Anne Perry and the Murder of the Century

by Peter Graham

  The press more or less left Hilary Nathan alone after that, but now she had been exposed to the world as one of the infamous New Zealand teenage murderers it was time for her to move on. Her cottage, stables, land, stables and all appurtenances were put on the market.

  The buyers were a local man, Andrew Ayres, and his wife. The Ayres liked Hilary Nathan. “She was very direct,” Ayres said. “We hit it off very well.”

  After an unconditional contract was signed, Nathan wanted to bring forward the completion date. She had learned that Heavenly Creatures was to be shown on prime-time television across Britain on Saturday, June 27. She wished to be out of the house before then and Ayres was happy to oblige. He noted that, despite what the newspapers had said, Nathan had a television set.

  An interesting feature of Hilary Nathan’s house was a mural on a wall of the upstairs front bedroom, which Ayres was sure had been painted by Nathan herself. Encompassing a number of different styles, the work consisted of dream-like vignettes making up a composite whole. At its heart a girl with dark curly hair—surely Pauline herself—sat, head bowed, under a blighted tree in a post-apocalyptic landscape. The figure was painted in a crude expressionist style, its tremulous brushstrokes suggesting an artist in the grip of severe depression. Below it, another image depicted the dark-haired girl as a fallen angel imprisoned in a bird cage. Her wings were dirty and bedraggled, her body stooped and naked. Nearby, another naked Pauline figure was desperately diving to submarine depths to grab hold of an image of the Virgin Mary.

  In a striking scene a blonde girl was seated on a horse, leaping skywards, while a dark-haired girl struggled on the ground to bridle the horse, attempting to keep both it and the rider on terra firma. Another depicted two girls, one dark-haired and the other blonde, as two flowers blooming on one plant but cruelly sundered by the stroke of a large heavy axe. More enigmatically, figures were entombed in utero, and there were corps de ballet of fairies or sprites.

  At the centre top of the mural, a beautiful blonde Juliet figure, rendered in comic-strip style, was mounted on a winged horse. Arms outstretched, jubilant, the girl shimmered and shone like a goddess.

  If the mural was indeed the work of Hilary Nathan, it was clear she was deeply troubled by her past and had not been able to put Juliet Hulme and the horror of their parting out of her mind.

  During the years the Ayres lived in the cottage a steady succession of inquisitive visitors came to the door, hoping to meet the notorious murderer face-to-face, but Pauline Parker had moved far away, to Orkney in the far north of Scotland, as isolated and secret a place as she could find.

  One of those fascinated by the Parker–Hulme murder was Alexander Roman, a young American film-maker. Roman’s interest having been aroused by Heavenly Creatures, he decided to make a dramatised documentary about the case. From the internet he learned that Hilary Nathan was living on a Scottish island. A private investi­gator he employed unearthed more specific information about where she could be found. Roman sent her a letter by FedEx, inquiring about the paintings found on the bedroom wall at Abbots Court, which he wanted to reproduce in his documentary. There was no reply.

  Roman decided to pay Hilary Nathan a visit. At Easter 2010 he flew from Los Angeles to Scotland and made his way to the island on which she lived. The local taxi driver, who doubled as the publican, was otherwise engaged but a helpful person volunteered to drive him from the main town to the incomer’s house.

  It was raining a fine drizzle as Roman travelled the short distance across the island. He noticed the scenery was beautiful in a bleak, barren way; trees obviously struggled to grow in the face of the Atlantic gales. The stone house and farm buildings stood looking out to sea at the end of a long uphill drive. The driver waited while Roman had a look around. There was a herd of goats, and a white horse that kept bumping Roman’s hand affectionately. The barn door was decorated with a huge painting of a tree, an artistic touch incongruous in such an austere place. The dark house had a “broken-hearted” look. A cat lay morosely on a windowsill beside a line-up of small dolls. There was a Roman statue of some sort in the porch, and a small conservatory tacked on to the house.

