by Peter Graham
Henry and Hilda Hulme were, however, anxious that the lawyers strive for a verdict of insanity. For Hilda it was a matter of face. Ifit could be established that her daughter had helped kill Nora Rieper only because she was suffering from a mental illness, that would be preferable to people thinking she and Henry had raised an evil brat. Gresson advised Hilda and Henry to retain Reginald Medlicott, a brilliant psychiatrist who was medical superintendent of Ashburn Hall, a private institution in Dunedin. After winning a Rockefeller Fellowship in 1949, Medlicott had pursued advanced studies at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland and got to know many of the leaders of American psychiatry. He would come to be recognised as the father of modern psychiatry in New Zealand. Tall and stylish, with a slight stammer and a penchant for bow ties, he loved classical music, sports cars and fine brandy. If there was a weakness in his curriculum vitae, it was his limited experience appearing as an expert witness in court.
Medlicott’s wife Nan, according to everyone who knew her, was a darling, as adorable as she was beautiful. She had been on stage with the J.C. Williamson theatre company, and at the superintendent’s house at Ashburn Hall she and Medlicott presided over a salon that attracted Dunedin’s leading artists, intellectuals and visiting theatrical personalities. When Rudi Gopas and his first wife Natasha lived in the city they had been among the regulars.
Accompanied by Nan, Medlicott spent the weekend of June 27 to 28 in Christchurch, interviewing Juliet and Pauline separately on both Saturday and Sunday. He and Nan also visited the Hulmes at Ilam. Medlicott found Henry Hulme two-dimensional and felt he didn’t grasp anything. Nan, for her part, was appalled by his stiff-upper-lip demeanour. Playing the perfect host, Hulme invited her to sit by the fire as if nothing had happened. His manners even extended to Bill Perry: Medlicott was surprised when he excused himself and went to get a glass of bicarbonate of soda for his wife’s lover.
Henry Hulme left for Wellington on July 3, accompanied by his son, Jonty. Although the murder had been the talk of Christchurch for a week, ten-year-old Jonty had not the faintest idea his sister had been arrested. It had been possible to keep him in this state of ignorance only because he had been in isolation in the sickbay at Medbury School, suffering from chickenpox. He had spent the long days teaching his only fellow sufferer, a boy named Forbes Mackenzie, to play chess.
In Wellington Henry Hulme was looked after by Clarence Beeby, the country’s director of education. While Beeby’s nineteen-year-old son Christopher took Jonty to the zoo and for a ride up the city’s cable car, Hulme conferred with Sam Barnett, the secretary for justice. He was, he told Barnett, quite sure the girls would be convicted. Barnett promised to help all he could and Hulme said he would return to New Zealand immediately if it might assist. He thought he had a friend and ally in Barnett. He could not have been more wrong.
On the Wanganella bound for Australia, Henry and Jonty occupied themselves playing deck games. When they reached Sydney, Henry bought the latest available works on nuclear physics to get himself up to speed: he was already thinking about job prospects in England. At their next stop, Adelaide, where the pair were to board the P&O liner Himalaya, the Wanganella was besieged by reporters and Hulme, unable to delay doing so any longer, finally told Jonty about Juliet.
The Australian journalists demanded to know how any decent father could leave New Zealand while his daughter was facing a murder charge. “The world must just consider me an unnatural father,” Hulme was reported as saying. A photograph of him, with a sickly grin on his face, was widely published.
Brian McClelland condemned Hulme as “a weak, gutless sod” for leaving New Zealand, and refused even to give him credit for his war work. “All he did was make sure the wine was served at the right temperature,” he would remark. But the decision was not Henry’s alone: Hilda wanted him out of the way. The most unwished-for publicity would soon be filling the newspapers. Henry needed to find a job in England as soon as possible and Jonty needed to be settled in a decent little prep school.
*
Even before Henry Hulme’s departure, all sorts of rumours that could only have seeped out of Central Police Station were circulating in Christchurch and further afield. The two girls were lesbians. They had written bloodthirsty novels and made plans to become prostitutes. They had acted out perverted sexual fantasies under the rector’s roof in the big house at Ilam. The conspicuous house, with its park-like gardens, became the object of intense curiosity.
