Anne Perry and the Murder of the Century

by Peter Graham

  No other religion could offer such an alluring prospect to a young woman who, according to her own mother, had believed herself to be a god at the age of fifteen. And the Mormon afterlife was very much like her own youthful concept of heaven for the masses and paradise for the chosen few.

  Just as appealing was the church’s doctrine on sin. In Mormon belief a person commits a sin only when he or she does the opposite of what they know to be right—thereby violating their conscience. Doing wrong without knowing it to be wrong is deemed a mere “blunder”. In the words of The Book of Mormon, “He that knoweth not good from evil is blameless.” Adam and Eve could not have committed a sin while in the Garden of Eden because knowledge of good and evil had not been given to them.

  Anne Stewart Perry seems to have wholeheartedly embraced this teaching. She once explained Mormons believe that, in order to grow, Adam and Eve had to bite the apple in the Garden of Eden. “You can only learn the difference between good and evil with experience. …

  I like its doctrine that you have to keep on learning, and that no one is excluded, no one is penalised. … I don’t believe that Adam and Eve sinned. We need to know about good and evil, and we need to make mistakes.”

  It is a short hop to the corollary: someone who “makes mistakes” —even big mistakes like helping bash someone to death—learns more about good and evil, grows more and becomes a better person than the less mistake-prone.

  CHAPTER 34

  Blighted Lives

  When she left prison Pauline Parker also changed her

  name. By deed poll, registered on December 1, 1959, she became Hilary Nathan. Chris Cooke, a journalist who has closely studied the Parker–Hulme case, believes that as a devout Catholic she may have chosen the name Nathan with an Old Testament story in mind. David, King of Israel, spots the beautiful Bathsheba, wife of Uriah the Hittite, bathing on the roof of her house. He has her brought to him and lies with her. Bathsheba’s husband is away fighting in David’s army. David arranges for Uriah to be killed, instructing his commander, Joab, to put him “in the forefront of the hottest battle, and retire ye from him, that he may be smitten and die”. God sends Nathan to David to inform him of his wrath at David’s despicable act. When the king admits he has sinned, Nathan tells him he is forgiven: “The Lord also hath put away thy sin.”

  Cooke was told by a Catholic priest that a person who chose the name Nathan would be indicating they had repented of their sins.

  This theory overlooks the fact that Nathan was God’s messenger, not a repentant sinner. A more mundane possibility, also suggested by Cooke, is that Pauline had been fond of a social worker at Arohata whose surname was Nathan.

  As it had been a condition of Parker’s release that she be under the supervision of the Department of Justice, in February 1960

  she was ordered to report to the probation office in Auckland. She resumed her studies towards a Bachelor of Arts degree at Auckland University, supporting herself with manual work, which included washing bottles in a hospital. At the time she graduated in 1963,

  her probation officer expressed concern that she was mixing with lesbians.

  Sometime after leaving university, Hilary decided to become a nun. She entered a convent as a novice, but after a short time was found unsuited to life in an enclosed order. She would have to find salvation in the outside world. By 1964 she was living in a cottage in Lyall Bay, a Wellington seaside suburb, and attending the New Zealand Library School. Cooke, writing in the New Zealand Woman’s Weekly, told readers that Hilary’s fellow students found her mysterious and secretive; she made sure she was absent on the day of the class photograph. Someone who claimed to be a close friend at the time said she had had no idea who Hilary Nathan was. “There was some­thing from her past she kept well hidden.”

  In 1965 she moved back to Auckland, where she worked as a librarian at Auckland University. In time the Justice Department decided she no longer needed to be on probation and her release from prison became unconditional. Soon afterwards she left her job at the university and disappeared, her whereabouts known to only a very few.

  Pauline Parker’s murder of her mother blighted many other lives: she had every reason to “feel terrible” about what she had done to her family. As well as emotional torture, the Riepers suffered dire financial consequences. They had relied on income from boarders, but without Nora that business came to an end. Bert Rieper struggled to pay off the legal fees for his daughter’s defence. In 1957, when Alec Haslam was appointed a judge of the Supreme Court, he learned his fees were still causing the family hardship and generously waived the large outstanding balance.