  Roman had come prepared. In his bag were small gifts from Los Angeles and a copy of his script, which he intended to present to Nathan. While he was snooping about, she drove out of the barn on a huge tractor and jumped down. Fair-skinned, with rich dark-brown hair, she was, he observed, thin and tough-looking.

  She glared at him as he muttered something about the docu­mentary he was making and handed her the bag of gifts. “You have the wrong person. This is the wrong place,” she insisted firmly. “Go immediately.” She pushed him into the waiting car. As it moved off she ran after it trying to return the bag, but it was too late.

  Back at his hotel, Roman felt disappointed about the way things had gone. He had handled it badly. He had travelled a long way to meet Pauline Parker and got nothing out of it. By next morning the rain had stopped. He had left some battery packs for his camera in the bag he had given Nathan and wanted them back. He decided to have one more try at talking to her. Fortunately the taxi driver was free to take him. Easter Sunday was possibly the worst day he could have chosen to invade the sanctuary of a devout and reclusive Roman Catholic, but that thought did not cross his mind. In any event, his schedule was tight.

  On the long unsealed driveway the taxi overtook a pretty young girl who was on a moped, maybe on her way to have a riding lesson. Roman got out of the car and walked towards the house. He was nervously patting a small dog when Hilary Nathan suddenly appeared, striding towards him. He recognised the look on her face, the angry, protruding lower lip, from her police mug shot.

  She was extremely angry. “Get out!” she yelled.

  He hurriedly mentioned the battery packs he had left in the bag. Could he please have them back?

  “I burned them!” she shouted. “I burned everything!”

  “Where did you do that?” he asked gently. “Might I have a look?”

  “I don’t know where,” she snarled. She waved towards a pile of rubbish. “You can rummage through that if you like.”

  The taxi driver, realising there was some sort of altercation going on, wandered over. “Is there something wrong?” he asked.

  “There is something seriously wrong,” Hilary Nathan said. “This man is harassing me. Take him away at once.”

  “I wouldn’t allow a woman like that in my pub,” the driver remarked as he and Roman headed back to town.

  CHAPTER 40

  What the Heck Was It?

  Psychiatry has moved a long way since 1961, when Reg Medlicott suggested that Pauline Parker and Juliet Hulme were suffering from “adolescent megalomania”. Perhaps out of respect forHilda Hulme and the dead Honorah Rieper, he had shied away from delving into the possible causes of their condition. Today, however, it is common to see a connection between emotional neglect in infancy or early child­hood and psychoses and personality disorders later in life.

  It is now well understood that a young child has a deep need to be lovingly attached to a reliable mother figure, whose unconditional adoration and physical warmth supplies emotional security. Children deprived of this are likely to become emotionally frozen or insecure, lack ego-control, and have a low sense of self-worth, even if this is well camouflaged. Natural feelings of affection for the mother are over­whelmed by rage, and this may be turned inward to become self-loathing: people who hate their mothers invariably hate themselves as well. The wounds of maternal abandonment remain for life. The unloved or under-loved child becomes ever more unlovable.

  Both Juliet Hulme and Pauline Parker experienced difficulties with their mothers, although these were different in nature. Juliet’s parents cared for her in a material sense and seemed fond of her, if in a somewhat cool and offhand way, but her upbringing was characterised by frequent and prolonged separations from her family in infancy and childhood. Later, when Hilda Hulme took a lover, she had less and l
ess time to give to her difficult daughter, and Henry Hulme, while proud of Juliet, had little clue about human relationships, as witnessed by the letter he wrote her in prison—a letter so cold prison staff refused to deliver it to her.

  Such an upbringing can be expected to produce an “avoidant attachment” character style. “Avoidants”, as they are called, haveshut down their emotions to defend themselves against further injury. They cannot be warmly affectionate, and come across as arrogantly self-sufficient, seeing themselves as perfect, and incapable of admit­ting faults of any kind. They can be shy loners who get sick a lot. For all their self-sufficiency in childhood, when they become adolescents avoidants often find themselves longing for a soulmate. In adulthood they may become workaholics, addicted to power or absorbed by other ambitions.

