Room was red with blood - mother

Sophie Elliott. Photo / Supplied

Sophie Elliott's mother has described the horror of seeing her daughter being stabbed to death and being helpless to stop it.

Lesley Elliott was composed as she told the High Court at Christchurch how she used a meat skewer to force her way into her daughter's locked bedroom after hearing her screams, and found her former boyfriend Clayton Weatherston straddling and repeatedly stabbing her with a knife.

"Sophie was dead. Clayton was still stabbing her. She was dead white. Her eyes were staring," Mrs Elliott said.

"The whole room seemed to be red [with blood]."

The force of the stabbing made her think "he was going right through her".

Speaking to a 111 operator as she saw her daughter being attacked, Mrs Elliott said she "screamed and screamed" into her cellphone, saying: "He's killed her, he's killed her."

Mrs Elliott said Weatherston was only about half a metre away and never said a word. He closed the door in her face when he saw her.

"I don't know why I stepped out of the room ... I wished I hadn't, but I did."

Miss Elliott died as the result of 216 stabbing and cutting wounds and seven blunt force injuries.

Weatherston, her former boyfriend and university tutor, says Miss Elliott attacked him first with a pair of scissors and he lost control. A broken knife and a pair of scissors were found in Miss Elliott's bedroom after the attack.

Mrs Elliott said she was on guard when Weatherston arrived at her family's home on January 9 last year because her daughter had told her of an assault at his hands 13 days earlier.

"For all intents and purposes, as far as I knew, Sophie wasn't going to see him again and the relationship was very definitely over."

Weatherston said he had something for Miss Elliott, she said.

He came into the house, and Miss Elliott told him if he wanted to talk they would have to go up to her bedroom because she was busy packing for a move to Wellington the next day to start a new job at the Treasury.

Soon after, her daughter came downstairs and Mrs Elliott asked her what was going on. She said she did not know and "he's just sitting there".

Miss Elliott went back upstairs to her room and "the next second she was screaming".

Mrs Elliott said she could hear her daughter saying "stop it Clayton" or "don't Clayton". She rejected the suggestion by Weatherston's lawyer, Judith Ablett-Kerr, QC, that her daughter was saying "f*** you Clayton".

Mrs Elliott said she tore upstairs and belted and kicked the door to try to get in. Her daughter eventually stopped screaming and then Mrs Elliott heard a "thumping".

"In my mind I thought Clayton was raping her."

THE CASE
* Clayton Robert Weatherston, 33, is on trial for the murder of Sophie Elliott, 22, in Dunedin on January 9 last year.
* Weatherston accepts he is guilty of manslaughter but denies the charge of murder. His "partial defence" is that he was provoked into the act of killing.
* The trial enters its third day today. The prosecution is to call 31 witnesses in the High Court at Christchurch. The trial is expected to last about three weeks.