NEWS & POLITICS
“But I Always Carry a Kitchen Knife…”AUCKLAND, NEW ZEALAND 25 July 2009 |
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It could be a courtroom anywhere. Small town or big city, it wouldn’t matter. It just happens to be here in New Zealand. A packed gallery, a witness box, a bench – everything in place for a murder case.
Nothing unusual there, murder has become so commonplace that it takes a really juicy one to shock us out of complacency. This case has juice in spades.
It goes something like this:
A college professor begins an affair with a pretty young student. He is, by all accounts, a very intelligent and somewhat intense young man. They fight a lot and fuck a lot. She writes him provocative notes during his lectures. He wants to know about her old lovers. They argue. They break up. She fucks someone else. He keeps tabs on her through her ‘Facebook’ page. She gets a job and is about to leave the city they both live in. He calls around uninvited and unannounced the day before she’s due to leave. They go upstairs. Her mother paces nervously in the kitchen. There is a scream. A thud. The mother runs up the stairs and opens her daughter’s bedroom door. She is already dead. Her bloodied body is lying across a half-packed suitcase and the young professor is atop her, mutilating her with a pair of scissors.
The horror.
He has sliced off her nose and ears. He has removed her nipple from her right breast. He has stabbed her in her bright blue eyes. When he is done with her face, he plants the scissors between her legs.
He has effectively erased her beauty with 216 knife wounds.
There’s no doubt the young college professor killed his student lover. He wouldn’t be so crass as to deny it. But he claims he was provoked.
Day after day he has taken the stand to recount his life. He was an anxious child. He loved his mother. He used to wet his bed. Nobody fully appreciated his intelligence or charm. The girl he murdered told him that her ex-boyfriend had a bigger dick than him. It hurt his feelings.
She was asking for it. She knew he was sensitive. She knew he was easily stressed. But still she came at him with her tales of her ex-boyfriend’s cock. She should have known better.
The day he killed her, he really didn’t mean to. He was simply returning the gifts she gave him. Sure, he asked her if he needed to be tested for a sexually transmitted disease (the slut), but she shouldn’t have swore at him (the bitch). Lucky for him, he was carrying a kitchen knife in his computer bag.
Oh that. The small matter of the knife.
He always carried it, you see. Just in case. In case he was attacked by muggers on the street. In case he saw an old lady being raped. In case his twenty-one year girlfriend had the nerve to tell him to fuck off before he sliced her up.
What he did with the knife is not as important as what he believes are the real facts of the case. He says his girlfriend emasculated him. It was only fair then, that he mutilate her genitals as a response.
He said their relationship was like Pride and Prejudice. With stab wounds.
She was Elizabeth Bennet to his Mr Darcy. He said he thought he looked like Colin Firth, whereas she had a fat ass like her idol, Marilyn Monroe.
He thinks it’s unfair his dead girlfriend has public sympathy. He doesn’t like the fact that she is being presented as the ‘victim’ in this case. It shouldn’t matter that she is dead. She was the aggressor. All that talk about another man’s dick.
For five days he took the stand with his stringy blonde hair and stubble. He smirked and winked and berated the lawyers as he laid his self-important theories on the table and waited for the jury and public gallery to applaud his giant intellect. Every day he gave us the opportunity to look inside the mind of a true narcissist and recoil at what resides there.
Each day he put the knife into his victim’s memory as he charged her with causing her own death. The wounds offered to her family cannot be so easily counted.
It took four hours for the jury to deliberate and find him guilty.
He’ll get fifteen, maybe seventeen years in prison.
216 stab wounds. 200 months in a cell. Somehow the numbers just don’t add up.
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Comment by Simon Smithson
2009-07-25 20:41:43
Ah, yes, ‘provocation’. Also known as the ‘Bitch totally deserved it’ defense.
Without attempting to sweep the idea of mental health issues of the table… what an asshole.
