by Peter Graham
What was the medical basis of Medlicott’s diagnosis? “Paranoia of the exalted type” accorded with the definition proposed by the German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin, who in the late nineteenth century pioneered a classification system for mental illness that is the basis of systems still in use today. In the sixth edition of his Textbook of Psychiatry, Kraepelin recognised only two major psychoses: manic depressive illness, which was curable, and dementia praecox, now called schizophrenia, which was not. He believed paranoia was a variety of dementia praecox. Medlicott explained that although paranoia involved various kinds of delusional beliefs, intellectual functioning remained intact: “Clear and orderly thinking was preserved.”
Medlicott was always well up with the play: by the 1950s Kraepelin’s classification had been largely accepted by the psychiatric profession in Great Britain and the United States, even if the diagnosis of paranoia would be mostly ignored by psychiatrists until 1980, when the American Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders—Third Edition (DSM–III ) was published. Dr Kenneth Stallworthy, by comparison, appeared ignorant of a type of paranoiac psychosis whose sufferers might plan, premeditate and calculate the odds of success of a criminal act—and even feign insanity. It was unfortunate the defence lawyers had not cross-examined him on this important point.
In his paper Medlicott argued that there was nothing unusual about paranoia in its exalted form developing during adolescence. Parker and Hulme, he contended, “went into adolescence already strongly narcissistic, and each acted on the other as a resonator, increasing the pitch of their narcissism. Having their own company they were able to isolate themselves more and more from the usual outside interests of adolescent girls and the socialising experiences of group relationships”.
With the onset of paranoia, subtle changes pervaded the whole personality. In particular, the girls’ “defences against unconscious aggressive forces were swept away and their superegos almost silenced. … Their moral values became reversed and they embraced evil as good. These aggressive impulses were so much in ascendancy that one might have predicted their expression in a violent act even had circumstances been different”.
Medlicott drew support from another of the giants of psychiatry, Eugen Bleuler, who had written in his 1924 Textbook of Psychiatry that paranoiacs often could not recognise or feel the rights of others. “Their own cause is so very much the only important, I might say the only sacred, thing in the world. … Like a cancer the delusion extends to ever-widening areas and there is far-reaching domination by the delusion of the entire personality in its behaviour and strivings.”
In exactly that way, the girls had given no thought to PaulineParker’s mother’s right to live. Medlicott reiterated his earlier conclusion: “The girls were so disturbed mentally by the time of their threatened separation they set about their murder with joyous abandon.”
Like Bevan-Brown, Medlicott remained convinced that the girls’ relationship was homosexual. There was no evidence that Juliet was ever interested in boys, he said, and Pauline’s attempts at heterosexuality had ended in failure—with no evidence of real erotic involvement. Further, “all her escapades were fully discussed with Juliet … a common feature amongst people basically homosexual in orientation”. This was based on what Pauline had told him, although she may not have been entirely truthful, given the Sydney Sun-Herald’s account of Juliet grinding her teeth and spitting silent words through rage-distorted lips when Pauline’s lovemaking with Nicholas was described in court.
Despite “most incriminating evidence” both girls had denied physical homosexual relations, but Medlicott felt they were just loath to admit homosexual leanings: the choice of male partners in their acted-out love scenes with the Saints was simply a disguise.
It should be borne in mind that homosexuality was categorisedas a psychiatric disorder until 1974, when it was removed from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders following a referendum of the American Psychiatric Association. In 1954, even in sunny California lesbians were being given electric shock treatment to bring them to their senses.
Six years later Reg Medlicott presented a new theory. There were, he had now decided, closer parallels between Parker and Hulme and the Chicago killers Leopold and Loeb than he had been willing to acknowledge at the trial. Leopold and Loeb, teenage sons of millionaires, had set about a life of crime that had culminated in the murder of a schoolboy. Leopold was described as “intellectually brilliant but physically unattractive and sexually abnormal”, while Loeb was “highly intelligent, good-looking”. The young men had been defended by the celebrated American attorney Clarence Darrow. Realising he had no prospect of winning an acquittal on grounds of insanity, Darrow had tried to save the young men from the electric chair by persuading the judge that their legal responsibility was diminished by personality disorders. Outstanding American psychiatrists of the day gave evidence in their defence. Dr Bernard Glueck found in Loeb “the absolute absence of any signs of normal feeling”. Dr William Healy said Leopold had “typical feelings and ideas of paranoiac personality … Anything he wanted to do was right, even kidnapping and murder. There was no place for sympathy and feeling”.
