The British crime writer famous as much for her books as for having participated in the murder of her best friend’s mother has died
British crime writer Anne Perry she’s dead on April 10 in Los Angeles: he was 84 years old and was in hospital after having suffered a heart attack last December. Her books have sold more than 26 million copies worldwide, but Anne Perry is also known for another story: when she was fifteen she participated in the murder of her best friend’s mother. It was June 22, 1954 and she was in New Zealand.
Anne Perry’s real name was Juliet Marion Hulme. She was born in London on October 28, 1938 and until the age of 13 she had lived between the Caribbean and South Africa where her mother, Hilda Marion Reavley Hulme, a marriage counselor, and her father, the British physicist Henry Rainsford Hulme, the they had sent hoping that the warmer temperatures would help her recover from the tuberculosis she contracted as an eight-year-old.
In 1952, at the age of fourteen, Juliet was reunited with her family, this time in Christchurch, New Zealand, where her father had moved to become the rector of Canterbury University College for work. At her new school, Juliet Hulme formed a strong friendship with Pauline Parker, who was a year her senior. When Mr and Mrs Hulme divorced and Juliet Hulme understood that she would have to move to South Africa, she devised a plan with her friend to stay together: kill Parker’s mother.
Honora Mary Parker, mother of Pauline, was killed in a public park, hit on the head twenty times with half a brick stuck in a stocking. The case, a murder which was also a matricide and which had been committed by two young girls probably involved in a romantic relationship, or so it was thought at the time, was much told from the country’s newspapers, and beyond.
The trial was very followed and it was discovered that the two girls had planned the murder precisely in an attempt to avoid being separated. In some subsequent interviews, she Hulme has however denied having been romantically linked to her friend, however acknowledging that their relationship had an obsessive nature.
Sentencing of Parker and Hulme in the Press newspaper published in Christchurch, New Zealand, August 30, 1954
When they committed the murder Parker and Hulme were two teenagers and received a lower sentence than that provided for adults: five years in prison, which passed in separate prisons. The court also ruled that the two should never meet again. If they violated the order, they would go back to prison and serve a life sentence.
Once free, Juliet Hulme changed her first and last name to Anne Perry, taking the surname of the man her mother had meanwhile remarried. She left New Zealand and worked for a while as a shop assistant, flight attendant, secretary and insurance broker. She joined the Mormon Church and then moved to a small town in Scotland. As she fantasized since school days, she became a writer.
He published his first novel in 1979. It was called The Cater Street Hangman (The Hangman of Cater Street), was set in 1881, in the Victorian era, and was also the first detective story in a long series. He wrote dozens more books, including the series about amnesiac private investigator William Monk. His latest works feature Elena Standish, a spy for MI6 during the Second World War. In 1998, when the Times named the 100 Masters and Mistresses of Crime, Anne Perry was included in the list along with Agatha Christie and Arthur Conan Doyle. In 2000 his short story Heroesset in the trenches of the First World War, won the Edgar Allan Poe Award, an American award dedicated to the best yellow, horror and thriller works.
Anne Perry moved to Los Angeles in 2017. speaking of the murder of her friend’s mother, she always acknowledged her guilt and apologised, but also said she was afraid that if she didn’t go along with the plan, her friend would commit suicide. In the documentary dedicated to Perry, Interiors, from 2009, produced in Germany, speaking of the murder Perry says: «In the end, who am I? Am I someone who can be trusted? Am I someone who is compassionate, kind, patient, strong?” He then mentions other qualities of hers: courage, honesty and being thoughtful. “If you’re that kind of person now, and if you’ve done something bad in the past, it obviously means that you’ve changed,” adding finally that what matters is the person you’ve become.
Perry’s story was told in the 1994 film Heavenly Creatures (Sky creatures) by director Peter Jackson, in which young Hulme is played by Kate Winslet.