Anne Perry and the Murder of the Century

by Peter Graham

  She reported that Juliet got up at six, had a meal, and then started work scrubbing and polishing black corridor floors. Two or three times a week she made sheets, white overalls and prison garments in the sewing room. She earned one shilling and sixpence a day, most of which she had to save. Only a few pennies were left to buy chocolate, sweets or bobby pins.

  “The weekends, I should imagine, are deadly. The Salvation Army comes round and plays hymns and we are allowed to visit her for half an hour but otherwise there is nothing to relieve the tedium. … Sheis apparently still doing a lot of writing, which the female super­intendent calls ‘sexy stuff’.”

  The other inmates were “a pretty crummy lot”. Most were prosti­tutes and petty thieves in for short terms. Their conversation was “hardly edifying” and their mentality “pretty low”. Quite a few had venereal disease, and most had lice, “which Juliet is nervous of catching”.

  To Vivien Dixon the prison was like Colditz Castle, with appalling conditions. Juliet had “awful clothes to wear, including big black boots” and had to endure “a lot of noisy Māori singing”. The prisoners ate a great deal of tapioca pudding and never had eggs or fruit. Juliet had told her not to bother bringing cakes as the prison officers always broke them to see if there were drugs inside. Prisoners were allowed to shower only twice a week. Sanitary towels had to be improvised from strips of cloth. There were no doors on the lavatories, which was the thing Juliet hated most.

  When Dixon complained about these conditions in a letter to Sam Barnett, he asked if she would call on him. In the event, she brought Nancy Sutherland along for moral support. The frankly spoken Sutherl­and got Barnett so worked up he slammed the door as they left.

  In November Juliet wrote to Nancy Sutherland, thanking her for the birthday cake she had sent, and passing on the information that she would not be allowed to have it until Christmas. She was, she said, reading a great deal of poetry. “I have seventeen poetry books in my room at the moment. Seven of them have 500+ pages in them and the others, all except one, have about 250 or 300. I have 1,500 pages of Byron (complete works), 1,000 of Shelley, 500 Tennyson (lent to me, not one of my favourites), the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, Rupert Brooke, James Elroy Flecker, The Oxford Book of English Verse, and of prose incidentally, and the rest are anthologies.”

  She had been been lent Macaulay’s History of England, which she found very interesting although she hadn’t yet got round to reading it, and was learning Italian. “I love the language, also the food, art, music and people, etc. I am nearly halfway through the course. As for my plans for the future … I shall probably try to write. But if I could do anything I liked it would be singing. My ruling passion in life is Italian opera.” Two months into her prison sentence her boastful self-confidence was undampened by the humiliating prison regime.

  Three months later Henry Hulme complained in a letter to Vivien Dixon that Juliet was “still up in the clouds … completely removed and occupied with herself and her grandiose ideas about poetry and writing, etc. I’m desperately sorry for her but it would be bad … to sympathise in any way with her present state—she feels (as a paranoiac) that she is right and others are wrong, and Medlicott feels strongly that to encourage this would reduce the slight chances of her recovery.” Although he was pleased Juliet did not seem “too unhappy”, he was “very bitter about the third-rate bums in New Zealand who insist she should be treated as a criminal”.

  At the end of November Juliet wrote to Nancy Sutherland ­pro­claim­ing that she and Pauline were marvellous opera singers.

  She herself was especially good, she said—a coloratura soprano!

  On December 15 Truth reported that Parker and Hulme were to be allowed to study for the University Entrance—actually School Certificate—examination. The paper added that when the girls began their prison sentences Hulme was “condescending and hoity-toity” and Parker “sulky and intractable”; neither appeared to show any obvious remorse. However, since they had been separated Hulme had apparently shown a “considerable improvement in her demeanour” and some symptoms of remorse. She had put on over a stone in weight and improved considerably in physical appearance but had “outwardly shown little interest in the fate of her friend. The two girls are not allowed to write to each other”.

