Anne Perry and the Murder of the Century

by Peter Graham

  “No.”

  “What did you mean?’”

  “It suggests defective stock.”

  “Defective stock means what?”

  “A generation can be defective.”

  “It means hereditary insanity?”

  “I don’t consider it means that.”

  “What does it mean?’”

  “I can’t elaborate further.”

  “It is meaningless?”

  “It means what I said.”

  “What does it mean other than as a suggestion of hereditary insanity?”

  “I can’t answer any more,” Medlicott said.

  Mr Justice Adams popped in a question of his own. “Do I under­stand from you now, doctor, that the fact there was a child that died and another child a Mongolian imbecile has no bearing whatever on the accused Parker’s sanity or insanity?”

  “I think they did, but not because of any heredity because we know of no heredity,” Medlicott replied. “I may be wrong, but I think that a family in which there is only one normal member—that has some significance.”

  “In what way?” Brown interrupted.

  “Just defective stock. I can’t elaborate any more.”

  Brown was browbeating the witness, having a go at him over something that was essentially unimportant. Now he suddenly did a u-turn. “Would you agree,” he asked Medlicott, “there is no suggestion from the fact of the blue baby and the imbecile that there was any hereditary insanity?”

  Some of the spectators exchanged looks. Hadn’t Medlicott made this clear all along? It was Brown who had been insisting “defective stock” meant hereditary insanity.

  The peculiar twists and turns of Brown’s cross-examination were by now noticeable to the other counsel, and had not escaped the judge’s attention. The crown prosecutor seemed not quite in control. Brown’s junior, Peter Mahon, stiffened with embarrassment. By then he and Brown were barely on speaking terms and he knew Brown was drinking heavily. During the trial “Brown filled up with grog the whole time” he would tell Brian McClelland.

  As Brown’s next line of questioning began, the crowd leaned forward and the reporters sharpened their pencils. This was really what they had come to hear.

  The prosecutor did not mince words. Medlicott had said that the relationship between Juliet and Pauline was homosexual but that there was no proof it was physical.“To ordinary people like myself and the jury,” Brown thundered, “homosexuality is thought to mean physical contact between two persons of the same sex.”

  “That is a completely erroneous view,” Medlicott countered.

  “Your reading of the diaries shows plainly that these young people played about with each other sexually and physically.”

  “I have tried to get evidence of that but can’t get absolute evidence.”

  “It is very strong,” Brown insisted, “so strong that anyone with any intelligence must know that is what they did.”

  Medlicott was not ready to concede “There is also very plain evidence that, as far as Parker is concerned, she was heterosexual as well, that she had sexual intercourse with boys—with a boy, at any rate.”

  “Homosexuals can have sexual intercourse with persons of the opposite sex,” Brown boomed. Pauline had done so “over and over again”. She had had intercourse with a boy.

  “That is reported in the diary,” Medlicott allowed.

  “Over and over again!”

  “That is denied. She said only once.”

  Brown took Medlicott through all the entries in Pauline’s diary that dealt with her attempts to have sexual intercourse with Nicholas. He seemed to have no obvious purpose, unless to create prejudice against the accused girl.

  “She had a good deal of sexual knowledge of the other sex,” he put to Medlicott.

  At that point, the Sun-Herald reported, “Juliet Hulme’s expression was savage. She leaned forward, grinding her teeth and spitting silent words through her rage-distorted lips” while Pauline “bowed her head down to her knees”. Pauline had told Medlicott she had described all these events to Juliet. It seemed Juliet did not know quite as much as Pauline had led him to believe.

  Alan Brown now set about challenging every aspect of Medlicott’s diagnosis in a shambling fusillade of questions. “Have not various people seen visions? … People who are perfectly sane have markedly different ideas about god and the afterlife? There are Buddhists, Moslems, Confucians, all have markedly different ideas? … The native in the African jungle has peculiar ideas to us about religion? … Are all these people mad? All the prophets had visions? These girls have one vision which they say they can conjure up at any time. Why does that make them mad? … She rather liked intercourse? … She tried it over and over again? … She was under the age of consent!”

  He was back on to sex. “Isn’t it a fact that they acted sex matters with their Saints, or as their Saints?”

  “Juliet maintained it was not actual sexual behaviour,” Medlicott replied. “It certainly sounds like it from the diary but she denied it

  to me.”

  “Did you believe her?”

  “I was very doubtful.”

  “You suspected she was not telling the truth?”

  “On that occasion.”

  “Harry Lime?” Brown asked. “Heard of him?”

  “Yes, he is a film star,” answered Medlicott erroneously. “The girls … told me they used their faces for their characters.”

  “Wasn’t it a fact they used other portions of their anatomy?”

  “At times they may have,” Medlicott conceded.

  “Even as far as private parts go?”

  “I don’t know about that.”

  “Didn’t you ask?”

  “No.”

  Brown charged on. Could Dr Medlicott imagine a girl who was fond of fornication?

  He could.

  “She might like to have intercourse with different types of men?”

  She might.

  “Wasn’t that what they were meaning in respect of these Saints?”

