The events formed the basis for the 1994 film Heavenly Creatures, in which Melanie Lynskey portrayed a teenage Pauline Parker and Kate Winslet the teenaged Juliet Hulme. At the time of Hulme's death in 2023, Parker and Hulme were not believed to have had any contact since the trial. They were released separately five years later. As they were too young to be considered for the death penalty under New Zealand law at the time, they were convicted and sentenced to be 'detained at Her Majesty's pleasure'. Parker and Hulme stood trial in Christchurch in 1954 and were found guilty on 28 August. The girls presumed that one blow would kill her but it took more than 20. Parker had planned to hit her mother with half a brick wrapped in a stocking. On an isolated path, Hulme dropped an ornamental stone so that Rieper would lean over to retrieve it. On 22 June 1954, the girls and Rieper went for a walk in Victoria Park in the Port Hills of Christchurch. The two teenage friends, who had created a complicated fantasy life together populated with celebrities such as Mario Lanza and James Mason, did not want to be separated.

Hulme's parents were in the process of separating and she was supposed to go to South Africa to stay with a relative. In June 1954, at the age of 15, Hulme and her best friend Pauline Parker murdered Parker's mother, Honorah Rieper. A 1948 Auckland Star photograph of Juliet arriving in New Zealand was discovered by Auckland Libraries staff in 2012 and written about in the Heritage et AL blog. She attended Christchurch Girls' High School, located in what became the Cranmer Centre.

She rejoined her family after her father took a position as rector of Canterbury University College in New Zealand. She was identified by journalists following the release of the movie Heavenly Creatures, directed by Peter Jackson, in which Kate Winslet portrays Hulme (Perry).īorn in London, the daughter of physicist Henry Rainsford Hulme, Perry was diagnosed with tuberculosis as a child and sent to the Caribbean, South Africa, and New Zealand in hopes that a warmer climate would improve her health. After serving a five-year sentence for the murder, she changed her name and returned to the United Kingdom. In 1954, at the age of fifteen, she and her 16-year-old friend Pauline Parker murdered Parker's mother, Honorah Rieper. In 1994, it became public knowledge that Perry had been convicted for murder as a teenager while living in Christchurch, New Zealand. Anne Perry (born Juliet Marion Hulme 28 October 1938 – 10 April 2023) was a British writer best known as the author of the Thomas and Charlotte Pitt and William Monk series of historical detective fiction.

Buckingham palace gardens by anne perry