  There were also legal complications. The house at 31 Gloucester Street was registered in Nora’s name, as was Nana Parker’s home, an attractive two-storied Victorian house near the Avon River off Bealey Avenue. The arrangement had almost certainly been set up to make it easier for the family to secure mortgage finance through Eric Cleland’s firm where Nora worked and—on the reasonable assumption that Nora would outlive her mother—avoid future death duties. Now death duties were payable. And there was another matter to be resolved. Pauline was a beneficiary under her mother’s will but Bert was determined she would not benefit from her crime. More legal

  fees were incurred sorting out the estate.

  For the first few years after the murder, Nana Parker lived with Bert and Wendy in Gloucester Street, where the three of them were able to look after one another. It is possible the Public Trust, as Nora’s executor, collected much-needed rental income from Nana Parker’s house in Churchill Street while the estate was being wound up. The house was finally sold in 1957.

  Bert Rieper saw little of Pauline. Although he drove her grand­mother and sisters to see her after she was transferred to Paparua, he himself paid few visits and wrote few letters. Not a churchgoing man, he had little to say to her and never forgave her. On learning she had been released he reportedly said, “It still doesn’t make up for robbing a person of their life. It was evil between them that did it, pure evil.”

  Two things happened to alleviate a little of the sadness in Bert’s life: his unmarried sister, Rhoda, came from Tasmania to take care of him, and as a result of the publicity about the trial his sons Ken and Andre got in touch. Over the years they and their families would visit him when they came to the South Island, apparently bearing him no resentment for having abandoned them as children. In later years Bert lived in a sad little flat in Upper Riccarton. Wherever he went for the rest of his life he was an object of pity, with people pointing at him and whispering. He died of a respiratory condition in 1981.

  Pauline’s sister Wendy, seventeen at the time of the murder, would say it was the worst thing that could ever have happened to her. A serious boyfriend whom she had hoped to marry was put off by the scandal that enveloped her family. In the circumstances she was extraordinarily loyal to her sister. “I can’t believe what’s happened.I don’t want to accept this,” she wrote to Pauline in prison. The alternative, she said, was to hate her for the rest of her life for taking her mother away. Pauline’s reply was matter-of-fact “It just all got out of hand,” she wrote. “I don’t know what happened and I just want to keep in touch with you.”

  Although Wendy married and had children, when she looked back she felt her life had been unhappier than her sister’s. While Pauline had been able to escape New Zealand with a new identity,

  she had had to stay and deal with the situation. “There are thousands of people out there who will look and say, ‘Oh, you know who she is, don’t you?’” she told a journalist. “I have to live with that and I’m very sensitive to it.”

  Over the years the sisters kept in touch. “I loved her and she still loves me,” Wendy said. It would be thirty-three years before they were able to discuss the murder. Pauline reminded Wendy she had always been an extremist. Even as a little girl she would go overboard when things went against her, she said.

  Wendy believes her sister underst
ood what she was doing and had intended to kill their mother, but had not fully understood the finality of death. “After it happened, she was very sorry about it. It took her about five years to realise what she had done.”

  CHAPTER 35

  A Secret Past

  All Anne Stewart Perry ever wanted to do was write. There was, she once said, no plan B. In Hexham, in Los Angeles, and later in England, where she returned in 1972 after Bill Perry became seriously ill, she wrote steadily. By 1978 she had produced several historical novels, all of which had been rejectedby publishers. She was living in the small Suffolk town of Saxmundham when by a stroke of luck the house next door was bought by a writer. Through this connection Anne met a literary agent, Meg Davis, and showed her her latest novel. The Cater Street Hangman was a murder mystery set in Victorian London; the idea had come from a conversation with Bill Perry about Jack the Ripper. The book was quickly accepted for publication in the United States and became a commercial success. Anne shortened her name to the crisper “Anne Perry”. She was now forty-one and a very attractive-looking woman.

