by Peter Graham
What was it, then, that led Juliet and Pauline to leave their world of fantasy, put a half-brick in one of Pauline’s old school stockings, and swing it at Pauline’s mother’s head?
In the seventeen years since the release of Heavenly Creatures, intense public interest has meant numerous opportunities for both women to tell their stories. Pauline Parker—Hilary Nathan—has chosen to remain silent, but Anne Perry has told and retold her version of events many times. Amanda Cable summed up her media appeal: “With her neatly tailored suit, bobbed hair and immaculate make-up, Anne exudes success. As a top-selling crime writer she has made a fortune writing fifty novels over the past four decades. … It’s hard to look at her perfectly manicured nails and know these same hands once bludgeoned a woman to death.”
More than once Perry has complained that, as a minor, she was not permitted to testify in her own defence. Sarah Gristwood faithfully reported in The Daily Telegraph: “At the trial she found that a fifteen year old had the worst of both worlds—compelled to be present but not allowed to say a word.” The truth was quite different. The law of New Zealand did not prevent a minor from testifying. It was Juliet Hulme’s defence lawyers who were against her doing so. They were convinced that if she gave evidence her overweening arrogance and condescension would destroy whatever chance they had of a defence of insanity, her only hope of an acquittal.
Perry established her basic storyline soon after Lin Ferguson’s exposé. After she was taken out of school with chest problems, she told Sarah Gristwood, she had a lonely time, relieved only by the friendship of another girl, Pauline Rieper. “I don’t want in any way to implicate or blame her … but she wished me to join her in this act and I believed that if I did not she would take her own life. … We were going to leave the country. I felt I was deserting Pauline. We would have taken her with us, but her mother wouldn’t let her go. She felt her mother was the only thing stopping her from leaving a situation she felt was intolerable.
“I believed at that time her survival depended upon her coming with us. I sincerely believed that her life was in the balance. Crazy as this sounds, I thought it was one life or the other. I just couldn’t face the thought of being responsible for her dying. And I made a very foolish choice.”
Reading this one might feel sympathetic. Far from being a cold-blooded killer, Juliet Hulme had been put in an impossible situation by her only friend, who felt pressed to kill her mother and had threatened to commit suicide if Juliet did not help her. With hindsight it wasfoolish, but she was only fifteen and acting under extreme moral duress. Wasn’t it entirely understandable? And wasn’t there something rather commendably loyal about her not wishing to blame or implicate the friend who put her in this moral bind?
Reading on, you learn she had been receiving treatment using drugs that had “since been withdrawn because they tend to warp judgement”. Although the normal course of treatment was three months, she had been given these drugs for nine months. How could anyone blame her, especially when she was prepared to square up and admit to having been “an accomplice … a party to this act, and I never pretended otherwise”. Didn’t you really have to admire her?
The story was on its way. A couple of weeks later the respected writer Sebastian Faulks wrote in The Guardian that Juliet, “confused by high doses of medication, provided a brick with which Pauline killed her mother”. It seemed Anne Perry had played only a very minor part in the thing.
NBC’s Jamie Gangel tried hard to pin her down on the details, but by now the story had grown. “[Pauline] felt her mother was the one thing standing between her coming with us, which to her seemed to represent safety, warmth, happiness, a chance to be the kind of person she wanted to be, and I didn’t have the strength to say, ‘No, this is wrong no matter what’ and to just walk away.”
“I don’t remember the events very much,” she added.
“You have blocked it out?”
“Yes, I have.”
Gangel persisted. “Let me give you a description … about what happened based on the court documents, and also your admission to the police. What it says is you gave half a brick to your friend Pauline, that she put it in a stocking and, at the deserted area of a local park, first she repeatedly hit her mother over the head, then you did the same. Then one of you held her down while the other one repeatedly hit her and there was a great deal of blood and she died within a few minutes. Did that sound to you like what happened? Do you think that was a fair account of what happened?”
“Probably,” Perry said. “I certainly hope it was a few moments,” she added.
