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The mother of Dunedin student Sophie Elliott has told a murder trial how she walked into the bedroom to see her dead daughter being stabbed.
"She screamed, and screamed, and screamed," Leslie Elliott told the second day of the trial of murder accused Clayton Robert Weatherston, 33, the Christchurch Court News website reported.
Weatherston has pleaded not guilty to murdering former girlfriend Sophie Elliott, 22, but guilty to her manslaughter.
He is claiming provocation as a defence to the murder charge, at a trial expected to run for three weeks before Justice Judith Potter and a jury in the High Court at Christchurch.
According to Leslie Elliott, on January 9 last year at her home in Dunedin, Sophie Elliott was in her bedroom packing to leave for Wellington the next day to start a new job.
Weatherston arrived and told Leslie Elliott that he had something to give her daughter.
She said he was friendly, he smiled, seemed relaxed and went up to the bedroom.
Sophie Elliott came out and told her mother she wanted him to leave.
She returned to the bedroom and Leslie Elliott then heard her screaming, either saying, "Don't Clayton, don't Clayton," or "Stop it Clayton, stop it Clayton".
"She was screaming and screaming and screaming," Leslie Elliott said.
She ran upstairs and belted on the door but it was locked.
There was a thumping and then her daughter stopped screaming.
She ran to get a meat skewer to poke it in the door handle to unlock it.
She called 111 on her cellphone and had the phone with her when she ran upstairs.
She heard a couple of sighs, and said the rhythmic thumping was still going on. She thought Weatherston was raping her daughter.
She was on the phone to a 111 call operator as she used a meat skewer to trip the lock and open the bedroom door.
"He's killed her," she told the operator.
The whole room seemed to be red, she told the court.
She saw Sophie Elliott was dead and Weatherston was still stabbing her. She was on her back in the corner of her bedroom. There was blood around one eye and over her neck.
He was stabbing her kneeling over her legs, her chest was all bloody where he was continuing to stab her, she said.
He pushed the door shut in her face, and the 111 call receiver told her to go outside and wait for the police.
Leslie Elliott also recounted what her daughter had told her of the six-month relationship with Weatherston, her university lecturer.
When Sophie Elliott had told Weatherston the relationship was over he became nasty, grabbed her and threw her on the bed.
She managed to get away and he followed her to her car and told her "When you were coming back from Australia I hoped the plane would crash and you would die".
Later another encounter with Weatherston at the university saw him chase her to a staircase and push her on the landing.
"I'm just giving you my hate," he told her.
After five hours of evidence, Leslie Elliott's cross-examination began.
She agreed with defence counsel Judith Ablett-Kerr QC that the relationship between Sophie and Weatherston was highly unstable, and not a relationship that was any good for either of them.
Ablett-Kerr suggested Leslie Elliott had heard her daughter shout something else that day.
"I'm going to suggest that the words you would heard were 'f... you Clayton' and then the other words?" asked Ablett-Kerr.
"I doubt it," Leslie Elliott replied.
His defence is that he was provoked to lose control, guilty of
manslaughter but not guilty of Sophie Elliott's murder.
