Anne Perry and the Murder of the Century

by Peter Graham

  She added that her mother was coming to spend Christmas with them. “I shall like having her, though she wants to save me, naturally, for God. God help me if he can. Send me your love some time. I need it.”

  CHAPTER 33

  A Fresh Start

  Pauline Parker arrived at Arohata with her head turned by her association with Juliet Hulme and the notoriety the highly publicised murder had gained her. She could see no good reason why she should take part in prison work. “I am a special case here,” she informed a staff member. She had to be reminded repeatedly that she was just another inmate.

  Apart from two prison officers who shared her interests in music and literature, she treated the staff disdainfully. An observer noted that to those not on her wavelength she maintained a cool, aloof, often sarcastic disposition, and frequently an icy politeness. For a long time she refused to have any contact with her fellow prisoners, most of whom were young Māori girls with little education. Mainly they were ship girls—prostitutes who hid away on ships to service the seamen.

  Beneath her defiant attitude, however, she was badly missing her beloved “Pandy”, as she now nicknamed Juliet. She wrote in her diary, “I have been walking around with tears streaming down my face lately. Oh Pandy, how I miss you. I, who adored you. I, who worship you. What did I do that I should lose you?” In January 1955 it was noted in her prison file that she had developed an interest in collecting maga­zine and newspaper cuttings of anything pertaining to crime and terror, including overseas murder cases. She was also collecting photo­graphs of intense love scenes cut from magazines.

  Regulations allowed her to write three letters a week, each of two pages, to approved recipients. She was not permitted to write to Juliet, although there is likely to have been an underground line of com­muni­cation through prisoners transferred between Mt Eden and Arohata. According to staff notes, she wrote intelligent and amusing letters to a school friend, signing herself “Nina”, “Rosemarie” and “Pauline (ugh, loathsome name)”. Letters to her father, her grand­mother and her sister Wendy were almost virtuously loving and under­standing. She took trouble over them, once recording in her diary, “I have written to Nana and composed it very well, I think.” She signed these letters “Yvonne”.

  Her family was less communicative. Wendy did not write until January 1955 and her father until October the same year. He visited her only once at Arohata and described the experience as depressing.

  Although N.Z. Truth had assured its readers the girl prisoners would not escape the normal work routine on account of their studies, Pauline became increasingly involved with school work and less with sewing, laundering and floor scrubbing. Provided with text books by the Department of Justice, after a while she was virtually studying full-time. Although initially ambivalent, her attitude improved as she began correspondence lessons for School Certificate, which she passed in five subjects, before taking on University Entrance. Her hard work was rewarded with an outing: she was allowed to visit Victoria University in Wellington during the academic vacation to see what a university was like.

  Prison authorities noted that as she spent less time doing work she regarded as demeaning, she became more relaxed and likeable. But she was subject to dramatic mood swings. When in an up mood, she would dismay prison officers with her lordly opinions. “I think pleasure is the only thing to live for,” she once pronounced. But there were bouts of sadness. One day in March 1955 she was observed weeping, and wrote in her diary that she was lonely and felt terrible about what she had done to her father and her family. A few days later, though, she was again mixing with the other girls, “playing cards … happy, bright and cheerful”.

  In April she was thinking about escaping. She wrote in her diary that she could pretend to be ill: when one of the staff came in she could overpower her, grab her keys, and lock her up in the cell. The following month she began worrying about her health, thinking she was about to have a heart attack. The prison’s medical officer found her heart was normal but that she was overweight and needed to go on a diet; prison had quickly cured her of bulimia. Despite trying hard she often succumbed to the temptation of cake and pudding.

  Within a year of arriving at Arohata, Pauline embarked on two close relationships with fellow inmates. One would come to an unhappy end when her friend accused her of stealing her chocolate. There was a complaint from a third inmate. “Pauline keeps putting her arm around her and calling her ‘dear’ and ‘darling’,” a prison officer recorded. The staff seem not to have thought any the worse of her for it, and by the time Pauline left Arohata she was regarded as a model prisoner—polite, studious and “exemplary” in her behaviour.

  Notwithstanding the secretary for justice’s promise that the girls should be interchanged from time to time between the two prisons, this never happened. Although the government’s psychiatric advisers believed Juliet had been the dominant character that may not have been the reason she spent most of her sentence at Mt Eden: Barnett, after all, had given his word the two would be accorded equal punish­ment. More likely it was a simple matter of convenience.

  In August 1958 Pauline was transferred to Christchurch Prison at Paparua and Hulme to Arohata. Speaking as controller-general of prisons, Barnett assured the public that parole for the two girls had not been considered. The period of their sentences remained the same—indefinite detention. Given that both Arohata and Mt Eden prisons were less agreeable places than Paparua, Juliet Hulme was

  still getting the rough end of the stick. Still, at Arohata she would some­times be given day release to travel by train to Wellington to use the Victoria University library, and she received regular visits from a psychologist, Beatrice Beeby, the wife of the director of education.

