’s terms, according to Dr du Fresne, Clayton Weatherston is mad, but not in a legal sense. A person can only be found not guilty on grounds of insanity if they have a delusional belief that what they did was morally right or they were so disturbed they didn’t even
know what they were doing. For example, a man believes everyone is conspiring to poison him, including his wife. She is colluding with aliens from outer space and the only way out of the predicament is to kill the wife. There is a very narrow definition of insanity available as a defence in New Zealand courts. So while Weatherston might not have been legally insane, at least understanding his personality allows me to rationalise what took place.

  Dr du Fresne also said that while Weatherston was on the stand people all around the country were being totally turned off, but he would have believed they were looking at him and thinking what an incredibly intelligent man he is. That is his personality — grandiose. He simply couldn’t have seen that others saw him as arrogant.

  Throughout this whole ordeal I’ve always wondered about two things. One is why Weatherston could have done what he did with seeming indifference and no concern about the consequences. The other is why, when he could be so cruel and hurtful to Sophie, she kept giving him another chance. Now I know and understand. But while it helps to understand, it makes the whole tragedy no less devastating and certainly no less excusable.

  6

  the trial—

  As if watching my daughter being killed in front of me wasn’t traumatic enough, I then had to endure 18 months of further pain and suffering waiting for justice to be done. One might have hoped for a guilty plea from Sophie’s murderer. After all, there was no doubt whatsoever that he, and he alone, killed Sophie. I guess that was too much to expect.