Parker-Hulme murderess Anne Perry: My first interview with a killer - Diana Wichtel

Anne Perry in 2001. Photo/ Getty Images

She was my first murderer. I’ve interviewed people who survived all manner of terrorists and lunatics: a woman who was the last person to be rescued from the rubble of the World Trade Centre; a woman severely injured in the 2005 London underground bombings. People, miracles each one, who, like my father, survived the Holocaust.

Anne Perry was my first murderer. As far as I know. She has died, age 84, in Los Angeles. We spoke in 2012, on the release of a book, The Search for Anne Perry, by New Zealand biographer Joanne Drayton. By then a successful writer of — you couldn’t make it up — murder mysteries, Perry had been outed in 1994 amid hype around Peter Jackson’s film, Heavenly Creatures, as Juliet Hulme, the “gym tunic murderess”. In 1954, 15-year-old Perry and her friend Pauline Parker murdered Parker’s mother. Honorah Rieper was battered to death with a brick in a stocking after tea at a kiosk in Christchurch’s Victoria Park. Heavenly Creatures went to town on the girls’ obsessive friendship, their fantasy world, their deluded dreams of fame and fortune. When Hulme’s parents separated and the girls were to be parted they hatched a plan.

Getting to speak to Perry involved endless careful requests, samples of work, proposed questions. I wrote in the Listener, “It feels like a small, unnerving glimpse into what it must be like to be Anne Perry: her words constantly scrutinised for subtext, her demeanour judged.”

Once on the phone from her remote village in Scotland, Perry talked about everything from her outing — “I would rather have kept my privacy, I think” — to string theory to the effects of five years in Mt Eden prison. “If you look at my life and situation now… You’ve probably seen photographs of me?” she said brightly. “I would say it hasn’t done me any harm.”

There was much what you might call slippage. Of the callousness of the British media: “Attack somebody your own weight who has a chance of attacking you back and I say right, may the best man win. But when you attack somebody who is vulnerable frightened and cannot possibly attack you back…” Cripes.

She did an interview in the back of a car with crime writer Ian Rankin. He raises what in Perry’s world is called “the thing that happened”. She fixes him with an unwavering gaze. “When I was 15, I committed a crime as an accessory… I helped someone kill another person.” Rankin swallows hard. “Was the mother awake, asleep?” he inquires wildly. “Oh, she was awake!” says Perry. I asked about that interview. “I thought it wasn’t too bad at the time,” she mused, “but I’ve had a lot of people say ‘Woo, that was a bit rough wasn’t it?’ I guess it was worse than I thought.”

One of her characters, amnesiac investigator William Monk, fears he is himself a murderer. Nothing to do with her own life, Perry insisted sharply. Still, her characters often seek redemption. Could she forgive herself? “You’ve got to… Is there anybody who hasn’t made mistakes thinking it was the right thing to do at the time? And realising afterwards that it certainly wasn’t? No. Exactly.” Dana Linkiewicz, in her haunted 2010 documentary about Perry, Interiors, describes such starchy replies as, “the sentences she needs to cling on to to manage her life.”

Perry writes, of Monk, “…there was still a black horror which held most of it from him, a dread of learning the unbearable.” Is it possible to fully face the thing that happened and carry on?

At the 1954 trial one of the girls’ fantasies was described. “They would go to Hollywood, choose their actors and supervise the filming of their novels.” When we spoke, Perry was hoping that options on some of her novels would progress in… Hollywood. The whole thing still does my head in.

Midnight my time. Perry signed off with a cheery, “Keep a good thought for me that some of these Hollywood things turn up!” I told her I would.