  At Paparua, Pauline was regularly visited by Wendy, Rosemary, Nana Parker and her father, and by friends of the Hulmes, Professor Henry Field and his wife Helen. The Fields were ideally suited to be prison visitors. Henry Field held the chair of education at Canterbury University College and had long had an interest in the psychology of criminal behaviour and delinquency, which he had studied at Harvard under, among others, Sheldon Glueck. Helen Field was a doctor specialising in the care of mothers and children.

  In October 1958 Pauline spent the first of many monthly parole weekends staying with the Fields. By then she was studying French and English for a Bachelor of Arts and, probably at Professor Field’s instigation, being tutored by a Professor Sussex, head of the university’s French department, and Gordon Troup, a senior lecturer in French. In December 1958 she was notified she had scored an A pass in English and a B in French. The following year she began studying Māori language and anthropology.

  Pauline seemed to wage a continual internal struggle between good and evil. At Arohata the cold sarcastic young woman with a sinister fascination for murder co-existed with the polite studious model prisoner who “tried to be good”, just as the dutiful sister and churchgoer had also enjoyed shoplifting, sex and revelling in “the thing called Sin”. At Paparua she began taking religious instruction from a Roman Catholic priest, Father Tom Cahill, the director of Catholic Social Services. In December 1958 she attended mass for

  the first time at the Mount Magdala Asylum, an institution founded by the Sisters of the Good Shepherd “for the reformation of fallen women”. Throughout 1959 she would attend mass at Mount Magdala once a month.

  In February 1959 rumours surfaced about Juliet Hulme’s future. London’s Sunday Express claimed “the English girl who shocked the world by helping to murder her school friend’s mother may soon be released from jail in New Zealand and come to England”. A former inmate had told the newspaper’s reporter Juliet expected to be released before her twenty-first birthday on November 28. (In fact her birthday was October 28.) Juliet had developed into an expert dressmaker, she said, and had ideas of setting up a dress shop in England. She had let it be known she never wanted to see Pauline Parker again.

  Asked to comment, the minister of
justice said Her Majesty’s pleasure was a matter for him to advise upon and the question of Juliet Hulme’s release had not been considered. The following day Sam Barnett said that the question of parole for Juliet Hulme and Pauline Parker had not yet been before the Parole Board. Ten months later, on December 4, he confirmed that both had been released from prison a month earlier. Their release had been ordered by the Executive Council. No official announcement had been made at the time because the Justice Department wished to give them an opportunity to make a fresh start in life without being identified.

  The girls had served nearly five and a half years. By today’s standards, this would be considered a short period in jail for such a brutal, premeditated murder. A similar crime, committed by offenders of similar age, would be likely to result in life imprisonment with a ten- to fifteen-year minimum non-parole period.

  Were prison officials confident both girls had been completely rehabilitated, Barnett was asked. He avoided a direct answer. They had been under “the closest study” during their imprisonment and had “developed in a highly satisfactory manner”, he said. Both had pursued “wholesome interests”. They had advanced their education and one had gone forward, with a great measure of success, towards a Bachelor of Arts degree. The parole board had concluded that individually neither would have committed the crime; it was a one-in-a-million chance that their association had been of such a nature as to lead to their planning such an outrageous act.

  It has often been said, not least by Juliet Hulme herself, that a condition of the girls’ release was that they were to have no further communication. This was not so. The Sydney Sun-Herald quoted

  Barnett as saying, “Miss Hulme’s release is unconditional. … Miss Parker’s release is subject to general control as to her residence, employment and the like”. Asked if the girls had been given, or been asked to give, an understanding to keep apart or refrain from corresponding, the secretary for justice said they had not been released on such a condition.

  Juliet Hulme had already left New Zealand, Sam Barnett told the press. She had gone to Australia to make a fresh start. In Sydney, she had walked around the streets without being recognised. It was a disingenuous comment, perhaps designed to put the press off the scent. In fact the New Zealand government had provided its released prisoner with a new passport and a new identity: she was now Anne Steward. At Wellington’s Rongotai Airport she had been farewelled by the Arohata matron, who had become fond of her. Florence Howland stood waving as Juliet walked across the tarmac to the plane. Juliet did not turn around. “She never showed any remorse for her part in the murder,” Howland said.

  It was true that Juliet had flown to Sydney—but there she had boarded a plane for Rome.

  Henry Hulme, recently promoted to chief of atomic research at Aldermaston, had arranged to meet his daughter when she arrived in Italy. He discussed his plans with Vivien Dixon, who was by then back in England. He and Margery would take the car across to France by ferry and drive to Rome, he told her. Having collected Juliet, they would make their way back to England when things had quietened down a bit.

  Vivien Dixon had met Margery once and not liked her much.

  She was shocked Margery would be present when Henry met his daughter for the first time in nearly six years. Inevitably, the meeting was a disaster. The two women took an instant dislike to each other. Margery later told Vivien she would not have Juliet to stay in the house. She was dangerous to have around.

  When she reached England, Juliet—now Anne—was lively, unabashed, and overjoyed to be reunited with her mother and Bill Perry. Her spirits seemed in no way subdued by her years in prison. She later said her mother never talked about her crime. “She felt we should leave it behind. I think, in many ways, she didn’t want to feel guilty. Maybe she thought that if she’d been there for me more as a teenager this may not have happened.”