Not only was Pauline—“the one from the fish shop” as she was often unkindly described—a lesbian, it was said, but before she was sixteen she was being done over by at least one of her parents’ boarders and students from Ceylon, black as your hat. Furthermore, her parents were not married. They had been living in sin for over twenty years! And plenty were willing to believe what was being said about Henry and Hilda Hulme and Bill Perry. They lived together in a ménage à trois, three of them sharing a bed. Even the vicar’s wife Mrs Norris believed that. It would be hard to imagine a gamier hotpot of fact and fiction.
CHAPTER 21
The Only Possible Defence
In all Dr Reg Medlicott’s considerable experience he had never come across a pair like Juliet Hulme and Pauline Rieper. Neither showed the slightest remorse for the death of Honorah Rieper. On the contrary, their mood was jubilant: they had set about the murder with joyous abandon and now exalted in what they saw as their brilliant success.
Their arrogance and conceit were “quite out of normal proportions”. They did not accept Medlicott as their intellectual equal and their contempt was never far from the surface. At times they were openly hostile and abusive, and even if the abuse was puerile their hostility could be venomous. When he raised with Pauline the likelihood that she would be separated from Juliet, whether in prison or a mental institution, she glared at him menacingly and seemed about to throw an inkwell at him. When the object was taken away by a guard, she jeered unpleasantly, “You’re not worth it!”
Another time she called him “an irritating fool… displeasing to look at”. He had, she said, “an irritating way of speaking”. She hopeda bomb would land on New Zealand with him right under it. Once, after he completed a physical examination, she shouted, “I hope you break your flaming neck!” He had to struggle to check himself from reacting.
Medlicott found Juliet a little more sophisticated and less vituperative, but just as challenging to his professional detachment. Once she admonished him for failing to speak clearly. On another occasion, when he refused to be drawn into an argument about religion, she sneered schoolmarmishly, “You do think, don’t you?”
Dr Francis Bennett, too, was shocked that neither girl showed any contrition for Nora Rieper’s death. “There’s nothing in death,” Juliet said loftily. “After all, she wasn’t a very happy woman. The day we killed her I think she knew beforehand what was going to happen and didn’t seem to bear any grudge.” Asked if she had any regrets she replied, “None whatever. … Of course we did not want my familyto get involved in this but we have both been terribly happy since it happened, so it has all been a blessing in disguise.”
Pauline, likewise, was sorry for the trouble she had brought the Hulme household but had no regrets about her mother. She would willingly kill her again if she were a threat to her relationship with Juliet. Juliet went even further: not only was Mrs Rieper’s murder justified, but so would be the murder of anybody else who threatened their friendship.
Bennett was inclined to accept Juliet’s assertion that her hysteria and Pauline’s appearance of shock at the tearooms and later at Ilam had been an act. If two young girls had really suffered a sudden horrifying emotional experience there would usually be some blunting of memory, even merciful amnesia, but there was none of this. When he told Juliet he had worked out how they probably did the murder, she interposed quite brightly, “Well, would you like me to tell you how we did it?” Out came every detail. She remembered everything and was more than happy t
o tell him.
Reg Medlicott, for his part, was not sure whether the girls had displayed a normal emotional response after the murder, but he certainly doubted that normal girls would have asked for and eaten a meal so soon after such a brutal and bloody incident.
After interviewing Juliet and Pauline, Medlicott questioned the Hulmes and Bert Rieper and conferred with Francis Bennett. He took Pauline’s 1953 diary and a copy of The Donkey’s Serenade back to Dunedin to read, as well as a large quantity of Juliet’s writing, including her poetry, some of the Borovnia-Volumnia correspondence, and part of her second book.
