Anne Perry and the Murder of the Century Read online

  Anne Perry

  and the Murder

  of the Century

  Peter Graham

  Skyhorse Publishing

  A Herman Graf Book

  Originally published in 2011 under the title of

  So Brilliantly Cever: Parker, Hulme and the Murder that Shocked the World

  by Awa Press, Wellington, New Zealand.

  Copyright © 2011, 2013 by Peter Graham

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Skyhorse Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

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  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  ISBN: 978-1-62087-630-5

  Printed in the United States of America

  EDITORIAL NOTES

  1. Honorah Parker’s first name was misspelled ‘Honora’ by the police and in subsequent media reports. The correct spelling has been used here except where quoting reports of the time.

  2. In 1955 the Supreme Court was the court where the most serious criminal cases were tried before a jury. Today this is called the High Court, and the Supreme Court is the name of New Zealand’s court of final appeal.

  about the author

  Peter Graham worked for thirty years in Hong Kong as a barrister before taking up a new career as a crime writer. His first book,

  Vile Crimes, about a notorious double poisoning case, was praised by The New Zealand Herald as “murderously good … a pacy narrative and a study in pathological selfishness”. His quest to unearth the whole truth about Pauline Parker and Juliet Hulme has taken him around the world. Peter Graham lives in rural Canterbury, New Zealand.

  To Rebecca, Guy, Lucy and Louise

  Anne Perry and The Murder of the Century

  Author’s Note

  1 A Walk in the Park

  2 State of Shock

  3 The Investigation

  4 Taking the Blame

  5 A Suitable Man

  6 Strains of War

  7 Cathedral City

  8 A New Residence

  9 “Sapienta et Veritas”

  10 Family Secrets

  11 Indissoluble Bond

  12 Two Beautiful Daughters

  13 Charles and Lance

  14 Angelic Behaviour

  15 The Temple in the Garden

  16 Serious Trouble

  17 A Lovely Remark

  18 Hectic Nights

  19 To Be Together Forever

  20 No Ordinary Crime

  21 The Only Possible Defence

  22 A Crime in a Million

  23 Dirty-minded Girls

  24 A Rare Form of Insanity

  25 The Thing Called Bliss

  26 Sleeping with Saints

  27 “I See Nothing Insane…”

  28 The Jury Retires

  29 Her Majesty’s Pleasure

  30 The Presence of Evil

  31 Life in Prison

  32 A Difficult Year

  33 A Fresh Start

  34 Blighted Lives

  35 A Secret Past

  36 A Lesbian View

  37 Stripped Naked

  38 A Piece of Fiction

  39 The Other Girl

  40 What the Heck Was It?

  41 Separate Lives

  Epilogue

  Select Bibliography

  Acknowledgements

  Photo Insert

  Author’s Note

  When Juliet Hulme and Pauline Parker bashed Pauline’s mother to death on June 22, 1954, I was seven years old. I don’t remember hearing about the murder or the trial, even though I clearly remember the conquest of Mount Everest by Hillary and Tenzing and Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation the previous year. It would seem my parents hid the news of the vicious killing from my sister and me: such protection of young minds was normal in those days. Matricide by teenage girls was then an exceedingly rare crime, as it is still. The killing of Honorah Parker, not to mention the talk of a lesbian relationship between the girls, would have made deeply distressing reading for parents everywhere.

  I first heard of what is usually called “the Parker–Hulme murder” in 1972, when as a young, newly qualified barrister and solicitor I went to Christchurch to work as an assistant to Brian McClelland, who had been junior counsel for Juliet Hulme. He often talked about the case, and on one occasion Peter Mahon, who had been junior to the crown prosecutor Alan Brown, shared his remembrances with me and others. From Brian McClelland I heard that the two girls had been engaged in a lesbian love affair when they were threatened with separation—although Pauline, he said, also enjoyed regular sex with a male law student. Pauline’s parents were not married and several cuts below the Hulmes socially. Her father ran a fish and chip shop in Sydenham and Pauline had been bedazzled by what seemed to her the glamorous social world of the Hulmes. The girls wrote poems and books together, and believing they were geniuses and great beauties made plans to run away to Hollywood and have their books made into films. McClelland firmly believed that Juliet Hulme, who called him “Bambi”, was certifiably mad but was not convinced the same was true of Pauline.

  The Parker–Hulme murder was somehow embedded in the soil of Christchurch, as much a part of local history as the pilgrims who, a century earlier, had footed it over the bridle path from Lyttelton, the men in frock coats and top hats, the women in crinolines, to found the city. I not infrequently met people who had been friends of Juliet’s parents Hilda and Henry Hulme when Henry was rector of Canterbury University College.

  The rector’s house, generally known then as Ilam Homestead, stood in its magnificent grounds in Ilam Road. You could not go past it—I was not alone in this—without thinking about those two strange girls. It was the same passing the old Girls’ High building in Cranmer Square, now sadly demolished after suffering severe damage in the earthquakes of September 2010 and February 2011. And if you went to Victoria Park you could not help wondering exactly where Pauline’s mother met her terrible end.

