But then had come the miraculous reprieve: Juliet’s move to South Africa. Although the imminent separation had cast the girls into an adolescent pit of despondency, Honorah was hoping that this trip would help to sustain the lift in their moods. The outing was one of a number of farewell events she knew Pauline would want before Juliet left, but it was also a bonding opportunity between a mother and a daughter. Sick of being cast as the villain, Honorah was hoping to re-establish communication.
They got off the bus at the terminus and climbed the hill to the kiosk that housed the Victoria Park tearooms. Since this was to be a special treat, Honorah dug deep into her purse to pay for tea for herself, soft drinks for the girls, one orange and one lemon, and a selection of cakes and scones to make it a proper feast. Agnes Ritchie, the proprietor, appreciative of their custom on a quiet winter weekday, chatted amiably with them. ‘They all appeared perfectly normal. Quite at ease. They were a quiet group.’13 She did not see them leave.
Along a ridge was a stone wall that ran almost up to the caretaker’s house, kiosk and tearooms. Much of the park is on a large grassed plateau, but on the eastern side of the wall the hillside descends rapidly through a plantation of trees and shrubs into a wide valley. Outside the tearooms Honorah and the girls turned right, and then went through a gap in the old stone wall.
It was just after 3pm when they took the narrow zigzag track, which is steep in places and slippery because it is shaded by bush and overhanging trees. At a secluded spot just past a rustic wooden footbridge about 450 metres down, Juliet placed the small pink stone she had brought with her on the dirt track. A little beyond the bridge, as they turned to go back, Pauline pointed out the stone and Honorah bent down to pick it up …
Less than 30 minutes after the trio had left the tearooms, Agnes was halfway through serving ice creams to two young women when she glanced up to see Pauline and Juliet running towards the steps of the kiosk. They were ‘agitated breathless and gasping’. Both were shouting and it took her a second or two to make out what they were saying: ‘Please could somebody help us!’ Then from Pauline: ‘It’s Mummy. She’s terribly hurt. She’s dead. I think she’s dead.’ And Juliet: ‘It’s her mother. She’s hurt. She’s covered with blood.’14 Agnes was horrified to see that their clothes were splattered with blood, and that Pauline had splashes of it over her face and in her hair.
They seemed to be in shock. Pauline was extremely pale, and Juliet almost hysterical. It was difficult to work out what had happened even after they settled down. ‘Don’t make us go down there again. Don’t make us go back,’ they kept saying.15 Gradually Agnes managed to get a little bit more out of them: there had been an accident down the path, and Honorah had slipped and hit her head on a rock. Agnes raised the alarm, summoning her husband, caretaker Kenneth Ritchie, who had been burning garden rubbish with his labourer assistant Eric McIlroy at the back of the tearooms, then telephoned for a doctor and an ambulance.
Agnes returned to the girls, offered them water to wash off the blood, and then tried to telephone their fathers. Herbert was away from the shop on business, but she managed to contact Henry, who said he would come immediately. Then she made tea and sat with the girls while they waited. Both remarked to her that it ‘seemed like a dream and that they would wake up soon’. When she tried to elicit more information, Juliet said: ‘Don’t talk about it, don’t talk about it.’ Pauline was more forthcoming: ‘She slipped on a plank. We had been down the track and were returning and somehow she slipped on a plank.’ She explained that her mother had fallen and hit her head on a brick, and that her ‘head kept bumping or banging as she fell’. They had tried to move Honorah, but she was too heavy and they had dropped her. She was worried that this might not have been the right thing to do. Pauline seemed dazed and Juliet anxiety-ridden. ‘Will my daddy be long? I wish he would hurry,’ she said several times.16
While the girls gulped down Agnes’s boiling-hot black tea, Kenneth Ritchie and Eric McIlroy followed the track until they found Honorah lying on her back; they knew instantly she was dead. Blood streamed from fatal head wounds, and vomit choked her mouth. They noticed that one of her shoes had been flung some distance from the body, that her possessions (including her dentures) were scattered on the ground, and that not far away lay half a brick and a bloodied lisle stocking. Their stomachs turned as they realized that this was not an accident, but a murder scene. Eric McIlroy stayed with Honorah’s body.