The following weekend he returned to Christchurch, where he studied the transcript of Pauline Parker’s 1954 diary prepared by the police, and talked again to Hilda Hulme and Bert Rieper, and for the first time to Bill Perry, Pauline’s sister Wendy, her grandmother Amy Parker, and a teacher at Christchurch Girls’ High. Again he twice interviewed Juliet and Pauline separately. After the second prison visit Medlicott called on his friend David Livingstone, a Christchurch psychiatrist. Ashen-faced, he asked for a large whisky. He had, he told Livingstone, never encountered such pure evil as he had in those two girls.
Medlicott was now ready with a diagnosis that might support a defence of insanity. It was launched at a meeting in Terence and Eleanor Gresson’s Fendalton house, down a long drive opposite the fashionable St Barnabas Anglican Church. Terence Gresson, Brian McClelland, Alec Haslam and Jimmy Wicks sat around the Georgian dining table with Medlicott and Bennett.
It was decided at the outset that the only possible chance of a successful defence would be for the lawyers and psychiatric experts acting for Juliet to collaborate with Pauline’s team. As Pauline had forecast in her diary on April 25, “We sink or swim together.” It was on this understanding that Bennett and Medlicott had each interviewed both girls and swapped notes freely.
Because of the written confessions the girls had made, insanity was the only possible defence. To put the psychiatric diagnosis into context, Gresson summarised section 43(2) of the Crimes Act. No person would be convicted of an offence, he reminded them, by reason of an act done when labouring under natural imbecility—which did not apply here—or a disease of the mind to such extent that the person was incapable of understanding the nature and quality of the act or knowing the act was wrong. Under section 43(1) every person tried for a crime was presumed to be sane, so the onus of proving insanity rested with the accused. Proof was judged according to the civil standard: not “beyond reasonable doubt” but “more probable than not”.
The gate was a narrow one. The lawyers could not possibly call Juliet or Pauline as witnesses. There was no legal obstacle to either girl giving evidence, but their rudeness, their arrogance and conceit, their abusiveness—which Medlicott and Bennett had recently experienced—would alienate the jury. The fact they crowed about having killed Mrs Rieper would appall anyone who had to listen to them.
It was a difficult problem. Juliet loved the limelight and was so convinced of her own brilliance she believed she could not fail to be a wonderful witness. Brian McClelland couldn’t tell her she would be dreadful. He would have to persuade her gently that it was far better to let her mother and Bill Perry do the talking on her behalf.
CHAPTER 22
A Crime in a Million
On July 16 Juliet Hulme and Pauline Parker were committed for trial by jury in the Supreme Court of New Zealand. It had been conclusively established that Herbert and Honorah Rieper had never legally married, so from now on both mother and daughter would suffer the indignity of being officially known by Nora’s unmarried name.
Evidence taken from Agnes and Kenneth Ritchie, Harold Keys, Dr Donald Walker, Sergeant Robert Hope, Constable Audrey Griffiths, Herbert Rieper, Hilda Hulme and Walter Andrew Bowman Perry had been presented in deposition form. Statements taken from the girls had been presented by Senior Detective Brown and Detective Sergeant Tate.
Juliet had painted a dramatic picture. “On the way back I was walking in front and was expecting Mrs Rieper to be attacked. I heard noises behind me. It was loud conversation in anger. I saw Mrs Rieper in a sort of squatting position. They were quarrelling. I went back. I saw Pauline hit Mrs Rieper with the brick in the stocking. I took the stocking and hit her too. I was terrified. I thought that one of them had to die. I wanted to help Pauline. It was terrible. Mrs Rieper moved convulsively. We both held her. She was still when we left her. The brick had come out of the stocking with the force of the blows…”
At last the press had some facts to get their teeth into. The committal hearing was fully reported in The Times, The Manchester Guardian and The Sydney Morning Herald. Even Time ran a short piece, although the writer had a shaky grasp of the mise en scène: “One day, three weeks ago, Pauline and Juliet, like many other fashionable New Zealanders, sat taking tea with Pauline’s mother at a restaurant in lofty Victoria Park…”
The Manchester Guardian reported that gasps had arisen in the crowded court when Senior Detective Macdonald Brown read out a few extracts from a diary found in Pauline’s bedroom. “Why could mother not die?” Pauline had written. “Dozens of people are dying all the time, thousands … Anger against mother boiled up inside me as it is she who is one of the main obstacles in my path … I want itto appear either a natural or accidental death … The pleasure of anticipation is great.”
