The crime writer with a crime in her past
Anne Perry 1938–2023
Anne Perry had written more than a dozen crime novels before her own criminal history was discovered. A prolific British author of period thrillers, Perry was only 15 when she helped murder her best friend’s mother. The mother disapproved of the two girls’ relationship and was going to keep them apart, so they bludgeoned her to death with a brick wrapped in a stocking, hitting her about 20 times. Perry served five years in prison in New Zealand, where the crime took place, then changed her name and began a new life. But her past made headlines 40 years later, when director Peter Jackson dramatized the true-crime story in his 1994 film Heavenly Creatures, with Kate Winslet playing Perry. “Many of my fictional crimes are committed by characters who find themselves caught up in a situation beyond their comprehension or control,” said Perry. “I know only too well how that can happen.”
Born Juliet Hulme in London, Perry was sent to the Bahamas at age 8 to recover from health problems. At 13, she reunited with her family in Christchurch, New Zealand, where they’d moved for her father’s job, said The New York Times, and she made a new best friend in Pauline Parker. The two bonded intensely, inventing “an elaborate, medieval-like fantasy world.” When Perry’s parents divorced, the plan was for Juliet to go with her father to South Africa, and Pauline wanted to come, too—but her mother stood in the way. The trial sparked “salacious interest,” said The Guardian, but Perry said that while her relationship with Pauline was “obsessive,” it was not sexual. She eventually settled in a small Scottish village to write, and she published her first novel in her late 30s. She went on to write more than 100 books, selling over 25 million copies.
“Yet the shadow of her past always seemed to skim the wake of her success,” said The Times. When her criminal history was finally revealed, Perry feared the life she had built would be destroyed. Instead, her book sales soared. In 2017, she moved to Los Angeles full-time to promote film adaptations of her novels. “I hope I have been punished,” she said in 2003. “I hope I have profited from the whole experience...to seek redemption, to devote the rest of one’s life to becoming a more compassionate, more just, less judgmental person. To atone.”