Anne Perry and the Murder of the Century Read online

  After lunch, Bert and Wendy biked back to their places of work—Wendy to her lingerie counter and Bert to Dennis Brothers, Poulterers and Fishmongers, the modest retail business of which he was the manager. As soon as the dishes were washed and dried, Nora Rieper and the two girls set off along Gloucester Street, nipping through Chancery Lane to Cathedral Square to catch the Cashmere Hills bus.

  They were an unremarkable trio, although Juliet, half a head taller than Pauline, stood out a little on the streets of Christchurch with her self-assured manner and the unmistakably English cut of her fawn coat. Pauline, who had just turned sixteen, had a stocky frame that no amount of dieting or purging seemed able to change. With her pale waxy complexion, intractable black hair and frequent scowl, she was not as attractive as her friend. Her coat was of a commonplace grey Donegal tweed. And while Juliet carried herself well, Pauline walked with a slight limp, a legacy of childhood osteomyelitis. Both girls toted shoulder bags, as girls their age did when out of school uniform. Nora, a buxom woman with grey-brindled hair and muscular legs, was turned out in a matronly matching jacket and skirt with hat, gloves and handbag. It was a lovely afternoon but the pullover around her shoulders was there in reserve for the drop in temperature to be expected later on.

  Victoria Park in the Port Hills above Christchurch is five miles south of Cathedral Square. Barging down Colombo Street, a river of bicycles and cars, the number two bus that had only recently replaced the tram service passed Dennis Brothers at number 668 and carried on over Moorhouse Avenue and the railway line. With frequent stops and starts it juddered past Sydenham, then on through dreary Beckenham to Thorrington at the foot of the Cashmere Hills. Here the road tacked west, tracing the Heathcote River around to Hackthorne Road, before climbing uphill past the affluent houses of Cashmere. The bus reached its terminus outside the Sign of the Takahe, a large, incongruous building that sought to emulate an English manor house of the fifteenth or sixteenth century. The vision of a conservation-minded eccentric named Harry Ell, it had taken an army of masons, wood carvers, heraldic painters and other craftsmen more than thirty years to complete.

  From the Sign of the Takahe a rough-metalled roadway led about a mile up a rise into Victoria Park. A couple of hundred acres of reserve land, the park had been opened to the public fifty-seven years earlier to the day—June 22, 1897—as Christchurch’s tribute to the great queen on the occasion of her diamond jubilee. For the most part it was a wilderness of tussock grass and scrubby trees, pierced in places by outcrops of volcanic rock.

  The three trudged up the hill to the park. None was much used to exercise and the light westerly had produced a warm afternoon. At the top, the girls unbuttoned their coats and caught their breath outside the tea kiosk that adjoined the caretaker’s house. The view over Christchurch and across the Canterbury Plains to the snow-licked foothills of the Southern Alps, milky-blue in the soft afternoon light, was spectacular. Not the sort of woman to venture into untamed wastes without fortification, Nora Rieper led the way into the tearooms. It was shortly after half past two.

  The caretaker’s wife was in charge. Nora ordered a pot of tea with cakes and scones, and suggested the girls might like soft drinks. Both said they preferred still and Agnes Ritchie brought the bottles of drink, orange for one, lemon for the other, with straws to their table. She chatted a little to Nora and the girls responded politely when she addressed them. They were a quiet group, she thought. Nothing out of the ordinary. The bill was paid and they left just before three o’clock.

  Pauline had been to Victoria Park before: when Juliet was away in the North Island with her parents in the Christmas holidays, she and another girl had gone there. She took the lead, heading down a steep track that started at a gap in the stone wall near the caretaker’s house. The east side bush track, as it was known, descended to “a delightful sylvan setting of native and English trees with young pines, ribbonwood and lemonwood predominating”, as a reporter from N.Z. Truth would later describe it. Another journalist would more theatrically call it “a lonely ravine”. Either way, a more secluded spot within a bus ride and short walk of central Christchurch did not exist.