  In The Cater Street Hangman five young women are murdered by a serial killer, who garrottes them with a cheese wire and disfigures their breasts with knife wounds. The killer turns out to be the crazed wife of a vicar, to whom the victims had been a temptation to fleshly lust. The language is at times florid. “You creature of the devil,” the murderer raves. “You tempted me with your white arms and your flesh but you shan’t win! The Lord said better you should not have been born than you should have tempted and brought to destruction one of these, my little ones, and brought them to sin. … I know how your body burns, I know your secret lusts, but I shall destroy you all, till you leave me alone in peace. Satan shall never win!”

  It is all too much for wide-eyed Charlotte Ellison, soon to marry Inspector Pitt and become the heroine of the series. “I didn’t even know women could feel like that—about other women,” she gasps, echoing Juliet Hulme’s reply to Dr Bennett twenty-four years earlier when he asked her about homosexual practices.

  While living in Saxmundham, Anne also met a woman who would become her lifelong companion. Meg MacDonald was in the throes of divorce, and like herself had little money. “We didn’t havea penny,” Meg remembered, “but we did have some good times.”

  Early in their friendship, Meg MacDonald learned of her friend’s secret past. She had begun to suspect something when they were studying the bible together. Anne “was irrationally against King David sending Uriah the Hittite into battle so he could have Bathsheba. We were discussing the idea of deliberately killing someone and it just came out”. It is an astonishing coincidence that the catalyst for Anne Perry’s confession was the biblical story that might have inspired Pauline Parker’s choice of a new name.

  The murder was a bogey that had always haunted her friend,

  Meg MacDonald said. “She is very, very insecure. She looks confident, but underneath there’s a lost little girl.” Anne would get into “a right tiswas” whenever the subject of capital punishment came up. Thiswas hardly surprising. Five hangings had taken place at Mt Eden during her time there. The whole prison knew there was to be a hanging when a tarpaulin was rigged up over the exercise yard inthe punishment block. The prisoners would hear a loud clang as the trapdoor of the gallows flew open.

  Many more books followed The Cater Street Hangman. There seemed to be, at least for a time, a literary collaboration between Anne and Meg. According to MacDonald, “We think about names and characters. Then Anne writes it out in longhand a chapter at a time. Anne will read the chapter to me, and we’ll go through it with a red pen. We’re always thinking of new things. We went to the Canary Islands and worked on eight books we chapterised and characterised for two weeks.”

  In 1988 Meg MacDonald moved north to Invernesshire in the Scottish highlands and Anne followed. “I came to visit Meg,” she explained, “and I fell in love with the place.” Portmahomack is a picturesque fishing village of around five hundred inhabitants on Dornoch Firth, fifty miles north of Inverness. Meg found her a cottage on the outskirts of the village, which she bought sight unseen.

  A few years later an old stone barn next to the cottage, with plan­ning permission for conversion into a motorcycle repair shop, came on the market. Not wanting a motorcycle repair shop next door, Anne bought the barn. With royalties from her books now rolling in, she converted it into what one visitor described as “an elegantly renovated, pseudo-Italian mansion and garden”. Although the exterior was dour, inside, a journalist reported, was “a riot of faux Tuscan reds and yellows and lime greens”. There were Italian chandeliers and gold taps in the guest bathroom. An ornamental fountain formed the centre­piece of a courtyard that had started life as a pigsty. A Jaguar anda sports car were sitting in the garage. Here Anne wrote six days a week, attended by two part-time secretaries, a full-time assistant, three gardeners and a housekeeper. On Sundays she worshipped for three hours at the nearest Mormon temple in Invergordon on Cromarty Firth.

  Her books gained a huge following, particularly in the United States and Germany. By 1994 she had sold more than three million copies in America and had a one-million-dollar contract for eight new ones. The books were replete with ethical and moral messages, some trite in the extreme (“If you love someone, you should be prepared to let them go”). Others might be seen as personally revealing (“If you are rejected enough, it hurts so much you lash out wherever you can. You pick the vulnerable people, not necessarily the ones that attacked you”). A certain unworldliness was occasionally visible (“Come for us when the chef is ready, Blunstone. And get me some of that claret again, same as last time. The Bordeaux was awful”).

