Anne Perry and the Murder of the Century

by Peter Graham

  He had put it to her that, on the basis of her own beliefs, she would probably meet Pauline’s mother in Heaven or Paradise. “I suppose so,” she had conceded.

  “With blood on her face?”

  “Well, she wouldn’t arrive in that state. In any case she will be in Heaven and we’ll be in Paradise. Even if we did meet her, we would not worry. There’s nothing in death. After all, she wasn’t a very happy woman.”

  Did Juliet know any people other than themselves who would go to Paradise?

  “There probably are some, but we have not met any yet.”

  “Who are the best people?”

  “The best people are those who fight against all obstacles in pursuit of happiness.”

  “Even to murder?”

  “Oh yes, if necessary.”

  Juliet had insisted the bible was bunkum. They were going to write a new one. She was going to write it on parchment vellum and Pauline would illustrate it. Pauline boasted she had broken all ten of the Ten Commandments and Juliet nine.

  Juliet had remembered and been prepared to cheerfully recite every detail of their attack on Mrs Rieper. In Bennett’s view this was further proof of insanity. And having decided to murder Pauline’s mother, neither girl had showed the emotional turmoil—fears, doubts, waverings, indecision, sleeplessness—to be expected of the sane. Pauline pretending to show affection towards her mother, making a play of industriously helping with housework to inveigle her to accompany them on the fatal outing, the “bestial and treacherous and filthy” murder itself—these, he insisted, were “a thousand miles away from sanity”.

  “If you want it better than I can express it, read Macbeth,” he told the court.

  At Bennett’s last interview with Pauline, on August 14, she had just returned from Mt Eden prison, where she had been sent at his request as an experiment to see what effect, if any, a period of separation from Juliet would have on her. She had, he said, spoken freely and intelligently, admitting that some of their previous ideas about the Saints or going to America now looked a little foolish. His conversation with her had been “bright, easy, cooperative” until he got on to the murder. Pauline was adamant the murder was justified, as was anything else that would prevent her being separated from Juliet.

  Towards the end of the interview she had suddenly grown impatient and become reluctant to answer any more questions. She had apparently had been told by a prison officer that as soon as he went she could rejoin Juliet. When he told her he had been informed she would have to wait until evening to see Juliet, she had become highly agitated. “She jumped up off her seat, began to stammer expostulations and… was obviously profoundly distressed. … Her reaction revealed most convincingly the profound impulsive force of delusion.”

  In summary, he believed both the accused were folie à deux homosexual paranoiacs of the elated type, and definitely certifiable under the Mental Defectives Act. He was familiar with section 43 of the Crimes Act. In his opinion, when both girls attacked Mrs Rieper they knew they were killing a woman and who she was, but did not appreciate the moral quality of the act. “They did not think it was wrong. They knew it was against the law of the country but they had another loyalty which was much more persuasive to them. It was the loyalty to a delusion. … They thought by killing her they would achieve two things. First, they would transfer an unhappy woman to heaven, and second, they would preserve the integrity of their associ­ation, which was so vital to their central, paranoiac delusions of grandeur.”

  Bennett’s evidence-in-chief had gone well, but standing at the prose­cutor’s bench, champing at the bit, was Alan Brown. The prosecutor got straight to the heart of the matter. Did the witness, he asked, agree that the girls knew when they killed Mrs Parker they were committing a criminal act?

  “They knew it was contrary to the law,” Dr Bennett answered.

  “If they knew it was against the law, they would know it was wrong in the eyes of society at large?”

  “They probably did,” Bennett allowed, although he very much doubted they gave any consideration to society at large.

  Brown next got Bennett to agree that when he examined Pauline on December 14, 1953, although he thought she was “unusual” he had not considered her insane. Bennett further conceded that Mrs Parker’s standing in the path of the girls’ desire was a very real fact, not a delusion, but insisted her killing was “an effect that grew out of the delusion, as most paranoiac acts are”.

  “Would it be correct to say the only true delusion was the wrong belief as to their own qualities and importance?” Mr Justice Adams inquired.

  “That is exactly it,” the doctor said.