Comment by Zara Potts
2009-07-25 20:49:49
The whole country has been glued to this case, Simon. It has been so bizarre. But what really got me wasn’t even so much his lack of remorse, but the fact that he obviously never even LIKED the poor girl. Total asshole.
Comment by Simon Smithson
2009-07-25 20:53:39
Maybe I haven’t been watching the right news channels, but it hasn’t been a huge story over here. We’ve had a couple of murders of our own recently, so that’s been taking up headline space.
People, man. Fuckin’ people.
Comment by Zara Potts
2009-07-25 20:59:00
People suck.
Comment by Megan DiLullo
2009-07-25 20:58:22
Ew. That is just vile, he is vile. And it doesn’t add up. But, at least he is going to prison where his imaginary Colin Firth looks won’t do him much good.
And yes, I agree with Simon. He is a total asshole.
Comment by Zara Potts
2009-07-25 21:02:41
There were so many outrageous things said in his trial, but the Colin Firth thing was a stand out. Talk about delusional. I mean for a start he doesn’t even have the right hair colour. Truly vile.
Comment by Ben Loory
2009-07-25 22:05:25
my stance on the death penalty is: i’m against it except in case of assholes.
so this guy should be shot.
on the other hand, i gotta say, 15-17 years in prison is no joke. No Joke as in, perhaps worse than being dead. at least when you’re dead you get to go somewhere else, or forget to notice you ain’t goin’ nowhere. 15 years in prison, that’s mind-boggling when you think of it. that’s harder for me to conceptualize than death. i’m just going to keep going on and on saying the same damn thing. who’s colin firth? let’s talk about that.
Comment by Zara Potts
2009-07-25 22:53:00
Colin Firth is an actor who played Mr Darcy in a BBC version of Pride and Prejudice. Some women find him extraordinarily attractive. I find him pretty ordinary myself. But take it from me, the nutbag in this case doesn’t even come close to CF.
Comment by jonathan evison
2009-07-25 22:28:33
. . . every time you manage to convince yourself that people are basically good, some shitbag like this guy comes along to muddy the waters . . . i’m keeping the faith, and hopefully avoiding this guy . . .
Comment by Zara Potts
2009-07-25 22:51:04
I’m with you, Jonathan. It’s hard to keep faith in humanity when there are dickhead’s like him sharing our planet.
Comment by Lenore Zion
2009-07-25 23:16:40
i was just telling brad and rich about how narcissistic personality characteristics influence the development of paraphilic behaviors, especially those including victims.
not that this was necessarily paraphilic, but it could easily be labeled as sexual sadism. anyway, i love shit like this. not that it happens, but hearing about it. i just wish i could have a nice long conversation with him. i want to know everything about him, through his perspective. maybe i will go visit him in prison.
Comment by Zara Potts
2009-07-25 23:25:38
No! You are not allowed near him! You are far too precious to breathe even the same air. I think he will probably write a book because he finds himself so incredibly misunderstood and brilliant that he will want to share himself with the world. Honestly Lenore, you would have found this case riveting. He was so offensive and so repulsive but I couldn’t take my eyes off him because he was beyond textbook.
Comment by Irene Zion
2009-07-25 23:39:19
I’m with Ben on this one.
Do it the Chinese way. Shoot him in the head and then charge his family for the bullet.
16 to 18 years is in no way enough.
Do they get out early on parole there, as they do here?
Here 18 years could mean 6.
Life in prison without possibility of parole. That would be the best, since living in prison for the rest of your life is fitting and, at least here in the USA, costs less than trying to kill him, what with the years and years of costly appeals.
This is disgusting, Zara.
Please write something funny next time to offset this.
Comment by Zara Potts
2009-07-26 00:09:14
Sorry, Irene! I am trying desperately to find something funny to write just for you. Hopefully I will embarrass myself tomorrow for some good material.
As for this creep, parole starts here at ten years. But my guess is he will have to serve a minimum of fifteen years. Still not long enough..
Comment by Irene Zion
2009-07-26 04:49:28
I realize it’s the pot calling the kettle black, you know.
My last one was not a funny one.