  After Christmas Juliet informed Nancy Sutherland that her first Christmas in prison had been a very good one. “Of course there are many things one misses, but on the whole it was very nice. All sorts of people came in and gave us things.” She was, she said, studying for School Certificate in English, maths, history, Latin and Italian. She was also studying Greek simply because she liked doing it, and also loved learning Italian: “The language appeals to me in every aspect and it’s hardly work at all.”

  A strange passion had developed from her love of James Mason in The Desert Fox. “I’m reading Rommel at the moment and I like it so much I can’t put the flaming thing down. I am very interested in and have a great liking for the German army, the North African desert, tanks, tactics and Rommel in approximately ascending order. … I also wanted to read the memoirs of Ribbentrop but I can’t get it. One of these fine days I’ll finish Churchill’s history of World War II. I loved it, it really was fascinating but I shall probably howl and put it down when the Germans start to get beaten.”

  She also loved The Three Musketeers. “They are right up my alley (especially Athos, Richelieu and d’Artagnan). I like Athos particularly when he spends a long time in the inn with [his servant] Grimaud.” In this episode Athos, in his cups, tells d’Artagnan that as a young man he fell in love with a girl of sixteen “as beautiful as the dawn. Child as she was, she was marvellously gifted; she had not a woman’s but a poet’s mind; she was more than charming—she was enchanting”.

  It was not hard to see why Juliet found this tale so appealing.

  As seigneur of the district Athos could have seduced the girl, or even ravished her had he wished, but he married her and made her the first lady of the province. One day, when they were out hunting, she took a heavy fall and lost consciousness. Seeing that her tight riding habit was stifling her, Athos took a knife and slit it open as she lay on the ground, exposing her shoulder. On it was a fleur-de-lis: she was branded. “The angel was a fiend, the innocent child a thief; she’d stolen the communion plate from a church.” The handsome young priest who posed as her brother was in fact her lover. Athos stripped her of the rest of her clothes, tied her hands behind her back, and hanged her. His heart was broken forever.

  Nancy Sutherland must have finally found Juliet Hulme’s egotism and lack of repentance hard to take. She wrote telling her she had many other commitments and could not write as regularly as she had in the past. Juliet refused to show any hurt. “I quite understand that you can’t write so frequently. Oddly enough I can’t either because of all sorts of restrictions and things.” She enthused about her achievements as a knitter. “The red jersey—I finished that ages ago. … I’ve done four more since, nearly finished a fifth, started well on a sixth and got a seventh planned. I knit and read at the same time.”

  She was also making prisoners’ shirts. By the time she left she would, she said, be able to make all her father’s shirts, as well as her mother’s and her dresses, and her underwear. “I’ve made four pairs of brassieres since I’ve been here. They are rather fun. Out of unbleached calico for us, not satin, but on the same sort of principle.”

  Dora Sagar, charged with tutoring Juliet for School Certificate, visited regularly. One winter’s day she was told Juliet could not get up because of a severe chill. A sympathetic superintendent allowed her to see Juliet in her cell. Dora later said that after seeing the conditions in which Juliet was living, she excused her all her tantrums. The building was leaking and to get to the cells she had to walk through puddles of water. The cells overlooked the laundry, the walls of which were dripping and mouldy. There was no electric light in the cell, and although it was bitterly cold Juliet wore only a cotton dre
ss and cardigan. It was no fit place for the New Zealand government to house a young girl who had suffered most of her life from a weak chest and been discharged from a tuberculosis sanatorium only a year before. Despite the conditions, Juliet’s chestnut-coloured hair looked beautiful, Sagar reported.

  CHAPTER 32

  A Difficult Year

  While Juliet’s trial was taking place Henry Hulme had taken Jonty to Brussels, where English newspapers were scarce and they could lie low. On their return to England they stayed with friends at Blackheath and Hulme got his son kitted up for boarding at a preparatory school.

