by Peter Graham
Later, as a leading light in the Christchurch Operatic Society, he had become one of the best known amateur actors in the city, with a particular talent for comedy. During the Depression he had risen to national fame as the frontman and clown for a series of “community sings” that started in Christchurch as a means of lifting people’s spirits and raising money for the families of men out of work. Brown had a wonderful line in jokes, patter and repartee and led a fast-paced show with more than thirty songs to the hour. His catchphrase was “Let’s all sing like the birdies sing”, whereupon the audience would start raucously tweeting, clucking and quacking. The singalongs ran on radio for more than three years and Brown got fan mail from all over the country. Community sings were started in Auckland and Wellington but no one else did it like Alan Brown.
In court Brown was a different person. Where his predecessor had believed the crown prosecutor’s duty was not to strive for a conviction by aggressive advocacy but to calmly present the evidence so justice could take its course, Brown was driven. He was unquestionably a very capable lawyer, with a memory envied by his opponents, but his style was too forced and intense for some tastes. Being of a theatrical temperament he could not resist grandstanding with a colourful turn of phrase, and was never lost for an apt quotation or literary allusion. And he loved to win. Perhaps he loved to win a little more than was desirable in a crown solicitor.
The influx of journalists from newspapers around the world put pressure on Brown to make a good showing. It was even a little unsettling for the urbane Terence Gresson. And Dr Francis Bennett, preparing to give evidence for the defence, clearly felt edgy. He wrote to his wife Pearl, who was overseas at the time, “I believe there are a number of foreign correspondents coming. The publicity glare will be fierce. The local glare doesn’t matter, it’s the historical one I fear.”
CHAPTER 23
Dirty-minded Girls
The foreign correspondents who flocked to Christchurch were at once struck by the incongruity of a murder of the foulest kind occurring in what the Sydney Sun-Herald called “New Zealand’s quietest, staidest, most Victorian-English city—a city of bicycles, lace and old ivy”. The Supreme Court stood beside the Avon River in the heart of the city. The building’s grey stone, neo-Gothic walls and sombre interior might have been designed to intimidate all who had business there. The cheerless place had not seen such a large and excited audience since the trial of Thomas Hall and Margaret Graham Houston for attempted murder in 1886. On that occasion admission had been restricted to ticket holders only. It was a “society crime” so most of those attending had been from the city’s well-off, whose hansom cabs had battled through the milling masses surrounding the court.
On Monday, August 23, 1954 when Pauline Yvonne Parker and Juliet Marion Hulme stood before judge and jury charged with the murder of Honora Mary Parker it was more of a free-for-all. By eight in the morning the first would-be spectators were trying the doors of the court. By nine there were several dozen standing outside. When the doors opened, the hundred or so public seats at the back of the court were quickly filled, mainly with women, who were, one newspaper reported, fashionably dressed. No standing was allowed downstairs. Next, the gallery was opened and sixty people stampeded into the first three rows.
Juliet had rebuffed her mother’s attempt to have a few words with her in the holding cell upstairs before the trial began. Now, far from being daunted by their surroundings, Juliet and Pauline gave every appearance of enjoying themselves, standing at an upstairs window smiling, waving and posing for the ruck of press photographers below, until court staff taped sheets of newsprint over the windows.
At least a dozen correspondents, most representing overseas newspapers or press agencies, took their assigned places on the press bench, pencils poised, notebooks at the ready. In the front row of a small box reserved for witnesses, Hilda, accompanied by Bill Perry, sat grim-faced. A whisper went around the crowd: the rector’s sex-mad wife was publicly flaunting the lover she had installed in a flat at the back of the family home. Most members of the public who had succeeded in securing seats were savouring her comeuppance. They didn’t like the snooty English upper-class look of her one jot. It was obviously her adultery with Perry that had broken up the home and caused the whole thing. And she called herself a marriage guidance counsellor!
