Anne Perry and the Murder of the Century

by Peter Graham

  It seems only the most miserable, shallow and gutless of beings—uncaring of anyone or anything—would not commit murder if

  the circumstances called for it. It is a point of view completely in accordance with the fifteen-year-old Juliet Hulme’s declaration to Dr Bennett that “the best people are those who fight against all obstacles in the pursuit of happiness”.

  “Even murder?” Bennett had asked.

  “Oh yes,” she replied, “if necessary.”

  CHAPTER 36

  A Lesbian View

  The murder of Honorah Rieper took an extraordinary hold on the popular imagination. Accounts of the case were published in many anthologies of crime, among them The World’s Worst Murderers, Greatest Criminals of All Time, The Deadly Innocents: Portraits of Children Who Kill, Queens of Crime, Murderous Innocents, Killer Couples: Terrifying True Stories of the World’s Deadliest Duos, and The World’s Wickedest Women.

  At least three novels appeared. The Evil Friendship by American Marijane Meaker, writing under the pseudonym Vin Packer, and Obsession by Tom Gurr and H.H. (Harold) Cox, two of the Australian reporters who had covered the trial, were both published in 1958. Inspired by newspaper reports of the case, English novelist Beryl Bainbridge completed Harriet Said that same year, but did not find a publisher until 1972. One of the rejection letters said the author had made the two central characters “repulsive almost beyond belief”.

  In 1991 a serious book-length study of the case appeared. Parker and Hulme: A Lesbian View was written by Julie Glamuzina, a tutor in information technology, and Alison J. Laurie, a lecturer in women’s studies at Victoria University of Wellington. Laurie had come out as a lesbian when she was sixteen, and according to an article in New Zealand Listener “began a long search for others like herself”. Signs on her noticeboard at Victoria University read, “Grow your own dope, plant a man” and “The more I know about men, the more I like my dog”.

  Glamuzina and Laurie set out to write about the murder from a pro-lesbian, feminist point of view. Laurie later explained, “I sympa­thised with the girls and thought that they must have had some stronger provocation for committing such a deed than was apparent from the newspaper stories.” The result sometimes makes for uncomfortable reading. Laurie believes Parker and Hulme were made such public monsters that for thirty-five years it was difficult for any lesbians to come out in New Zealand.

  In 1995, an updated edition of the book, published in America, included an introduction by B. Ruby Rich, a cultural scholar and film critic. Rich claimed that in Christchurch lesbianism was, at the time of the murder, as taboo as matricide. It’s not surprising she would think so. Glamuzina and Laurie confront their readers with a vision of New Zealand in the 1950s that is alarmingly black. There is rigorous censorship of films and publications. Films reinforce a “romantic, heterosexual model of life”. Māori are oppressed and exploited by the white majority, whose racism is also directed against Chinese, Yugoslavs, Jews, Indians and Lebanese. Persons of Indian origin are not allowed the best seats in picture theatres. At a South Auckland primary school, Māori boys are made to use segregated toilet facilities. This last piece of information, astounding news to anyone who attended a state primary school in the 1950s, came from a Communist Party newspaper, People’s Voice, as did other illustrations of the evils of the time.

  It did not end there. Racially offensive words such as chink, chow, nigger, dago, wop and wog were, Glamuzina and Laurie claimed, used conversationally. Many jobs were advertised in gender-specific terms. Sex outside marriage was frowned on, especially for women—although many broke the sexuality codes. Divorced women and unmarried mothers were reviled as loose and immoral. Women were unwelcome in public bars. Canterbury itself was a “deeply stratified society” and the city of Christchurch “conservative … reflecting its origins as a white, class-conscious, Anglican settlement”.

  In the 1995 edition of the book the authors quoted Fay Weldon, who lived in Christchurch as a child and briefly attended Girls’ High. Weldon said it did not surprise her that two girls from her old school had taken one of their mothers and battered her to death. Post-war New Zealand was “repressive and repressed”. In fact Weldon had left New Zealand forever in 1946 at the age of thirteen, eight years before the murder.