  With his university connections Hulme had no difficulty getting an appointment to teach mathematics at Cambridge, but by then some­thing else was in the air. The British government had determined that if the country were to maintain its standing as a world power it needed to develop an independent thermonuclear weapon—the hydrogen bomb. The project, to be carried out at the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment, situated on an old airfield at Aldermaston in Berkshire, was put in the hands of the noted nuclear physicist William Penney, an old friend of Hulme’s. By September Hulme was suffi­ciently certain of a job to start looking for accommodation in the area, although his pictures, books, china and other possessions salvaged from his marriage would not be arriving until the middle of October.

  At Jonathan’s school, parents were encouraged to visit often, Henry reported to Nancy Sutherland. Jonty was “very well” and “quite happy all the time”. The boy had still not been told about Hilda and Bill. He would let him settle in at school first, and then make sure he saw a lot of the three of them together during his first school holiday. “The really upsetting part for a child is if the parents quarrel or chastise each other and I’m sure we can avoid that.”

  He was heartened that people in England had been “extraordinarily kind”. The same could not be said of some of his former colleagues in New Zealand. Although he had been granted £900 to meet the cost of his and his family’s fares to England, the executive committee of the college council, aware the family group had broken up, had resolved not to pay for Hilda’s passage after all. According to the college’s solicitors Dougall and Co., Mrs Hulme was no longer eligible.

  The college went further. It would not meet any part of a bill for £144.12.0 Hilda had incurred shipping personal effects back to England, even though some of the effects were Henry’s. Nor would it pay any of Henry’s travelling expenses beyond his fare. Its solicitors had determined the college had no authority to pay travelling and removal expenses to any employee who had resigned. It had, in fact, already exceeded its authority.

  In November, Hulme told Nancy that things were going reason­ably well in England. Caius had made him a fellow for a year and he was spending alternate weeks at Cambridge and Aldermaston. Hilda had agreed to his having custody of Jonty. (In 1954, as an unfaithful wife, she would have had no choice.) The divorce would be going through in couple of months, “hopefully without publicity”. Hilda and Bill were slowly recovering from the strain of the last few months. He himself felt very lonely at times.

  He also wrote to Vivien Dixon. Hilda and Bill, he told her, did not yet have a place of their own and Bill was not finding it easy to get a job: publicity about the case had killed his chances with his old firm. Meanwhile, Jonathan had been entered for Stowe School in Bucking­ham in 1957. The scholarship standard there was not of the highest, he confessed, but the school was known to turn out nice people and the boys were very happy. This was a major change of attitude for Henry Hulme, who had always valued academic standards above all else.

  At the end of the year Jonathan came top of his class and his teachers reported that he was very well balanced. He and his father spent Christmas day with Hilda and Bill: this was the day they had chosen to tell him they were divorcing. On Boxing Day, Henry took his son to Switzerland for a winter sports holiday. The divorce petition was heard on January 26.

  *

  Some time after arriving back in England Henry Hulme had met and begun a relationship with a woman called Margery Ducker. Ducker’s father, Sir James Cooper, was a tycoon who held directorships of Lancashire Cotton Corporation, the vast engineering firm Vickers-Armstrongs, Goodyear Tyre and Rubber and other big companies. Margery was about the same age as Henry. She had been married twice before and had one child from each marriage, a boy aged seventeen and a girl of twelve. Henry told Nancy Sutherland that, like him, Margery been through difficult times and she had similar interests. By the time the couple married in the middle of 1955, Hulme had secured a permanent position at Aldermaston and they were hoping to buy a house in the Berkshire countryside near Reading.

  In June 1955 Hulme wrote to Juliet giving her the news. His letter was intercepted by the prison authorities, who wrote back informing him they could not give his daughter such a heartless letter. He must write again showing some feelings towards her. Dora Sagar, to whom they had shown the letter, thought it “quite unbelievable”, blunt and brutal. Several weeks passed before Henry wrote another letter in slightly more sympathetic terms. Nevertheless, as Vivien Dixon said, the letter knocked Juliet sideways.

