Heavenly Creatures murder: Teen killer Pauline Parker's reclusive ...

Pauline Parker (left) and Juliet Hulme on their way to a preliminary court hearing in 1954. Photo / Christchurch Star

On June 22, 1954 Pauline Parker and her best friend Juliet Hulme battered Pauline’s mother to death on secluded walkway at Victoria Park on Christchurch’s Port Hills.

The brutal killing of Honorah Parker remains one of the most infamous in New Zealand crime history.

The teens admitted bashing Honorah to death with a brick in a stocking - but claimed they were insane at the time. A jury was not convinced and they were convicted, and sent to prison.

To mark the 70-year anniversary of the murder, Juliet’s brother Jonathan gave his first in depth interview about the case and it’s aftermath.

After her release Juliet changed her name to Anne Perry and went on to become a successful crime novelist - selling more than 20 million copies of her books.

She died in April last year and only then did Jonathan feel comfortable speaking about her life beyond her notorious offending.

But what became of Pauline Parker? Senior journalist Anna Leask reports.

When Pauline Parker was released from prison five-and-a-half years after bludgeoning her mother to death, she wanted a quiet existence.

Unlike her co-offender, she no longer yearned for the fame and fortune they had planned as teenagers. She just wanted to get on with things well out of the spotlight.

While in prison Pauline began attending Catholic mass and soon became devoutly religious. She was allowed to study, under the Government’s correspondence school scheme, and obtained School Certificate.

When released she changed her name to Hilary Nathan. While Juliet had been allowed to leave New Zealand immediately and freely, the Parole Board imposed conditions on Pauline.

She was under constant supervision and had to report frequently to a probation officer.

After an unsuccessful attempt at becoming a nun, she reportedly worked at a Catholic institution doing office work.

She also studied, graduating from Auckland University with a BA in 1964.

Pauline then moved to Wellington and attended library school. It later emerged that in order to keep her true identity secret she would ensure she was absent on the day class photos were taken.

In 1965 Pauline moved back to Auckland and took a job working as a librarian at the university.

Soon after that, the Parole Board ended her probation period.

After receiving the news, Pauline almost immediately left her job and disappeared.

For many years she managed to stay under the radar and out of the headlines. While Juliet, as Anne Perry, published book after book, selling millions of copies, Pauline kept mostly to herself.

She had moved to the UK in 1965 and got a job at a London library. The city life was not for her though, and she soon relocated to a small village in Kent.

In 1997 it was revealed a movie was coming out about Honorah Parker’s murder - a Peter Jackson creation titled Heavenly Creatures, wording used by Pauline in a poem about herself and Juliet, found in the back of one of her diaries.

Kiwi journalist Lin Ferguson decided to track down the girls and managed to find Juliet.

Ferguson knew Juliet had changed her name and become a novelist so, she began checking the birth dates of writers until she found a match with Anne Perry.

After Juliet was unmasked, another New Zealand journalist tracked down Pauline.

At the time, it was rumoured she was still in Auckland working at a Catholic bookshop. But Chris Cooke found her in the village of Hoo, near Rochester, Kent, where she had started a riding school for children.

He made the trip to England to try for an interview.

When he knocked on the door the woman who answered confirmed she was Hilary Nathan.

But she said: “I’ve never had another name – I’m sorry, you’ve got the wrong person.” She refused to speak further.

Cooke then contacted Pauline’s older sister Wendy, who still lived in New Zealand. She agreed to speak about Pauline’s life after prison.

She said while, like Juliet, her sister had settled in a small village, never married or had children - that is where the similarities ended.

Pauline had no interest in interviews about her past or present, she was prepared for her new name and life to be outed but wanted to be left alone afterwards.

Wendy told the reporter that her sister had not been suited to life as an official Catholic nun, but was a nun in her own way.

She said: “She’s living in solitude. She’s deeply religious. She leads a very unusual existence. She hasn’t got a TV or a radio, so would never have heard what Anne Perry had to say and she wouldn’t care.

“She doesn’t have any contact with the outside world – she’s a reclusive, really. She’s a devout Roman Catholic and spends much of her time in prayer.

“She has led a good life and is very remorseful for what she’s done. She committed the most terrible crime and has spent 40 years repaying it by keeping away from people and doing her own little thing.”

Wendy said Pauline was living the life she had always dreamed of as a child - residing in the country with a stable of horses.

Cooke spoke to Wendy about the impact the murder had on her. She was just 17 when her sister battered her mother to death hours after the family sat down to lunch together.

Wendy told him: “I had to decide if I would hate her for the rest of my life because she took my mother away from me. It was the worst thing that could ever have happened to me.

“Because we’d been so close growing up, I wrote to her and said, ‘I can’t believe what’s happened. I don’t want to accept this’.

“Hilary wrote back and said, ‘It just all got out of hand. I don’t know what happened and I just want to keep in touch with you’.”

The sisters kept in contact and wrote to each other regularly.

Wendy said Pauline - who the family refer to as Hilary - sends money to New Zealand for her nieces and nephews.

For many years after they reconnected the sisters did not speak about the actual murder.

One day though, Wendy decided it was time to confront her sister.

“She says she was an extremist. When things went against her, Hilary went overboard the other way. She did this right from when she was a little girl,” she told Cooke.

Wendy said Pauline understood what she was doing and intended to kill her mother - but she felt her younger sister never really understood the consequences.

“Looking back, she said it was something that grew and grew out of all proportion,” she said.

“After it happened, she was very sorry about it. It took her about five years to realise what she had done.

“It was absolutely overboard, wasn’t it? The story is they met; they were ill-fated and they went overboard and committed a dreadful crime they have paid for their whole lives.