  The case so fascinated me that in 1975 I decided to find out as much as I could and write an account of it, as true as I could make it. From what I already knew the facts seemed too good, from a literary point of view, to waste on fictionalisation. I had come to unwittingly share Dr Johnson’s belief that “the value of every story depends upon its being true”.

  With Brian McClelland’s support I tried to retrieve the case papers from his old firm, Wynn Williams and Co. I was informed the file had gone missing. For such a cause célèbre it is astonishing how many files, boxes of photographs and exhibits of various kinds have disappeared from solicitors’ offices, court registries and police stations. Regrettably, my book was not started in 1975 but in 2008, after I had returned from thirty years in Hong Kong. In the interim a number of people involved had died, but one way and another I was able to find more than enough documentary evidence and people with long memories to piece together a wide-ranging narrative of the death of Honorah Parker, the backgrounds of J
uliet Hulme and Pauline Parker, and their lives both before and after the murder.

  My research began at the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington. At the front desk the librarian told me there was always a lot of interest in the Parker–Hulme case. “Mostly prurient,” he added. How could he tell? I tried my best not to look shifty but may not have succeeded. That disapproving “here’s another one of them” look from librarians and archivists was something I would get used to. As my research progressed I was, however, frequently rewarded by new discoveries that were interesting in themselves, or shone new light on Juliet, Pauline and the lives of people affected by their crime.

  The murder is internationally New Zealand’s most famous crime. In part that is due to the success of Peter Jackson’s film Heavenly Creatures. The trial of Parker and Hulme caught the attention of theworld’s press from the word go, but to many it is, and will always remain, the “Heavenly Creatures murder”. A quick search on the internet will disclose that there exists in cyberspace an international cult whose devotees feed on every morsel of information, however small, connected with the crime.

  What makes one act of murder and its surrounding circum­stances fascinating, where another is merely sordid or banal? Other than the assassination of presidents and other heads of state, no other murder of a single individual anywhere in the world has probably inspired so many works of fiction—novels, films, plays and screen­plays—not to mention film and television documentaries. The only possible exception is the 1924 Chicago kidnap and murder of Bobby Franks by Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, two outstandingly intelligent teenage sons of millionaires convinced they were Nietzschean supermen.

  Surprisingly, though, apart from short lurid accounts in anthol­ogies of crime, the only previously published true account of the Parker–Hulme murder is Parker and Hulme: A Lesbian View. The scope and purport of that book, which appeared twenty years ago, is very different from my own, being motivated by the wish to examine the effect of the murder on the lesbian community in New Zealand. Anne Perry and the Murder of the Century tells the whole story for the first time.

  Peter Graham

  September 2011

  CHAPTER 1

  A Walk in the Park

  By eleven o’clock in the morning, hard bright sunlight had melted the last pockets of frost from the rector’s expansive lawns and dispelled the mist from the river that glided through the grounds. It was Tuesday, June 22, the winter solstice, but the sky was blue and cloud­less. Dr Henry Hulme was at the wheel of his Jaguar in front of the carriage-porch, warming the engine while

  he waited for his daughter. It was a late start, but Hulme’s days at Canterbury University College were all but over. Soon, thank heaven, he would be back home in England.

  A tall ectomorphic man in his mid forties wearing good London tailoring and horn-rimmed spectacles, the rector looked every inch the Cambridge boffin. There were women who found his aquiline features and pleasant dry manner rather attractive. His prominent forehead intimated a powerful intelligence, and indeed at the time he took up his appointment in New Zealand he had been rated among the leading mathematical physicists of his generation and one of Britain’s foremost authorities on nuclear weapons.

  As Juliet slipped into the front passenger seat her father was agree­ably surprised by her cheerful smile and inconsequential chatter. Julie could be moody—damned difficult in fact. One way or another the rest of the family was always hostage to her uncertain temperament. She had been delayed in the kitchen, modelling for her mother and Bill Perry the camel skirt she was wearing, bought the day before. Julie loved clothes. Perhaps the new skirt explained her buoyant mood.

  Hulme eased the car around the sweep of the drive, past the stately Wellingtonias and Ilam’s famous rhododendrons.Turning into the road, father and daughter headed towards town.

  The professorial board had left Henry Hulme no choice but to resign. But he had had it anyway with the endless bickering that had proved an unhappy feature of university administration in New Zealand. The thought of getting down to serious research work again at home appealed greatly.

  Still, the college had done things properly: he and Hilda had been farewelled with every token of regard. And Bill Cartwright’s vale­diction had generously praised his contribution to Canterbury College and the University of New Zealand. He had been presented with quite a decent cheque—a collection from the academic staff. Rudi Gopas had applied the final brushstrokes to his portrait, com­mis­sioned to hang alongside those of the other illustrious men and women of the college.

  In less than a fortnight he and Juliet would be departing. His daughter was still convalescing from tuberculosis. He and Hilda were agreed that it would be best for her health if she stayed with his sister Ina in Johannesburg during the European winter while he looked for a job in England.