Comment by Greg Olear
2009-07-26 01:39:14
First, great piece, Zara. Really well done.
Second, I don’t know how it works in New Zealand, but if that smug psychopath wound up in an American prison for that many years…let’s just say his precious manhood would wind up quite a bit shorter, or in bloody bits on the floor of Cell Block A.
I find the death penalty difficult to reconcile…on surely philosophical grounds I guess I’m opposed, but there is something viscerally satisfying about removing people like him from this plane of existence. I’m always pleased when some psychopath visiting violence upon, say, a school is shot dead by police.
Finally, this is why you shouldn’t sleep with your teachers.
Comment by Zara
2009-07-26 10:40:38
Thanks Greg. I agree with you -I can’t reconcile the death penalty even for the worst kind of people, but hey, if it happens in a cell then I wouldn’t lose any sleep over it. I just wish that our justice system gave out longer sentences. Fifteen years seems like a walk in the park for this crime.
Comment by Irwin
2009-07-26 02:22:52
I wasn’t expecting this.
And now I feel a little bit sick.
I had a dream out a murder last night— a man had killed his maid but instead of hiding the body she was nailed to a large oak table in the basement. Fully dressed in her maid outfit— she was an old woman.
I’d literally just got over that before reading this.
It’s horrific. The man is clearly insane. If he wasn’t such a narcissist he probably could have used insanity to avoid prison and et locked up in an institute. (That is, of course, depending on whether the NZ penal system works like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest).
He looks like an asshole.
Comment by Zara
2009-07-26 10:41:46
Oh god, sorry James!!! Nightmares are the worst, they can take weeks to get over sometimes so please forgive me for putting this nasty bit of knitting in your head.
Comment by Irwin
2009-07-26 12:02:01
It’s fine, really.
A day absent mindedly surfing the internet and drinking birra superiore and I’m over it, I think.
It wasn’t a terribly vivid dream.
And surprisingly far less haunting than a dream I had the night before— I was eating a steak sandwich and having an awkward conversation with Michael Cena. It was awful, he was really insecure and I was lying to him; I told him I loved his character in arrested Development, when really I don’t.
It really was quite bizarre.
The murder dream looked almost like something from The Sims.
Your real murder story, however, was genuinely upsetting. Guys like him are such dicks.
By no right is there any way a girl that pretty should even get within touching distance of a guy that looks like that— a guy that looks like he probably played keyboards for a failed 80s new romance band.
That’s not the upsetting part, obviously. The upsetting part is the fucker couldn’t accept that he’d been very lucky and it was over.
Generally I’m not pro-death penalty, although I also think prison has gotten way too fucking cushy in the name of ‘human rights.’ But in this case, the fucker wants to be hung from a tree.
By his scrawny little scrotum.
Comment by Brin
2009-07-26 06:50:01
Consummate asshole.
Comment by Zara
2009-07-26 10:42:14
Amen to that.
Comment by David S. Wills
2009-07-26 08:04:26
That’s vile… But great writing, though!
Comment by Zara
2009-07-26 10:42:50
Thanks David. Vile is just a perfect description of him.
Comment by Rich Ferguson
2009-07-26 11:40:04
Holy shit. This was intense beyond words. I really don’t know what else to say other than great work, Zara.
Comment by Zara
2009-07-26 11:56:23
Thanks for reading, Rich. I don’t think I managed to paint this guy as strangely as he came across. He really was a very weird fish.
Comment by Elizabeth Collins
2009-07-26 17:44:26
I always think that really messed-up things like this only happen in the U.S. Apparently, not! The one good thing I can say here about my country (and by the way, nicely written piece–esp. in the description of what psychopath did to the girl’s body) is that the defendant *would* probably face lots of extra time in jail for the pure savagery of what he did.
And isn’t premeditation a given, here? He must have had some really good lawyers.
Comment by Zara Potts
2009-07-26 18:46:21
God, we have the strangest criminal cases here in NZ. Just really weird shit.
