by Peter Graham
When McClelland went back upstairs Juliet’s only concern was that he make sure she and Pauline went to the same prison. McClelland told her Dr Medlicott thought she needed his help.
“I don’t mind,” she said. “He was always nice to me.”
Shortly before four o’clock, when most of the crowd outside had departed, the girls were driven away to start their sentences. Brian McClelland did not visit Juliet in prison and never saw her again. “Frankly,” he said, “I didn’t want to. There was nothing I could do. She needed a doctor, not a lawyer.”
CHAPTER 29
Her Majesty’s Pleasure
The despised adulterers made a handsome couple as they left the court. Hilda Hulme, arm in arm with Perry, kept her bearing. She was determined not to give the ghastly types mobbing around them the pleasure of watching her snivel. The crowd was disappointed, felt short-changed. Her behaviour wasn’t natural. Some said it was a pity the girls hadn’t taken her for a walk in Victoria Park instead of the nice mother. Even people who knew Hilda well thought her calm, dignified manner during the trial showed she was a hard woman. Almost none thought to give her credit for her courageous and steadfast support of her daughter.
One of the police officers who escorted Juliet and Pauline back to Paparua was Audrey Griffiths, the young constable who had had the job of undressing Honorah Rieper’s body on the night of the murder. She would never forget Juliet’s coldhearted tomfoolery. She was shocked to hear her say to Pauline in a stage whisper, “The old girl took a bit more killing than we thought.” When Griffiths took her to task, Juliet turned on her, jeering, “Oh, aren’t we the perfect little policewoman.”
If Pauline and Juliet really were psychotic, or afflicted with some lesser mental disorder, the tragedy was that they had become individually and as a pair so odious that hardly anyone could give them a second’s sympathy. A piece of paper was discovered on which they had listed all the other people they intended to kill at the first opportunity. Probably it was meant to be found. Agnes Ritchie was alarmed to be told her name and her husband’s were on it. There were six other names, including Archie Tate and two or three mistresses from Girls’ High, including the Latin teacher, Miss Waller.
And yet the girls were not without their admirers. There was the young man who stood up at the back of the court and shouted “I object!” as the jury returned its verdict. There was the anonymous sexual fantasist in England who posted Brian McClelland a long black evening gown and high-heeled shoes, hoping he would forward them to Juliet. And all over New Zealand—and further abroad—there were unhappy teenage girls who had no trouble imagining how they too, if only they had the resolve, might take bricks and stockings and send their mothers to kingdom come.
Then there were girls whose lives were changed by the case. One was Alison Laurie. Aged thirteen and in the third form of a girls’ school in Wellington, she had found herself falling in love with girls and had a fantasy life full of romance and passion, if limited by her ignorance. Despite the best endeavours of her parents, she read about the case of Pauline and Juliet in the local newspapers. For her, it was confirmation that there were other girls who fell in love and felt for one another the way she felt for a number of girls. Many years later she would write about the case as co-author of a book, Parker and Hulme: A Lesbian View.
The government psychiatrists who found no evidence of mental abnormality they felt oath-bound to mention to the jury at the trial now found themselves with another part to play. The secretary for justice, Sam Barnett, consulted them before tendering a report to his minister, whose duty it was to decide where and for what duration the girls would be confined.
The editor of Wellington’s Dominion was outraged by the process. “The accused, two thoroughly bad-minded girls, stand convicted of one of the gravest crimes in the calendar, and one which shocked the conscience of the nation,” he wrote. “As we have said, the jury had no doubt of their mental state. Why then should the psychiatry issue be raised now in deciding their form of detention? Psychiatry is unwanted in this case.”
As befitted a matter of such seriousness, the minister had to consult his cabinet colleagues before a decision could be announced. Meanwhile, the two girls continued to be held at Paparua, where, the superintendent announced, they were in separate cells but saw each other at exercise periods in the mornings and afternoons. No longer remand prisoners, they now wore prison clothes.