  CHAPTER 2

  State of Shock

  At half past three, give or take a few minutes, Agnes Ritchie was in the servery making ice creams for two small children. Half a dozen stone steps led up to the serving window. While busy scooping the ice cream she saw the two girls who had been in the tearooms earlier dashing up to the foot of the steps, breathless, greatly agitated, with bloody hands and clothing. One girl’s face was splattered with blood and the other’s finely speckled. Both were shouting. One was calling out, “Please, could somebody help us? Mummy has been hurt! It’s Mummy—she’s terribly hurt! She’s dead!” The other yelled, “It’s her mother—she’s hurt! She’s covered with blood! Please, somebody help!”

  Agnes Ritchie sent her two young customers to fetch her husband, who was burning rubbish nearby, and rushed out through the tearooms to the girls. She asked them to show her where it had happened. One gasped, “Down in the bushes—down the track.” Agnes went through the gap in the stone wall and peered down the track, but couldn’t see anything. She went back to the girls and told them they would have to show her. They begged her not to make them go down to that horrible place again. Assuring them she wouldn’t, Agnes took them into the kiosk. One, whom she later learned was Juliet Hulme, was bordering on hysteria; the other, Pauline Parker, was quieter, white as an aspirin, perhaps in shock.

  Kenneth Ritchie, the caretaker, knew only that a woman had been injured in an accident. Seeing the two girls, he took the one with the blood-splashed face through the gap in the stone wall to the edge of the bush. Her left hand was coated with gore. He demanded to know where had the accident had happened. The girl gestured vaguely towards the vegetation below. Ritchie could get from her only that her mother had slipped and hit her head on a rock. Thinking he might have to staunch some heavy bleeding, he raced into the house to grab a towel. The second his assistant, Eric McIlroy, showed up the two men hotfooted it down the track.

  Agnes Ritchie took the girls back into the tearooms and phoned

  for an ambulance. Juliet kept saying, “Don’t go away! Don’t leave us!” She was definitely the more upset of the two. Next, Agnes phoned Donald Walker, a doctor whose Beckenham surgery was not far away. Juliet, in particular, was worried about the blood on her hands and clothes and wanted to wash urgently. There was no hot water in the house that day; Agnes took them into the servery to clean themselves

  as best they could at the sink. She gave them towels and left them to it. “Oh dear, isn’t she nice?” Juliet said and both girls dissolved in giggles.

  When they were slightly more presentable, the girls asked Agnes Ritchie if she would ring their fathers. Pauline said she didn’t want to go back to her house as no one would be there. The phone at Bert Rieper’s fish shop was engaged but Agnes got hold of Henry Hulme at the university. He would come immediately and collect them both. While they waited, Agnes gave them a cup of tea. Pauline gulped hers scalding hot, not pausing to add milk.

  Agnes asked repeatedly how the accident had happened. Juliet shrieked, “Don’t talk about it! I can’t bear to talk about it!”

  Pauline said in a slow, husky voice, “She slipped on a plank and hit her head on a brick. … Her head kept bumping and banging as it fell.”

  Juliet chimed in, “Don’t think about it. It’s only a dream. We’ll wake up soon. Let’s talk about something else.”

  Agnes thoughtfully moved on to more general topics. Which school did they go to? They weren’t at school any more, they said. During a lull in the conversation, Pauline groaned loudly, “Mummy—she’s dead.” Agnes suggested she might not be hurt that badly. Pauline just stared at her.

  After a long silence, Pauline volunteered that they had tried to pick up her mother and carry her, but she was too heavy and they had dropped her. “Perhaps we didn’t do the right thing,” she sugg
ested. Both kept saying they wanted to go home. “Will my Daddy be long?” Juliet plaintively asked no one in particular. “I wish he would hurry.” She wanted to get away at once from “this horrible place”. Pauline said she just wanted to go to bed, although she was very calm, Agnes Ritchie observed.

  Kenneth Ritchie and Eric McIlroy had run a quarter of a mile down the rough track when they came upon a woman lying on her back near a ramshackle bridge of wooden planks. Her legs, splayed indecently, lay towards them; her head, smashed and bloody, was downhill. The woman’s eyes were closed and bulging. Her mouth gaped and her hair was matted with globs of blood. Blood smeared her face and was caked in her mouth and nostrils. Jets of blood from her head had travelled in rivulets, now clotted twelve feet down the track. Her skirt was around her thighs. Instinctively protecting the woman’s modesty, Kenneth Ritchie pulled at the hem to cover her knees. It didn’t look like an accident, he thought. There were no rocks anywhere near, and on the ground a foot from her head there was a half-brick with blood and bits of hair on it. McIlroy remained at the scene while Ritchie shot back up the hill to call the police.