“I accept what happened in our lives was an absolute mistake. I loved her and she still loves me.”

After Cooke’s story was released other reporters chased Pauline for interviews.

She refused, but some who knew her shared tidbits, thoughts, comments.

A Hoo local told the London Daily Mail Pauline was “very eccentric and very much keeps herself to herself”.

“She is very well-spoken and appears very intelligent and well-educated. But she is quite childish in a way.

“When she goes to the gymkhanas she takes part in events which children usually compete in, such as the sack race.”

It was revealed that Pauline began running the riding school two years earlier, after she retired.

She had previously been deputy headmistress at a school for children with special needs in nearby Strood.

People there found her “strange”, noting she would often turn up for classes in “wellies and battered black sunglasses”.

Her outing came as “a shock to the whole school”.

“Nobody knew anything about it,” a source told the Daily Mail.

“She was very much a loner but she was well-liked and there were never any problems. I did notice when school photographs were taken she used to hold herself back out of the picture.”

The London Express revealed Pauline’s home - which she owned - was sparsely furnished, with no radio or television.

It was reported her living room was “full of dolls” and that she had a large rocking horse standing inside her front door.

A reporter approached “a small sprightly woman” resembling Pauline as she fed and groomed the ponies in the stable behind her cottage.

“I have absolutely no comment to make,” she said.

In June 1997 it was announced Heavenly Creatures would air on UK television.

Pauline decided she had to move, quickly.

She sold her home in Hoo to local man Andrew Ayres in June 1997. At the time he had no idea who she was, all he knew was that she wanted to be out of the house and out of the village by June 27.

Later he would realise that was the date Heavenly Creatures was scheduled to screen.

“It was not until we moved in we found out who Hilary was, and in total fairness it never did and never has changed my opinion of her – she was a very nice lady – just a little different,” he wrote in a letter to the publisher of a Heavenly Creatures fan website.

“She was very well known in the area, mostly for what she had done but also for the good she did in the community where she showed many children how to ride horses.

“If you were to ask me what I thought of Hilary that would be very simple: she was extremely nice, to the point and maybe a bit eccentric but we connected and things went very easily with the sale. During the sale we had quite a lot of contact and as before I couldn’t have wished for a nicer person.”

Ayres revealed that when he took possession of the house he discovered a bizarre mural painted on the wall of an upstairs bedroom.

Many of the images feature women - one dark-haired, one light - as goddesses, mythical creatures.

One shows the women with an axe cutting between them. Another shows the same women engulfed in flames, their faces appearing joyous.

“I think they are of a life that couldn’t be,” Ayres told TVNZ’s Close Up.

“If you can understand that, you know there’s the there’s pictures of two figures, black-haired, light-haired, with an axe through them being split up.

“You know, for me, after seeing [Heavenly Creatures] it looks like that, perhaps the parents trying to separate the two girls when there’s a deep emotion between them.”

Ayres said when he moved in the house was sparsely furnished and not well kept, which seems to speak to Pauline’s reclusive existence.

“It was completely covered by ivy and no part of the brickwork could be seen. To the side of the house were many homemade stables and outbuildings – it was quite a mess, to say the least.

“When we went in we couldn’t believe how someone lived in the house in such a humble way.

“In the front room was a workbench along one wall with many dolls on it. The kitchen just had a sink and very basic cooking instruments… The bedroom where she slept was just a mattress chucked in the corner and nothing else, there was just one lump of coal on the coal fire which didn’t even tackle the cold.”

Pauline was later tracked by the Daily Mail to Scotland’s Orkney Islands.

She was living on a remote island called Burray.

She would not speak to the Daily Mail, but a close friend said: “I wish you could meet her. She’s amazing. She’s an angel.”

Another said Pauline had not tried to hide her identity.

“This lady asked her if the rumours were true and she said, ‘Yes, it’s true about the court case and murder’ but she didn’t want to talk about it again.”

Pauline, again, surrounded herself with animals - the Daily Mail reporting she had “four pygmy goats, three horses and a Chihuahua-toy English terrier”.

It was reported that Pauline “gave children free riding lessons and has been known to drive with her dog strapped into her car’s front seat”.

“She has no TV but loves reading, a friend said.

‘She reads most of her literature in French and Italian, never English, because she loves the way those languages sound. She’s highly intelligent.”

Another local said Pauline, who “only ever eats pot noodles”, was “a very kind lady”.

“People around here take her for what she is,” they said.

It is assumed Pauline remains in her remote island home. There is no record of her death with New Zealand authorities.

She will mark her 86th birthday on May 26.

Those close to Pauline and Juliet say after they were jailed they had no further contact. It was reported widely that they were forbidden any contact after their release - but that was never a condition or court order.

When Juliet’s new life was revealed and she was asked if she knew where Pauline lived she exclaimed: “No! Why should I? I have no interest whatsoever in Pauline.’”

And Jonathan Hulme said as far as he was aware his sister genuinely wanted nothing more to do with Pauline.

“I’m pretty sure she didn’t. Everything that came through the computer - for 22 years, I handled that. And there was there was nothing. As far as I know, nothing came through the mail, or any third person,” he said.

“I think both realised that it was a horrendous episode in their lives. And really the only way forward was for them to sort out their own salvation in their own sweet time, and stay away from each other.”

Pauline’s sister Wendy also said there had been no contact between the killers post-prison.

“She hasn’t got a TV or radio, so would never have heard what Anne Perry had to say and wouldn’t care.”

Anna Leask is 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. She writes, hosts and produces the award-winning podcast A Moment In Crime, released monthly on nzherald.co.nz