As for the premeditation factor – he said it wasn’t. That he ALWAYS carried a knife for protection and that he just snapped when he went to see her because she apparently ‘lunged’ for him. He certainly isn’t insane, just an asshole.
Comment by D.R. Haney
2009-07-26 17:47:28
The details of the murder itself speak volumes about the guy.
By removing her nose and ears, as well as stabbing her in the eyes, he was symbolically depriving her of her senses. If he’d kept going, he probably would have amputated her lips as well.
As it was, he moved on to mutilate her sexually. A nipple is a classic “trophy” taken by serial killers. I think it’s likely that he intended to pocket it.
I won’t even remark on the 216 wounds and the violation of the vagina with the murder weapon.
In short, he felt he owned this girl, who wasn’t allowed to have any feelings that didn’t concern him. Her taunting of him likely took place in his head, or in any case he asked for it. Even negative attention is attention. Indifference, especially for a narcissist, is the greatest punishment of all.
But, of course, I’m stating the obvious.
Comment by Zara Potts
2009-07-26 18:48:36
Well said, my friend.
I think also in the end, her intelligence far outweighed his. She was leaving for a plum job in Treasury and while he denigrated her and insulted her, he knew that she was so much better and smarter than him. I think in the end, he just couldn’t take it.
Comment by Marni Grossman
2009-07-26 18:43:10
This is what happens in a world in which violence against women is normalized, acceptable.
I know this word is out of fashion, but I’ll use it anyway. This is what happens in a patriarchy.
These sorts of cases have ceased to surprise me. We think of this guy as an aberration, but really, he’s just the extreme end of a continuum. On one side, this shithead, on the other that dude on the subway who eyed my boobs.
Comment by Zara Potts
2009-07-26 18:51:37
You would have been horrified at the trial, Marni. This poor dead girl was basically on the stand. They read her diaries, talked about her promiscuity, basically said – she deserved it. The good thing is we are now looking at a law change because of this very case where victims are not put on trial or ‘answerable’ in any way. About time.
Comment by Ducky
2009-08-22 19:31:17
Here here, Marni.
Comment by Matt
2009-07-26 19:02:18
Wow. This is like something out of a mid-90s Peter Jackson film. Except without the gooey space zombies or carousing medieval clay people.
Something similar happened here in California recently, though in this case it was an attack by a heterosexual man on a homosexual one. The killer claims the gay dude was aggressively coming onto him, attempting to intimidate him into having sex, to the point where he felt his life was at risk and had to use lethal force in self-defense. Which amounted to something like 67 stad wounds with a kitchen knife, some of them post-mortem. The killer spent all evening hanging out with his victim and several other friends at a bar, so yeah, that must have been one intimidating gay man. I don’t even think they’ve yet decided whether or not to charge him with a hate crime.
Comment by Zara Potts
2009-07-26 19:09:51
I’m going to paraphrase Simon Smithson: People are fucked.
Comment by Matt
2009-07-27 07:12:12
And people are fuckers.
Please don’t tell me the court is buying his “I always carry a knife” routine. Firstly, this isn’t some Swiss Army or other type of pocket knife, but a damn KITCHEN KNIFE!!!
Secondly, as someone who has actually been in a knife fight, I can tell you there’s nothing defensive about them whatsoever. It is not “defensive” to stab someone who is unarmed, and unless you actually know what you’re doing, you’re more likely to hurt yourself than any assailant.
Philisophically speaking, I have no problem with the idea of a death penalty, but I think the way in which it is deployed here in the U.S. needs a massive overhaul (hell, so does our entire penal system). We imprison/execute waaaaaaaaayyyy too many mentally ill or minority individuals (Texas, I’m looking at you). Execution should be a means of absolute last resort, and should be conducted safely, humanely (though I’m partially inclined to think the convicted should be allowed to choose their method of execution)—and, barbaric as it sounds, publicly. As Albert Camus once argued, it completely fails as a deterrent when conducted outside of the public eye.