The minister’s options were few. The only women prisoners Paparua held were those on remand or serving short sentences. There was Arohata Borstal and Reformatory near Porirua, a few miles north of Wellington. Borstal was a place of corrective training for juveniles who were, in the words of the Justice Department, “not yet widely experienced in crime, and might, with individual treatment, be expected to reform”. At Arohata there were at any one time about thirty women and girls, whose days were spent doing laundry, gardening or sewing for other institutions. The department freely acknowledged that the Arohata inmates presented “the most difficult penal problem in New Zealand since too many of them constitute moral problems”.
Auckland Prison in the suburb of Mt Eden—“the Hill” to the cognoscenti—was a dreadful old place, a damp, cold, rat-infested, foul-smelling Victorian jail built by convict labour in the 1880s from rock hewn out of its own quarry. Today it is rated too squalid, unhealthy and inhospitable to accommodate even the roughest, toughest, meanest prisoners for any length of time. Its facilities were worse in 1954. A small section was set aside for older women and “young women for whom Arohata is not suitable”. These female prisoners were set to laundry work and sewing.
When the matter was submitted to the cabinet, the view of the Justice Department officers, supported by psychiatric opinion, was that the greatest punishment that could be inflicted on Parker and Hulme was to separate them. It didn’t need to be said that the more severe the punishment the better: most people in New Zealand were firmly convinced the verdict was the right one.
It was decided that Juliet Hulme would be sent to Mt Eden. A few weeks later, as soon as a security compound of three escape-proof rooms was completed, Pauline Parker would go to Arohata. The justice minister, Thomas Webb, announced that this arrangement would be periodically reversed so that Parker too would have “a taste of Mt Eden”. On the information available, Webb said, Hulme was the dominant personality but they did not intend to treat them differently. That commitment would be shamefully dishonoured.
As for their term of detention, “Her Majesty’s pleasure” would be determined by the minister of justice. People under eighteen sentenced for a capital crime could be released at any time under conditions imposed by the minister. Webb assured the public he would keep the cases of Parker and Hulme under regular review.
On September 3, Terence Gresson’s clerk Peter Penlington hurried down to the Supreme Court Registry with a document for filing.
It was a deed poll changing the surname of Hilda Marion Hulme to Perry. Juliet’s mother would choose to be known in years to come as Marion Perry. Five days later the tabloid N.Z. Truth reported that Mrs Hulme proposed leaving New Zealand within a few days. “I am distressed to leave Juliet here,” she was reported as saying, “but I feel that Jonathan has a greater claim on me.”
Bill Perry told the reporter that he too would be leaving New Zealand. The fact was he had little choice. Associated Industrial Consultants of London had taken a dim view of the publicity their New Zealand representative had attracted as an adulterer closely connected with a shocking and highly publicised murder case. He had embarrassed the firm to such a degree his services were no longer required.
Hilda’s departure led to a falling out with Nancy Sutherland,who could not understand how her friend could skip the country, leaving her daughter in jail. Juliet refused to see her, Hilda told her. Jonathan needed her back home in England. Bill had lost his job, and could find work only in England, or with one of the international companies that recruited in Engl
and. They had no house in New Zealand. She would arrange for friends to visit Juliet in prison, and teachers to teach her. Reg Medlicott would be visiting her to give her the treatment she needed. She would come back if she were really wanted and needed. None of these arguments impressed Nancy Sutherland. Hilda’s decision to leave New Zealand was, in her eyes, unforgivable.
Hilda and Bill, in gratitude for Brian McClelland’s wholehearted efforts on Juliet’s behalf, presented him with a fountain pen inscribed “From W.A. and H.M. Perry”. The three shared a grim little joke about it being a Parker pen. On Saturday, September 11, the couple flew out of Christchurch International Airport for Sydney, and thence to Melbourne, where they would connect with a ship for England. Only a few well-wishers were on hand to wave goodbye, among them Terence Gresson and his son, who took photographs of them walking on to the tarmac to board the aircraft.
