The best-selling crime novelist with a terrible secret: She and her best friend battered one of their mothers to death with a brick
As Anne Perry dies aged 84, family and friends reveal a story more riveting than any fiction...
under her assumed name of Hilary Nathan in the Orkney Islands, where she is, the Mail understands, currently in hospital.
Much loved by the tiny community on her remote island of Burray, she has never spoken publicly of her crime, but one close friend told the Mail this week: ‘I wish you could meet her. She’s amazing. She’s an angel.’
Angel or not, Anne once said seeing Pauline again would be her ‘worst nightmare’. Yet Joanne Drayton insists she bore her no ill feeling: ‘She didn’t blame Pauline — and Pauline was the instigator.’
It should be noted, however, that Pauline, whose father managed a chip shop, was also a vulnerable teenager at the time of the murder. Scarred from osteomyelitis, a condition that causes pain in the bones, she also had bulimia, although her eating disorder was not recognised in the 1950s.
And while Anne had support from her family in her later years — her mother proof-read her books, and her younger brother, Jonathan, worked as her researcher, and both moved with her to Scotland — Pauline’s family had little to do with her.
This week, a source in New Zealand said Pauline’s sister Wendy — whose mother, after all, had been killed by her sister — forbade her children from having any direct contact with their aunt, even though she would send gifts to her nephews and nieces.
‘There were no phone calls or visits because Wendy didn’t want that to happen, although I know at least one of the children would have loved to have spoken to her,’ they said.
After Pauline was first discovered living in Kent, Wendy gave an interview in which she said her sister was ‘reclusive,’ and, as a devout Roman Catholic, ‘spends much of her time in prayer’.
Why Pauline moved to Burray is unclear. Perhaps the rugged island landscape reminded her of New Zealand. Or perhaps, if even on a subliminal level, she wanted to be closer to Anne.
After Pauline arrived in Burray, she was asked by a new friend about the gossip that arrived with her. ‘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,’ said a Burray islander last week.
An animal lover with four pygmy goats, three horses and a Chihuahua-toy English terrier, she 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 told the Mail.
‘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 bizarrely claimed Pauline ‘only ever eats Pot Noodles’. However eccentric the general consensus is, however, ‘people around here take her for what she is: a very kind lady’.
Meanwhile, Anne’s life took another turn when, in 2015, aged 73, she moved to Los Angeles. She had a huge following in the States and, as her biographer Joanna Drayton says, ‘there was something in her that deeply needed to be loved or cared about’.
OF COuRSE, this meant leaving Meg MacDonald, who had been by her side for more than 40 years. ‘Meg wanted the best for Anne . . . but they were close friends, not partners or lovers, and she wasn’t about to turn her life upside down to help Anne chase her LA dream,’ says Joanne.
Pauline’s family in New Zealand, however, remain scarred by their past.’ [Her nephew and niece] saw the terrible effect the murder and the story of it had on their mother, something she had had to put up with her whole life,’ said a source.
‘Every time it was brought up it would cut her in half.
‘It’s been a burden the children themselves have borne their whole lives. They may have families and good careers, but are guarded, socially, because of the legacy the murder has.’
A self-confessed ‘workaholic’, Anne’s final books are due to be published later this year. After a heart attack last December, she was at times too ill to talk in her final weeks, yet still came up with an idea for her next book from her hospital bed.
‘She wrote because it was her lifeline. She breathed those stories. They were her redemption. They were also her sanctuary,’ says Joanne Drayton.
Yet ultimately, of course, the most compelling story was her own.