Peter Graham (5) (1947–)

In June of 1954, Juliet Hulme and Pauline Parker took a walk in a Christchurch, New Zealand, park with Pauline's mother. A bit later, the teenager girls ran into a nearby shop in a panic, looking for help for Pauline's mother, who fell and hit her head on the trail. What initially appeared to be an accident was almost immediately identified as murder - after all, it's unlikely that someone falling to the ground would hit her head more than 40 times and wind up with bruises on her throat. And show more with little questioning, the girls told the police exactly what they did: they beat her to death with a brick in a sock.

This wasn't a sudden or spur of the moment decision. Juliet and Pauline had been extremely close companions for several years and had a relationship that included strong fantasy and near-delusional aspects. Both had grown up with significant issues of abandonment earlier in life, and both had trouble connecting with family and others emotionally. Plus, their families - especially Juliet's - were pretty screwed up. Their trial didn't involve questions of guilt at all, since the girls freely admitted the events that happened, but rather focused on whether they were responsible for their actions under the insanity defense in the law at the time. The jury found them guilty - and they spent about 5 years each in prison before essentially disappearing from public view on release.

Then in 1998, Peter Jackson released Heavenly Creatures to wide public acclaim, a movie documenting the crime and the public furor over the trial. Pauline, after release, converted to a strong Catholic belief, to the point of trying to become a nun. When that didn't work out, she left New Zealand for England, where she lived quietly for many years running a riding school and horse boarding establishment. Once the movie came out, she eventually left for the Orkney Islands, where she farms a small croft and lives as a hermit with little contact with others.

Juliet, on the other hand, moved to the US, then England, and changed her name to Anne Perry - her stepfather's name. Yep, NY Times bestselling author Anne Perry. Writer of more than thirty murder mysteries Anne Perry. And this gets to the heart of my thoughts about Graham's book. On the one hand, it's a rather common, albeit well done, true crime book. He's documented the crime well, his telling of the story keeps the reader's interest, and he handles issues from that time (for example, the girls' purported lesbian relationship) with reasonable delicacy. So I'd give it a decent recommendation on the face of things.

On the other hand, the more I read this book, the more I realized that there are millions of people reading rather good murder mysteries written by someone who has actually committed a murder. So the further I went the more this story creeped me out. And in that sense this book becomes more than just a decent true crime book and opens some interesting questions for me. What is the role of rehabilitation here? Anne Perry certainly claims to regret what was done, and the girls' behavior shows plenty of signs of mental illness that seems to have gotten better as she matured. Perry has paid for her crime, but these events happened and are part of the life experience from which she writes. Is it appropriate to experience her murder mysteries as a reader, knowing what horrific thing lies behind them? I certainly don't have any answers, but these are interesting questions!

Do I recommend the book? Yes. As I mention above, it's a decently written true crime story. But if you're an Anne Perry fan, this story could change how you view her work. show less

Because in 1994 Anne Perry’s books were not yet selling in the numbers they soon would sell, many of her current fans (if they were old enough even to have heard about it at the time) missed the big announcement that year about the author’s true identity. Some forty years after having been convicted of one of the more infamous murders in the history of New Zealand, a New Zealand journalist revealed that Anne Perry is none other than convicted murderer Juliet Hulme – the same Juliet show more Hulme who in 1954, as a teen, helped Pauline Parker, her best friend, beat the girl’s mother to death with half a brick that Juliet brought from home for that specific purpose. Peter Graham’s Anne Perry and the Murder of the Century is a meticulously researched account of events leading up to the murder, the murder itself, the trial that followed, and what happened to the key players in those events once the two killers had been released from prison to go their separate ways.

Juliet Hulme, daughter of a prominent English couple, came to New Zealand as a young girl when her father was recruited for a university position in Christchurch. Her lack of social skills did not stop the physically striking Juliet from making an impression on her classmates, albeit it, for the most part, a negative impression. Pauline Parker, on the other hand, was blessed neither with physical attractiveness, nor with any social skills of which to speak. The angry and socially inept Pauline wanted badly to find a soul-mate to whom she could reveal her thoughts and dreams, and Juliet wanted just as badly to find someone she could recreate in her own image. The two girls were made for each other because each of them got their wish.

Pauline Parker’s mother, Honorah Rieper, did not die an easy death. Barely aware of what was happening to her, the woman nonetheless valiantly attempted to fight off her attackers, and it was only when Juliet held her down by the throat that Pauline was finally able to finish off her mother. There was never any doubt as to whom the woman’s murderers were, but the defiantly gleeful manner in which the two teens confessed to what they had done still managed to shock and surprise the country.

Five and one-half years later, after the two young women were released from prison, they assumed new names and began the new lives far from Christchurch, that they hoped would shield them from further notoriety. And it worked for forty years.

There is a lot of material out there, including one major movie (Heavenly Creatures), a documentary made inside Anne Perry’s Scotland home (Interiors), and several books that attempt to explain how two fifteen-year-old girls could so callously murder the mother of one of them. In Anne Perry and the Murder of the Century, Peter Graham explores each possibility, one by one, reaching his own conclusion that the strong homosexual ties between the two girls, compounded by a perfect meshing of two distinct personality disorders, created exactly the perfect storm needed to make such a thing possible.

Perhaps most shocking today, is how differently the two women have responded to what they did in 1954. On the one hand, Paulette Parker has lived a life of repentance and appears still to be much bothered by what she did to her mother. On the other, Juliet Hulme (Anne Perry) still shows no remorse whatsoever and has constructed a version of the events that she uses to explain why she had no other choice but to help her friend commit matricide. As Graham notes, Perry’s version of what led up to the murder is so obviously false that it cannot be taken seriously. Anne Perry appears to be much the same person that she was in 1954.

When asked if she ever thinks of the woman she and Paulette murdered, this writer who has made a fine living for herself writing bloody murder mysteries for the last four decades said this:

“No. She was somebody I barely knew.”

And yet, as late as 2006 according to Peter Graham, Anne Perry and her publisher were known to grant interviews about the murder just prior to the publication of a new Anne Perry book, under the theory, I suppose, that “no publicity is bad publicity.”

To this point, they seem to be correct about that. show less

3.7 Need a notebook to keep up with all the names and characters. Too much detail in many areas. Insightful look into how mental health and the justice system worked for a shocking 1954 matriarchal murder in New Zealand.

I remember putting this book on my wishlist after hearing somewhere on LT about the fact that author Anne Perry had been involved in murdering a friend's mother when she was a teenager. I wasn't a fan of Perry's Victorian mystery series, but the real-life situation intrigued me. It floated up to the top of my attention pool recently when reading about Peter Jackson's movies, as I came across Heavenly Creatures, Jackson's fictionalized version of the infamous New Zealand crime. It was a quick show more read, somewhat repetitive with its facts, but overall quite interesting. The author went to some trouble to distinguish what is known now about sexuality, mental health, and child development from what was believed in the mid-twentieth century; and to discuss changes in treatment as well as general attitudes toward these aspects of humanity. show less