Anne Perry murdered her best friend’s mum. Then she became a bestselling crime writer.

Pauline Parker and Juliet Hulme were immediately drawn to each other.

The teenagers first met in the early 1950s at Christchurch Girls’ High School when Hulme’s family moved from England to New Zealand. At first, the girls bonded over their shared medical history. As a child Pauline had been diagnosed with osteomyelitis, a bone marrow infection, and Juliet had survived tuberculosis. 

Soon, they discovered they shared a love for writing and becoming lost in fantasy worlds of their own making. They dreamed of one day becoming famous novelists. They would spend hours together writing stories and creating their own ‘religion’, and a version of heaven which they called ‘The Fourth World’. 

Watch: Best friends: Translated. Story continues after video.

Their friendship quickly intensified, with each girl becoming more and more obsessed with the other. Their families began to worry that they were spending too much time together and drifting further away from reality. 

When Juliet was once again hospitalised for tuberculosis, her parents were relieved she would be spending time away from Pauline. But the girls’ friendship just intensified, with Pauline visiting Juliet in the hospital and them falling back into their old routines as soon as Juliet returned home. 

Shortly after, Pauline’s parents took her to see a psychiatrist, who told them he suspected Pauline and Juliet were in a romantic relationship. At the time, same sex relationships were considered a ‘mental illness’, and engaging in sex acts with someone of the same gender remained criminalised in New Zealand up until 1986. 

This ‘diagnosis’ from the psychiatrist only heightened the parents’ concerns. 

In 1954, Juliet discovered her mother in bed with another man. Her parents separated and her father planned to take Juliet in South Africa to live with a relative. 

That’s when the girls hatched a plan. Pauline would move to South Africa with Juliet. All they had to do was convince their parents. While both girls believed Juliet’s parents could be talked around, they thought Pauline’s mother, Honora, would never let it happen. 

So Pauline came up with another plan. By April of that year, she had begun fantasising about killing her mother, writing in her diary about how she could make it look like natural causes or even an accident. In June, she shared her fantasy with Juliet. And the fantasy turned into a plan. 

In the days leading up to the crime, the girls put on an act and pretended they had come to terms with their separation. 

Then on June 22, the teens took Honora for a walk in Victoria Park. While they were walking down a secluded path, Juliet dropped a pink stone on the ground. When Honora bent down to pick it up, Pauline began to hit her mother with half a brick wrapped in a stocking. 

In total, the girls struck Honora 45 times before running to find help. They claimed Honora had fallen and been injured, but their story quickly unravelled. 

The teenagers, then just 16 and 15, were charged with murder. During their trial, they claimed they were ‘Heavenly Creatures’ who belonged to their fictional version of heaven ‘The Fourth World’ and therefore should be exempt from earthly laws. 

They were convicted in August 1954, with the prosecutor who won the case calling it a "coldly, callously planned murder committed by two highly intelligent and sane but precocious and dirty-minded little girls”. 

The girls spent five years in prison before being released. Juliet would later refer to her time in prison as “the best thing that ever happened” to her. "It was there that I went down on my knees and repented," she told The Guardian in 2003. "That is how I survived my time while others cracked up. I seemed to be the only one saying, I am guilty and I am where I should be."

Pauline moved to a small village in Kent, England, and began teaching horse riding lessons to children. And Juliet seemingly disappeared off the face of the earth. 

Then the movie Heavenly Creatures was released in 1994. Peter Jackson’s directorial debut told the girls’ story, with Kate Winslet playing Juliet, and Melanie Lynsky starring as Pauline. 

The box office hit led to renewed international interest in the case and it was soon discovered that Juliet Hulme had been hiding in plain sight the entire time, living under a new name as successful English crime novelist Anne Perry. 

"I had to give up my past - the hardest thing imaginable - and begin life in my new identity as Anne Perry, knowing even a tiny slip could unravel everything," she explained to The Guardian in 2003. 

The full story of Juliet’s life post-prison came out in the 2012 book, The Search for Anne Perry: The Hidden Life of a Bestselling Crime Writer, written by Joanne Drayton, a biographer who grew up in Christchurch. 

After her release, Juliet had moved back to the UK and become a flight attendant. Later she moved to the United States and converted to Mormonism, before returning to the UK and settling in the Scottish fishing village of Portmahomack and taking on the pseudonym of Anne Perry. 

She published her first book, The Cater Street Hangman, in 1979 and went on to become an international bestselling novelist. 

In the 2009 documentary, Interiors, Perry didn’t shy away from the crime of her past. But she said she went along with the plan because she was worried that if she didn’t, Parker may have ended her own life. 

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“She threatened to kill herself if I didn’t help,” Perry also told The Guardian in 2003. “She was vomiting after every meal and losing weight all the time. I am sure now she was bulimic. I really believed she would take her life and I couldn’t face it.”

Perry hasn’t seen or spoken to Parker since the trial. "I wish her well," she told The New York Times, "but I have nothing to say." She also denied that their relationship was ever romantic, saying, "I was so innocent sexually then”. 

Perry never married. In Interiors, her friends said her romantic relationships would end because she didn’t know how to tell them about who she really was. In her later years, she lived with her brother, a retired doctor who worked as her full-time research assistant. 

In 2017, Perry moved to Los Angeles, to be closer to the film and TV industry, so she could work on various adaptations of her books. 

On April 10, 2023, Perry died in an LA hospital. She was 84 years old. 

In Interiors, the author reflected on her impact on the world and wondered what her legacy would be. 

“In a sense it’s not a matter — at the end — of judging,” she said in the documentary. “I did this much good and that much bad. Which is the greater?”

“It’s in the end, who am I? Am I somebody that can be trusted? Am I someone that is compassionate, gentle, patient, strong? If you’re that kind of person — if you’ve done something bad in the past, you’ve obviously changed. 

“It’s who you are when time’s up that matters.”

Feature Image: Dailymail