Medlicott had discussed the Leopold and Loeb case with Glueck and another of the defence’s psychiatrists, William Alanson White. White thought that although Leopold and Loeb both unquestionably had an intellectual understanding of right and wrong “there was
no adequate feeling attitude towards the wrongfulness of the act”.
And although the prosecution psychiatrists had testified that the boys were mentally normal, Glueck remained convinced of their “gross abnormality”.
All four of these teenage killers, Medlicott now argued in the
New Zealand Law Journal, were homosexual, had rich fantasy lives, indulged in play-acting, and saw themselves as supermen. All exhibited arrogance, feelings of omnipotence, and gross exaltation that continued after the murders and during their trials. He no longer liked his earlier diagnosis for Parker and Hulme of exalted paranoia. Paranoia was normally a disease of middle age, and the girls’ grandiosity bore no similarity to that of paranoiacs whose mental faculties were in a state of deterioration. Upon reflection, he thought the
cases of Parker and Hulme and Leopold and Loeb were so exceptional they demanded their own diagnostic formulation. He proposed “adolescent megalomania”.
He did not expressly say whether adolescent megalomania was a psychosis or a personality disorder and made no attempt to establish what caused it, being content to state, “The natural history of adolescent megalomania is unknown.” He was, nonetheless, certain that “without the continual stimulus of … mutual reaction and with increasing age it loses its grossly psychotic nature and subsides”. Adolescent megalomaniacs recovered spontaneously in time when separated from the stimulation provided by a similarly afflicted partner. His new diagnosis seemed designed to accommodate the fact that neither Juliet Hulme nor Pauline Parker had displayed psychotic symptoms while serving their prison sentences.
Medlicott also jettisoned paranoia as such and placed narcissism at the heart of the case. Both pairs, he observed, “went into adolescence already strongly narcissistic”. The individuals in each couple “acted on the other as a resonator, increasing the pitch of their narcissism”.
A defect of Medlicott’s analysis was that he made no attempt to distinguish Pauline and Juliet from each other, as though their thoughts, feelings and motives were at all times identical. The folie à deux scenario caused him to look for similarities rather than differences. Narcissism is said to be associated with inadequate development of the conscience, but the girls were quite different in this regard. Juliet Hulme seemed genuinely untroubled by conscience; a conscience was, she thought, senseless, “bred in people so that they punished themselves”.
Pauline Parker, on the other hand, struggled at times to overcome feelings of guilt, deeming them unworthy of a superior being. He
r diary disclosed a high degree of self-awareness: she did not have pleasant dreams on the eve of the murder; she felt “rather queer and jumpy” before setting out to rifle Dennis Brothers’ safe. When, after the girls’ first shoplifting expedition, she wrote, “I have come to the conclusion that I have no conscience whatsoever” it was as though she were trying to persuade herself. The more closely their cases are looked at the more obvious it becomes that, although Pauline and Juliet shared many crazy ideas, their personalities were perceptibly different.
For all his scientific analysis, Reg Medlicott never forgot that when he interviewed Pauline and Juliet at Paparua he felt he was in the presence of evil. In their grossly delusional state, he wrote, the girls had “openly embraced evil. In earlier times, one would have said they had become possessed by evil spirits”. When interviewed thirty-three years later by the authors of Parker and Hulme: A Lesbian View, he recounted a dream in which an evil scorpion-type creature who seemed to be Juliet came crawling out of a wall.
