Anne Perry and the Murder of the Century

by Peter Graham

  Hilda was also stringing the girls along. In her initial statement to the crown solicitor after the murder, she said it was apparent the two girls were determined not to be separated—“They tried to induce us to allow Pauline to go to South Africa with Juliet.” Later she claimed she and Henry were in no way encouraging. “Juliet asked if it would be possible for Pauline to go with her and we said it would be right out of the question. Both girls were made to realise that Pauline would not accompany Juliet. That is what we understood—we made it plain to them.”

  Clearly they had done nothing of the sort. If they had made it plain that Pauline could not, under any circumstances, go to South Africa, Nora Rieper would not have been put in the position of appearing to be the chief, if not the sole, obstacle to the girls being together. Juliet herself would years later confirm that her father had offered to take Pauline with them.

  Time was running out. Juliet and Henry were to leave Christchurch on July 3 for Wellington, where they would begin the first leg ofthe journey on the Wanganella, bound for Australia. It is unlikely Pauline directly asked her mother if she could leave New Zealand with them: she knew there was no chance she would agree. She also knew that, although Dr Hulme had declared himself willing to pay for her passage, he would take her only with her mother’s consent—and as a practical matter she would need her parents’ consent to get a passport. She must have believed, or hoped, she had a good chance of getting her way with her father—if he were her only surviving parent. By June 19, murdering Pauline’s mother had become “a definite plan”.

  Seven weeks earlier, when Pauline had first mooted the idea, she had not wanted to go to too much trouble: the death should appear natural or an accident. The girls now decided it would be an “accident”. They would persuade Pauline’s mother to go for an outing with them to Victoria Park, a safe distance from the city. They would take the Cashmere Hills bus to the Sign of the Takahe and from there walk up to the park. They would then suggest a walk down a quiet track that Pauline remembered from a visit six months earlier. Pauline would have a sandbag in her shoulder bag. Juliet would go on ahead, drop a pink stone on the track, and point this out to Pauline’s mother. While Mrs Rieper was bending down looking at the stone, Pauline would whack her over the back of the head with the sandbag and she would collapse, dead. They would push her off the track so it would look as if she had fallen, banged her head and died. They would rush up the track and call for help, acting shocked and distressed.

  It was a fairly simple plan. They thought they had an even chance of getting away with it. If it didn’t work it wouldn’t be the end of the world. As minors, they wouldn’t hang. Probably they would get only six or seven years in jail, maybe less time in the loony bin if they could convince people they were insane, but they would still be together. That was the important thing. Pauline would have the great satis­faction of having avenged all her mother’s miserable misdeeds and unpleasantness, but more than that the world would know of her wonderful, beautiful friendship with Juliet Hulme, who had been prepared to commit murder with her, for her, so they could be together. Forever.

  The murder was to take place on Tuesday—June 22. It was vital Pauline did not have a row with her mother in the meantime or she might refuse to go with them. As Bert reported, on Sunday night the Rieper household was a model of harmony and tranquillity. On Monday Pauline, again employing the sweet and loving tactics, energetically helped her mother with housework and chatted to her cheerfully. When the moment seemed right, she suggested they go with Juliet the following afternoon for a picnic in Victoria Park. It was a lovely idea, Nora thought, but she would first have to give Father and Wendy their midday dinner. The three of them could go to the park after that.

  When Juliet phoned, Pauline was able to report that everything was going according to plan. Going over the details again, they decided to use a brick in a stocking instead of a sandbag: a blow with a hard object would make it seem more as though Pauline’s mother had fallen down a bank and banged her head on a rock. Juliet would bring a half-brick from home, and also the pink stone, removed from an old brooch: this artistic touch and attention to detail was typical of Juliet. Pauline, meantime, would find one of her old school stockings. Juliet told her mother that Mrs Rieper had invited her to lunch the next day, and afterwards was going to take Pauline and her for a walk in Victoria Park. Hilda was pleased to give her permission.

  Bert noticed that when he arrived home for lunch his wife was feeling very happy about her daughter: “She had been working so well and had talked such a lot to her. … my daughter seemed much happier about the house.” Pauline had been discussing the Saints with her mother, thinking it would be interesting to have her opinion of them.