Bert Rieper had not been able to bring himself to attend—he would turn up only when he was needed to give evidence—but Hilda, in her beautifully cut brown tweed suit, would sit in the court for the whole dreadful five days. During lunch adjournments and other breaks she and Perry would retire to the barristers’ robing room with Terence Gresson and Brian McClelland to drink coffee delivered in thermos flasks by Gresson’s clerk.
After being loudly announced, the trial judge, Mr Justice Adams, entered the court and took his seat while the crowd scrambled respectfully to their feet. Francis Boyd Adams was a sixty-six-year-old widower. Before his elevation to the bench four years earlier he had been for nearly thirty years Dunedin’s crown solicitor, a position he had inherited from his father, when his father became a judge of the Supreme Court. Adams lived for the law. His book Adams on Criminal Law, of which he was editor and principal contributor, would be published ten years later and become the bible on criminal law for generations of lawyers. An austere man, he lived alone in the Gainsborough, a private hotel in the centre of the city, but there must have been some stirrings in the undergrowth. An associate—as the judges’ female secretary-typists were called—once complained he had chased her around a room. Young women who might be called on to dance with him at Law Society balls were warned to beware of wandering hands.
Adams had a reputation as a hanging judge. Partiality toward the prosecution was a hard charge to escape for a judge who had been a crown prosecutor for most of his professional life and the son of a crown prosecutor, but Brian McClelland went further. In his opinion Adams was an “awful, mean bastard … a miserable, narrow-minded, teetotal, Scottish Baptist shit”. It was certainly true that he was a teetotaller and for many years an office-bearer of the Hanover Street Baptist Church in Dunedin.
Juliet and Pauline entered the courtroom and sat side by side in the portable dock that was wheeled into place whenever the room was used for criminal trials. Between them sat the police matron, Mrs Felton. Pauline was wearing a brown dress and a small brown hat, and Juliet a green coat and a pale green headscarf. After the charge was read to them both girls quietly murmured, “Not guilty”.
Looking a little flushed, Alan Brown rose to his feet, adjustedhis wig and launched into his opening address. He had the cocky air of a man holding all the aces. The evidence to follow would, he promised, make it clear that the two young accused had conspired together to kill the mother of one of them and horribly carried out their plan.
“It was arranged,” Brown went on, “that the accused Hulme should go with her father as far as South Africa. The accused Parker wanted to go with her … Both girls were determined not to be parted and both girls knew that Mrs Parker would be the one who would most strenuously object to their going away together. They both decided the best way to end Mrs Parker’s objection was to kill her in such a manner that it would appear she had been accidentally killed. … Their plan miscarried, and as a result repeated blows had to be struck at the head of the unfortunate Mrs Parker, causing the terrible injuries she received.
“The behaviour of the two accused may have been shockingly unusual and their deed a most dreadful one, but both the accused knew what they were doing when they battered Mrs Parker to death, that what they were doing was wrong, and they were by all medical and legal standards perfectly sane.”
There were one or two more things about which he would have to remind the jury. The case had received much publicity but it was their duty to forget all they had read or heard about it and decide the case on the evidence that they would hear in court and nothing else. And there was no room for personal feelings. “You may p
ity the dead woman and be incensed against the young persons in the dock, or you may feel pity for the two accused in the dreadful situation they find themselves in today. These things have nothing to do with this trial at all. Sentiment and emotionalism have no part in British justice. Your duty, as you have sworn to perform it, is to deal with the case on the facts and not allow your judgement to be swayed by feeling either for the dead woman or for the two accused in the dock.”
Brown was right that prejudice against an accused person should have no part in a criminal trial, but the defence lawyers were certainly hoping for sympathy. If the jurors could be persuaded that Juliet and Pauline were suffering from a serious mental illness they might deal with them generously, without pedantic regard for the exact letter of section 43(2) of the Crimes Act. Wasn’t the beauty of the jury system the fact that justice could be tempered with mercy, that the common sense and humanity of the ordinary man in the street could prevail, if need be, over the strict letter of the law?