  Brown turned to the Saints. Did Dr Bennett agree the Saints were film actors the girls liked to think slept with them, film actors whom they chose, one by one, to sleep with because of their physical qualities?

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “That is very plain, I suggest, from the diary.”

  “No, I don’t think it is.”

  “Do you think any man of average common sense would come to that conclusion?” Brown insolently inquired.

  “There is more information about that than in the diaries,” Bennett insisted. “There is my interrogation of them.”

  “But you know they are liars,” Brown insisted.

  “Sometimes, but not altogether.”

  “They will lie whenever it suits them?”

  “Probably.”

  “Putting it baldly, they are liars?”

  “Yes.”

  “Passages in their diary which refer to liking a ‘large amount of man’ and to visible characteristics of Him, Her and It, et cetera—that is suggestive of the film actors being persons they like to sleep with?”

  “It is suggestive, yes. It is not proof.”

  “Strongly suggestive?”

  “Yes, strongly suggestive.”

  Brown now homed in on the girls’ sexuality. “Their attachment is a homosexual one?”

  Bennett agreed.

  “Physically?”

  The doctor was inclined to think not. First, if Pauline was getting satisfaction out of heterosexual practices, as Brown was postulating, it was unlikely she would engage in homosexual acts at the same time.

  Secondly, Bennett continued, the girls, “in a way that leads me to believe they are probably telling the truth”, denied there was any physical homosexual relationship between them. He had questioned Juliet Hulme “with some delicacy” and “she seemed to have no idea what I was talking about”. When he asked her directly about physical homosexual practices, she had looked very surprised. Her actual words had been, “But how could we? We are both women.” Bennett found this “quite convincing”.

  Like Medlicott, Bennett was keen to stress that whether Pauline and Juliet’s homosexual relationship was physical or not made no difference to his diagnosis.

  Mr Justice Adams seemed unpersuaded. “Must there not be some sexual element, whether physical or not?” he insisted.

  “Not necessarily,” Bennett said. “The word comes from the Greek ‘homus’, meaning ‘same’. Homosexual means same sex, without there being a physical aspect of sex.”

  “If the word be interpreted in this way,” the judge shot back, “it would mean no more than that two persons are of the same sex.”

  “In the psychiatric world,” Bennett explained, “it can be applied to this morbid association—love, if you like—between two people with an unhealthy exclusion of other people, and it very frequently and perhaps most often goes on to physical relations.”

  Here Brown interjected. Surely it was doubtful that the relation­ship between Pauline and Juliet was homosexual, given Pauline’s plainly heterosexual interest in a Sinhalese boy, Jaya, and the fact she had had sex on at least one occasion with Nicholas.

  Bennett was having none of it. Pauline Parker was, he said, “a silly, adolescent, amoral girl out for experience”.

  At four-thirty the court adjourned. The
members of the public who had been fortunate enough to secure seats in the gallery left buzzing with excitement. They had got even more from the day than they hoped. Rarely had such disgusting goings-on in Christchurch been talked about so openly.

  As the fifth day of the trial began, the dogged cross-examination of Dr Bennett continued. Rather surprisingly, Brown undertook to dispute that the girls ever displayed grandiosity in their thoughts. The witness had said that Parker’s poem The Ones That I Worship exhibited this grandiosity, but did he know a line in English poetry: “Not marble nor the gilded monuments / Of princes, shall outlive this noble rhyme”? Wasn’t that grandiose? Didn’t it mean the poet considered his rhyme would outlive marble? Had he heard of the immortal Shakespeare? That was a line from Shakespeare. Had he read it? Did he not agree there was grandeur in it? Did he agree Shakespeare was a genius? Did he agree Shakespeare wrote about love and sexual love? Had he read The Rape of Lucrece? That poem was full of sex. The girls wrote a lot about sex.

  In the public gallery they may not have noticed, but it had become clear to all the lawyers in court, and surely to the judge as well, that the crown prosecutor was behaving very oddly. He was like a runaway bus. What was the matter with the man?