  Avoidant attachment is known to be at the heart of narcissistic personality disorder, the diagnostic criteria for which are a grandiose sense of self-importance; preoccupation with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance and beauty; the belief the person is “special” and “unique”; excessive need for admiration; arrogance and haughti­ness; sense of entitlement; lack of empathy for others; and exploitation of others for selfish needs—all factors that seem to square with the young Juliet’s personality. While, beneath their grandiosity, narcissists have a fragile sense of self-esteem, it doesn’t show: they have succeeded in burying their insecurities.

  Psychopathic traits are closely related to narcissism: doctors often refer to the “narcissist-psychopath type”. Psychopaths are often articulate and charming. They lie glibly and convincingly. In some types, violent behaviour is likely to be premeditated rather than impulsive. Fearless­ness and lack of conscience and remorse are common.

  Such an individual has an advantage over the majority of the population when it comes to not remembering an act that would leave most people guilt-ridden for the rest of their lives—namely dissociation, the ability of the mind to hide a memory, a feeling, or a body sensation for a short or a long time. Meg MacDonald’s statement that “Anne doesn’t talk about her childhood—she doesn’t believe she had a childhood” is revealing. Anne Perry may have blocked out not only the memory of Pauline’s mother’s death, but most of her childhood with it.

  *

  Although both girls were insecurely attached to their mothers, Pauline Parker had a distinctly different psychological profile from Juliet. From the outside, apart from a spell of serious illness her childhood appeared to be relatively normal. But there were tensions and secrets within the family. Her father had abandoned his first wife and chil­dren, and he and her mother had started a new life in the South Island. They were not married, something seen as intensely shameful in 1950s New Zealand. They struggled financially and endured the stress of a baby’s death and later of raising an intellectually handicapped child. Pauline was seen as the difficult daughter and her mother’s behaviour towards her fluctuated wildly.

  In terms of character Pauline was “anxious ambivalent”. Rather than being unwilling to become emotionally close to others, the ambivalent is desperate to have close relationships—although, forfear no one would want to get close to them, they can act in a superior, stand-offish way. Ambivalents’ inner feelings of self-worth are some­times so lacking they see themselves as loathsome, unclean, and even poisonous. While drawn to relationships with others, they handle them incompetently: friendships can be destroyed by eruptions of irrational rage. Jealousy and clinginess often drive away friends and potential partners.

  It is believed that in ambivalents the character-shaping trauma occurred later in life than it did for avoidants, and that their mothers were less rejecting. It has been said that ambivalents result from partial maternal deprivation rather than drastic separation.

  Whereas avoidants learn to disguise their inner hurt and anger, ambivalents do not develop protective indifference and are obviously full of rage. Where Juliet had an icy contempt for humanity, Pauline had open anger and animosity. She neatly captured the distinction herself in The Ones That I Worship: “Hatred burning bright in the brown eyes with enemies for fuel / Icy scorn glitters in the grey eyes, contemptuous and cruel.”

  The mothers of ambivalents blow hot and cold. Emotional, or even physical, cruelty followed by kindness is a familiar picture. The child may become hooked on the mother’s unpredictability. Now and then the mother will deliver the emotional warmth desperately wanted and the child will become more addicted than ever. As one expert, Jude Cassidy, professor of psychology at the University of Maryland, explains, “Nothing makes a laboratory rat push the pedal more furiously than an inconsistent reward.”

  The relationship between ambivalents and their mothers is always complicated: the anger and aggression mingle with an anxious needi­ness. This conflict probably explains Pauline’s intervals of “being good”. Eating disorders like hers are also common: self-starvation can be a way for a child to punish their mother. In teenage years and later, ambivalents may attempt to satisfy a sense of emptiness and need for love with overeating, alcohol or drugs.

