An Imaginary Realm Takes Hold
Pauline and Hulme came from very different worlds. Pauline was the daughter of a working-class family; Hulme’s father was a university physicist. But when they met in high school, they found common ground in shared illnesses: Pauline had suffered from osteomyelitis, a bone marrow disease, and Hulme from tuberculosis.
What began as friendship quickly became obsession. The girls invented elaborate fantasy kingdoms populated by characters they created and worshiped as “saints.” At night, they dressed up, acted out their stories and filled notebooks with plays, poems and even an opera.
Their closeness worried Pauline’s mother. And when Hulme’s parents announced they were sending Hulme to South Africa to live with relatives following their separation, the girls saw being apart as unbearable.
Pauline wanted to go with Hulme, but she knew her mother, Honorah Parker, would never consent, which led them to the murder plan. “We have worked it out carefully and are both thrilled by the idea,” Pauline wrote in her diary of the idea.
The Mother of All Murders and the Trial that Followed
On June 22, 1954, the girls asked Honorah to join them for tea in Victoria Park. Afterward, they led her down a quiet path.
There, they pulled out a brick hidden in a stocking and beat her with it. Evidence later showed she had been struck at least 45 times in the head and neck.
The girls ran back up the path, crying for help. They claimed Honorah had fallen and hit her head. But investigators soon discovered the bloodied weapon, and their lie unraveled.
The girls’ trial transfixed New Zealand. Prosecutors cast Pauline and Hulme as so dangerously devoted to one another that anyone who threatened their bond had to be forcibly removed.
Both girls said they were not guilty by reason of insanity. Defense psychiatrists said they suffered from paranoia and delusions, each fueling the other’s decline. But prosecutors countered that the killing was deliberate, calling it a “cold” slaying committed by “two highly intelligent and perfectly sane girls.”
Pauline’s diary confession—which including plans for the slaying—proved damning. And on August 28, 1954, an all-male jury found both girls guilty. Too young for the death penalty, they were sentenced to indefinite prison terms and barred from ever contacting each other again.
Pauline Parker and Juliet Hulme’s New Lives
After serving about five years each in prison, the two women disappeared into separate lives under their new names.
Pauline became Hilary Nathan, running a riding school in a small English village. She has given no interviews, but her sister, Wendy Parker, has described her as reclusive and devout.
Juliet Hulme reinvented herself more publicly. As Anne Perry, she wrote more than 100 novels, her past largely unknown until 1994, when her identity was exposed with Heavenly Creatures.
Perry later said the Oscar-winning movie made her feel like her life was “being interpreted by someone else,” the same way she had felt during her trial. Even so, her new friends stood by her, Perry said.
From Diary Pages to Cinema: ‘Heavenly Creatures’
Peter Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures premiered four decades after the killing with Lynskey as Pauline and Winslet in her breakout role as Hulme. Co-written with Fran Walsh, the movie drew on court transcripts, interviews, newspaper archives and Parker’s diaries to recreate the girls’ lives and relationship up until their arrest.
At the time, Jackson said he wanted to show two teenagers who were “not evil, not psychopaths but totally out of their depth.” The film also brought viewers into the lush fantasy worlds the girls created.
Walsh admitted she had initial misgivings about turning the tragedy into entertainment. “You can’t exploit anybody’s life and not feel bad about it,” she said in an interview with The New York Times in 1994. “You’re exploiting them for what, in the end, has to have entertainment value.”
But, Walsh added: “I’ve had very intense adolescent friendships. They were very positive, affectionate and funny, and I understood to a large degree what was so exciting, so magical about the friendship. And though it ended in a killing, the friendship itself is something people would identify with, particularly women.”