  A St John’s ambulance was pulling up as Ritchie got to the top. Harold Keys, the driver, asked him about the woman who had fallen down a bank. Not a man to waste words, Ritchie tersely informed him she was down the track—dead. Keys went to have a gander, leaving his offsider Ray Edmonds to wait by the ambulance. At her husband’s instruction, Agnes Ritchie phoned the police. By then it was ten to four.

  Shaken by what he had seen, Kenneth Ritchie called the girls into the sitting room but got nothing out of them. That was when he saw the large patch of blood on the front of the girl Hulme’s skirt. He made a brief report by telephone to Morris Barnett, the superintendent of reserves. Barnett was worried the woman might have tripped on the planking of the bridge: they both knew it was overdue for repair. Out of caution Barnett phoned Ross Lascelles of Weston Ward and Lascelles, the council’s solicitors, alerting him to a potential legal problem.

  When Henry Hulme arrived at Victoria Park, Juliet and Pauline sank happily into the aromatic upholstery of the Jaguar. Relieved that the police had not yet arrived, Hulme paused only to leave his name and address with Edmonds before accelerating away in the direction of Ilam. At a quarter past four, he and the two girls arrived at the house. Bill Perry, who lived in the self-contained flat at the back of the house, had arrived seconds earlier and was collecting his newspaper at the gate when Hulme’s car turned into the drive. The men did not speak.

  As the girls, pale and trembling, entered the panelled entrance hall Hilda was on the telephone. She stared at them horror-struck and crisply brought her phone call to a close. “I have to go. Juliet’s just come in and she’s covered in blood!”

  There had been an accident, Henry told her. Julie and Pauline had seen Mrs Rieper fall on some rocks at Victoria Park. She had been very badly injured—was possibly dead. Even as he spoke, an accident sounded hardly plausible considering the state the girls were in. Fearing a ghastly crime had been committed, he was stunned into inertia.

  Hilda was made of sterner stuff. Both girls appeared to be in shock. While running them a bath, she summoned Bill Perry. Henry was hopeless: Bill would prove much more resourceful in a crisis. After instructing Hilda how to treat shock, Perry took charge. For a start Henry should phone Nancy. All he had to do was tell her there had been an accident at Victoria Park and Julie would not be able to go to the Léon Goossens recital with Diony and Jan. That was all he needed to say.

  While Hilda was bathing the girls—in water as hot as they could stand—Perry left cups of very sweet hot tea on a tray outside the bathroom. The two bloodstained coats were on the landing. The left sleeve of Pauline’s coat was sodden with blood six inches up from the cuff. Her mother’s blood—God almighty! He roared off to the nearest dry-cleaning depot, Hicks’ Drapers at the corner of Clyde and Fendalton Roads, which closed at five o’clock. He hadn’t yet spoken to the girls; he took their coats to be cleaned—or so he would later claim—only because he thought it wouldn’t be good for them to see their bloodied clothing while in a state of shock.

  While Perry was away, Hilda washed the girls’ underwear. After her bath Juliet became excitable, flushed and talkative, but remained reluctant to discuss the accident. Hilda put the girls to bed togetherin Juliet’s room. They told her they were hungry and she brought them a light supper. When Perry returned, he looked in on them.

  A wireless was playing music. Pauline was very quiet, very white, almost in a coma. Juliet was flushed, perspiring, and extremely ani­mated. He gave each of them a sedative. Best they got to sleep as soon as possible. He did not discuss Mrs Rieper’s accident but chatted quietly about books and music, hoping to keep their minds off unpleasant thoughts.

  Dr Donald Walker was the first to arrive at Victoria Park after Henry Hulme had taken the girls away. Kenneth Ritchie told him he was wasting his time if he thought he was going to give the woman medical help. The doctor decided he might as well wait at the tea kiosk for the police.