  In the afternoon she washed her hair and she and Juliet went to

  a two o’clock film at the Regent in Cathedral Square. One of their former classmates from Girls’ High saw them outside the Avon Theatre in Worcester Street, just around the corner from the Regent, at about four-fifteen and chatted to them. They were waiting for abus or tram to take Juliet home to Ilam. The discussion was brief but friendly. The classmate remembered their manner as “quite normal”, not hyped up or giving any indication they were sharing a tremendous secret.

  Pauline went to bed that night at eight forty-five. As usual she wrote up her diary. “I feel very keyed up as though I were planning a surprise party. Mother has fallen in with everything beautifully and the happy event is to take place tomorrow afternoon. So next time I write in this diary Mother will be dead. How odd yet how pleasing…”

  The next morning, Tuesday, June 22, she wrote her diary while still in bed, carefully heading the page in fancy writing “The Day of the Happy Event”. “I am writing a little of this up on the morning before the death. I felt very excited and ‘The night before Christmas-ish’ last night. I did not have pleasant dreams though. I am about to rise!”

  That morning Juliet Hulme picked up a half-brick from a pile of old bricks beside the garage at Ilam, wrapped it neatly in newspaper and put it in her shoulder bag. To Bill Perry she seemed “very gay” as she left the house. Her mother noticed she was radiantly happy and very calm—“if anything more affectionate than usual”.

  At the Riepers’ house, while Bert was pottering in his vegetable garden and Nora was getting ready to serve dinner, the two girls went to Pauline’s bedroom, removed the half-brick from Juliet’s bag, slipped it into the foot of one of Pauline’s old school-regulation lisle stockings, and tied a knot at the ankle to hold it in place. They then put the weapon into Pauline’s bag.

  At the lunch table Juliet and Pauline were in sparkling form. The day was pleasant; by one o’clock the temperature was 63.6 degrees Fahrenheit. The warm and balmy weather was so unusual for the year’s shortest day that the Christchurch Star-Sun would say it was suggestive of late spring or summer “although trees were bare and lawns were damp”.

  All had gone well. In the tea kiosk, the girls quietly and pensively ate buns and cakes and sipped soft drink as Mrs Rieper chatted to the woman in charge. Just before three o’clock, the three of them set off from the kiosk. As they descended the zigzagging bush track, Pauline took the lead, with Nora in the middle and Juliet walking behind.

  As the foliage grew denser, the path became muddy underfoot. A quarter of a mile down the track they crossed a small rickety wooden bridge. Nora decided she had had enough and would go no further. The girls walked on a short way, perhaps for a last-minute conference, before turning back and rejoining her.

  The time had come. The three of them seemed to be miles from any other sign of human existence. Juliet announced she was going

  on ahead a bit. Pauline walked behind Nora, intently fumbling at the buckle of her shoulder bag. When Juliet got far enough ahead to let Pauline get ready, she dropped the pink stone on the track and called for Pauline and Mrs Rieper to come and see what she had found. As Nora squatted down to look at the stone, Pauline, coming from behind, swung the bri
ck as hard as she could at her mother’s skull. Nora yelled and instinctively covered her head with her hands. She was now fighting for her life.

  Pauline bashed away mercilessly but her mother was slow to go down. She and Juliet forced her to the ground. Juliet grabbed the loaded stocking from Pauline and landed further furious blows on Nora’s head. Blood was spraying everywhere. Her resistance was weakening.

  The stocking broke. Nora was now lying face upwards, making a terrible noise. Juliet kneeled, gripped her around the throat and held her head against the ground while Pauline, grasping the half-brick in her hand, hammered her again and again and again—on the forehead, the temples, wherever she could land a blow. Nora writhed and twisted, then twitched convulsively. They tried to drag her to a place where they could roll her down a bank but she was already a dead weight. It was all they could do to shift her a few feet. She was still gurgling blood as they left and raced back up to the kiosk.