  “I understand you thought they were homosexual,” Medlicott retorted. The fact they described somebody as being long, bony or roly poly did not, he contended, have any great bearing on their intense preoccupation with these fictional characters.

  “You think they play like innocent children?” Brown demanded, trembling with rage.

  “There is no suggestion they play like innocent children,” Medlicott replied in the quiet voice he might use to calm a dangerous madman.

  Brown had the bit between his teeth. “Take one of them as an example. He—Mario Lanza—is roly poly?”

  “In that entry,” Medlicott answered.

  “Therefore it is nice to pretend, when they roll around in bed together, that one of them is Mario Lanza?”

  “It could be,” Medlicott conceded.

  Brown read out Pauline’s diary entry for Sunday, June 13. “‘We spent a hectic night going through the Saints … We have now learnt the peace of the thing called Bliss, the joy of the thing called Sin’.

  What did they mean by that?” he demanded.

  “I would think there had been lovemaking between them.”

  “Physical?”

  “I would think there has been,” Medlicott replied “I know they are grossly homosexual. I have not the slightest doubt about that.” But when he had asked Juliet about Pauline’s diary entry for June 11—“We enacted how each Saint would make love in bed, only doing the first of seven as it was 7.30 a.m. by then”—Juliet had replied that the acting of love scenes did not amount to any physical relationship between them.

  “You believed that?” Brown asked.

  “I have already said I was extremely doubtful.”

  At that point Mr Justice Adams cut in. “Was the same question put to Hulme?”

  “That was to Hulme,” Medlicott said.

  “Was the same question put to Parker?”

  “That was Parker. I am sorry.”

 
“Did you put it to Hulme?”

  Medlicott was floundering, losing the imperturbable authority of a good expert witness. “I am confused as the notes are not labelled for different interviews,” he said. “The interview is from Juliet Hulme. I was wrong. It was Juliet Hulme.”

  The judge was not satisfied. “You told us of one girl denying it was physical. Was the same point put to the other girl?”

  “I have no specific reference. I don’t think it was.”

  Brown pressed the point. “You don’t think you asked Pauline Parker if there was a physical relationship between them?”

  “I questioned her closely on her relationship with Juliet. She said, ‘Juliet is not a close friend. She is much closer.’ I suggested, ‘Isn’t that love?’ She said, ‘I don’t know … I care for her more than anyone else in the world.’”

  “Did you not ask her whether that love developed into sexual passion or orgies?” asked Brown leeringly.

  “I did not. … Physicality, I am not concerned—I have no doubt of gross homosexuality.”

  Brown was reluctant to abandon the subject of sex. What, he asked Medlicott, was the meaning of Pauline’s diary entry for Friday, 11 June: “It is appalling. He is dreadful. I have never in my life seen anything in the same category of hideousness… We returned home and talked for some time about It, getting ourselves more and more excited.”

  “It” or Harry Lime represented evil to them, Medlicott said. “The adoring of hideousness is generally considered evil.”

  “I suppose you will agree that… some [men] have rather hideous features?” Brown asked. “You do find that some women fall properly in love with ugly men?”

  “That is so,” Medlicott agreed.

  “Because a person is ugly, that cannot be evil?”

  “Hideousness is different from ugliness.”

  After a few more exchanges, Brown turned to the matter of Juliet’s diary. Had the girl ever written a diary?

  “Not that I know of,” Medlicott replied.

  “Did you inquire?”

  “I did.”

  “From whom?”

  He could not remember specifically. From Mr Gresson, he thought.

  “Did you not ask Juliet?”

  “No. I was quite certain if she had written a diary it would be brought to my notice because it would have been evidence.”

  Brown pressed on. “Is there not a reference—or more than one—in Parker’s diary: ‘We went home and wrote in our diaries’?”

  “There may be.”

  “Would that not make you enquire from Juliet and Pauline if Juliet had written a diary?”

  “I made inquiries … Mrs Hulme gave me, I thought, a very straightforward story about the girl and made no reference to any diary. I was given a whole suitbox of what they could find of Juliet’s writings to take away with me. I concluded it was self-evident there was no diary.”

  Brown was not finished. “Do you agree that, if there had been a diary or diaries, they could have been hidden?”

  “They could have been,” Medlicott replied.

  Brown had made his point: Medlicott’s answers were not convincing. Any discomfort Hilda Hulme may have been feeling during this exchange would have been nothing compared to her relief that she had arranged the destruction of a terribly embarrassing document.

  Finally Brown returned to the main point of Medlicott’s evidence, his diagnosis that the girls were insane in a setting of folie à deux. “Have you ever,” he asked the doctor, “had under your personal experience any instance of two [insane] persons combining to commit a crime?’

  “I have not,’ Medlicott replied, “but it is not out of keeping.”

  “Have you ever read in any text book of two insane persons combining to commit crimes and both committing them?”

  “I have not read a lot of literature on folie à deux.”

  “The answer is no?” Brown persisted.

  “I have not read it.”

  There was, Medlicott pointed out, the famous Leopold and Loeb case, but that was not quite the same as the accused “did not have the clear-cut insanity with gross emotional disturbance one sees here”. Although insane people, he agreed, generally did not contrive, Parker’s and Hulme’s was a different type of insanity.

