Honorah Parker: Anne Perry helped her best friend batter her own mother to death with a brick in brutal murder’ British author Anne Perry, who died in California last month aged 84, sold 26 million copies of her books.
But her astonishing professional legacy has come despite — or, indeed, because of — an almost unimaginable act Anne committed aged just 15: murder.
Her vicious crime — the bludgeoning of a friend’s mother to death with a brick — transfixed the Press and public and gave the young Anne, who had grown up in a privileged family, instant notoriety.
So much so, it became the subject of the 1994 Oscar-nominated film, Heavenly Creatures in which Anne was played by an 18-year-old Kate Winslet in her breakthrough role.
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British crime writer Anne Perry at the Edinburgh International Book Festival in 2006. Her astonishing professional legacy has come despite — or, indeed, because of — an almost unimaginable act Anne committed aged just 15
Melanie Lynskey (left) pictured as Pauline Parker, with Kate Winslet as Juliet Hulme in 1994 film Heavenly Creatures
The triggers which led a mere girl of 15 to become a killer gave the film its fascination, as it recounted the real-life story of how, Anne — born Juliet Hulme — had befriended teenager, Pauline Parker, at school in 1950s New Zealand.
Friendship turned to obsession, they sometimes shared a bed and baths, and when Anne’s father announced he was sending Anne to sunnier South Africa to convalesce after a bout of tuberculosis, the girls were terrified of being separated.
Pauline’s mother forbade her daughter from leaving the country with Anne and Pauline hatched a horrifically misplaced plan to kill her.
On June 22, 1954, the girls battered Honorah Parker to death with a brick knotted into a sock, leaving her lying in a pool of blood in deserted Victoria Park, Christchurch. The attack was brutal, the coroner recorded 45 separate head wounds.
The combination of matricide, Anne’s well-to-do family — her scientist father Dr Henry Hulme was Rector of Canterbury University College in Christchurch, her mother Hilda a marriage guidance counsellor who’d been having an affair — and the suggestion of a lesbian relationship between the girls, rocked the quiet, conservative country.
The pair served five years in different prisons and changed their names on release. Pauline became Hilary Nathan and Juliet, Anne Perry.
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Yet what came next for the teenage murderers is maybe even more gripping.
Anne, successfully concealing her identity, became a bestselling crime author, writing of killings, justice and morality, while her own sins remained buried for 40 years.
Then, in a dramatic twist, just before Heavenly Creature’s cinematic release, Anne’s past was exposed and she was discovered living quietly in the small Scottish fishing village of Portmahomack, Easter Ross.
The world’s Press promptly descended, shattering her carefully constructed existence.
Three years later, in an uncanny case of parallel lives, Pauline was also found living in the UK, and working as a riding instructor in Kent.
After her cover was blown, she fled and ended up living 90 miles from Anne, in the Orkneys — although the pair never met again.
The Mail spoke to sources close to both women this week to shed light on their extraordinary lives since the crime. Did they find the redemption they desperately sought?