The London Daily Mail reported that during the seven and a half hours the girls were in court they “giggled, whispered, yawned and scribbled notes”. The Sydney Morning Herald noticed that they smiled and whispered together unconcernedly, and twice had to be rebuked by a police matron. The matron told a reporter from Sydney’s Sun-Herald that they found it “all very boring”.
Christchurch Prison was in the countryside at Paparua, about ten miles from Christchurch, and close to Templeton Farm where Rosemary Rieper lived. While Pauline and Juliet awaited their trial they lived in the women’s section, a modern bungalow-style facility housing seven or eight prisoners. Kept apart from the other prisoners, they were reported by the Sun-Herald to spend much of their time on the verandah. Free to write, they wrote voluminously, and were allowed to listen to classical music for an hour each morning and afternoon. “They are very happy together and seem completely unconcerned at the seriousness of their position,” the newspaper told its readers.
Such titbits of information whetted the public appetite, not only in New Zealand but around the world. The noses of seasoned news editors told them this was a crime in a million. Many saw a similarity to the famous 1924 Chicago case in which two wealthy college students, Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, believing themselves superior beings, had decided to commit the perfect murder. Leopold had been nineteen and Loeb eighteen.
To many the evil act of Parker and Hulme was a prime example of the moral rot afflicting adolescents. Even a year before rock ’n’ roll was unleashed on the world and teddy boys appeared in zoot suits and rebellious youths in leather jackets and jeans, the older generation was despairing of youth. On April 21, 1954—a week before Pauline fixed seriously upon “removing Mother”—in New York City a subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee investigating juvenile delinquency had launched an inquiry into the comic book industry. Horror comics aimed at young readers were believed to be an important contributor to juvenile delinquency. The subcommittee’s star witness, Fredric Wertham, was a psychiatrist with expertise in criminal behaviour, and author of an alarming book called Seduction of the Innocent. Wertham believed “normal” children were particularly at risk from horror comics. “Morbid” children, he said, were less affected, being “wrapped up in their own fantasies”. The description fitted Pauline Parker and Juliet Hulme perfectly.
New Zealand was not immune from the general moral panic. Hilda Ross, the straight-shooting government minister in charge of the welfare of women and children, blamed youthful immorality
on “lustful images flowing from trashy magazines and unclean reading matter”, and in
July 1954, as the trial of Pauline Parker and Juliet Hulme was about to begin, the government convened a special committee to investigate. It reported that both comics and working mothers were to blame. The government quickly passed legislation banning the sale of contraceptives to anyone under sixteen.
To sober citizens, the fetid secret lives of Pauline Parker and Juliet Hulme were clear evidence of a sickness infecting youth. During the trial, parents throughout New Zealand would do their best to prevent their children reading about it in the papers. Who knew what effect reading such sordid muck might have on immature minds?
In August 1954, while Terence Gresson and Alec Haslam were laying plans for a defence of insanity, the prosecution was being driven forward at full speed by the crown solicitor, Alan Brown. Brown had been only recently appointed to his position on the death of Sir Arthur Donnelly, who had held it since 1921. For more than twenty years as his deputy, Brown had done a large part of the prosecution work while Donnelly, an able, affable and immensely popular man, was otherwise engaged with horse-racing and business interests. The prosecution of Pauline Parker and Juliet Hulme for murder, a case that had captured the attention of most of the English-speaking world, was the perfect opportunity for Brown to make his mark now the coveted office was finally his.
Aged forty-three, Brown was a stocky man who dressed in the style of a Chicago gangster. From the 1920s, while studying part-time at Canterbury College and working in the offices of Raymond, Stringer, Hamilton and Donnelly, he had distinguished himself as the director, song writer and star of such graduation revues as You’re Hit, Crash, Gosh and Jubilations. According to the college’s official history, “Brown produced in the Ziegfield tradition, a cast of forty girls was not uncommon, and the songs were sung and whistled about the college for the rest of the year.”