Teenage killer, Juliet Hulme who became a famous crime writer under the name Anne Perry Photo: Wikipedia/composite
Anne Perry, the famous British crime novelist - formerly Juliet Hulme the infamous Christchurch teenager convicted of murder - died last week at age 84.
The Parker-Hulme case rocked Christchurch in 1954, and the crime that has stayed in the public memory - the murder of Honorah Parker by her daughter Pauline and her friend Juliet - was dramatised in Sir Peter Jackson's 1994 film Heavenly Creatures.
Perry managed an extraordinary reinvention, leaving a country gripped by the murder and forging a new life as a best-selling crime writer in a remote part of England.
But can you ever leave a past like that behind? And will the public let you?
Anne Perry's biographer Dr Joanne Drayton tells Sunday Morning that in the backdrop of the murder, Hulme was a lonely teenager who had been very sick as a child, but found the support she needed in Pauline Parker.
"Her parents had been quite remote parents. Her father was the rector of Christchurch College by that stage. Her mother was quite an ambitious sort of society wife to some extent, but also was an important person in the Marriage Guidance Council and was regularly heard on 3YA in Christchurch," Drayton says.
"I think Juliet Hulme was really quite desperate for company, for community, and for commune with a special friend."
Dr Joanne Drayton Photo: Supplied
But upon learning they could be separated because Hulme would be going abroad, Parker felt desperate, especially when she felt so close to the Hulmes who were well-off, Drayton says.
"So, she developed the idea of killing her mother, who seemed to be, to her perception at the time, which was quite disturbed I think, the obstacle to her leaving with Juliet Hulme.
"They were very removed from reality and very caught up in it. And Juliet Hume became part of that idea and was drawn into the murder and was there at the scene."
The trial sparked much interest in New Zealand and around the world.
"It was so gripping for people because it was extremely unusual. Matricide was very unusual ... and then you had also the very well-to-do nature of the Hulmes, then the revelation of the fact that Mrs Hulme was having an affair with her boarder ... I mean it just carried on giving that story," Drayton says.
"Probably it was the most fascinating thing, or well for a very long time, that happened in Christchurch and pretty much New Zealand in terms of sensational murders."
The pair spent five years in jail before being released, with the condition being that Hulme change her identity and leave the country, Drayton says.
"I mean, it was just the most compassionate and sympathetic thing to do to both girls and both of them were given new identities. Both of them were told that really they were not to meet each other again, but that's nothing that the court could enforce."
Kate Winslet and Melanie Lynskey starred in the film 'Heavenly Creatures.' Photo: Archives du 7e Art/DR
Once she changed her name to Anne Perry and moved away, Hulme found comfort in the Mormon church, which "would in some ways release her from the burden of what she had done", Drayton says.
Then she began writing historical romance novels but didn't find success until she switched to crime detective novels on the advice of her stepfather while in Portmahomack in Scotland.
Drayton says Perry became "the closest thing to a machine", writing more than 100 books.
"She was completely consumed. Those stories - they came from her imagination, but she literally lived them, so it was no hardship, it wasn't work for her.
"It was an extension of her imagination that she lived in and that she lived for and that completely captivated her in ways that it's almost hard to imagine really.
"Her last book was released just I think a week before she died."
She appeared to be very reserved at first, Drayton says, but in 1994, on the eve of the release of Heavenly Creatures, Perry's real identity was revealed.
"The journalist contacted Anne Perry's agent Meg Davis and she was completely non-plussed, she couldn't believe it.
"She was just about to ring her lawyer, thought she'd better send a quick phone call through to Anne ... and there was just a sort of stony dead silence down the line, and she [Perry] said I'm afraid it's true, you can't ring the lawyer. It's true. I am Juliette Hume.
"And it was the moment when the two parts of her life coincided in one phone call ... She had gone and made another life, and now her old life was there to catch her, to catch up with her.
"As much as it was horrifying for her to be revealed, as a Mormon, as a woman of faith, as a murderer, it was also freeing because she could now feel that people that loved, liked, wanted to read her books, knew who she was."
Drayton says she's watched Heavenly Creatures many times and was struck by how accurate many aspects of the movie are.
"I feel that it was an inevitability [that Perry's identity was exposed] and it was a story that in some ways sort of should have been broken from New Zealand, and to some extent a movie that should have been made in New Zealand, because we kind of own that part of her life and inevitably it will be part of our history, woven into our experiences and our sort of stories. Yeah, it's ours really."
For her, it felt like destiny to be Perry or Hulme's biographer, having grown up hearing the story and being around as the film unfolded, she says.
"It was [an] amazing and unforgettable" experience meeting Perry, she says.