It was certainly true that Juliet and Pauline were captivated by evil: it was glamorous and alluring, a way of proving their superiority
to the lumpen mass of humanity. They worshipped evil characters such as Count Rupert of Hentzau, Black Michael, Duke of Streslau, Diello in Five Fingers, James Mason’s Field Marshal Rommel, and Jay Robinson’s Caligula. As Medlicott saw it, the two girls were both mad and bad.
In his 1961 article, he stepped into even more controversial territory, drawing on a 1948 paper by the noted American psychiatrist Leo Alexander to compare Parker and Hulme with the Shutzstaffel, Adolf Hitler’s infamous SS. Alexander believed the SS, as an organisation, was paranoiac in nature. Medlicott wrote: “Although this may seem a far cry from these two girls, there are several very close analogies … [specifically with] the way the SS frequently carried out crimes of sickening brutality without any sense of pity, shame or remorse, in a mood that was often frankly exultant.” Pauline Parker and Juliet Hulme had approached their crime and responded to it afterwards in a similar way, he wrote.
Leo Alexander was particularly interested in what he called the “rapid perversion of the superego” achieved by SS training. Medlicott concluded: “The religious-humane cultural superego common to civilisation was replaced by an exclusively tribal one in the Nazis’ case and by a narcissistic one in the girls’ case. … Reason, the main force at the disposal of the ego in repressing and sublimating primitive destructive forces of the id, was weakened. In the case of the SS, sanction by the group became the main ego support, while in the girls’ case sanction one of the other provided this. With the SS there was a progressive destruction of the taboo against killing. … Both girls came to treat death very cheaply as something of no particular concern.”
These views would be mischievously misunderstood. Decades later an article in New Zealand Listener said that at the trial Medlicott had pronounced the girls helplessly under the sway of “evil” and had later compared them to the Nazi SS. The implication was that there was no such thing as evil, and that Medlicott was fool enough to believe the murder of Honorah Rieper on a par with the atrocities of the SS. It provided an eye-catching headline but naturally he believed no such thing.
In 1954 the capacity of human beings to commit acts of unspeakable wickedness was much in the minds not only of psychiatrists but of all thinking people. Almost the whole of Europe and a great part of Asia had recently emerged from one of the worst epochs in human history. Morality and civilisation seemed to have collapsed. There was a shocking realisation that a man of culture could preside over the extermination of thousands of his fellow humans and then go home and dine in good humour with his wife and children. How could such horror have happened? In 1954 Lord Russell of Liverpool, a member of the legal team at the Nuremberg trials, published The Scourge of the Swastika, which gave the English-speaking world its first detailed account of the horrors of the concentration camps and mass-extermination policies practised by the Nazis. It was a phenomenal bestseller.
In 1954, too, an English schoolmaster named William Golding published Lord of the Flies. This novel, which became a sensation, used the story of a group of schoolboys marooned on a desert island to explore the fragility of civilised society and the ugly violence at the heart of humanity. The Inheritors, published by Golding the following year, took as its theme the brute force in primeval man.
Golding came to be preoccupied with evil and original sin. Explaining his motivation, he wrote, “There was a time when I would have said we are not evil, and by the time I had found out after the Second World War what men had done to each other, what men had done to their own people, really then I was forced to postulate something which I could not see coming out of normal human nature as portrayed in good books and all the rest of it. I thought there must be some kind of principle of evil at work.”
CHAPTER 31
Life in Prison
The most outstanding defect in judgement,” Reg Medlicott wrote of the two girls whose case had so much occupied his thoughts, “was their complete inability to foresee the natural outcome of their action—namely separation.” Juliet had said, “Surely no one would be so illogical as to separate us?” and added, “We will behave ourselves as long as no one tries to separate us.”
Inevitably her threat fell on deaf ears. Even if the girls had been found not guilty by reason of insanity, they would for therapeutic reasons have been sent to separate mental institutions. As it was, as convicted murderers they were dispatched to different institutions to compound their punishment.
N.Z. Truth assured its readers that Parker and Hulme would be kept in “full security conditions” and both girls would be subject “in every way” to the normal regime of a long-term sentence. “They will wear the ordinary prison clothes, eat the ordinary prison food, do the ordinary prison tasks set long-sentence women prisoners, and be subject to ordinary prison discipline.”
