It took police less than a day to unravel the circumstances of Honora Parker's death. Pauline's diaries provided the most critical evidence. At first, Pauline tried to take the blame alone, but prosecutors would have none of it, and charged both with murder.
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| Parker & Hulme in court |
During their highly publicized trial, defense attorneys tried to portray the girls as insane, but the that defense unraveled when a key defense witness, Dr. R.W. Mendlicott, acknowledged under questioning from the judge that despite their wild fantasies, both Hulme and Parker understood that murdering Honora Parker was a crime, but that because of their exalted status as "Heavenly Creatures," the laws did not apply to them.
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| Prosecutor A.W. Brown |
In his summation, Crown Prosecutor Alan W. Brown hammered that point home to the all male jury. "This was a coldly, callously planned and carefully committed murder by two precocious and dirty minded little girls," Brown said. "They are not incurably insane, but incurably bad."
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| Justice Adams |
The jury apparently agreed. On August 29, 1954, Pauline Parker and Juliet Hulme were convicted of murder. They each spent five years in prison, and were released just weeks apart. As a condition of their release, they were ordered to never see one another again.
In the years since, Parker has drifted into obscurity. She could not be reached for comment on this story. According to published reports, she has remained in New Zealand and become a devout Roman Catholic.
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| Pauline Parker, 1990s photo |
Juliet, of course, did emerge again in the public eye. By the 1990s, writing under the name Anne Perry, she had received a fair degree of notoriety for a series of mystery novels set in Victorian, England. She did not respond to requests for an interview sent through her agent. But in a 1994 interview with the New Zealand TV 3 , Perry insisted that her role in the slaying had more to do with a sense of misplaced loyalty to Pauline than with devotion to their shared fantasies.
"I felt that I was running out on a person who stood by me when I was in trouble (with illness in hospital) and that I was betraying her by just leaving and doing nothing. I really believed that if I didn't take her with us that she would take her own life and I made a very, very wrong decision."
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