All About the Pauline Yvonne Parker and Juliet Hulme Case

"The Ones That I Worship"

New Zealand map with Christchurch locator

It's been more than 50 years since Parker and Hulme were convicted and sentenced to prison for the death of Honora Parker, a solid, honorable woman known to most of the stolid community of Christchurch, New Zealand, as Honora Rieper, the surname of her common law husband. It's been more than 45 years since the two killers were released from prison, Parker to drift into obscurity and Hulme to find the fame she had apparently craved as a girl as a mystery writer under the nom de plume Anne Perry.

Heavenly Creatures Video Cover

And yet, to many, not just in New Zealand, but also throughout the English-speaking world, the case remains almost an obsession. It has been documented in scholarly essays and books. A decade ago, New Zealand filmmaker Peter Jackson recreated the events leading to the murder in painstakingly accurate detail in his film, "Heavenly Creatures," a film that has achieved near cult status. More recently, the public library in Christchurch published a vast array of documents and news clippings about the case on its Web site.

Throughout cyberspace, devotees of the film and the case behind it, continue to dissect its every moment and to probe deeper into the questions that surround it. One of them, John D. Porter, spent countless hours creating a 500-page concordat on the film and the documents supporting it, which has become a kind of bible for aficionados of the case.

The question of course is, why? Why has this one case captured the imagination of so many people around the world? Certainly, it is a shocking case, says one of those devotees, Adam Abrams, a Vancouver-based graphic designer who operates a Web page devoted to the movie and the murder. But there is more to it than just the graphic lure of violence that makes the Parker-Hulme murder so fascinating.