It was often mentioned that Juliet Hulme had been taking medication. USA Today, America’s largest-circulation national newspaper, reported, “While Perry makes no excuses for herself, she does point out she was on a medicine that was eventually taken off the market for its judgement-altering qualities.” She repeated this in the Daily Mail. “At the same time I’d also been taking strong experimental drugs for tuberculosis which were later found to be hugely mood-altering. … They can’t have helped.”
Then there was the question of her friend’s state of health. Not only had Pauline threatened to take her own life, Juliet feared she was about to die of malnutrition. She was literally wasting away. “I was afraid that she was seriously ill to the point where she might not survive. … She was vomiting after every meal and losing weight all the time. I am sure now she was bulimic. I really believed she would take her own life and I couldn’t face it.”
By the time Perry was interviewed for Dana Linkiewicz’s documentary there was another layer of detail. Pauline had been “throwing up after every meal. She was a bag of bones. Her skin was very pale. If you put a sticking plaster on it, it used to suppurate.”
The most comprehensive account was to Amanda Cable. Her one constant friend, Anne Perry said, was her classmate Pauline Parker. It was an obsessive friendship on Pauline’s part. Her parents suddenly announced they were divorcing and she—Juliet—would be returning to England within days. When Pauline’s mother refused to let Pauline accompany her, Pauline got into a murderous rage.
On the morning of the murder, Perry said, she felt as you would if you were going to jump out of a plane with a parachute—“that awful sickening ‘Am I going to jump or am I not?’”
In the space of a few days her whole life had fallen apart. “I adored both my parents and I hadn’t a clue the marriage was in trouble. My own safe, happy little world was destroyed overnight. I was devastated … We were such a close family and now I didn’t have a clue what the future would hold…
“I felt I had an immense obligation to my friend,” she continued. “She was the only person who had written to me during the months I had been in a sanatorium recovering from TB. She had shown me such loyalty and now I must return it. She was bulimic—she had an eating disorder—and I truly believed that she would take her own life and it would be my fault if I didn’t do what she suggested. My debt to her just had to be paid, no matter how horrific. …
“I remember feeling real nerves beforehand. I was horrified even as the attack was happening, but I felt it was a debt and I had to continue. It was as if I was a completely different person.”
Within hours, she was being questioned on her own in a police cell. “I was utterly terrified. There was no solicitor or adult there to represent me. … When the case came to court I stood there alone and I remember them discussing hanging. I knew then my life was hanging in the balance. I wasn’t allowed to give my side of the story—to try to explain my desperation or the events leading up to it. … We were never lesbians. That was made up and I was unable to speak out.”
Of the numerous ways in which these stories deviate from reality, three stand out. First, there was no possibility of Juliet being under the influence of judgement-warping medication at the time of the murder. As Reg Medlicott said at the trial, she had received both isoniazid and streptomycin during her stay at the sanatorium, but there wasno evidence ei
ther drug produced psychological changes. Both were antibiotics commonly used to treat tuberculosis. Neither was experimental or later withdrawn from the market. Furthermore, Juliet had left the sanatorium nine months before the murder.
Secondly, although it seems likely that Pauline Parker was bulimic, there is no evidence the disease had reached a life-threatening stage, or that Juliet believed her friend was at risk of dying. Pauline’s mother believed her daughter was starting a new job the following week, and allowed her to stay away from home for eight nights with her friend. She had been well enough on her return to energetically help her mother with housework. When the family had lunch on the day of the murder she was lively and sparkling—and there is no denying the physical energy she displayed in the afternoon.
Both when she was a remand prisoner and later, when she served her sentence, there was no indication that her life was in danger, or even that special treatment was required because of an eating disorder that was causing her to waste away. In April 1955 the medical officer at Arohata found she was overweight and needed to diet.