  A writer for The Times saw her work as “one long debate between good and evil, and the grey areas between”. Anne Perry claimed, “There are so many understandable motives for crime—social ills, injustices, many of which are with us today.”

  An interesting aspect of the earlier Anne Perry books is the attitude to murder and murderers. In Bethlehem Road two members of parliament are murdered in fairly quick succession on Westminster Bridge. Both are found strung up to street lamps by their white silk evening scarfs with their throats cut. Inspector Thomas Pitt investi­gates and suspicion immediately falls on Florence Ivory, a well-known suffragist, and Miss Africa Dowell, the friend she lives with. Both murder victims had been instrumental in depriving Florence of the custody of her daughter.

  Florence, while having “no bosom to speak of” and shoulders that are “square and a trifle bony”, is “not unfeminine”, with large wide-set eyes and a “husky, sweet and completely unique” voice. When she thinks of the injustice done to her, “hatred twists her face and mouth that a moment before were mobile, soft and intelligent”. Africa Dowell is younger and bigger, with “a delicate bosom, rounded arms”, and a “face like a Rossetti model crowned with a cloud of auburn hair”. Inspector Thomas Pitt notices the way she puts her arm protectively around Florence’s slender frame, and directs anger at him on her friend’s behalf.

  Willingness to commit murder is depicted as admirable, even heroic. Florence has been heard to say there are occasions when violence is the only response to incurable wrongs. Pitt reports to his superior that she “certainly has the imagination and intelligence to do it, and the willpower”. He believes that when it comes to murder she will not be stopped by “fear or convention, risks to herself or other people’s doubts or beliefs … she was capable of it both emotionally and physically with Africa Dowell’s help”.

  Charlotte Pitt is of the same opinion. She takes one look at Florence and concludes that “a woman with a face like this could assuredly have loved and hated enough to do anything”. And Africa, with her ashen, Pre-Raphaelite face, would be prepared to defend what she loved—both the woman and the ideal. “It was a dreamer’s face, the face of one who would follow her vision and die for it.”

  Anne Perry spells it out: “Pitt liked murderers. … It was the pett
y sinners, the hypocrites, the self-righteous that he could not bear.” It turns out the killer is someone else entirely. Pitt’s admiration for murderers of the right type had thrown him off the scent.

  In Brunswick Gardens Miss Unity Bellwood plummets to her death down a staircase in the house of Reverend Ramsay Parmenter, a distinguished theologian. Even in death, this young woman, a brilliant student of languages, fluent in Greek and Aramaic, and a believer in free love, is “extremely handsome in a wilful and sensuous fashion”. She is found to be three months pregnant and suspicion falls on two young men, the startlingly handsome Dominic Corde and the Reverend Parameter’s son, who is studying for the Catholic priesthood. When the Reverend Parmenter attacks his wife Vita, a “most striking woman” with “very large wide-set eyes” and “very handsome shoulders and bosom”, suspicion falls on him as well.

  Once again, murder is the moral preserve of the passionate, the caring and the bold. Pitt—now a superintendent—agrees with wise old Lady Vespasia that people killed “because they cared about something so fiercely they lost all sense of reason and proportion. For a time their need eclipsed everyone else’s, even drowned out their own sense of self-preservation”.

  In Anne Perry’s other crime series, Inspector Monk, like Pitt, regards the capacity to commit murder as a test of character. In A Dangerous Mourning he ruminates that “to care for any person or issue enough to sacrifice greatly for it was the surest sign of being wholly alive. What a waste of the essence of a man that he should never give enough of himself to any cause, that he should always hear the passive, cowardly voice uppermost which counts the cost and puts caution first. One would grow old with the power of one’s soul untested…”

  Similar sentiments are uttered by a cook in one of the households. It is impossible, she thinks, that the maidservants could have done it. One is “too afraid of what’d happen to her, apart from anything else”, another is “far too mild to do anything so passionate” and a third “wouldn’t ’ave the courage either”.