  He had now chosen to dispute with Bennett that there was any­thing delusional about the girls’ religious ideas. Was it an insane belief that people went to heaven or paradise? Didn’t millions of people believe this? Didn’t some very famous churches think there were two or three places in the afterlife? Were they mad? Why were these girls mad for believing there were two places in the afterlife? Hadn’t millions of people thought the bible was bunkum?

  Still the torrent of questions kept flowing. When Bennett doubted a sane person could approach a crime such as murder with a completely calm mind, Brown retorted, “You heard of Judas Iscariot? Was not Judas Iscariot cool and calm when he took bread and wine with our Lord?”

  Here Mr Justice Adams was moved to check him. “Mr Brown, whatever the temptation, I think it would be advisable not to continue that topic.”

  “I will not take it further, Your Honour.”

  “I am sorry we did not continue,” Bennett announced. “It would lead us to where Judas hanged himself.”

  Undeterred, Brown moved his attention to Shakespeare. Did not Macbeth murder Duncan at the instigation of Lady Macbeth? Was she mad? Was not Lady Macbeth calm before the murder? Did she not behave before and after the murder of Duncan precisely the way these girls behaved?

  The crown prosecutor no longer knew when enough was enough. “I must press this. Did not Lady Macbeth welcome Duncan to the castle on the evening of his death?” he demanded.

  “Yes.”

  “Did she not find Macbeth was getting cold feet about the death?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did she not spur him on to get it done?”

  “Yes.”

  “Was she not calm and calculating throughout all that? … Was she not a party to the killing beyond striking the actual blow?”

  “She was out of the room. She kept away from it.”

  “She knew it was going to be done? She counselled it?”

  “Yes.”

  Tears were now streaming down Alan Brown’s cheeks. Seeing that the crown prosecutor was becoming overwrought, Mr Justice Adams stepped in with a question he hoped would sew the whole thing up. “May your view,” he said, “be summarised in these words: that in your opinion [the accused] knew the act was contrary to law and knew it was contrary to the ordinary moral standards of the community but nevertheless it was not contrary to their own moral standards?”

  “Yes,” Bennett replied. “You have completely summarised it.”

  CHAPTER 27

  “I See Nothing Insane…”

  The three-man team from the government’s Department of Mental Hygiene had a straightforward mission: to rebut the case that Juliet Hulme and Pauline Parker were insane. The leader, Dr Kenneth Stallworthy, had examined both girls over the course of several visits to Christchurch prison. He had also examined Pauline at Auckland’s Mt Eden Prison when she was separated from Juliet. Although he had not seen either girl until more than a month after the murder, he felt able to say that at the time they killed Mrs Rieper neither girl had any disease of the mind. Both knew the nature and quality of their act in killing Mrs Rieper and both were sane medically and in the legal sense. He believed neither was certifiable under the Mental Defectives Act.

  Further, both knew they were breaking the law. Pauline Parker had explicitly told him they knew they were doing wrong. “We knew we would be punished if we were caught and we did our best not to be caught.” On another occasion Parker had told him she could hardly fail to know that murder was not encouraged, and Juliet Hulme had gone as far as to say, “You would have to be an absolute moron not to know murder was against the law.”

  As far as Stallworthy was concerned, insanity could, therefore, be ruled out. Both the accused had acted for an intelligible motive. Their crime was carefully premeditated and planned and they had weighed the prospects of getting away with it. They had given themselves a better than even chance. They were aware that because of their ages they would not be hanged if they were caught. Then there was the fact they wanted to be found insane if it would get them an earlier release. Persons who were insane were always anxious to be considered sane.

  Although paranoia was a relatively rare disease, Stallworthy informed the jury, he had seen dozens of paranoiacs in mental hospitals and they did not behave anything like these girls. In all cases paranoiacs’ illnesses progressed to the stage where they no longer realised they were breaking the law. All were most insistent they were sane and indignant at being sent to a mental hospital.

