Anne Perry and the Murder of the Century

by Peter Graham

  Dr James Hunter, the medical superintendent at Sunnyside Mental Hospital, was even more cursory. He seemed to be there to add weight of numbers, so that in the final count there would be three psychiatrists for the prosecution against two for the defence. He had never, he said, heard of two insane persons conspiring to commit a crime, except for one example mentioned in East’s Forensic Medicine. He did not bother to explain what the example was. His opinion, surprising to no one, was that neither girl was suffering from any disease of the mind at the time of the killing and neither was certifiable.

  Not one of the prosecution’s three psychiatric experts, sworn to tell “the whole truth”, had been prepared to acknowledge any mental abnormality whatsoever in either Juliet Hulme or Pauline Parker. There had been no concessions that might tempt the jury to take pity on the two girls.

  The Crown’s case in rebuttal ended shortly before five in the evening on Friday, August 26. The time had come for closing speeches, followed by the judge’s summing-up, after which the jury would retire. The judge asked the foreman to consult the jurors as to whether they would like to continue the next morning, Saturday. The foreman reported that they would.

  There was general dismay. An event of utmost importance was taking place on Saturday afternoon: at two o’clock Canterbury was defending the Ranfurly Shield at Lancaster Park against a strong challenge by Waikato. Like almost all the city’s rugby-lovers, Terence Gresson and Brian McClelland had plans to watch the game.

  Surely the jurors, too, would hope to be there? Having them sit on a Saturday seemed to Brian McClelland a ploy by Mr Justice Adams to make the jury rush its decision. A quick verdict would be bad news for the defence, he thought glumly. An acquittal could come only after a long hard deliberation.

  The court staff, too, were unhappy about having to work on Saturday, as was Alan Brown’s junior Peter Mahon. What shape would his leader would be in next morning? Brown had already darted off in the direction of the Canterbury Club, where he did most of his drinking.

  As the lawyers gathered up their papers, a message came from the judge. He wished to see counsel in his chambers at their earliest convenience. His Honour was told Mr Brown was indisposed; it was agreed that junior counsel could deal with whatever it was Mr Justice Adams wanted to discuss.

  McClelland, Wicks and Mahon trooped into the gloomy room to learn that the judge was intending to withdraw the defence of insanity from the jury and direct them to enter a verdict of guilty. There was no evidence, he said, to support a finding of insanity under section 43 of the Crimes Act. Doctors Medlicott, Bennett, Stallworthy and Saville had all given evidence to the effect that, at the time they committed murder, both accused knew it was wrong in criminal law and wrong according to the standards of the community.

  It was true. Medlicott and Bennett had insisted the girls were medically insane in that they were certifiable under the Mental Defectives Act 1911 and that, because of their delusions, had believed it was right—or at least not wrong—for them to kill Pauline’s mother, even though they knew it would be wrong for others to do so. It was well established that on a strict reading of section 43 such a belief, personal to themselves, did not support a defence of insanity.

  Brian McClelland protested vigorously. There was evidence that, if accepted by the jury, would mean Juliet Hulme was legally insane. He would need more time to research the point. Peter Mahon, too, was strongly opposed. He firmly believed the question of the girls’ guilt or innocence ought properly to be left to the jury to decide.

  Mr Justice Adams was firm: the matter was his alone to decide.

  “In the end he said he would see us again in the morning before the court sat,” McClelland remembered. “In the meantime we could think it over.”

  Accompanied by Mahon, McClelland disappeared to the law library in the Supreme Court to see if there were any precedents for what the judge proposed. The only case of relevance was R v Windle, which had been decided by the English Court of Criminal Appeal

  two years earlier. It was not at all helpful. The defence to murder had also been folie à deux insanity. Although there was evidence that the appellant suffered from a disease of the mind, medical experts on both sides were agreed that when he administered a fatal dose of aspirin to his wife he knew he was doing an illegal act. On that basis the trial judge had withdrawn the insanity defence from the jury.

  The Chief Justice, Lord Goddard, in the course of the argument had said he himself had once made a similar ruling and was aware of another case where the same had been done. To decline to leave insanity to the jury, he had ruled, was a strong line for a judge to take—in most cases the effect was to condemn the prisoner to death—“but it is one he ought to take if he is convinced there is no evidence to be left to a jury on a particular issue”.

  Although there was good authority for the course of action the judge was threatening, McClelland was unbowed. Next morning he told Mr Justice Adams that if he ruled out insanity the defence would appeal immediately. Peter Mahon added that he would feel honour-bound to withdraw from the case. Unlike Alan Brown, Mahon was not preoccupied with winning. He thought it perfectly obvious that the girls, if not legally insane, were seriously mentally disturbed, and did not want to deny them the possibility of a sympathy verdict that might allow them to receive treatment they would not get in prison.

  If the jury were not allowed to consider the defence of insanity, the kerfuffle that would create, with the world’s press sitting there noting down every word, could readily be imagined. The previous day the Christchurch Star-Sun had boasted that not for many years had news from New Zealand received such prominence in British news­papers. Each day most were publishing at least half a column, generally on the front page. In some broadsheets the coverage was even greater. The Mirror and the Daily Sketch were giving the trial extensive space on their inside pages.

