Anne Perry and the Murder of the Century

by Peter Graham

  It was Anne Perry’s career as a writer of murder-mysteries that finally overcame Ferguson’s qualms. Towards the end of July she rang Perry’s literary agent, Meg Davis, in London. Davis noticed the jour­nalist phoning from New Zealand was in a great state of excitement. She wanted to know if Davis had heard of the Parker–Hulme murder or the film Heavenly Creatures. One of the murderers, Juliet Hulme, she contended, was now Anne Perry, the writer.

  “Hand on my heart, I think you’ve got the wrong woman,” Davis said. Her next thought was that she must immediately instruct lawyers to get an injunction in New Zealand before the Sunday News went to print. She needed Anne’s authority to do this.

  It was the telephone call Anne Perry had been dreading for thirty-five years. “There’s a ridiculous rumour going around in New Zealand. There’s a film being made about a murder. They say you’re Juliet Hulme, one of the… We must put it to rest.”

  “You can’t,” Perry said. “It’s the truth.”

  They both knew the news would soon hit Britain. Perhaps it would be in the papers next day. “It was an absolute unqualified night­mare,” Anne Perry would remember. “All I could think about was that my life would fall apart and it might kill my mother. … I thought I might lose my career, my home … It seemed so unfair. Everything I had worked so hard to achieve as a decent member of society was threatened.”

  Hilda was eighty-two, and according to Perry had a serious heart condition, but it was she who came up with a plan. “We must speak to the postmistress,” she announced firmly. “She is the heart of the village.” If they told the postmistress, the news would come from them and nobody else.

  Perry summoned the postmistress to her house and told her of her true identity. “It was the first time in years I had told anyone my secret,” she said. “It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do.” Then she phoned all the people she cared about. “That was absolutely bloody.”

  The story broke in the Sunday News on July 31 under the headline “MURDER SHE WROTE! BEST-SELLING BRITISH AUTHOR’S GRISLY KIWI PAST REVEALED”. Two days later it was picked up by the Scottish paper The Daily Record, and by August 5 English journalist Sarah Gristwood had been granted an interview with Anne Perry and produced a long sympathetic piece for The Daily Telegraph. According to Gristwood, Perry had been “literally half-fainting with distress” when they met. The story was headlined “When murder catches up with you”.

  The news then went global. For Anne Perry it was “a very painful business being stripped naked in front of the world”. Reporters laid siege to her house and camped on her mother’s lawn. Her companion Meg MacDonald snapped and snarled, trying to keep them at a dis­tance. But at least the Rosshire Mormons and the villagers of Portmahomack had been forewarned.

  If it were a personal crisis for Anne Perry, it was a commercial opportunity for her publishers. If it were handled carefully, the discovery that the author of their extremely popular murder mysteries was writing from personal experience might not be a bad thing.

  Peter Jackson’s worst fears had been realised: because the exposure of Anne Perry as the former Juliet Hulme was a publicity coup for his film, many felt he must be behind it. He was at pains to deny any responsibility. He had had no contact with either Anne Perry or Hilary Nathan, he said. “The last thing I [wanted] to happen was for them to be found out and exposed.” He insisted that by 1992 Anne Perry’s identity had, anyway, been an open secret among New Zealand literati.

  Jackson and Walsh had received a good deal of help with their screenplay from Hilda’s old friend Nancy Sutherland and had estab­lished a warm relationship with her. They were quick to write and assure her they had had no part in revealing Juliet’s new identity. Meanwhile, Hilda had received reports on Jackson’s film from, among others, a New Zealand friend, Brian Easton, who told her how helpful Nancy Sutherland had been to the film-makers. She wrote to thank Nancy. “Brian tells us you played a large part in putting an entirely different perspective on the events, more sensitive to the human frailties of them and their personal integrity. He speaks of you with affection and admiration. And now, because he has shared this with us, I can write to you again, for Anne as well as myself, and say a heartfelt ‘thank you’. We shall NOT be seeing the film, but have heard from many who have, around the world, much of its flavour etc, and now we know that you had a large part in this we want you to know how deeply and sincerely we appreciate your time and efforts.”