Having paid lip service to the doctrine that sentiment and emotionalism should be put aside, Alan Brown felt free to attack the accused with all the vehemence at his command. “The contention of the prosecution is that this plainly was a coldly, callously planned and premeditated murder committed by two highly intelligent but precocious and dirty-minded little girls.” The phrase “dirty-minded little girls” tripped off his tongue; he would use it again before the trial was over.
At the end of his opening address, Brown sought to introduce in evidence the gruesome photographs of the battered face of Honora Parker that had been taken at the morgue. Terence Gresson objected strenuously. The photos proved nothing, he said, and could only shock and disgust the jury. Mr Justice Adams agreed. Brown had to be content with less graphic images that showed her body lying on the track, with the stocking and half-brick clearly visible.
A succession of witnesses now gave their accounts of the events
of the afternoon of June 22. Agnes Ritchie described the two girls returning, blood-splattered, to the tea kiosk. Kenneth Ritchie said Juliet Hulme was “excited … but not hysterical”. The Ritchies were followed by Eric McIlroy, the ambulance driver Harold Keys, Dr Walker, Sergeant Hope and Constables Donald Molyneaux and Griffiths, but it was Bert Rieper who made the greatest impact on the hushed gallery. It was almost impossible to imagine the heartache this mild harmless little man had endured. His description of his middle daughter treating him “with disdain” was tragic. So was his account of the last time he saw his wife alive. “We all had the meal together, my wife, the two accused and other members of the family. The lunch hour was very bright indeed. The two accused seemed very happy …laughing and joking.”
Nothing, though, was more chilling than to hear the pathologist, Dr Colin Pearson, describe Honora Parker’s horrific injuries—the extensive fractures in the front of the skull, the multiple small contusions of the brain itself. The injury to the skull suggested a crushing type of injury, with force applied while the head was immobile against the ground. The bruising in the neighbourhood of the thyroid bone suggested that at one stage the deceased had been held forcibly by the throat. There was also a lacerated wound to the little finger of one hand, which could have been caused by the deceased attempting to defend herself. It was all too easy to visualise Pauline’s mother’s last terrible struggle.
Brown next called Hilda Hulme to the stand. Her evidence, while of immense interest to the jury, the press bench and the public, would be of no real use to the prosecution case. He went easy, not even asking her what had happened to Juliet’s diary, although it was obvious she had kept one.
In response to his questions, Hilda sketched a faint outline of Juliet’s unhappy childhood: the bomb shock she had suffered as atwo year old in London during the war; her excitable nature, “very demanding … even in early childhood”; how, when she was six, she had been separated from her after Jonathan’s birth; how she had subsequently suffered a severe breakdown in health with pneumonia and bronchitis, and how this had led to her being sent away to live with strangers in the Bahamas; how, after a year, these people had taken her to New Zealand, where she had finally been reunited with the rest of the family; how she had then been sent to board at Queenswood, a Rudolf Steiner school in Hastings, and later, after contracting tuberculosis, been left in the Cashmere Sanatorium while she and Henry went to Britain and the United States.
Her daughter was incapable of being disciplined easily, tended to want to be the centre of attention, and was always critical of other people, Hilda Hulme told the court. At one time she and Dr Hulme had wondered whether it might be wise to have her psychoanalysed, but medical friends who knew Juliet advised that psychoanalysis was unwise at such an early age. Hilda preferred not to name these friends but one was a doctor of psychology. She was probably referring to David Livingstone, the psychiatrist who had visited Juliet in the sanatorium.
As they would throughout most of the trial, Juliet and Pauline looked nonchalant, calm and apparently unconcerned. One of the newspapermen described their demeanour as “contemptuous amusement”. One of the few times Juliet reacted visibly was when her mother told the court she had never accepted her young brother, never played with him much, and “definitely resented him”. She half stood up in the dock as if about to say something but quickly sat down again.