  Glazumina and Laurie had little doubt of one thing. “Did Pauline and Juliet have a lesbian relationship? In our view they did, although there are difficulties involved in using the term ‘lesbian’ for women and girls in the past who may not have defined themselves in this way.” The fact is that Juliet Hulme—Anne Perry—has never defined herself as lesbian. More than fifty years later, she still adamantly denies she is, or ever was, lesbian.

  Parker and Hulme: A Lesbian View championed the normality of the two girls and took issue with anything that might amount to criticism of them. There was nothing odd, the authors insisted, about the girls calling each other—and demanding that others called them—Deborah and Gina. “We think it is common that teenage girls experi­ment with names and identities this way.” Similarly, Pauline’s diary entry about the Port Levy revelation, rather than evidence of paranoia, could, they asserted, be an actual record of a religious experience, experimental writing, over-romantic prose describing a beautiful setting, or a reference to an “emotional physical encounter” between the two girls.

  From Glamuzina’s and Laurie’s perspective, the girls’ talents were “unjustly devalued by agents of the dominant culture”. Pauline’s poem The Ones That I Worship, far from showing a lack of talent, contained “some interesting lines, with a lively use of language and some sense of rhythm”. And many women had, like these girls, dreamed of pub­lishing poetry and novels that were unlikely to find publishers “because of oppressive publishing controls and dismissive male critics”. Nor did the girls’ plans to travel overseas and publish their writings show a neglect of reality. In Glamuzina and Laurie’s eyes, the steps taken by the girls to achieve their travel goals, such as Pauline visiting shipping companies and collecting money “by various means, including stealing”, were practical ones.

  Even bolder was the claim that Parker and Hulme probably had little idea of the permanence of death or what it meant. Many found this hard to believe. While very young children sometimes have difficulty comprehending the permanence of death, Pauline and Juliet clearly understood that killing Nora Rieper meant she would be dead forever, as evidenced by the past tense in Juliet’s chilling words, “There’s nothing in death. After all, she wasn’t a very happy woman.”

  Glamuzina and Laurie argued that Juliet and Pauline were not in any way mentally abnormal. “Psychiatrisation”—the supposed pre­sump­tion that females who commit crimes must be mentally ill—was no more than the hostile prejudice of a male-dominated world. They deplored Reg Medlicott’s belief that there could be a connection between homosexuality and paranoia. “Medlicott’s diagnosis had been rejected, not only in the legal sense, but also in medical terms, at the Supreme Court trial. Psychiatrists for the prosecution had clearly refuted the concept of folie à deux and had explicitly denied that there was any connection between paranoia and homosexuality.” Indeed, any hypothesis that might reinforce negative attitudes about lesbian­ism was unthinkable. The jury’s verdict rejecting insanity as a defence was, in their view, the end of the matter.

  Convinced the girls were not insane, Glamuzina and Laurie pondered whether the family circumstances of the Rieper or Hulme families could help answer the question “Why was Honora Parker killed?” There were, they pointed out, secrets and stresses in both households; both “contained many unresolved conflicts”. The relation­ship between Juliet and her mother, for example, had “conflicts typical of a culture which encouraged children to see the absence of a mother as neglect”. Even so, they rejected the idea that dysfunctionality within the Rieper or Hulme families might supply an answer: “The sugges­tion that some families are ‘dysfunctional’ implies the existence of a ‘functional’ family, a conce
pt we reject.”

  Their conclusion was that Hulme and Parker had found an “extreme solution” to the problem they faced, and by using violence had stepped outside expected gender patterns. “Pauline chose to kill her mother as the solution to the conflicts. Juliet chose to help her, possibly as a substitute for killing her own mother, or perhaps she simply wanted to help Pauline.”

  Alison Laurie would later suggest to a New Zealand Listener journalist that there were extenuating circumstances. “They were absolutely isolated as young lesbians. They undoubtedly felt that if they were separated they would never meet anyone else again—so they were desperate.”

  “These days,” she continued, “we would hope that two young lesbians in that position could ring up Lesbian Line and get advice and support.”