  The killing had been far messier than they had imagined: in films one good whack on the head and a person was dead as a dodo. But they kept their wits about them. Juliet later boasted that her hysteria and Pauline’s appearance of shock were part of the plan, drawing on their great acting skills. Perhaps it was true. When Pauline groaned theatrically in Agnes Ritchie’s presence “Mummy! She’s dead!” it was unlikely she was bemoaning her mother’s loss. It is perfectly believable that after Agnes Ritchie had brought them towels and left them alone to clean themselves up, Juliet said, “Oh dear, isn’t she nice?” and the girls collapsed in a fit of giggles. It was so funny!

  Colin Pearson, the pathologist, made a count. There were forty-five external injuries to the deceased. Some of the twenty-four lacerated wounds to the face and scalp had penetrated to the bone. There were extensive fractures to the front part of the skull. The majority of the head wounds were serious. “It would not take many of them, only a few, to produce unconsciousness,” Pearson reported. That was a morsel of comfort to those who hated to think of Nora Rieper suffering. With the woman’s convulsive spasms and gurgling noises it would have been impossible for the girls to know exactly when death occurred. They had bashed her a good twenty or thirty times.

  CHAPTER 20

  No Ordinary Crime

  The arrest of Juliet Hulme and Pauline Parker for murder caused enormous excitement. The shock waves radiated from Christchurch to the extremities of New Zealand, across the Tasman to Australia and on to England, where people who knew the Hulmes heard the news in disbelief. New Zealand was a law-abiding country and murder of any kind was a major event. In the early 1950s there were only two or three a year, and convicted murderers became household names. Women who killed were rarities. As for teenage girls, matricide—it was unheard of. That they were educated girls, Girls’ High girls, schoolgirls until just a few months before, and one of them a very attractive girl from a well-known family, added to the furore. At Christchurch Girls’ High a stunned Miss Stewart convened an assembly and announced a new rule: no girl at any time was to speak to any newspaper reporter about “a certain matter”. Serious consequences would, she said, befall anyone who as much as gave the newspapers a class photograph showing the two girls.

  The international press quickly realised this was a crime well out of the ordinary. On June 24 The Times and Daily Mail of London and The Sydney Morning Herald ran reports from Reuters, noting

  that the father of one of the accused had been Britain’s director of naval operational research during the war. Next day the Manchester Guardian reported that Juliet Marion Hulme had been charged with murdering the mother of one of her school friends and that her father, Dr Henry Rainsford Hulme, who had recently resigned as rector of Canterbury University College, was a former lecturer at Liverpool University and had held the posts of chief assistant at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, and scientific adviser to the Air Ministry in London.

  On June 25 Henry Hulme telephoned Vivien Dixon in Wellington. “You’ve probably already heard but Juliet and Pauline killed Pauline’s mother with a brick,” he told her. The way he said it Vivien thought it was some kind of strange joke. When he insisted it was true she still didn’t believe him. He didn’t sound shocked or upset, she remembered, just spoke in a matter-of-fact voice. “Look at the paper,” he said. “It’s in the paper.”

  When she spoke to him again a couple of days later he told her Bill Perry had been marvellous, taken charge of everything. Henry was sure Juliet would be convicted, although there was going to be a plea of insanity. He was going back to England with Jonty to get the boy out of it. He was being shunned by everyone in Christchurch. He had just been to the post office and no one spoke to him. They all turned away and ignored him. He asked her if she would visit Juliet in prison. She agreed, although she had never met her.

  On July 1, the day Pauline and Juliet were to be brought before Rex Abernethy S.M. at the Christchurch Magistrate’s Court, some three hundred people—mostly women—queued up outside the court to get a look at them. They were at the wrong entrance. The No. 1 court­room normally used for remand hearings was under renovation and the prisoners were delivered by police patrol car to a smaller courtroom entered from Armagh Street. Rex Abernethy had worked closely with Hilda Hulme on the Marriage Guidance Council: it is likely the occasion was stage-managed to minimise her embarrass­ment. When the girls were driven away a minute or two later, further remanded in custody, the crowd was still hanging around the wrong door.

  Bert Rieper, despite being in as miserable a situation as a man could ever be, did not hesitate to organise legal representation for Pauline.