  Hilda, as always, would do what suited her. The current plan was that she would pack up the house and bring their son Jonty home to England when his school broke up for the August holidays. Bill Perry—officially a close family friend, in truth her lover—might perhaps be in tow. Hilda wanted a divorce and Henry was determined they should all be adult about it.

  Unsuprisingly, there had been ructions in the household, with Julie at the epicentre. She was upset about saying goodbye to her great friend and soulmate Pauline Rieper. That was only natural, but she was turning the thing into a tragic opera. She overdramatised every­thing. Always had. Deborah and Gina the two girls called each other. Julie insisted the family also had to call her Deborah.

  Both girls were desperate for Pauline to join Juliet in Johannesburg but of course that was impossible. Pauline’s mother would never allow it. He had done everything he could, but that didn’t stop dear Julie making herself thoroughly disagreeable whenever she chose. Only when the Rieper girl stayed at Ilam was there anything like peace in the house. Henry was quietly confident all this unpleasantness would resolve itself in eleven days’ time, when he and his daughter sailed for South Africa.

  On the journey into town, Juliet told her father something of her plans for the day. She was going to have lunch with Gina at the Riepers, after which Mrs Rieper was taking them up to Victoria Park for a walk. That evening she was going to Léon Goossens’ recital at the Civic Theatre with Jan and Diony Sutherland. To Henry, who loved good music, the last item was welcome news. The accomplished English oboist’s concert was a foretaste of how life would be back in England, when Julie’s life

  no longer revolved around Pauline Rieper.

  Henry dropped Juliet in the centre of town, at the intersection of Colombo and Cashel Streets. She was looking beautiful: tall for her age, slender—an English rose, not quite sixteen. Her light brown shoulder-length hair—almost blonde with a little help from a product called Golden Rinse—was parted on the side like one of the whole­some young film actresses of the day. If Juliet were feeling troubled, as would have been natural enough with parental divorce in the air, and the prospect of being shunted off to South Africa looming, no one seeing her march confidently into Beath’s department store that morning to make some small purchases would ever have guessed.

  Leaving Beaths, Juliet walked down Cashel Street towards the river and on to the Riepers’ house at the Christ’s College end of Gloucester Street. Number 31 was a large, plain, two-storey Victorian house that backed on to Christchurch Girls’ High. The weatherboard exterior was in urgent need of repainting, and there were bicycles all over the place. Pauline’s parents, Nora and Bert Rieper, took in boarders, mostly young male university students or trainees from the Teachers’ College in Peterborough Street.

  Juliet didn’t much enjoy spending time at the Riepers. Their frightful furniture and tasteless nicknacks, not to mention the faint pong of fish and gas from the water heater, would put anybody off. And Nora and Bert, although they could not help being who they were, were hopelessly ignorant of anything that mattered: art, great music, literature. Molto insimpatico. Pauline agreed entirely.
She lived at home only under sufferance.

  The girls’ first idea had been to have a picnic at Victoria Park, but Mrs Rieper preferred to have lunch—the Riepers called it dinner—at home first. Bert Rieper was already back from work and in his vegetable garden when Juliet arrived. Pauline’s sister Wendy turned up not long afterwards. Like Juliet, Pauline was in a happy mood. Not just happy, excited. Lunch was a particularly cheerful occasion. Pauline and Juliet cracked jokes, and Bert and Nora joined in the laughter. Wendy, a pretty seventeen-year-old proud of her position in the lingerie section of a nearby department store, may not have found the girls quite so amusing, but Nora was basking in the restored warmth of family life.

  For a long time, Pauline—or Yvonne, as the family called her—had been sulky and often downright rude, treating them with a contempt she didn’t bother to hide. And the way she usually spoke to Wendy was dreadful. In her eyes her family measured up poorly against the Hulmes. Many harsh words had been exchanged between mother and daughter, and the truth was that Nora could hardly wait for the stuck-up, obnoxious, self-opinionated Juliet Hulme to disappear from New Zealand forever—along with her snooty mother and the rest of the Hulmes. Freed from Juliet Hulme’s influence, her daughter would soon get her feet back on the ground, forget all the airs and graces she had acquired over the last two years.

  However, since Sunday afternoon, when they had collected Pauline from the Hulmes’ house at Ilam, where she had been staying for more than a week, they had noticed a change. She was in a happier frame of mind than they had seen for ages; she seemed to have finally come to terms with Juliet’s departure. She had sat in front of the fire that evening, writing an opera she said, but at least making a contribution to the conversation. That was something she hadn’t bothered to do for a long time. She had spoken civilly to her father for once. And yesterday she had worked like a demon, helping with housework. Nora had no desire to go walking in Victoria Park or anywhere else, but seeing how Pauline had bucked herself up it would be nice: a mother-and-daughter outing and a sort of farewell to Juliet. Pauline had found a job and was starting the following week, and Nora would probably not see Juliet again before she left New Zealand. The thought cheered her greatly.