  Brown had two last questions.

  “They knew it [murder] was wrong in the eyes of the law?”

  “They did.”

  “And they also knew that what they did was wrong in the eyes of the community?”

  “In the eyes of the community, yes.”

  They were the answers he wanted. Reg Medlicott had been in the witness box for nine hours.

  The defence was in tatters. As Brian McClelland put it, the crown prosecutor had given their principal witness a rough passage, made

  a mess of him.

  Medlicott, meanwhile, was convinced Brown was showing psychi­atric symptoms of his own. “Make no mistake,” he told McClelland, “Alan Brown is certifiable. He will be in Ashburn Hall within two years.”

  He was even more outspoken to his fellow psychiatrist David Livingstone. Brown, he told him, was as mad as the two girls.

  CHAPTER 26

  Sleeping with Saints

  Alec Haslam got to his feet to defend Pauline Parker. His opening to the jury was economical. They would not challenge the evidence provided by the prosecution. The only question was whether the accused girls were insane or not. The first and only witness for Pauline Parker’s defence would be Dr Bennett.

  Francis Bennett walked towards the witness box filled with a sense that the eyes of history were on him. Despite having no specialist qualification in psychiatry—he was a general practitioner, best known for his obstetric practice—he was bursting with confidence. Brian McClelland thought him “self-opinionated … not as clever as he thought”. Reg Medlicott, too, saw him as self-important, a frustrated actor who loved the drama of it all and relished his close connection with the Hulmes.

  If less cerebral than Medlicott, Bennett was certainly more pug­nacious. In the war he had risen to lieutenant-colonel in the Medical Corps. He was used to being deferred to. He was determined not to be pushed about by Alan Brown the way Medlicott had allowed himself to be.

  He got straight to the point. The actions of Pauline Parker and Juliet Hulme could, he said, be explained only on the basis of mutual insanity. Like Dr Medlicott he believed the girls were suffering from the major psychosis known as paranoia, from delusions, even though apparently—he stressed the word—capable of clear and logical reasoning. Once such delusions took hold, he continued, they became the paramount obsession in the patient’s life, a relentless compulsion.

  “Forced to choose between the moral values of the community or pursuing the delusion, the patient rejects the moral values. Paranoiacs have to, they must, follow the delusion wherever it leads. Such persons become amoral, anti-social and, in any community, dangerous.”

  The girls’ delusion was that they were especially gifted, mentally brilliant, and immeasurably superior to the general run of mankind. The truth was, while the girls were certainly not dull and one was known to have a high IQ, they were not towering intellectuals. Their writings, he believed, were not of outstanding literary merit.

  He considered the “mental disturbance” of both girls to be similar; it was an extraordinary coincidence that two such girls should meet in the same class at the same school. If they had never met, the full symptoms of paranoia would have developed at a much later date, he believed. “The lone paranoiac makes slow progress in his conflict with society.”

  The two girls had “delusions of grandeur … whipped themselves up to a state of elation … formed a society of their own … dwelt ecstatically in their new society … filled it out with the Saints and their families and their fictional characters.” Thus far, it seemed, Bennett was making a better fist of describing the girls’ delusional state than Medlicott had.

  “They can persist in this delightful new
society,” he continued, “only if they are together. If separated [each has] to revert back to her lone, unhappy conflict with her contemporary fellow beings. Their attachment is a homosexual one and to them it is vital. Only in that do they feel secure. Had it never been threatened, they might have continued their morbid infatuation without any gross trespass against society. But it was threatened. The threat against it was a threat against the delusion of their superiority and, as is the nature of the paranoiac, they acted out to resist the threat.”

  Haslam was pleased with how well his witness was doing. Bennett now drew the jury’s attention to numerous entries in Pauline’s diary that illustrated the girls’ delusions of grandeur, and then, with a flourish, summed up their oddities. The girls “spent all the time they possibly could at Ilam endlessly discussing the Saints and the plots of their books; bathing and bedding together; photographing each other in fancy borrowed dresses and in the nude; talking all night; dressing up; getting up at night, going out on the lawn and acting; ignoring other people; making a little cemetery in the grounds that they later extended into … the Temple of Rafael Pan, where they buried a dead mouse and put up a cross over it, and later put up a number of other crosses to represent the burial of dead ideas which they had once had and had since discarded. They had no friends of their own age; they never went to dances, with one exception; … they never read the newspapers; Pauline records how she hated school; she hated Digby’s College; she said the girls … were fools. She went to the [school] swimming sports and wrote a novel all through the events. During

  the queen’s visit they made no attempt to see the queen or the decorations. They preferred the company of the Saints.”

  The story progressed to its mad climax. The girls had “left this world behind them”, were “mounting higher and higher in their ecstasy of infatuation”. They were convinced there was survival after death. Everyone would go either to Heaven or Paradise. Heaven was for happiness; Paradise was for bliss. The vast majority went to Heaven. As for Hell, Juliet had assured him there was no such thing. The whole idea was too primitive, too inartistic.