  In 1994 Sarah Gristwood met Peter Jackson at the Venice Film Festival, where Heavenly Creatures won a Silver Lion. She found him “rumpled, worried, friendly … Above all guilty”. He was still defending himself. The film, he said, might have been made less sympathetically by someone else, and he would never have made it had he known Anne Perry’s mother was still alive.

  He worried far too much. Anne Perry would say of her outing, “It was the best thing that could ever have happened because now I feel free. There’s nothing to be afraid of any more in the middle of the night.” Later on her website she would briskly dismiss the film that launched Peter Jackson’s international career. “I have been asked questions occasionally about the film Heavenly Creatures, but I cannot answer them. Neither I nor my family and friends knew anything about it until the day before it was released, and I have preferred not to see it, or comment on the accuracy or otherwise of any part of it. I am very grateful to that vast majority of generous people who allow me to move on and leave that grief behind.”

  After the world learned that the international bestselling crime writer Anne Perry had, in an earlier life in distant New Zealand, been Juliet Hulme, convicted murderer, she received, so she told Sarah Grist­wood, “the most incredible support. … No one has turned away. Everybody has said, ‘You were a child, this was forty years ago, we are right with you.’ I didn’t know there were so many compassionate, honourable people around.”

  To the Daily Mail she said, “People didn’t point. They didn’t stare, and I didn’t lose one single friend once my identity was out.” Someone had pushed a note under her door saying: “Don’t worry. We know you. We take you as you are, not as you were.” Even the Mormon Church supported her. She asked a senior figure if her membership would be affected—an odd question, given her stated position that the church knew about the murder before she became a member. “Your calling comes from God and He knows,” the elder assured her. It was all perhaps a little too perfect to be the absolute truth.

  Perry claimed to be surprised that the media were still so interested in her past. In an interview with The Times in March 2006 she com­plained, “Why do they all bring up something that happened fifty-two years ago?” She was being disingenuous: she and her publishers were well aware of the publicity value of her story. That particular interview had been arranged to promote her latest book, The Sins of the Wolf.

  The Times writer spelled out the big selling point. “Perry has an insight that few crime writers can boast of. Perry committed murder,

  in 1954. Her name back then was Juliet Hulme, played by Kate Winslet in the film Heavenly Creatures.” A bold sub-headline informed readers, “Her intimate knowledge of good and evil has brought literary acclaim”.

  The endless rehashing of Anne Perry’s past proved exceedingly good for sales. Up until August 1994, when Lin Ferguson blew her cover, her books had sold three million copies in America, her biggest market. By March 2006, according to The Times, twenty million had sold worldwide. In the intervening period Perry had retailed a version of her early history to, among others, The Daily Telegraph, The Times, The Guardian, USA Today and the Daily Mail. To publicise Weighed in the Balance, Robert McCrum of The Guardian: Weekend had been granted an interview extending over several days.

  Many of the interviews were reprinted in other newspapers and magazines, and formed the basis of many more articles published around the world. Perry was interviewed for United States television by Jamie Gangel of NBC and Bob Brown of ABC. She also appeared in The Poisone
d Pen series, on which specialist bookstore owner Barbara Peters interviewed crime writers. The videoed six-part interview was readily available online.

  On British television there was a prime-time interview with an uncomfortable Ian Rankin, the Scottish crime writer. It was clear from Perry’s comments to the creator of the Inspector Rebus series that a new line in mitigation had emerged. “I was an … accessory,” she murmured. “I was involved … there was no time to find a better solution.” Rankin lobbed a gentle question about redemption. “Redemption comes when you decide you want to become the person you want to be,” Perry replied.

  There was yet another interview when The Cater Street Hangman was dramatised for television by Ardent, the production company owned by Prince Edward. Perry was obviously pleased with the royal connection. “He [Prince Edward] said to me he could see the head­lines in print about us teaming up together—he actually came up with a few choice headlines himself,” she told British journalist Louise Gannon. “But he said he didn’t care, and that as far as he was concerned he was behind this project one hundred percent.”