  Boiling with rage at Henry’s callousness, Vivien went to visit Juliet. Her mood was not improved by a female warder, who sat jangling her keys and listening to every word between them. Juliet assured Vivien that, although she had been shocked at first, she was now over it. However, she felt she might have received more notice as such things didn’t happen in a week—“especially to people their age”. Vivien was inclined to agree that the relationship must have been going on almost from the time Juliet was sentenced.

  By then Juliet had written to her new stepmother, asking her to write a few lines, but there had been no reply—“I suppose she doesn’t want to own me”—although she had received photographs of her father and Margery and thought Margery very beautiful. By the end of August, however, a beautiful letter had come from Margery, and Juliet was assuring Nancy Sutherland, “You need never fear I shall be upset or resentful about the marriage. I was shocked of course but I think it is a marvellous thing—in fact the only thing.”

  She added a plea—probably directed more at prison authorities, who would read the letter, than at Nancy—to be left alone. “I will never look back,” she wrote, “but I find it very hard because there seem to be so many people unremittingly trying to bind me down and say ‘you must do this or that or the other’, all of which tightens a net around me and makes me feel panicky. I will make a new character and a good one. I’ve learnt my lesson and I’m sorry and I’ll never lose my head again. I’ll rehabilitate myself, grow into a new person … but I must do it myself without being watched over and dictated to. I must do it myself, no one can do it for me or help me.”

  Hilda and Bill had, in fact, been having a dreadful time. By December 1955, when Hilda belatedly replied to a letter from Nancy, they were living in Ullesthorpe, a small village in Leicestershire. “Most of this past year,” she confided to her old friend, “has been too difficult.… We were so badly broke that for months we scrambled through each week as it came along, vainly hoping for something better to turn up. In the end I went to the Labour Exchange and got me a job. I’d wanted to do this first not last, but there were real reasons why I didn’t. I found it almost physically impossible to talk to anyone. I had to gear myself up to do the simplest necessary shopping. I wanted to keep free to see Jonty when I could. I needed to keep Bill’s courage and hope alive

  that a job would turn up.

  “As I walked alone for miles day after day, and as the weeks passed, I suppose I became less sub-human and held on to my will to live, which at times had been non-existent. Make no mistake about my interpretation of broke. Cheap digs, no sherry to help drown my confusion.”

  The day after she got a job Bill Perry too found employment, with the Daimler Motor Company in Coventry. The couple had since bought a house, which they would “share with the mortgage brokers for the next twenty years! But
it makes a big difference and gives us the chance to lift our heads again”.

  Although Hilda had been in favour of Hulme taking their son home to England while Bill Perry remained to support her in New Zealand during the trial, she was bitter that her former husbandhad readily found employment while Bill had struggled. “The scandal attached to the trial broke Bill’s career,” she wrote. “If he had left New Zealand before the trial it would have been different, but becausehe offered to stay instead of Henry he was too involved. On return he found he was too highly qualified for just any job he was willing to do, and the top jobs needed influence no one would give him under the circumstances.” He now had a job at a quarter of the salary he should have, but it was a start. “We can live on it, just.”

  Henry’s feet, she complained, “just don’t touch the earth”. No one meeting him would have a clue that anything had happened to upset him. “He seems to have some magic formula which sees to it that nothing does. If a thing may be unpleasant he turns away from it and, heigh presto, it isn’t there.”

  She closed her long sorrowful letter saying she had written Christmas letters to others in New Zealand, where there were still “a few people left who have compassion for those in deep trouble”, but there was no one else to whom she had written as freely and honestly. “On my long lonely walks I’ve talked to you many hours and wanted you near me. Did you ever feel this, I wonder? Or did you think I’d slid off, ridding myself of all the past and indulging in a life of careless luxury? … It is nearly two years since you and I spent that halcyon few days at the cottage. Two years or two lifetimes. Oh Nancy, what utter tragedy. And I couldn’t know, I simply couldn’t guess…”