Thirdly, there is no possibility that Juliet took part in the murder of Honorah Rieper only under moral duress. All the contemporaneous evidence points to her being a willing participant. While on April 28, nearly two months before the murder, Pauline recorded a moment of depression when she “quite seriously considered committing suicide” as “life seemed so much not worth living”, this had quickly turned into active hatred. “Anger against Mother boiled up inside me as it is she who it one of the main obstacles in my path. Suddenly a means of ridding myself of this obstacle occurred to me. If she were to die,” she wrote in her diary.
By Saturday, June 19 they were “both thrilled by the idea. … Naturally we feel a little nervous [but] the pleasure of anticipation is great”. Hilda Hulme said Juliet looked “radiantly happy” as she left the house on the day of the murder; afterwards she was elated and jubilant. “Neither of them showed the slightest remorse,” Medlicott said, and Dr Bennett would never forget Juliet’s insistence that not only was Mrs Rieper’s murder justified, but further murders might be justified of anybody else who threatened their friendship.
It seems Anne Perry, consciously or unconsciously, has reworked the raw facts in her imagination to such an extent as to create a piece of fiction. The writer Anaïs Nin once remarked, “We see things not as they are but as we are.” For all Perry’s lip service to “no excuses” and not blaming others, she admits to nothing more than a youthful error of judgement in highly extenuating circumstances involving the death of a virtual stranger.
Whether real repentance can come from this is a subject worthy of discussion in one of the ethics classes said to use Anne Perry novels as teaching materials. Perry herself believes, “I have done everything I can to live as good a life as I know how since. To the best of my belief I am doing nobody any harm and as much good as I am able.”
CHAPTER 39
The Other Girl
With Anne Perry unmasked, attention shifted to finding “the other girl”. Peter Jackson told the media he was determined Pauline Parker would not suffer the same fate as Juliet Hulme. The Guardian reported that the film-maker would not release any details about her, except to say that “she apparently lived a life of great regret and not a very happy life either”. It is doubtful Jackson knew any more about her than the widespread rumour she was working in a bookshop in Auckland.
It was generally believed Pauline had lived in England for some years but had since returned to New Zealand. After the release of Heavenly Creatures, representatives of the world’s press unsuccessfully staked out Auckland’s two Catholic bookshops hoping to spot her. Robert McCrum wrote in The Guardian: Weekend that she was proving difficult to track down. “Those who protect her will speak only on condition of anonymity, but her presence in New Zealand has helped keep the story alive.” The last official reference to Parker, under her new name Hilary Nathan, had been in February 1967, he said, when she had been reported teaching in an English girls’ school. By the 1970s she had become a figure of mystery, although McCrum assured readers she was known to have returned to New Zealand and taken a new name. She had kept in touch with her family, but from a distance, and had pursued a number of different careers, including work with the mentally handicapped.
“Reports of her state of health and mind vary,” McCrum wrote. “Some say she is ‘troubled’, ‘sad’, even ‘suicidal’. Others indicate a more robust condition, pointing out that she has been adept at covering tracks.” There were other reports that she had married and was living in a rural town in New Zealand with children of her own who did not know her true identity.
The journalist Chris Cooke was not convinced Pauline had returned from England. He learned from someone who had attended the New Zealand Library School at the same time as her that after going to London in 1966 she had worked at the Wandsworth Town Library. By clever detective work he found she had a close companion called Joan Nathan, known as Jo, and since 1985 had been living in the village of Hoo St Werburgh on the Medway Estuary in Kent. Once he got that close he found her name in the telephone directory. Her address was the Abbots Court Riding School.
Hoo St Werburgh may have once been a pretty place, but it was now a straggly village of mostly ugly post-war pebbledash houses. One of the few he could find who knew Hilary Nathan was the local librarian. Miss Nathan, she told him, spent many hours in the library reading.
The headquarters of the Abbots Court Riding School turned out to be an old, semi-detached, red brick farm-worker’s cottage, run-down and half-choked with ivy, with stables behind. What must have once been a pleasing view over cornfields to the Medway, beneath towering clouds worthy of Constable, was now marred by power stations and pylons.