  Mr Justice Adams relented. He would allow the defence to be put to the jury, subject to a careful direction. Thanks largely to Mahon, the game was still on. But the defence counsel were not at all sanguine: they were sure there would be a strong summing-up against them.

  CHAPTER 28

  The Jury Retires

  It was the first time for many years that there had been a murder hearing on a Saturday. At nine-thirty in the morning, the upstairs public gallery in the Supreme Court was not as full as on the preceding five days but there were still a hundred spectators. Some were rugby supporters, clutching knitted woolly hats in the colours of their respective provinces. These visitors from out of town would dine out on their remembrances of the famous Christchurch murder trial for years to come.

  Alec Haslam spoke first. He apologised to the jury for “a lot of repulsive evidence” that had been put before them. The intention had not been to shock, but to help them decide the question of insanity. The two accused, he said, were “lonely and withdrawn types” who had both suffered ill health in childhood, and whose friendship had quickly developed an “alarming intensity”. They had become “morbidly close”.

  He made no attack on the psychiatric evidence called by the Crown, and did little in the course of twenty-five minutes to counter the crown prosecutor’s assertion that the girls were merely “dirty-minded”. Appeals to emotion were not Haslam’s forte. He glossed over the crucial question of legal insanity under section 43 in the hope that if the jury felt sorry for the girls they would overlook the legal niceties. “Dr Bennett … agreed with Dr Medlicott that the girls were suffering from paranoia with delusions of grandeur … There was ample evidence the girls were insane in the broad general sense of the term … Dr Bennett had said their delusion would affect their whole judgement … They did not regard their act as morally wrong.” That said, he invited the jury to bring back a verdict of not guilty on the ground of insanity.

  Terence Gresson was more persuasive, but like Haslam there was not much fight in him. Dr Medlicott, he said, had arrived at a clear-cut diagnosis of paranoia with an association of
folie à deux. The accused were certifiably insane, aware at times of wrongness and right­ness, but it was so temporary they could switch from what they knew of the law to their own fantastic world at a moment’s notice. Dr Bennett had arrived independently at a similar conclusion. “You have two competent, reputable doctors telling you Parker and Hulme were insane and I ask you to accept that evidence.”

  Dealing with the evidence of the psychiatrists from the Depart­ment of Mental Hygiene he trod carefully. The three doctors, he pointed out, all worked for the Crown. “I don’t suggest they are mentally dishonest but they do come from the same stable. If they were out a­t Addington [Raceway] this afternoon they would have to be bracketed. It does tend to create an identity of views.” He hoped jurors might grasp the point without his having to spell it out.

  Then he made his final appeal to the jury. “If you had a daughter, and she displayed half the symptoms that have been enumerated in respect of these girls, would you not call a doctor? Would you not assume she was mentally touched? Is it not clear from the facts that have been proved that these girls are what is commonly called ‘crackers’? I submit to you that they were incapable of forming a moral judgement on what they did. … These girls are mentally ill, sick adolescents—not brutal criminals.”

  Brian McClelland knew Gresson had not made a strong enough pitch to the jury’s emotions. Even Gresson’s son Nico, who was sitting in court, would admonish his father for being too soft. “Why didn’t you do a Marshall Hall?” he said, referring to an English barrister famous for his powerful advocacy. “It needed it.”

  Gresson was at heart too much the gentleman. Both he and Haslam had been content to deliver workmanlike performances. Neither had been prepared to risk alienating the judge, and perhaps making fools of themselves, with a vehement attack on the govern­ment psychiatrists, in the faint hope of winning acquittals for their unappealing clients. McClelland believed they were too keen on becoming judges themselves to risk getting offside with Mr Justice Adams.

  Now it was Alan Brown’s turn. Juliet and Pauline, who had been whispering and smiling to each other, fell silent as the prosecutor began to speak. The two in the dock were charged with a very dreadful crime, Brown said. One could not help pitying them for the horrible position they were in and for being such bad people. They were thoroughly depraved, but their depravity did not mean they were insane. “The evidence proved they had most unhealthy minds, but it was badness and not a question of insanity at all. I say what I said in my opening—that this was a coldly and callously planned, pre­meditated murder committed by two highly intelligent but precocious dirty-minded girls.”

  Juliet sat with her fingers in her ears. “They are not incurably insane,” Brown exclaimed theatrically. “They are incurably bad!”

  As he sat down he slumped forward a little, looking terribly distressed. Nico Gresson, sitting in the grand jury box, noticed and wondered what was happening to him.

  Section 43 of New Zealand’s Crimes Act, like the legal defence of insanity in a number of jurisdictions, was closely based on the English M’Naghten rules of 1843. Over the years various legal and medical experts, including Dr Kenneth Stallworthy, had observed that if these rules were correctly interpreted very few killers would be found not guilty by reason of insanity. This notwithstanding, it was firmly established in practice in both England and New Zealand that an accused proved to have been medically insane at the time of his or her crime would get an acquittal. In clear cases of insanity it was the custom of the courts, the jury, the judge, and the counsel, as Stallworthy had once written, “to connive at either ignoring the rules or paying the merest lip service to them”. This was precisely the door Stallworthy and his colleagues from Sunnyside were now determined not to leave ajar for Pauline and Juliet.