  In 2007 Anne Perry consented to a documentary about her being made by Dana Linkiewicz, a young German film-maker. Linkiewicz and her crew followed their subject to an international writers’ conference in Vancouver and then spent six weeks at her home in Portmahomack.

  The film, Anne Perry Interiors, gave the world a rare window into the writer’s everyday life. It was shot in mid winter. The wind whips, as Robbie Burns would say, “snell an’ keen” into Dornoch Firth off the North Atlantic. An air of misery hangs about the place. There is no laughter. Reclining in a La-Z-Boy with pen and foolscap pad, Perry churns out novels relentlessly, not even allowing herself time to walk the dogs across the frosty corn stubble. There is a Rolls-Royce—or is it a Bentley?—in the garage, but for all the accoutrements of wealth it seems a life few would envy.

  Anne Perry rules a little principality. Her mood determines the mood of the people around her. “Anne’s emotions change us,” hersad-eyed companion Meg MacDonald says. “If Anne’s happy, we’re happy.” Anne does not seem to be happy all that often. When the woman typing Anne’s latest book exclaims to the camera, “Never a dull moment!” it seems like ironic despair.

  Meg lives in the cottage next door to Anne’s converted barn. It seems she no longer travels to places like the Canary Islands to help Anne plan her new books. Instead she keeps an eye on the barn and feeds the cats and dogs when Anne is away in America on month-long book tours. Jonathan Hulme, retired from medical practice, lives in Portmahomack and helps his sister with her research. He appears bored and a little uncertain of his place in the scheme of things. “I have to be mature and not push my ego over this,” he says. There is a faint hint that his ego takes a pounding from time to time.

  There are odd comments about Anne’s marital prospects. Jonathan comments, “She’d be happy if there was a man in her life, but her personality and intelligence would make it rather awkward.” There is a curious monologue by Meg as she and Anne drive along in a car. “When you meet the right person,” Meg intones, “it’ll be the right person. You have to move out of your comfort zone. … There’s nobody here. You’ve been in the comfort zone too long.” What the dickens is she talking about? Is Anne Perry, aged over seventy and never married, still searching for Mr Right? Or is this a subliminal message to the world that she is not lesbian? Is this important after all these years?

  In pre-publicity for the documentary, Dana Linkiewicz revealed that the initial cut presented to Perry after half a year of editing had taken a rather critical stance. Clearly, this had not been acceptable. “They all agreed it was a good film. In the end, however, the final version turned out to be much more affectionate.” You can’t help wondering what has been added to, or subtracted from, the first cut of Linkiewicz’s film to make it less critical, more “affectionate”.

  Despite being painfully slow-moving, Anne Perry Interiors contains some memorable sound bites.

  Anne Perry: “I’m in the right place. I quite like myself. I’m not looking at myself too closely.”

  Meg MacDonald: “Anne doesn’t talk much about her childhood—she doesn’t believe she had a childhood.”

  Perry: “I grew up taught to show self-control.”

  MacDonald: “She’s got to make time for fun as well—a walk on the beach or a walk in the fields.”

  Perry: “No one talks about it. … My friends don’t want me to talk about it. They find it distressing. They don’t want me to be hurt.”

  MacDonald: “I wish she could trust other people with her life. Until she does she is not going to be free…”

  Perry: “My family never talked about it. I assumed that other people wouldn’t.”

  MacDonald: “Anne … I love you so much I want people to know the real you.”

