Anne Perry and the Murder of the Century

the best people are those who fight against all obstacles in the pursuit of happiness”.

The foreign correspondents who flocked to Christchurch were at once struck by the incongruity of a murder of the foulest kind occurring in what the Sydney Sun-Herald called 'New Zealand's quietest, staidest, most Victorian-English city - a city of bicycles, lace and old ivy.

The huge gibbous moon that rose in the sky as darkness fell cast hardly a glimmer under the trees.

She was even at fault for having brought a wringer-mop from England, complaining loudly that such a simple thing was unprocurable in "this God-forsaken country".

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.

Some people tell us, ‘You shouldn’t make the film until everyone involved has died.’ But what’s the use of that? How could it possibly be accurate if there’s no one left to talk to?

The girls had served nearly five and a half years. By today’s standards, this would be considered a short period in jail for such a brutal, premeditated murder.

If Pauline and Juliet really were psychotic, or afflicted with some lesser mental disorder, the tragedy was that they had become individually and as a pair so odious that hardly anyone could give them a second’s sympathy.

Hilda Ross, the straight-shooting government minister in charge of the welfare of women and children, blamed youthful immorality on “lustful images flowing from trashy magazines and unclean reading matter”, and in July 1954, as the trial of Pauline Parker and Juliet Hulme was about to begin, the government convened a special committee to investigate. It reported that both comics and working mothers were to blame. The government quickly passed legislation banning the sale of contraceptives to anyone under sixteen.

Its private counterpart, St Margaret’s College, was content to produce well-mannered, nicely spoken young ladies, versed in the rituals of the Anglican Church, not over-burdened with learning, and certainly not expected to earn their own living.

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”.

It was the telephone call Anne Perry had been dreading for thirty-five years. “There’s a ridiculous rumour going around in New Zealand. There’s a film being made about a murder. They say you’re Juliet Hulme, one of the… We must put it to rest.” “You can’t,” Perry said. “It’s the truth.

Alison Laurie would later suggest to a New Zealand Listener journalist that there were extenuating circumstances. “They were absolutely isolated as young lesbians. They undoubtedly felt that if they were separated they would never meet anyone else again—so they were desperate.” “These days,” she continued, “we would hope that two young lesbians in that position could ring up Lesbian Line and get advice and support.

The lawyers could not possibly call Juliet or Pauline as witnesses. There was no legal obstacle to either girl giving evidence, but their rudeness, their arrogance and conceit, their abusiveness—which Medlicott and Bennett had recently experienced—would alienate the jury. The fact they crowed about having killed Mrs Rieper would appall anyone who had to listen to them.

Pauline wished her mother dead. She had wanted to kill the bloody bitch for ages. Her mother had it coming to her for her ill humour, her nagging, her stupidity, her small-mindedness. Pauline would never forget the unhappiness of her childhood, everything that had happened to her.

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!

The Inheritors, published by Golding

Informed that an opportunity would be given her to see her daughter before the latter was transferred to Mt Eden, she had done nothing.

The paper found Mrs Perry’s concern for her daughter’s welfare and the alleged unhumanity of her sentence “difficult to reconcile with the fact that she went to see the girl only occasionally after her arrest, and then only, it is understood, after a message had been passed that her daughter wanted to see her”.