Comment by Aaron Dietz
2009-07-26 20:20:46
Wow. You know…I’ve said a few nasty things to people when they’ve shocked me with “provoking” statements, but I certainly didn’t resort to violence, or respond with TWO-HUNDRED-SIXTEEN verbal critiques. And if that’s not crazy enough, it’s even crazier to think that a response along that measure would be justified in any way.
Comment by Zara Potts
2009-07-27 22:54:36
I know. Crazy doesn’t even begin to explain it…
Comment by Megan
2009-07-27 15:31:43
I love this sort of non-fiction take on crime stories, Zara. I’m all about it. It’s totally ok to sleep with teachers (I am a teacher). He’s only average looking. A small weenie can ruins nice facial bone structure. Poor, poor girl. And her poor mother.
I agree, the number do not add up. He should have gotten 50 years, minimum.
Have you read the novel “A Fraction of the Whole”? Australian writer. Amazing. Some crime in it as well.
Comment by Zara
2009-07-27 15:40:01
Yes! I have read it. It was great. I agree with you -50 years minimum. Thanks for reading Megan…
Comment by jmb
2009-07-27 17:12:28
Lot of heaviness on TNB today.
If I were God
I’d shut this
experiment down
& bring everyone home early.
Comment by Zara Potts
2009-07-27 22:55:25
The heaviness stops tomorrow. promise.
Comment by Erika Rae
2009-07-29 05:11:32
I saw the most amazing and intense rainbow I’ve ever seen on the day you posted this (the 27th). It was the 5 year anniversary of when my dad died. The clouds in the sky were bizarre – looked like angel wings. I don’t know what it all meant, but I like to think it meant “hope” at some level.
People like this professor make me forget the good in people and life sometimes. What an awful, awful story, written amazingly well.
Comment by Zara
2009-07-29 10:48:52
Erika, I’m so glad you saw the rainbow on your Dad’s anniversary. I just know it was there just for you.
Thank you for reading and leaving me your comments. You are a darling.
Comment by Colleen McGrath
2009-08-03 10:20:44
Really? 15-17 years? That’s it? For 216 knife wounds? That’s crazy. But I guess his lawyer must have though the only way to get him the max was to let him testify. Right? Otherwise, why? Why would you let your client go on the stand and sound that insane? It’s amazing to me what makes it across the boarders and what doesn’t. This didn’t. Should have. But happens everywhere and more often than we’d like to believe I think. Shit.
Comment by sheree
2009-08-08 10:33:52
Seriously great writing. Horrid story. Hope this dirty wombat of a turd lick meets some new and interesting giant cocked man rapers while serving his measly couple dozen years in prison.
Comment by Zara Potts
2009-08-09 00:01:58
Hey Sheree! How nice to see your name!
Great sentiment, one that I can only fully agree with.
Did this happen in Christchurch? From what you’ve said about the place, I’m kind of inclined to think so.
No. A city called Dunedin. About four hours down the road from ChCh.
Here’s the really sick thing – in his own mind, Clayton Weatherston has “won”, and every single word that is written about him simply solidifies his notoriety. Even the mean ones. He will consider himself some kind of brilliant Hannibal Lecter, and trade on his reputation as a killer to market the works he will no doubt write in prison! Of course, we’ll all buy into this, too, by discussing the whole sorry business online.
He won’t be gang-banged in prison and he’ll be nobody’s ‘bitch’. He’ll be with the paedophiles in what’s known as ‘protection’, with his books, magazines, and computer, working away on “Project Weatherston” and building the myth with every day that goes by. He’ll be a model prisoner, and receive all the benefits that model prisoners get – be they Maori gang members or middle-class Pakeha men.
And now I’ve done my bit to help him. Or perhaps not?
Hey Wahine,
Yes, I agree with you. We do buy into it and provide him with the attention he is desperate for. I thought about that before I wrote this and debated whether or not to post it. But then I figured he’d never see it and so it would not fuel his gigantic and warped personality disorder.
I hope not!!
Thanks for reading!
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