  While Pauline was not strongly narcissistic, her behaviour might be seen as satisfying the criteria for the disorder “borderline personality”, which, like all personality disorders, has a narcissistic component. “Borderlines” have much in common with the ambivalent character type and the two often coincide. Most borderlines have been at times physically or emotionally abused by a mothering figure whoat other times was adequate and nurturing. Not surprisingly, the border­line child hates and loves her vacillating mother at the same time: a book on the disorder has the title I Hate You—Don’t Leave Me.

  Borderlines grow up with an unstable self-image and acquire a history of stormy personal relationships. At the heart of the personality lies a profound feeling of emptiness and a weak sense of self. “Unable to figure out who or what they are … they glom on to others so as if to acquire an identity by osmosis,” was how Jerrold Maxmen and Nicholas Ward expressed it in their 1994 work Essential Psychopathology and Its Treatment. Their moods oscillate wildly: “inappropriate intense anger” is one of the defining symptoms. Relationships with friends and lovers are all-consuming, characterised by “overidealisation” that usually ends in deep disappointment. As with other personality disorders, the border­line has low tolerance of frustration, grief and threats of abandonment: the first of the American Psychiatric Association’s criteria is “frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment”. Borderlines are also known to have “transient delusions”—brief psychotic incidents—which might explain Pauline’s Port Levy “revelation”.

  Dr Phil Brinded, a Christchurch psychiatrist familiar with the case, questions whether the label “borderline” is appropriate for Pauline Parker in light of her later history. As Hilary Nathan, Parker has shown deep remorse, embracing Catholicism to the extent of want­ing to become a nun, devoting herself to special needs children, and avoiding the public glare. She seems to have had a stable long-term relationship and none of the violence, self-mutilation and drug-dependency typical of someone with borderline personality disorder.

  A recent development in psychology has been the identification of the “symbiotic” character, or personality. Symbiotics are thoughtto have been excessively corrected by their parents at a young age, overdisciplined to conform to the parents’ expectations. They have a weak sense of self and often “borrow” an identity from someone else, conforming to this person’s tastes and interests and even being in­vaded by their moods. This is accompanied by a deep-rooted fear that the person will abandon them. The symbiotic personality experiences extremely hostile fantasies and dreams, and has difficulty modulating aggressive impulses. People who compulsively overeat are often found to have issues of symbiosis. It is not hard to see evidence of the symbiotic character in Pauline and her relationship with Juliet.

  Mental illness may also have had a part in shaping the destinies of Pauline Parker and Juliet Hulme. Bipolar disorder, or manic depres­sive il
lness, was recognised in 1954 but little understood until the 1970s. Today DSM–IV—the American Psychiatric Association’s Diag­nostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition—defines manic episodes as periods of “abnormally and persistently elevated, irritable or expansive mood, accompanied by symptoms such as inflated self-esteem, non-delusional grandiosity, decreased need for sleep, flight of ideas, and excessive involvement in pleasur­able activities. Sufferers overvalue their beauty, talents, achievements, brilliance, and other qualities.

  During the manic phase the person will feel euphoric, see humour in everything, and have an increased interest in sex. Racing thoughts and rapid speech are characteristic. Abnormal beliefs, such as grandiose delusions, are found in nearly half of bipolar patients in manic phase. Manic depressives in general are narcissistic and temperamentally hyper-excitable. It has often been observed that sleep deprivation triggers manic episodes, and in full flight sleep is impossible, as it often was for Juliet and Pauline during April, May and June of 1954.

  During manic episodes there may also be “somatic” delusions—bizarre beliefs about the body. An example in psychiatric literature is a German judge who one night found himself wondering what it

  would be like to be a woman having sexual intercourse. This developed into the delusion that he was changing sex. Something like this might explain Pauline’s diary for Good Friday, April 16, 1954: “We had the most intriguing conversation about what her parents would think if they concluded that [Juliet] had changed into a male. It would have explained a great many things extraordinary to them”? The girls’ belief they had an extra part to their brain might also be seen as a somatic delusion.