  Perry (in tears): “Mother was going with Bill. I was going to South Africa. When Pauline heard, her world fell apart. I really thought she would take her life. She had bulimia. She was throwing up after every meal. … I knew it was stupid. I felt trapped. I knew it was wrong. I knew it was stupid. I knew I would have to pay for it. I didn’t see any other way. I couldn’t go to my mother or father. I couldn’t walk away. I did something stupid I’ll regret for the rest of my life. I can’t undo it…”

  There was nothing like penitence or contrition in the letters Juliet Hulme wrote as a sixteen year old from prison. Nearly five months after the murder, Henry Hulme complained his daughter was “still much the same as she was immediately after the event. Completely removed and occupied with herself … she feels that she is right and others are wrong”. After being in prison a year, she defiantly told Nancy Sutherland, “I’ll rehabilitate myself and grow into a new person … but I must do it myself without being … dictated to”.

  On her release, not even Sam Barnett, the Secretary for Justice, was prepared to claim she was a reformed character. Florence Howland, who saw her off at the airport, said she never showed any remorse.

  Now as Anne Perry the crime writer she talks a good deal about redemption, and in interviews with international media has regularly related a colourful tale of repentance and redemption. “Once I was in prison alone I had to come to terms with it and I did,” she told Bob Brown of the ABC. “You get on your knees and you say to God, ‘I was wrong. No excuses. I am sorry.’ As long as you make excuses for yourself, blame others, somebody else, you are still not here.” She claimed this dark night of the soul came during three months in solitary confinement at the beginning of her stay in Mt Eden.

  More details appeared in an interview with Amanda Cable of the Daily Mail: “Finally, after I’d been there for three months and was at my lowest, I knelt by my bed and prayed. I just begged for forgiveness. I said sorry again and again and I meant it.”

  The story was reprised for Dana Linkiewicz and the German film crew. “The first three months I was frozen … then I cried and cried and cried again. … After that I never cried again.”

  She spoke with pride to Angela Neustatter of The Guardian about being the youngest inmate by years in the toughest prison in the southern hemisphere. “I went down on my knees and repented … That is how I survived my time while others cracked up. I seemed

  to be the only one saying, ‘I’m guilty and I am where I should be’.” To some this read more like a profession of moral superiority than actual remorse. She boasted to Sarah Gristwood, “I have had people say that my work is studied in ethics classes for its compassion and humanity.”

  Being sorry did not meant beating your breast all the time, she informed Deirdre Donahue of USA Today. Far from beating her breast, as she repeatedly told interviewers, she had blocked the murder from her mind. “I’m not amnesiac, for Pete’s sake,” she told Robert McCrum. “I just don’t choose to remember certain things.”

  Most revealing of all was her exchange with Amanda Cable of the Daily Mail in 2006. Did she ever, as those dark Scottish nights drew in, think back
to the murder, Cable asked.

  “No,” Perry said, “I would just torment myself and that wouldn’t help anybody.”

  Did she ever think of her victim?

  “No. She was somebody I barely knew.”

  CHAPTER 38

  A Piece of Fiction

  What was the real explanation for the killing of Honorah Rieper that sunny winter’s afternoon in 1954? Why did two intelligent adolescent girls commit an almost unimaginably savage murder—and just as important, how were they able to bring themselves to do it? As with Leopold and Loeb, the enduring interest in Parker and Hulme has come about in large part because no answers have ever seemed completely satisfactory.

  The issues that preoccupied the trial—the girls’ possible insanity and their sexual relationship—ultimately shed little light on the crime. The girls were not psychotics of the sort who receive mes-­sages from God or their television set telling them to kill people. They were in love, certainly, but throughout history untoldmillions have been passionately in love and threatened with separation without resorting to murder. Lesbian couples are no more likely to commit acts of violence than heterosexual couples. And while many teenage girls may entertain thoughts of killing their mother, veryfew actually do so. Matricide is the rarest of crimes. A 2009 American study showed that of murders where the victim and offender were known to each other, fewer than two percent were matricides. In most of these cases the mothers were killed by their adult sons. When a daughter was the killer, they were almost always over eighteen years of age, and most were single middle-aged women living at home with their mother. To this day it is extremely rare for girlsof fifteen or sixteen, the ages of Juliet Hulme and Pauline Parker respectively at the time of the murder, to commit or be a party to matricide.