The ambulance was just arriving as Kenneth Ritchie returned to the kiosk. As soon as he could, he rang the police. At 4pm Henry arrived, gave his address to the ambulance driver and left a message with Agnes to say he was taking both girls back to Ilam. After consultation with Kenneth Ritchie, Dr Donald Walker, who had arrived in response to Agnes’s call, decided to wait for the police: this was clearly a crime scene, and he had no mandate to visit it alone.
A patrol car carrying Sergeant Robert Hope and Constable Donald Molyneaux eventually arrived, after a misdirected trip to Victoria Lake in the city. Kenneth Ritchie led the party to where Honorah lay. Dr Walker pronounced her officially dead, and Constable Molyneaux was left to guard the scene while Sergeant Hope returned to the kiosk and then radioed the Central Police Station for reinforcements.
Herbert came as soon as he got the message, driven by a friend. Agnes told him that his wife had been in an accident and that an ambulance had been called, but her lack of clarity about what had happened left Herbert pacing anxiously backwards and forwards outside the kiosk. Initially he was the prime suspect, soon interrogated by Sergeant Hope about his whereabouts that day. ‘I was in and out of my shop once or twice during the afternoon and when I returned on one occasion I found the message from Victoria Park and I rang and spoke to Mrs Ritchie.’17 His errands were all in the city and had taken him nowhere near the park.
When Detectives Gordon Gillies and Archie Tate and Policewoman Audrey Griffiths arrived, they were escorted immediately to the body, where the brick and the bloodied stocking were noted and a decision made to inform senior officers. At this point, Senior Detective Macdonald Brown and Inspector Duncan McKenzie of the CID were brought into the case.
As night was falling, the city coroner, Dr Colin Pearson, pathologist EB Taylor and police photographer William Ramage were also called to the park. With flashlights, they went down the track. The body was still warm when Pearson began examining it. Photographs were taken and a detailed examination of the scene began. Audrey Griffiths accompanied the body to the Christchurch Public Hospital mortuary, where she removed Honorah’s ‘clothing and effects’. She took an inventory and handed her belongings over to Detective Gillies as evidence.
In Hilda’s words, Juliet and Pauline were ‘white and trembling’ when they arrived on the Hulmes’ doorstep.18 She saw that their clothes were bloodstained and immediately ran a bath for them. Bill Perry had been out buying a newspaper when he saw Henry’s car arrive with the girls. He returned to his flat, not realizing that anything had happened until Hilda came to his door and told him that there had been an accident involving Mrs Rieper. She washed the girls’ underclothing and gave Bill their outer garments to take down to Hick’s Drapers, a dry-cleaning agency on Fendalton Road.
Juliet and Pauline were given a meal, treated for shock and put to bed in the same room. It was not long after that, that they asked Bill Perry to come up and see them. They had the radio playing. ‘Pauline was very, very shocked, I thought, and Juliet was trembling, but a different type of shock from Pauline’s. Pauline was almost in a coma.’ They needed noise and someone to be there without discussing the incident.
Bill and Hilda, however, knew that the police would soon be interviewing the girls, so they decided to talk to them separately in order to ascertain exactly what had happened. They agreed that Bill should talk to Pauline, and Hilda to her daughter. At this point and later, separately and together, they urged the girls to tell the truth.
Bill recalled that he told Pauline that ‘the police wer
e grown up people and that she was only a child and it would be better for me to deal with the police on her behalf’. He urged her to give him a detailed account and explained that they had to have everything ‘right as policemen have all sorts of ways of looking at these things’. Pauline repeated the story she had told Agnes Ritchie. When he suggested that perhaps there had been a quarrel during which Honorah had tried to hit Pauline, she said, ‘My mother has never struck me.’19
Immediately after the tragedy, a traumatized Herbert Rieper gave the police permission to interview his daughter without legal representation. At 8pm Detectives Brown and Tate arrived at Ilam, where they were met by Hilda, Henry and Bill. Hilda took them upstairs to the bedroom where Pauline and Juliet were in bed. Juliet was taken down to the sitting room while they questioned Pauline. She repeated the story that Honorah had fallen.