  After the long car journey from Rome, Margery couldn’t stand the sight of her stepdaughter, but Juliet bore her father not the slightest ill will on account of his marriage. Father and daughter enjoyed each other’s company, but they had to be careful about being seen together. Because of his job, Henry Hulme was fairly well known. If he were regularly seen with a young woman it would not be hard for people to work out that Anne Steward was Juliet Hulme, the murderess. Their meetings often took place at the National Gallery or the Tate; they would wander around looking at paintings before having a quiet lunch. When her twenty-second birthday approached, Anne requested a bracelet of carnelians she had seen and admired. Henry, always careful about money, balked at the expense until she reminded him she had cost him nothing for over five years.

  Anne had learnt shorthand typing in prison and found it easy to get a job as a secretary. After a couple of years, she moved into a flat and started to go out with boys. “I was always dreading the day I’d have to tell somebody what I had done,” she later told a journalist who interviewed her, “but in the end I only ever felt close enough to one boyfriend to tell him.” She was keen to stress her heterosexuality. Pauline Parker was “a very good friend. We had all sorts of romantic dreams. … I like women very much as good friends but for romance it has to be a male.”

  Not long after arriving in England, she changed her name from Anne Steward to Anne Stewart Perry. Where the Stewart came from is a matter of conjecture. It is unlikely she chose it in honour of “Stewpot”, her old headmistress at Christchurch Girls’ High. It may have been from her maternal grandmother, whose middle name was Stuart. Probably, though, it was just a modification of Steward, the name supplied by the New Zealand government. As for her use of “Perry”, she once remarked, “After my mother remarried, my step­father legally adopted me so I took his name.” It was an odd explanation. Why, as an adult on friendly terms with her father, would she have been legally adopted by Bill Perry? Another time she remarked that it was obvious that if she were to live with her mother and Bill Perry and “be their daughter” she should take their name.

  She had not lost the urge to go to Hollywood. According to some­one who heard the story from Anne herself, she went to the American embassy in London to apply for a visa and was interviewed by a consular official. Everything was going swimmingly until the last question.

  “Any criminal convictions?” the official asked the beautiful, self-possessed young woman sitting in front of him.

  “Oh, just something when I was fifteen,” she answered airily.

  “Well, I’m sure that’s no problem,” the official said. As she was walking towards the door, he thought to ask what it was for.

  The visa was not granted.

  After three years in London, Anne Stewart Perry moved to the historic market town of Hexham in Northumberland, near Hadrian’s Wall.

  No doubt a strong part of the town’s appeal was that it lay within

  the territory of her ancestors the Reaveleys, hereditary bailiffs of the manor of Chatton to the Earls of Northumberland.

  Anne then hatched a plan. She secured a job as a stewardess for an airline that flew frequently to the United States. The airline had a block visa for its air crew, allowing members to enter for short stays. After a few return flights she told her father that next time she went to America she would not be coming back. True to her word, she jumped ship in Los Angeles and was soon working as a nanny for a Hollywood couple.

  Eventually she would get the visa she had been denied in London. She later insisted she had disclosed her murder conviction to United States immigration officials, who had issued her with a full visa and work permit after studying a transcript of the trial. There is no way of knowing if this is true.

  Anne Stewart Perry lived in southern California from 1967 to 1972. As she tells the story she rented a Beverly Hills apartment “on the wrong side of the tracks, in a street lined with jacarandas” and worked as a limousine dispatcher and an insurance underwriter.

  She had an active social life with many boyfriends but never married, although she “came near t
o it once or twice”. According to Vivien Dixon, she was once engaged.

  At the age of twenty-six, Anne became a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. While keeping her past hidden from her everyday social contacts, she claims to have revealed her crime to the church before being baptised.

  It is not difficult to see the attraction of Mormonism for the former Juliet Hulme. As a girl she had not been able to believe in the idea of hell on the grounds it was “too inartistic”. In Mormonism there is no eternal hell or damnation: everyone is saved. When you reach heaven, there are three levels. The lowest and most heavily populated, the telestial kingdom, is for those who have not accepted Jesus as their saviour—including unrepentant “liars and sorcerers and adulterers and whoremongers”. Above it, the terrestrial kingdom caters for essentially good people who have been led astray by the wickedness of the world and not done enough to spread the gospel of Jesus. Such people fall short of achieving “exaltation”. This spirit world is located on Earth but in “another dimension”. At times the veil lifts and it is possible to see the spirits.

  At the top of the pyramid is the celestial kingdom where God lives. This is the highest goal for Mormons. Getting there requires baptism, faith, endurance and various rituals, including the cleansing of sins. No one can enter without the presumed consent of the church’s founder, Joseph Smith. “Eternal marriage” is a prerequisite, although people who have failed to get married on Earth will get another chance after Christ’s second coming. Those exalted to the celestial kingdom become gods themselves: kings and queens who dwell with God for all eternity.