  The distinguished Cambridge University law professor Glanville Williams had written that the M’Naghten defence was “extremely narrow … unless indulgently interpreted”. Mr Justice Adams was a solid criminal lawyer but his approach to the law was pedantic and literal: he was not given to indulgent interpretations. The jury’s task, he instructed them, was to consider coldly and calmly whether the defence of insanity had been proved beyond reasonable doubt. The case for both girls had, he said, been conducted on the basis that the evidence affecting them individually—for example, the diaries for 1953 and 1954 written by Parker—was to be considered in regard to them both. The only verdicts open were “not guilty on the ground of insanity” or “guilty”.

  “Insanity,” the judge continued, “must of course be a question of degree. … It may well be that you will think they suffered from some degree of mental disorder, that to some extent and in some way their minds and intelligence are abnormal. I do not think anyone could listen to the evidence in this case without forming some sort of conclusion to that effect.” His words seemed a mild rebuke for the prosecution’s psychiatric team, who professed to have formed no such conclusion.

  At this point things got more difficult for the defence. The law, the judge explained, did not relieve persons of criminal responsibility merely because they were insane. The insanity had to be such as to render the person incapable of understanding the nature and quality of the act or omission, or of knowing that such an act or omission was wrong.”

  Four doctors, he reminded the jury, had said both girls knew what they had done was wrong in the eyes of the law and according to the generally accepted moral standards of the community. It was not sufficient to suggest an accused person had some private moral standard of their own: this was no defence in law. No medical man, he said, had given the evidence necessary to establish that the girls did not know the act of killing Mrs Parker was wrong for the purposes of the statute. Unless the jury could find elsewhere in the evidence any material that might support a contrary conclusion, it was their duty to convict.

  Where might the jury begin to look for such evidence? The defence of insanity had been destroyed as surely as if the judge had withdrawn it. Even if they were of a mind to accept the evidence of Medlicott and Bennett that the girls were medically insane, there would be no indulgent stretching of a legal point in their favour.

  The jury retired at nineteen minutes to one. Two hours and twelve minutes later, when they filed back in and took their seats, the court had filled to capacity. The atmosphere was tense. Pauline gazed impassively ahead. Juliet briefly scanned the jurors’ faces and the faint smile on her face vanished. Bill Perry placed a hand on Hilda Hulme’s arm as the registrar asked the foreman for the verdict. There was no hesitation. “Guilty,” he replied. The rest of the jury indicated it was the verdict of them all.

  The momentary silence was broken by a young man in the upstairs gallery who yelled, “I protest! I object!”

  The court crier roared, “Silence!” and two policemen propelled the interjector out of the courtroom.

  There was another matter to be dealt with. Capital punishment—death by hanging—was the sentence prescribed by law for convicted murderers, but there was a proviso: where the person was under eighteen, Section 5 of the Capital Punishment Act provided that the sentence should instead be detention during Her Majesty’s pleasure. That meant an indefinite term of imprisonment until the minister of justice decided to order the prisoner’s release. His Honour wished to hear from counsel on the matter. Terence Gresson submitted there was clear evidence from Mrs Hulme as to her daughter’s age. Alec Haslam said Mr Rieper had given similar evidence in respect of Pauline Parker. The judge was concerned to follow proper procedure: the girls’ ages were questions of fact that had to be determined.

  Alan Brown proposed that the evidence relevant to the ages of the prisoners be read to the jury. “He appeared upset and several times had to stop, as though he was finding it difficult to speak,” The San Francisco Examiner reported. As he sat down again he collapsed forward, face on the table, arms stretched out in front of him, sobbing audibly. When he sat up, still weeping, he covered his face with his hands.

>   When Brown gained control of himself, Mr Justice Adams submitted the matter to the jury. After brief consultation in the jury box, the foreman announced that they found both prisoners to be under the age of eighteen.

  Juliet and Pauline showed no sign of emotion as they were sentenced. “You both being under the age of eighteen, the sentence of the court is detention during Her Majesty’s pleasure,” Mr Justice Adams pronounced. “That sentence is passed upon each of you. … The prisoners may now be removed.” Pauline stared firmly ahead as they were led back to the cells upstairs. Juliet glanced sideways towards her mother but Hilda did not see her: her eyes were shut in deep despair.

  Feeling sick and close to tears himself, Brian McClelland went upstairs to speak to Juliet.

  “Bambi,” she asked, “is it true that wig on your head is made of horsehair?”

  “I’m sorry, I feel I’ve let you down,” McClelland said.

  “Don’t worry. I’ve had a bet on it, I’ve read it–”

  “Yes it is,” he answered. “Will you see your mother?”

  “I don’t want to see her,” she replied.

  “I’ll go downstairs to see her and come back,” McClelland said.

  On receiving the news that her daughter wouldn’t speak to her, Hilda maintained her composure, as she had throughout the ordeal. “Tell her I’ll do what I can to help,” she said.