Halfway through the interview, the police invited Bill into the room and they broached the issue of the half-brick. The interview was then suspended, and downstairs Juliet was questioned with her parents and Bill present. Detective Brown suggested that they were not convinced that she had been there when Honorah died. This seemed to throw Juliet, and Bill asked to be allowed to speak to her in private.
He returned with an announcement that Juliet would like to make a new statement. Juliet said she had given her first version of events so things would be better for Pauline. ‘I told that story because I wanted to be loyal to Pauline and did not want to see her in any trouble.’20 Without legal representation, her new version was taken down in writing. In it she agreed with the police that she had come back to find Honorah already dead. Pauline had explained to her that her mother had fallen and hit her head against a stone.
With this as a lever, Brown went upstairs again to talk to Pauline, with Hilda present. He told her they believed that Juliet had not been involved in Honorah’s death, then accused Pauline of murdering her mother. At this point she agreed to answer questions put to her by the police. In answering them she accepted responsibility for her mother’s death, and at the same time absolved Juliet. ‘My friend does not know anything about it. She was out of sight at the time. She had gone ahead.’ She finished by saying, ‘As soon as I started to strike my mother I regretted it but could not stop then.’21
At the conclusion of the interview, Detective Brown read her back the series of questions and answers, which she accepted as a correct account and signed. Pauline was charged with the murder of her mother, and taken from Ilam homestead to the police station. As the police were leaving they asked Pauline where she got the half-brick, and Hilda, who overheard, was quick to say: ‘She did not get it here. She brought it with her.’22 Pauline’s response was immediate: ‘No, I took it from home.’
That evening Tate and Brown went to the Riepers’ house. Herbert took them up to Pauline’s bedroom, where they found two diaries, 14 exercise books and a scrapbook containing actors’ photographs. They also removed a pair of lisle stockings identical in colour and style to the one used in the murder. The exercise books were scattered about the room; the diary containing Pauline’s last entry was lying on the dressing table close to the bedroom door.
It was the diaries that immediately captured their attention. ‘In transcript, the 1953 diary contains 120 pages, with entries completed for nearly every day. The partially completed 1954 diary contains fifty-two pages, again with almost daily entries.’23 From the diaries they could construct a remarkably clear picture of the months leading up to Honorah’s death. Brown took extracts from the diaries and ‘Photostat copies of different pages of it’.24
At the Ilam homestead, Juliet was close to distraught. She kept the radio on and recited poetry in order to drown out the dreadful events of the day. That night she slept in her mother’s arms after Hilda read to her from her favourite poetry. ‘Her one repeated sentence was that she didn’t wish to talk about it, that she wanted to go to sleep and forget [about] it.’25
On Wednesday, 23 June, Detective Gillies picked up from Hick’s Drapers the girls’ clothes, which had not yet been cleaned, and then took Herbert to identify the body at the Christchurch Hospital Mortuary. ‘It is the body of Honorah Mary Parker who has lived with me for 23 years,’ he confirmed in his report to the coroner. At 11.10 that morning Brown and Tate went back to Ilam, where Bill was the only adult at home. He escorted the police upstairs to Juliet’s bedroom.
‘We have reason to believe now that you were present when the fatality occurred. You are suspected of having murdered Mrs Rieper yesterday,’ Brown told Juliet, then gave her an official warning.26 Bill suggested they wait until Juliet’s mother returned. While they waited he told her she ‘must tell the truth … she broke down, and after a few minutes she told him the story told later to Detective-Sergeant Tate’.27 She said that they went with some vague hope that they might be able to frighten Honorah into agreeing to Pauline going to South Africa, but what happened instead was a nightmare.
They were well down the track when Honorah had decided it was time to go back. The group turned, and Juliet was walking ahead when she heard noises — there was a quarrel. When she went back, Honorah was on her knees and Pauline was hitting her. Juliet took the stocking and hit her, too. ‘I was terrified. I thought that one of them had to die. I wanted to help Pauline. It was terrible.’