  Nor did he believe the girls were delusional. Delusions were beliefs that had no foundation in fact, and were staunchly maintained in spite of all logic and argument to the contrary. Undue conceit, even overwhelming conceit, did not constitute a delusion of grandeur. Adolescence was commonly a very conceited age, and the accused had much greater grounds for conceit than the defence had conceded. Hulme displayed the vocabulary, and the shrewdness in under­standing and answering difficult questions, of a highly intelligent and sophisticated person of a much greater age. Parker, too, was con­siderably above average in intelligence.

  Stallworthy’s argument that the girls were suffering from nothing more than the ordinary conceit to be expected in adolescents, especially intelligent ones with something to be conceited about, was thin and perhaps he realised it. “Suppose my views were wrong,” he now allowed, “and the girls did have delusions of grandeur, I do not think it would explain their crime.” There was no delusional basis in their motivation: Pauline’s mother was standing in the way of their friendship. “These two girls were in love with each other.… The most important thing in the world for them was to be together.”

  Nor did Stallworthy think the girls’ various fantasies indicated insanity. “I see nothing insane in having a vivid imagination and a fondness for using it at every opportunity.” He had already stated that he saw nothing insane in two highly intelligent and imaginative adolescents being preoccupied with the hereafter, even toying with a private religion of their own.

  Stallworthy also said that in interviews with the accused he had seen no evidence of inappropriate emotional reactions. Certainly they had not shown the remorse and regret one might imagine to be normal, but he had, he said, seen murderers about whom there was no suggestion of insanity show the same apparent coldness and callous­ness. Although there was evidence of the girls being quite unduly pleased with themselves, he did not consider this amounted to exaltation in the sense a psychiatrist would use the word. There was never the degree of elevation of mood that was, in itself, evidence of insanity.

  In short, the chief medical office of Auckland Mental Hospital would not acknowledge the girls were suffering from mental abnormality of any kind.

  Terence Gresson rose to cross-examine the wit
ness. As was his style he stood languidly, one foot up on his chair. He quickly extracted a number of concessions. Yes, Stallworthy agreed, Dr Medlicott, whom he had known for many years, was a competent and capable psychia­trist and a man of professional integrity. Yes, whether a person was sane or insane was a matter upon which psychiatrists might disagree. Yes, there had been instances in the past when he had been proved wrong and his colleagues right. And yes, paranoia was one of the rarer forms of insanity and often hard to diagnose. Paranoia of the exalted type was, he agreed, a very rare form. He acknowledged that it was very common for paranoiacs to display gross conceit, and in the later stages to think they were gods or superior beings. Female paranoiacs, he had to admit, occasionally believed they were goddesses.

  What, Gresson asked, would Stallworthy think about the mental condition of an adolescent who came into his consulting rooms solemnly telling him she had an extra part of the brain and persisting in that belief? He acknowledged that he would suspect she had a delusion and seek confirmatory evidence of mental disease. He further acknowledged that if the same person were to tell him she were destined for a paradise for which only ten persons qualified, she might have been described in earlier psychiatric terminology as a monomaniac.

  He was also willing to confirm that folie simultanée was a rare but recognised mental condition in which, as Gresson put it, “the mental instability of one patient aggravates the mental instability of the other”, causing “a kind of mutual acceleration of the mental illness”. And he agreed that if a patient had paranoia, the disease would taint the whole of his reasoning and affect his judgement.

  Gresson had made some useful points while avoiding a head-on collision that might alienate the judge and jury.

  Next to take the stand was Dr James Saville, medical officer at Sunnyside Mental Hospital in Christchurch. Saville said he had examined thousands of mental patients, and never before had a case come to his notice of two insane persons combining to commit a crime. He, too, believed that the first two times the girls were examined by him they were trying to make themselves out to be insane. Juliet had told him she thought they might be released from a mental hospital in two or three years but were unlikely to get out of prison so quickly. In his considered opinion, at the time of the offence both the accused understood the nature and quality of their act in killing Mrs Rieper and that the act was against the law and wrong from the point of view of the general belief of the community morally. He had read the diaries of the girl Parker and skimmed through other writings. Nothing in them, or anything said to him in the course of the interviews, caused him to alter his opinion that the accused were sane at the time of the murder and sane today.