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In 1954, Pauline Parker and Juliet Hulme were convicted of one of New Zealand’s most brutal and high-profile murders.
It was a sunny, crisp Tuesday afternoon in June when the girls attacked Pauline’s mother Honorah on a secluded walkway at Victoria Park on the Port Hills.
With “animal ferocity” they hit her over and over again with a brick inside a stocking. Police would later say the 46-year-old had been “battered to pieces”.
After a controversial trial, the teens were found guilty of murder – a jury rejecting their claims of insanity.
The case made headlines around the world, its infamy elevated in the 90s with the release of Sir Peter Jackson’s film Heavenly Creatures.
A Moment In Crime writer and host, senior journalist Anna Leask looks back at the case — and speaks exclusively to Juliet’s brother Jonathan about the aftermath.
Seventy years on, early in 2024, hoping a journalist would look into his sister’s story and find out if there was any mechanism under New Zealand law to get her conviction retrospectively altered, he approached the Herald.
Juliet, who changed her name to Anne Perry after prison and went on to sell more than 20 million crime novels, died in April 2023.
Only then did Jonathan feel he could speak out about her life — and his strong belief she was never mentally sound.
He wanted her trial outcome to reflect that and had hoped to get it altered to state that, while she committed the crime, she was insane at the time.
“She did not regard herself as being psychotic or being mad, but it was pretty clear to me looking at it,” said Jonathan.
“[Juliet] had a major psychotic disorder … that was basically my opinion.
“My sister had a gifted imagination, she ran on high-octane emotions and she loved to invent and create. In the right environment, that is good … in writing, that is what made her successful.
“She had a fragile hold on reality and most people respected that. But when it becomes malignant as it did in the relationship with Pauline, you end up with a murderer.
“My sister’s fragile hold on reality remained … at times she was a bit naive, gullible, gauche, a bit over the top.
“There’s no hard and fast dividing line between sane and insane – and in the wrong environment, with a toxic influence she was running insane … the end result is there were two people who found each other and it spiralled off into a psychotic, murderous climax.
“It was a classic psychosis.”
Jonathan, who was just 10 at the time of the murder, felt the speed of the court process and the direction of the trial judge to the jury before they deliberated screamed “miscarriage of justice” to him.
For more on the crime and trial click here.
“They had confessed to the murder. They seemed to acknowledge that what they did was wrong,” he said.
“The judge that presided over this case, he pushed for a verdict of guilty. He was not prepared to accept insanity. The government psychiatrist somehow managed to dismiss the florid, flagrant, psychotic behaviour of these two young people.
“To him, they were evil but they were not mad. They were evil and always would be. But the [defence] psychiatrists were saying they were mad, and always will be.”
Jonathan now wants to look into getting some kind of acknowledgement that the trial was unjust.
“I want to approach the legal authorities in New Zealand to adjust the verdict on Juliet from just plain ‘guilty’ to ‘guilty but insane’ — surely a much fairer verdict and one that would be returned if such an event took place today,” he said.
“She left prison a damaged and very vulnerable person, ill-equipped to face the future. Surely there must be a way for the New Zealand legal authorities to acknowledge that and say ‘hey folks, we could have done that a bit better’?
“A retroactive verdict of guilty but insane would not affect Anne — she’s gone — but it would help friends and family, and posterity.”
More from Jonathan about his sister’s life can be found here.
The Herald approached two legal experts for their take on Jonathan Hulme’s suggestion.
Nigel Hampton KC is one of the longest-serving and best defence lawyers in New Zealand, having conducted more than 100 murder trials.
He was just 10 in 1954, but the murder of Honorah Parker had a big impact.
“The Star Sun was the paper, it was an afternoon paper. and I was always allowed to take my time and read every bit of paper. But, strangely, in 1954 there were large chunks cut out of the paper, and I could never quite work out why, and it piqued my interest,” he said.
“And I found out why — kids always find out why — and of course, it was in relation to this trial of Hulme and Parker.
“In a funny way, it was one of the things in the background that took me to the law … It was always there in my mind.”
Hampton went on to work alongside the key players from the trial — the judge, lawyers and key defence psychiatrist.
“He maintained that the real defence was that this was a Folie a deux case – the madness of two … and it was clear from my discussions with him, he was firmly of the view that that the insanity verdict was the correct categorisation of these two,” he said.
“So he was always concerned that the jury had got it wrong. And he was rather unforgiving of some of the other actors and in the performance, particularly the prosecution and the judge.
“He undoubtedly thought it was wrong … it’s not as if he carried it as a sort of a matter of resentment or anything like that, but it was still a very live issue in his mind when I talked to him, he talked freely about it so obviously he had some concerns.”
Hampton has “strong views” that Parker and Hulme did not get a fair trial and were effectively doomed from the outset.