Cooke knocked on the door and asked the woman who answered if he could talk to her about certain events in New Zealand in 1954. She refused to speak to him, insisting “I’ve never had another name. I’m sorry, you’ve got the wrong person.” She was, he said, “a wiry, fit figure, decked in moleskins and gumboots, with a broad, rural accent”. He managed to take some photographs before making his departure.
Cooke had the news the world was waiting for and the media were quick to grab hold of it. On January 8, 1997 Wellington’s Dominion reported that Miss Nathan had refused to comment, but a friend claimed to be negotiating on her behalf to sell her story to Britain’s Daily Mail and other publications. The friend, Joan Nathan, described as having lived near Hilary Nathan for thirty years, said she had never detected anything sinister in Hilary’s background. “She is a thoroughly nice person and I’m very sorry this has all surfaced again.”
Chris Cooke was granted an interview with Hilary’s sister Wendy, who said Hilary had authorised her to speak to the press in New Zealand in the hope this would extinguish media interest. Her sister was not like Anne Perry, Wendy said. She had no interest in giving interviews but was prepared to allow New Zealanders to learn of her new life. She asked that once they had heard her story she be left alone to continue her quiet existence.
Wendy explained that Hilary lived as a recluse in a village where no one knew of her secret past. Although she had failed to become a nun, she was now “a nun in her way. She’s living in solitude. She’s deeply religious. … She leads a very unusual existence. She doesn’t have a TV or a radio so would never have heard what Anne Perry had to say and she wouldn’t care.” She had not seen and did not want to see Heavenly Creatures. “She doesn’t have any contact with the outside world. She’s a devout Roman Catholic and spends much of her time in prayer.”
It had been her sister’s childhood dream to own a place in the country and have a stable of horses. Now she had achieved that lifestyle she was a much more contented person. “She has led a good life and is very remorseful for what she’s done. She committed the most terrible crime and has spent forty years repaying it by keeping away from people and doing her own little thing.”
The
most highly paid New York public relations consultant could not have done a better job of explaining Hilary’s present way of life and her attitude to the crime she had committed. There were no excuses.
The discovery of Pauline Parker was the lead item on television news in New Zealand. A reporter from TV One had got hold of some locals who said they were surprised to learn of Miss Nathan’s past but would rally around and give her whatever support she needed. TV3 had secured hidden-camera footage of the Abbots Court Riding School.
In England the Express and Daily Mail made their own inquiries and published stories, seemingly without Hilary Nathan’s cooperation. “SWEET SPINSTER WHO IS ONE OF THE WORLD’S LOST KILLERS” was the Express’s arresting headline. The newspapers revealed that she had been a teacher of mentally handicapped children at Abbey Court Special School in nearby Strood, and risen to deputy headmistress before retiring three years earlier to establish her riding academy. “It will come as a shock to the whole school,” a so-called source close to Abbey Court Special School said. “Nobody knew anything about it.” She was, the source said, well-liked but strange, “often turning up for classes in wellies and battered black sunglasses”. It was noticed that when school photographs were taken she was never in the picture.
Reporters thought it odd there was no television, radio or even an oven in Nathan’s three-bedroom cottage. Odd also that the living room was full of dolls and there was a large rocking horse standing inside the front door. The former Pauline Parker kept ten ponies and an Arab stallion. Each weekend, it was said, half a dozen young girls from the village would come to muck out the stables. When the “small sprightly woman” had been ambushed by the press while feeding and grooming her ponies, she insisted she had absolutely no comment to make.
Villagers dished up slivers of information. Miss Nathan was very eccentric. She kept herself very much to herself. She lived on a diet of sandwiches and currant buns. She attended the English Martyrs Roman Catholic Church in Strood every day without fail. To one informant she seemed “quite childish in a way”: at gymkhanas she would take part in children’s events such as the sack race. Joyce Hopkins, her next-door neighbour, said she seemed very nice and clearly loved children. Miss Nathan never said anything about her past, Hopkins remembered. “We didn’t even know she was from New Zealand.”