Honorah moved convulsively and they both held her down. She could not remember if Honorah said anything or shouted out, because she was too frightened to listen. ‘After the first blow was struck I knew it would be necessary to kill her. I was terrified and hysterical.’28 Her statement was read back to her in the presence of her mother and Bill. She agreed to the contents and wrote: ‘The three pages of this statement have been read to me. They are true and correct, signed J.M. Hulme.’29 She was arrested, taken to the police station and charged with murder.
‘After the children returned home, Dr Hulme, Mrs Hulme and I urged them to tell the truth right from the beginning,’ Bill explained in a statement given later.30 Although this advanced the investigation, it left the lawyers with almost no case to defend. The situation was difficult and there were few precedents. Juliet and Pauline, both minors, were questioned by police without legal counsel, yet once they entered the justice system they were tried as adults. The well-meaning recommendation to tell the truth might have been sound parental advice after a misdemeanour, but for murder the proper and appropriate counsel should have come from a lawyer.
There was nothing straight-thinking or normal, however, about the lives of the adults involved in this tragedy. In a single day, the fact that Herbert was not married to Honorah had been publicly revealed, and her surname and that of his children changed to Parker. He had lost his beloved common-law wife, and his daughter had committed matricide. Henry’s marriage was ignominiously ending; he had forfeited his position as rector and was leaving New Zealand under a cloud of dissent and disagreement. Hilda was living in a farcical ménage à trois, while continuing to work as a marriage guidance counsellor. Bill’s role, technically that of adulterer, was undefined and problematic.
There was little wider support in this time of enormous stress. The family and friends of Bill and the Hulmes were in Canada and the United Kingdom, and Herbert was an Australian whose past life he could not easily revisit. Even the Birmingham origins of Honorah’s background had disconnected family links and limited the circle of people who could be called on to help.
Then there was the behaviour of Pauline and Juliet in custody, which confounded everyone. The girls did not seem to have properly come to terms with the gravity of the situation. Apart from being repulsed by what had happened, they had shown little sign of remorse.
After Pauline was taken to the station late in the evening of 22 June, she found a piece of paper and continued to describe events as if she were confiding in her diary at home. When she realized that her writing might be incriminating, she attempted to burn it. Margaret Felton, the police matron who confiscated and read the note before it wa
s largely destroyed, recalled Pauline’s words. The entry read: ‘I find myself in an unexpected place … after having committed my murder. All the H-s have been wonderfully kind and sympathetic. Anyone would think I’ve been good. I’ve had a pleasant time with the police talking 19 to the dozen and behaving as though I hadn’t a care in the world.’ There was a section the policewoman could not remember, then it finished: ‘I haven’t had a chance to talk to Deborah properly but I am taking the blame for everything.’31
On 23 June at 10am, Pauline appeared in court before magistrate Rex Abernethy, charged with her mother’s murder. Immediately afterwards, Brown and Tate interviewed her in the latter’s office. When they interrogated her about the confiscated note, she told them she would give a true account of everything and sign it if she was allowed to see Juliet. She said Juliet would confirm what she said.
Pauline was left in the office at the police station while Brown and Tate drove out to Ilam, accused Juliet of being involved with Pauline in Honorah’s death, and arrested her. On 24 June, she appeared before magistrate Raymond Ferner on a charge of murder; the trial for the girls in the Magistrates’ Court was set for 14 July. In the meantime they were remanded to Paparua Prison, just out of Christchurch.
Honorah Parker’s funeral service and cremation was held at the Bromley cemetery in Christchurch, on 24 June 1954. It was a quiet, devastating end to a life — laid to rest among old gravestones and pink Summerhill pressed-brick memorial walls and tiny, immaculate rosebush plots. She would be remembered publicly not for her life, but for her death. Newspapers around the world would carry descriptions of her belongings and details of her grizzly end. She would forever be the mother who was murdered, a 45-year-old woman of medium build with greying hair — an ordinary person who became extraordinary in death. However, Pauline’s classmate Margaret Tyndall remembers her differently.
The Search for Anne Perry Page 22