In July 1954 — in response to Honorah’s death, a teenage sex scandal in Lower Hutt and other high-profile incidents including a milk-bar murder in Auckland — the Government appointed lawyer Oswald Mazengarb to chair a special committee on Moral Delinquency in Children and Adolescents.
The committee blamed the “promiscuity” of the nation’s youth on working mothers, young women enticing men to have sex and the ready availability of contraceptives.
The Mazengarb report was sent to every home in New Zealand, attributing juvenile delinquency to inadequate parental supervision and advocated a return to Christianity and traditional values.
The result — moral panic, which Hampton said the prosecution “played on” at the Parker Hulme trial, by painting the pair as “evil lesbians” who were “unnatural and not insane”.
Hampton added: “The trial judge bringing the all-male jury back on a Saturday morning to hear the summing up and retire to consider the verdicts — they were never going to spend a long time in deliberation when Canterbury rugby, in a golden era, was to defend the Ranfurly Shield at Lancaster Park that very afternoon.
“Secondly, an all-male jury ... the fact that a fair proportion of that male jury wanted to be down at Lancaster Park to watch [meant] that they took very little time to reach a verdict of guilty.
“I mean, this was a serious issue that they were confronted with, and should have been given real attention to.
“And there was little surprise in the verdict given the summing up. Adams wasn’t much taken with the insanity defence.
“So there were some troubling aspects to the trial.”
While Hampton is adamant Parker and Hulme were insane, he said retrospectively changing the outcome was far-fetched.
“Seventy years on, to think those verdicts could be set aside and substituted presumably for an insanity verdict - I think there’s no realistic prospect of that at all, to be truthful.
“There was evidence which could be taken either way, argued either way, and where are the wider interests of justice and what are they?
“I don’t think you’d even get anywhere near … because it’s not as if you’re arguing that an innocent person has been convicted.”
Warren Brookbanks is a professor of Criminal Law and Justice Studies at AUT and an internationally recognised authority in criminal law, mental health law, criminal justice and non-adversarial justice.
He said it simply was not in the public interest to have the convictions of the two killers reviewed.
“It is highly unlikely — the problem is simply the passage of time. The difficulty would be the degradation of evidence that would have been available — most of it has probably disappeared now,” he said.
“But the biggest problem is the fact that people who would have been available to do assessments, and experts have probably all died. It was 70 years ago — so the ability to try and revisit it would be hugely problematic, because you wouldn’t be able to, for example, to reassess the victim and it would be pure speculation.
“Courts are very suspicious about retrospective assessments of people’s mental state, because it’s simply too speculative.
“So in this case, I can’t see how you’d go about doing it because there’s just so many imponderables, that would have to be overcome.
“The other thing is, what’s the point? What’s the public interest in this? These two girls had a trial in front of a jury, the jury received the evidence, the jury made a verdict based on the evidence that was presented, which is all that’s required of them.
“And the fact that now, there’s disaffection or upset with the way the jury handled the case is really neither here nor there. It’s part of the criminal justice system ... frankly, I just think it’s just simply too problematic to even think about proceeding with revisiting the case.”
Jonathan understood the experts, and while there were little to no legal options for him, he still wanted people to understand his sister better.
He told the Herald he never saw any “remorse” from his sister.
And, any “regret” she voiced, he felt was not for helping to murder a woman — but for having to go to prison for her actions.
“She admitted that what she had done was wrong. And she admitted that it was right that she was sent to prison. I do not remember her at any time, expressing much remorse,” he said.
He knew she was sorry in her own way for the trouble she had caused, but he believed that she was mentally unwell her entire life and never really recognised the finality of what she and Pauline had done.
“As a rational for why she did what she did, I think she was just captured by the moment — it was all rather jolly, I don’t think she really understood the seriousness of what he was doing.”
You can hear much more of the interviews with Jonathan and the legal experts — as well as from Juliet herself, in this episode of A Moment In Crime.
This episode references Canterbury crime author Peter Graham’s book about the case, So Brilliantly Clever, the documentary Anne Perry Interiors which is available to rent or buy in New Zealand on AppleTV and author Ian Rankin’s documentary Evil Thoughts, which aired in 2002 and can be found in part on YouTube.
A Moment in Crime is available on iHeartRadio, Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes are released monthly.
The series is hosted by Anna Leask, a Christchurch-based reporter who covers national crime and justice. She joined the Herald in 2008 and has worked as a journalist for 18 years. If you have a crime or case you would like to hear more about email anna.leask@nzme.co.nz.
Since 2019, A Moment in Crime has produced over 55 episodes, and has been downloaded over 1 million times, with listeners in over 170 countries. It was nominated for Best True Crime Podcast at the 2024 Radio and Podcast Awards.