  Constable Donald Molyneaux, on duty in the watch house at Central Police Station in Hereford Street, received the call at ten to four. Molyneaux drove Sergeant Robert Hope up to the park, arriving at twenty past four. The two police officers spoke briefly to Dr Walker and Harold Keys and then, guided by Eric McIlroy, they all descended the track. Kenneth Ritchie and Ray Edmonds were gazing in reflective silence at the body. It was as utterly motionless as anything could be—stone, stone dead. It was eerily quiet down in the bush, where the east side of Latters Spur fell away steeply to Bowenvale. Night was falling fast: not a sparrow’s peep disturbed the intense silence. It was hard to imagine the corpse at their feet had been as alive as them only an hour ago.

  As Dr Walker confirmed what they already knew, Sergeant Hope’s eye was drawn not only to the half-brick, but to a stocking lying on the bank beside the track. He instructed Constable Molyneaux to make sure no one touched the body or anything else, then hared back up the hill to contact the Criminal Investigation Branch office on his patrol-car radio.

  Detective Sergeant Archie Tate and Detective Ferguson Gillies of the CIB and Constable Audrey Griffiths of the Women’s Division were dispatched to Victoria Park. Being the shortest day of the year, it was getting dark by the time they arrived at five-fifteen. Sergeant Hope led them down the zigzag. They were joined soon afterwards by Inspector Duncan McKenzie and Senior Detective Macdonald Brown of the CIB, Ted Taylor, the coroner, Dr Colin Pearson, the police pathologist, and the police photographer Bill Ramage. The huge gibbous moon that rose in the sky as darkness fell cast hardly a glimmer under the trees, where the body of Nora Rieper lay on a dirt track, surrounded by bloody pine needles.

  The experts studied the scene by torchlight: the body, still warm;the half-brick; the lisle stocking, knotted at the ankle and broken at the toe. It turned chilly as they poked and probed, took photographs, made measurements, drew sketch plans, and wrote careful notes.

  The abject details were all recorded: the woman’s muddied stockings, the shoe cast off her right foot, her lower denture half-buried in gritty clay to the left of her jaw, her trampled hat and gloves, the brooch squashed beneath her left leg. Nearby were a handbag and white cardigan—lost or discarded as the first blows thonked into her. A placenta-like pudding of clotted blood lay near her feet on the grass beside the track. It suggested her body had been moved from where it first lay oozing blood. Marks around the neck indicated that the woman had been held down by the throat while being bashed on the head.

  The wounds to her hands escaped no one’s attention. The tip of the little finger of her left hand was hanging by a piece of skin. She had clearly tried to ward off blows to her head. She had put up a fight. Her death had been neither quick nor painless.

  The death scene sickened them all. Violent killings were rare in Christchurch, and as Detective Sergeant Tate would say, “The deceased had been attacked with an animal ferocity seldom seen
in the most brutal murders.” That this savagery was the work of two teenage girls who might have been their own daughters was a thought too shocking for words. Tate’s own daughter Lesley was the same sort of age.

  They now knew that one of the girls was the daughter of the rector of Canterbury College. Her mother, the rector’s wife, was often on the wire­less, dishing out advice about family things on Candid Comment. Station 3YA, for crying out loud. It was beyond comprehension how or why two young girls—girls like that—anyone—could have done such a thing. It was something people would puzzle about for a long time to come.

  When the detective work at the scene was finished, the woman’s body was humped up to the top of the track, where Constable Griffiths was deputed to escort it to the Christchurch Public Hospital morgue—“the dead house” as it was unceremoniously known. Hers would be the grim task of undressing the corpse, and wrapping and labelling items of clothing that might be needed as evidence. She would have to tie the upper joint of the left-hand little finger to the lower in case it became detached and lost. When she was finished, a mortuary attendant would come and shear the dead woman’s head and get everything ready for Dr Pearson in the morning.

  At seven-thirty, Inspector McKenzie ordered Brown and Tate to get cracking and interview the girls. Up at the tea kiosk the two men came across Bert Rieper. Agnes Ritchie had telephoned Dennis Brothers again later in the afternoon and Bert had finally got her message at half past four. A friend had driven him to Victoria Park, where Sergeant Hope had given him the bitter news. He had been hanging around since then, stunned, transfixed, unable to bring himself to venture down the track yet powerless to leave. Crushed by grief, he had all but lost the power of speech. The detectives sought his permission to question Pauline, whom they believed was at the home of Dr and Mrs Hulme. With a mute nod he agreed.