In Sydney, Hilda gave an interview to the press. “It was not justice,” she said, “to send a young girl to jail when what she needed most was love, care, attention and affection.” She firmly believed Juliet was insane, a paranoiac, “although according to the M’Naghten rules she was not insane by law when she committed the murder”. The rules, she said, should be revised. “Under the present rules she was guilty because she knew she was doing wrong, but in her own insane mind—which the law does not recognise—she believed she was immune to the law, that she was a god and able to break the law.”
It was observed that Hilda’s face was drawn and lined by theworry and anxiety she had been through. It was something, she said, she could never forget. “To do that would be to write my child off completely and no mother could do that.” People had told her after the trial ended that it was all over. “How wrong they were. It is only the beginning. It will last forever.” A psychiatrist was keeping her daughter under constant observation and she might return to New Zealand if Juliet made any improvement. Meanwhile, she told the Australian journalists, she was going on a trip in search of rest and peace.
N.Z. Truth was not slow to put the boot in. The Standard, the Labour Party newspaper, had published a front-page article deploring the fact that Mrs Perry—as she now wished to be known—had been persecuted by the press. Truth was indignant. “Whatever may have happened outside New Zealand, neither Dr Hulme, the father, nor Mrs Hulme, the mother, was persecuted in any way by any New Zealand newspaper. Dr Hulme’s departure, although it had obvious interest, was barely reported. … New Zealand newspapers restricted themselves to coverage of the trial itself and gave no particular emphasis to the evidence given at the trial affecting the relationship between Mrs Hulme and Perry.”
The paper found Mrs Perry’s concern for her daughter’s welfare and the alleged unhumanity of her sentence “difficult to reconcile with the fact that she went to see the girl only occasionally after her arrest, and then only, it is understood, after a message had been passed that her daughter wanted to see her”. After her conviction, Juliet had been in Paparua for a week before being moved to Auckland, the paper pointed out. During that time her mother had been in Christchurch, or staying in a bach at Port Levy about thirty miles away. Informed that an opportunity would be given her to see her daughter before the latter was transferred to Mt Eden, she had done nothing.
Truth was concerned that, with her mother’s departure, Juliet Hulme would have no relatives whatever to visit her. “Any visitorsshe has will be officials, doctors who take an interest in the case, or official prison visitors.” The headline proclaimed: “LEFT WITHOUT GOODBYE VISIT TO HER DAUGHTER”.
Whatever Hilda’s shortcomings as a mother, she did not deserve such a vicious attack. She would have given anything for a few words with her daughter, for whom she had lied, cheated and destroyed evidence. A few inquiries would readily have established the bitter truth: that Juliet refused to speak to her. The tone of the article reflected the hostility towards the Hulme family that hung in the air, the feeling that the manipulative daughter of degenerate upper-class Poms had led astray the honest fishmonger’s girl. Although New Zealand proclaimed itself a classless society, the social and cultural divide between the Riepers and the Hulmes was seen as going a long way to explain how the churchgoing daughter of decent, hard-working ordinary folk had come to murder her own mother.
CHAPTER 30
The Presence of Evil
In 1955 Dr Maurice Bevan-Brown, a Christchurch psychiatrist who had been a colleague of Hilda Hulme on the Marriage Guidance Council, released a paper he had written on the death of Honorah Rieper. In Adolescent Murder he wrestled with the problem of how Juliet Hulme and Pauline Parker, children of “the educated class”, could have come to commit a particularly grisly murder. He concluded the driving force had been love—“love no doubt of an immature and even infantile type and dating back to their own infantile needs; love of the best type of which they were capable, yet so egocentric as to ignore the interests of other people”.
“Many people,” Bevan-Brown continued, “have said the real culprits are the parents.” He thought it reasonable to suggest they must indeed carry a heavy responsibility. The ultimate origin of the crime could be expressed as deprivation of love in early childhood and both Juliet Hulme and Pauline Parker had had inadequate parenting. If a child were deprived “of love and valuation, especially in the matter of tender feelings, various abnormal or morbid results will follow.