Both in Arohata and Mt Eden, the work given to female prisoners was tedious and exhausting. In the laundries the only labour-saving appliances were hand-turned mangles. For work the women wore coarse jeans and a woollen cardigan—with, Truth was quick to point out, “plain underclothing”. They were issued with a simple cotton frock to wear outside working hours.
On September 3, Juliet Hulme was airlifted to Auckland on a Royal New Zealand Air Force plane. At Whenuapai Airport she was met in person by the chief superintendent of Mt Eden prison. The women’s section of Mt Eden offered grim accommodation. The fifteen year old lived in an eight-by-six-foot stone-walled cell with fourteen-foot high walls. There was only one small barred window, too high to see out of. Her furniture consisted of an iron bedstead with a straw mattress, a pillow and six blankets, a stool, a small cabinet, and a small mat on the concrete floor. No heating was provided.
Arohata, where Pauline Parker was sent as soon as its new security wing was completed, provided more pleasant quarters. It was a modern building not unlike a hospital, complete with corridors of polished linoleum. The security wing was designed to house recalcitrant or difficult inmates who, it was thought, needed to be confined apart from the other prisoners. Even the exercise yard was screened from view, and the wing had its own workroom, which looked out over green fields. Pauline had a wooden soundproof room, eight feet by ten, with a normal-sized window covered by strong meshed wire. The furnishings were a wooden bedstead and a wall-mounted table and stool. Her bedding was the same as Juliet’s in Mt Eden but at Arohata the inside temperature was considerably warmer.
Convinced Juliet needed psychiatric treatment, Medlicott, supported by Hilda Hulme, sought permission to visit her. This was refused. Although Mr Justice Adams had said that no one could have sat through the trial without concluding that the two girls suffered some degree of mental disorder, The Dominion editorial writer who insisted “psychiatry is not wanted in this case” was in tune with the vengeful mood of the public. On December 13 Sam Barnett, the secretary for justice, was moved to deny rep
orts in a Sydney newspaper that Juliet was receiving psychiatric treatment. All that had been done, he explained, was that her case had been studied to ascertain whether such treatment was necessary.
Barnett took personal responsibility for the two young prisoners. He was keen for them to continue their education and willing to make facilities available. He also decided who could visit and correspond with them. Many letters came from well-meaning busybodies, some of them religiously motivated, others sexual fantasists. All letters were intercepted.
As was the case with all new long-term prisoners, Juliet was kept in semi-isolation from other prisoners in the women’s wingfor three months. This was partly a “probation” or “settling-in” period and partly a suicide watch. After nearly two months, Barnett noted she was not showing the slightest inclination to settle down to any systematic work.
At first she was allowed visitors for half an hour on Sunday afternoons. Later, more liberal access was granted for people coming to tutor her, among them Erica Hoby, a violinist and music teacherwho had taught at a private girls’ school, Woodford House, in Hawke’s Bay for seventeen years before becoming proprietor and headmistress of Queenswood, the Rudolf Steiner School that Juliet had briefly attended. Other dedicated visitors were Professor Kenneth Maidment, an Oxford classics don who was vice-chancellor of Auckland University, his wife Felicity Maidment, and Vivien Dixon. Although she had met Henry Hulme only weeks before the murder and did not live in Auckland, Vivien Dixon visited Juliet three times a year for the entire time she was in prison.
At the end of October 1954, in a letter to Nancy Sutherland, Felicity Maidment painted a picture of Juliet’s life in prison. Juliet “talked freely and cheerfully and was animated and smiling, though none of us really knows what goes on in her mind. We bring her books to read and flowers but we are not allowed to take in anything else. … As she is considered to be a suicide risk, she is segregated from the other prisoners to a certain extent. She is taken back to her ‘room’ at about four and given her evening meal and then locked up until six the next morning—long hours of solitude for a little girl, which we are doing our best to help her occupy. They have even removed her looking glass—I suppose for fear she might break it and cut herself.”