Alec Haslam now took over, inviting Hilda to explain the episode, described in Pauline’s diary, which had taken place at three in the morning in Mr Perry’s bedroom. Mr Perry, Hilda said, had been seriously ill for about a fortnight, suffering severe pain. Hearing a disturbance in the house, she got up, put on her dressing gown, went through the door that led to his flat, and called out to him. As he was in obvious pain she went down to the kitchen, made a pot of tea and took it upstairs to his room. She gave him a cup of tea and had one herself. She sat on a chair at the side of his bed. He, too, was wearing a dressing gown. The light was on.
While they were having tea they heard the door to the flat open quietly and close again. Thinking it might be one of the children, she called out, “Does somebody want me?” When her daughter appeared in the open doorway she said, “Do you want me, darling?” Juliet replied, “Oh, so you are here.” She asked her to come in and have a cup of tea. Mr Perry, who was by then feeling a little better, went down to the kitchen to get a cup and saucer for Juliet.
Juliet, Hilda continued, seemed to be amused at a secret joke of her own. When Hilda asked her why she was laughing, she said something like, “Oh, the balloon has gone up. I was hoping to catch you out.”
“I had no idea to what she was referring,” Hilda said. She could not remember every detail of the conversation but recalled Juliet saying to Mr Perry, “Pauline and I had hoped to get £100.” She had no idea of the remark’s significance until recently reading Pauline’s diary.
Haslam then fed her a leading question: as he was, strictly speaking, cross-examining it was allowable. “You did your best,” he suggested, “just to stop her from being silly about a very routine incident?”
“Yes,” she replied. The account of the incident in Pauline’s diary was “totally inaccurate … entirely untrue”.
It is doubtful anyone believed her. The notion she would enter Perry’s bedroom only in a medical emergency was widely seen as an outrageous lie. The future of her marriage was more than just, as she described it, “uncertain”: years later the family gardener would disclose that when he was called to investigate a blocked drain outside Perry’s flat he found it choked with condoms.
Bill Perry attempted to support Hilda’s story. What Mrs Hulme had said about the night she came to his room and made him tea was quite correct, he told the court. Juliet did discuss the fact she was going to blackmail him but nothing improper whatever had taken place. There had never been any deception of Henry Hulme, he added. Before the bedroom incident he had told Hulme that he and Mrs Hulme found themselves falling in love.
All that was left was for Senior D
etective McDonald Brown and Detective Sergeant Tate to describe interviewing the two accused and to produce the girls’ signed statements. By mid afternoon on August 24, the prosecution case was concluded and Terence Gresson stood to open his defence of Juliet Hulme.
CHAPTER 24
A Rare Form of Insanity
Terence Gresson had little leeway. That the accused girls killed Mrs Rieper was not in dispute, he told the jury. The sole question was whether they were of sound mind. After reading out section 43 of the Crimes Act, he informed them that whether the accused were sane or insane was a medical question. As Dr Medlicott and Dr Bennett would explain, the girls were suffering from paranoia associated with folie à deux, or “communicated insanity”. This made them not legally responsible for their crime. They knew what they were doing when they killed Mrs Rieper, but because of their paranoiac constitutions they were unable to form any rational view of the rightness of what they were doing. They were not ordinary “dirty-minded little girls”; they were mentally sick. Their preoccupation with sexual matters was a symptom of their mental disease. Their homosexual relationship was fatal to both of them, accelerating their inevitable downfall.
Reg Medlicott stepped into the witness box. Although called by the defence as an expert witness, he was sworn to tell “the whole truth and nothing but the truth”. As a psychiatrist he may have wondered whether the whole truth was ever within human understanding, but his professional obligation and overriding duty to the court was to give his honest opinion of the case to the best of his knowledge and ability.