One is a reaction of hate, aggressiveness, truculence and defiance, together with an unstable pseudo-independence.” But this was not to condemn the girls’ parents, he hastened to add. They themselves were the products of their own parents’ shortcomings.
Bevan-Brown also considered the intense homosexual relationship between the girls, whether there was physical intimacy or not, to be an essential factor. Parker and Hulme, largely isolated individuals with no real friends, had found in each other a love relationship for the first time in their lives. “They mattered intensely to each other,”
he wrote, “and no one else in the world mattered at all or was worthy of any consideration. It was supremely important to them that they should not be separated—perhaps more important than life itself and certainly more important than anyone else’s life.”
Reg Medlicott, too, could not get the two girls out of his mind. The Hulme-Parker case was of such interest to the psychiatric profession that he would travel the world addressing learned gatherings. Some colleagues said, with a sniff of disapproval, that he made a career out of it. When he died in 1987, the Bulletin of the Royal College of Psychiatrists proclaimed that New Zealand psychiatry had lost its senior and most respected figure.
Medlicott not only remained fascinated by the case for the rest of his life, but from time to time he revised his medical opinion. In 1955 he published his first paper on the case in the British Journal of Medical Psychology. The outstanding thing about the girls’ mood, he reported, was their “definite exaltation”, which had risen to an increasing pitch in the months before the murder. “When they launched on their crucial religio-philosophical themes, the exaltation would increase to a high pitch and be accompanied by gross excitement. … They never doubted they were outstanding geniuses far above the common herd of mankind.” He had been impressed by their persistent state of exaltation, their complete lack of remorse, and their fantastic conceit, arrogance and self-inflation.
For Medlicott the diagnosis of psychosis—that is to say full-blown, systematised delusions—depended greatly on what he called the girls’ “religio-philosophical” views. Juliet had told him she and Pauline had their own religion with a non-Christian god, and only twenty-five people in the whole of time had approached their level. Their god was “a nice chap”, who didn’t necessarily label all sin bad or evil. Sin could be good.
Medlicott was impressed that when he questioned the girls about the 4th World and The Ones That I Worship they gave consistent accounts, even though there was no opportunity for them to swap notes between interviews. However, given the countless hours the g
irls spent discussing such matters and the slavishness with which Pauline adopted Juliet’s ideas, there was probably nothing particularly remarkable about the fact their accounts tallied closely.
He considered the “Port Levy revelation” crucial evidence that the girls were paranoiac in a setting of folie à deux. This was opento debate. The incident had occurred less than a year after the girls became close friends. Indeed, Parker told Medlicott they had known about the 4th World six months earlier and their experience at Port Levy had simply “clarified it”. If that were the case, their belief inthis other world must have come into being in the early months of
their friendship—an extraordinarily short time for “communicated insanity” to have developed, especially between two people not living together in isolation.
It is more likely the 4th World was just a piece of nonsense dreamed up by Juliet—perhaps dredging up vague memories of anthroposophism from Queenswood school—and committed to writing by her faithful disciple. Judging from her diary, Pauline herself had no particular interest in religio-philosophical ideas. Other than the Port Levy revelation, the only reference to religion, apart from mentioning when she went to church, was on June 14, 1953: “Juliet and I decided the Christian religion has become too much of a farce and we decided to make one up of our own.” The very words “decided to make one up” made it clear the new religion would be a self-conscious invention—the antithesis of paranoiac delusional thinking. Pauline continued to attend the East Belt Methodist Church regularly until the murder in June 1954.
It is likely Juliet was spinning Medlicott a line—part of the pretence of being mad—when she told him she and Pauline had their own religion and only twenty-five people in the whole of creation had reached their level of enlightenment. The 4th World “clarified” on Good Friday 1953 at Port Levy gave frail support to Medlicott’s thesis that the two girls had crossed the befogged frontier from paranoid constitutional personality into actual paranoia.