  Alison Laurie and Julie Glamuzina had a wilder theory to throw into the mix. As evidence in court showed, before dawn on Good Friday 1953 Pauline and Juliet had walked up a hill behind the Hulmes’ bach at Port Levy. Here, Pauline recorded in her diary, they had found a gateway through the clouds using an extra part of their brains possessed by only ten others, and looked into the beautiful 4th World where they would go when they died.

  Port Levy—Koukourarata—is a place of ancient Māori habitation, rich in sites of spiritual, cultural and historical significance for the Ngāi Tahu people. On the advice of Māori friends who read Pauline’s diary, Glamuzina and Laurie had consulted a local tohunga—a priestly expert. Far from the incident being, as Dr Medlicott had thought, evidence of paranoia, the tohunga believed it was an actual occurrence and the girls had entered another dimension. “A gateway through the clouds,” he said, might be a way to ascend to other worlds.

  He explained that mauri was the physical life force that came from the solar system and was controlled by kaitiaki, or guardians. Once a person knew where mauri was, karakia—prayers or incantations—or waiata tawhito—ancient songs—could get that person into another dimension. It was possible to enter this other dimension only twice a year, just before and after certain planets came into alignment. One of the times was at Easter. Pauline and Juliet appeared to have stumbled on this accidentally.

  The tohunga thought the fact the girls were so young and that Pauline was menstruating—as mentioned in her diary—made them especially vulnerable. It was possible, he thought, that the Saints were gatekeepers to the 4th World. Sexual symbolism was a key to what had happened: the girls’ “experiments” may have triggered a spiritual experience; their frequent bathing would have “provided an oppor­tunity for forces to go through them and to be received”.

  When it came to the question posed by Glamuzina and Laurie—“Why was Honorah Parker killed?”—the tohunga believed Pauline and Juliet had been near several wāhi tapu—sacred, forbidden places. Today these places are still known and feared by local Māori, as is a giant red octopus, or wheke, which residents of Port Levy say they have seen lurking off the eastern end of Horomaka Island, guarding it.

  The most tapu place is on the hillside climbed by the girls: the sacred red rocks of Te Ngarara. When the Port Levy reserve was being surveyed in 1849, the surveyor, Octavius Carrington, reportedly caused an uproar by standing on these rocks, and Māori still steer well clear of them. In the past the rocks were a tuahu—shrine—where tohunga performed rituals, and offerings were made to atua, the gods or spirits. The dead were laid to rest in caves among the rocks and lethally tapu items, such as the unwanted garments and food baskets of high-ranking chiefs and tohunga, were discarded there. The tuahu, like others of its kind, stood at a safe distance from dwellings.

  Airini Grennell’s grandfather Teone Taare Tikao, a highly learned man who lived in Port Levy from 1880 to 1889, had once said the sanctity of the tuahu was so great that any Māori who trespassed, even accidentally, on its immediate surroundings died. He did not need to be put to death: the shrine’s tapu killed him.

  Anyone walking up the hill behind the Hulmes’ bach would soon come to these sacred red rocks. Pauline and Juliet probably went there: it was a perfect place to look down over the bay and Horomaka Island. The tohunga told Glamuzina and Laurie that local Māori would be protected against such violations of tapu by their spiritual guardians. People in the know could protect themselves by taking cooked food; without it a disaster could happen. If it did the guardians would have to be placated with cooked food or blood. If blood was required, the person killed would have to be of that person’s own group.

  The tohunga concluded that the spiritual effect on the girls of this experience could have been the cause of the killing of Honorah Parker. As Glamuzina and Laurie wrote in their book, “Honorah’s death could be seen as a sacrifice.”

  Most people versed in such matters would challenge the notion that Pakeha-European New Zealanders could, by inadvertently violating a wāhi tapu, find themselves unconsciously programmed to kill a blood relation. The authors of Parker and Hulme: A Lesbian View, however, found the tohunga’s insights “compelling and helpful”.

