Heavenly creatures

We examine the shocking real-life crimes given the Hollywood treatment

On 24 June 1954, the people of Christchurch, New Zealand, were reeling with shock. Two girls, Pauline Parker, 16, and Juliet Hulme, 15, had been charged with murder. The victim? Pauline’s mother. Honorah Parker, 45, had been bludgeoned, her body found on a blood-soaked path in Victoria Park.

But when police searched Honorah’s house, they found Pauline’s diaries, and the whole twisted tale emerged.

It’d started two years earlier, when Juliet and her welloff British family moved to town.

As a child, Juliet had suffered pneumonia and bronchitis.

Pauline had been a sickly child, too.

She’d had a bone-marrow infection, osteomyelitis. After several operations, she limped, suffered chronic pain.

When outspoken Juliet started Christchurch Girls’ High School, she befriended Pauline.

Both unable to take part in PE, they quickly bonded.

But Pauline’s parents were working class, she was embarrassed.

Juliet represented money, prospects, flamboyance. And she’d chosen Pauline to be her only friend.

It was intoxicating, addictive...

The pair shared a love of literature, and together created a fantasy world.

They wrote books, created characters, shared secrets.

In 1953, the Hulmes took Pauline with them to their weekend cottage. She became infatuated, wished she was their daughter. Juliet was then diagnosed with tuberculosis and spent three months in a sanatorium. Alone, Pauline swung between happiness and despair. I was in one of those moods in which committing suicide sounds heavenly, Pauline wrote in November 1953. Worried, Honorah told their doctor about the pair’s intense relationship. He diagnosed the friendship had ‘homosexual overtones’. Alarmed, Honorah made Pauline move schools. Then Juliet’s parents said that they were splitting up. Also worried the girls were lovers, they spotted an opportunity to separate them. Sickly Juliet would be sent to South Africa to live with her aunt. But, desperate not to be apart, Juliet demanded Pauline go, too. The Hulmes allowed the girls to believe they could both go – if Pauline’s mother agreed. But Honorah would never allow it. Pauline saw her mother as the only obstacle to her happiness, and hated her for it. The girls began to plot. wrote Pauline. On 22 June 1954, the girls lured Honorah to Victoria Park, led her down a secluded path.

As planned, Juliet dropped a pink stone on the ground.

As Honorah bent to look, Pauline pulled a brick in a stocking from her bag. And swung. Bashing Honorah to death. Covered in blood, the girls then fled to a nearby cafe. They claimed Honorah had fallen. But, seeing the 45 separate injuries, police arrested them.

At the house, police found 14

Covered in blood, the pair fled to a nearby cafe...

exercise books filled with stories, documenting everything.

At their trial in August 1954, the girls pleaded insanity.

Defence lawyers stated the girls’ writing was proof of a pathological narcissism – and their insanity. The prosecution disagreed, said the diaries proved the murder was ‘callously planned and premeditated’ by ‘highly intelligent but dirty-minded girls’.

We decided to use a brick in a stocking… So the next time I write in the diary, mother will be dead. How odd, yet how pleasing, Pauline had written.

Both Parker and Hulme were found guilty of murder.

Too young for the death penalty, they were jailed indefinitely.

However, both were released after five and a half years with brand new identities...

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