  He contacted the only lawyer he knew, Eric Cleland of G.W.C. Smithson, Cleland and Wicks: Nora had once been Cleland’s secretary. Cleland passed him on to the firm’s court man, Jimmy Wicks. Wicks, know­ing murder was beyond his expertise, engaged Alec Haslam, an irascible but erudite barrister who practised on his own and often acted as leading counsel.

  Haslam was a square-jawed, fit, energetic man. He had been a Rhodes Scholar at Oriel College, Oxford, where he had rowed in the college eight and distinguished himself as a distance runner while gaining a doctorate of philosophy. A widely respected lawyer, he had lectured part-time at Canterbury’s law faculty and been president of the Canterbury District Law Society. It was rumoured he would

  not decline an appointment to the Supreme Court if it were offered.

  Haslam moved swiftly. On June 24—less than thirty-six hours after the murder—he had his close friend Dr Francis Bennett, also a friend of the Hulmes, interview Pauline and Juliet at the Central Police Station.

  The Hulmes, meanwhile, engaged their friend Terence Arbuthnot Gresson. A partner in the firm Wynn Williams, Gresson, Reid and McClelland, Gresson had a legal pedigree second to none. His great-grandfather, Henry Barnes Gresson, had been Christchurch’s first resident judge. His father, Maurice Gresson, had been a leader of the profession in the city, and his uncle, Sir Kenneth Gresson, was a judge of the Supreme Court.

  Gresson was a product of two private schools, Medbury and Christ’s College. At Christ’s he had excelled at tennis and squash racquets and become a member of the First XV and captain of athletics. He had gone on to Gonville and Caius College at Cambridge, where he was a contemporary of Henry Hulme. While a member of both the Cambridge and British Universities’ athletics teams—a photograph of him standing with Jack Lovelock at the 1934 Oxford-Cambridge athletics meeting was always on display in his office—he had found time to take an honours degree in the Law Tripos. He had been called to the bar at Inner Temple in 1935 and returned to New Zealand the following year.

  Now, at the age of forty, Gresson was, in the words of one of his former clerks, the complete aristocrat, urbane and somewhat arrogant but a delightful companion. He spoke with a BBC accent and on the streets of Christchurch seemed dandified, with hair longer than was usual and a large signet ring on the little finger of his left hand. He often sported the old-fashioned rig of striped trousers, black worsted coat and w
aistcoat favoured by English barristers. A racehorse owner and breeder of dogs, he was on the committee of the Canterbury Jockey Club, the holy of holies.

  Although by this stage of his career Gresson rarely did more than half a dozen trials a year, he was known for his polite but highly effective cross-examinations. If he seemed indolent at times, he was capable of bouts of intense industry, turning out screeds of notes in tiny neat handwriting. He took the brief to defend Juliet Hume for the not insubstantial fee of £500.

  Gresson, not a great one for visiting criminal clients in police stations or urine-scented prison cells, was fortunate to have an out­standingly capable junior partner to do the legwork. Educated at Christ’s College on a scholarship, Brian McClelland, known to his friends as “Clicks”, would become one of the most persuasive jury advocates ever to practise in New Zealand, due in large measure to his rare ability to empathise with ordinary working men and win them to his cause with humour that was often caustic. His slender, almost frail appearance belied hard years in the North Atlantic with the Royal Navy. His rather prominent liquid brown eyes would inspire Juliet to nickname him Bambi.

  When Gresson and McClelland read Juliet’s written confession they realised they couldn’t move a yard on the facts. Cursing the unfathom­able stupidity of the Hulmes in allowing their daughter to make a statement to the police without first seeking legal advice, they resigned themselves to presenting, if it were possible, a defence of insanity under section 43 of the Crimes Act, 1908.

  In New Zealand anyone found not guilty of murder (or any other crime) by reason of insanity was, and still is, detained indefinitely in

  a mental institution. Accused persons facing the death penalty not unnaturally regarded this as an attractive alternative. But this was not the case here. As Juliet Hulme and Pauline Parker were under the age of eighteen, if found guilty of murder they would be sentenced to imprisonment pending Her Majesty’s pleasure—in other words, until the authorities decided to release them. Most people, given a choice, would have preferred this to indefinite detention in a mental insti­tution, outside the parole system and in conditions often greatly worse than those in prison.