  CHAPTER 37

  Stripped Naked

  Nineteen ninety-one was an eventful year for those following New Zealand’s most notorious murder case. Not only was the Glamuzina-Laurie book published, but in October a play based on the murder opened at the Court Theatre in Christchurch. Daughters of Heaven was written by a young American-born play­wright, Michelanne Forster. Since 1989 Forster had been interviewing everyone she could find who had known Juliet Hulme or Pauline Parker, or had any personal knowledge of the case. Information had not been given lightly. “Women tended to voice the same bewildered sentiment: ‘How could this have happened here in Christchurch?’ Most men were even more reticent. “It was a long time ago,” they would say. “I don’t recall. The girls were punished … what’s to be gained from talking about it now?”

  Despite having to prise information out of unwilling subjects, Forster had created brilliantly convincing characterisations of Pauline and Juliet that pulled audiences into the girls’ strange world. The produc­tion was a sensational success, proving particularly fascinating to people born after 1954. The following year the play was staged in Wellington, where critics praised its “gripping theatre” and “diamond-hard production”.

  Michelanne Forster was not the only person to have seen the strong dramatic potential in the story. At least two screenplays had already been written: Fallen Angels by Australian playwright Louis Nowra in 1987 and The Christchurch Murder by English writer Angela Carter in 1988. Neither would be produced, pipped at the post by a young Wellington film-maker, Peter Jackson, and his wife and collaborator Fran Walsh.

  Jackson and Walsh had a name among aficionados as auteur-directors of splatter movies but were little known to mainstream film audiences. Researching and writing the screenplay for their film, Heavenly Creatures, they were, like Michelanne Forster, having difficulty getting people to open up.

  “I can understand the reluctance of some people to talk with us, but it is very frustrating,” Jackson complained. “After all, the film is happening—nothing can stop it—and we’re trying so hard to make a good job of it. In a year it will all be over, and any information or thoughts people have held back will be of no use to us. Some people tell us, ‘You shouldn’t make the film until everyone involved has died.’ But what’s the use of that? How could it possibly be accurate if there’s no one left to talk to?”

  Nevertheless, he felt squeamish about the project. “I feel a bit guilty making a film about the death of someone’s mother,” he said. “It’s not the sort of thing I would want made about me.” He and Walsh also worried they would be accused of exploiting the girls or glamourising the crime.

  Jackson struggled—excessively perhaps—to justify the decision to go ahead. In New Zealand the case was “an open wound that has never healed,” he said. Interest had never gone away. He knew of five or six prospective films. Fellow New Zealand film-maker Jane Campion and Dustin Hoffman’s production company were just two who had shown interest. Given
that someone was going to make a film, Jackson and Walsh reckoned they could do the best job. “What was important to us was to make the film as fairly as possible, not taking sides in any way. … Deciding to do the film when we did may at least have stopped something more unsympathetic being made.” It came across as an odd aspiration: to make a film about a horrific murder in a manner sympathetic to the murderers.

  The evening Jackson and Walsh attended the opening party of Michelanne Forster’s Daughters of Heaven at Wellington’s Downstage Theatre there was lots of talk about Pauline Parker and Juliet Hulme. What had become of them? It was rumoured that Pauline was work­ing in a Catholic bookshop in Auckland. A former classmate of the two girls at Christchurch Girls’ High let it slip that Juliet was now a writer named Perry living in Scotland. This morsel was picked up by Lin Ferguson, a journalist for the Wellington tabloid Sunday News.

  In July 1994, three months before Jackson and Walsh’s film was to be released, Ferguson decided to try and track down Juliet Hulme. It proved amazingly easy. There was an entry for an Anne Perry in the reference work Contemporary Authors. Perry’s date of birth was given as October 28, 1938, Juliet Hulme’s birthday. Her mother was listed as H. Marion Perry (née Reaveley) and her father as Walter Perry. It was well known that Walter Perry had been Hilda Hulme’s lover and that Hilda had changed her name to Perry. It was all very obvious. A recent photograph of Anne Perry closely matched photographs of Juliet Hulme at the time of the trial.

  Ferguson agonised about whether to go with the story. “I knew I was going to blow up this woman’s life after forty years.” Before going public she phoned Peter Jackson, who spent an hour trying to persuade her not to run the story. “They’re not Nazi war criminals,” he argued. “They don’t deserve to be hunted down.”