The Search for Anne Perry

by Joanne Drayton

  Miramax’s marketing campaign only inflamed a difficult situation. A New York Daily News article announced their strategy:

  Harvey Weinstein, the Miramax big-wig … apparently has made so much lucre from his seven films nominated for 22 Academy Awards that he’s actually arranged to have an empty seat held at every theatre screening for the award-nominated ‘Heavenly Creatures.’ He also knows a good publicity stunt when he sees one. The empty seat, he says, is for mystery writer Anne Perry … Weinstein is hoping the best-selling novelist will finally see the flick while she does a 23-city U.S. tour for her forth coming suspense novel.74

  The Miramax advertisement for Heavenly Creatures, entitled ‘Murder, She Wrote!’ and published in leading American newspapers, was an open letter to Anne:

  We read that you want to put this all behind you — yet you have very publicly given your opinion on a movie you haven’t seen. Our offer to you remains the same: we’re holding one seat open at every showing of ‘Heavenly Creatures’ — just for you. Or we will happily arrange a private screening. We’ve done everything we can to accommodate you. Please see the movie before you judge it or speak out against it.75

  The advertisement finished with a challenge: ‘There is one piece of the story which still remains a mystery: the whereabouts of Pauline Parker.’76 When Peter Jackson heard that Miramax was about to use Anne in a cheap advertising stunt, he was horrified. ‘At no stage did we want to have Juliet’s identity exposed … I especially asked Miramax not to use her in the publicity for the film at all,’ he told journalists.77

  When what Don Maass described as ‘the loathsome ad’ hit the newspapers, he called Miramax’s director of marketing:

  I kept it friendly, asking him whether they intend to continue using that ad (if not, problem over) and to express our hope that in respect of Anne’s feelings that they not use her to directly advertise the film. (I said a bit more, actually, though it was understood that the conversation was ‘confidential, informational and with no threats made or implied’).78

  Another crisis was ignited by John Darnton’s article in the New York Times of 14 February 1995. Meg, who ‘wish[ed] now he’d stayed cancelled’, thought it ‘mean-spirited’ and harsh.79 John Darnton took a tough, war correspondent’s approach to the story. ‘She has participated in a publicity campaign to tell the world “who I am.” What began as “damage control” has turned into a single-minded and self-absorbed crusade of revelation, obfuscation, justification and attack.’ He outlined the circumstances leading up to the murder, mentioned the issue of lesbianism, gave Anne’s rationale for the murder and explained that she now lived in the midst of achievement in ‘a Scottish idyll’. His parting comment was churlishly ambiguous:

  The marketing of Miss Perry as someone who has ‘courageously faced the world and shared her painful story’ raises the usual questions about exploiting the notoriety for gain. Miss Perry insists that her motives are pure.80

  ‘What a great idea, to write to The New York Times. I have to confess, my thinking lately has been hampered by exhaustion and now also by a bad cold,’ Meg wrote to Don on 17 February.81 Incensed by John Darnton’s claims, Don wrote a letter to the editor, which was ultimately published. In it he said the article ‘unfairly maligns this author and wilfully ignores the facts’. He was especially appalled at Darnton’s assertion that ‘expressions of remorse are not volunteered’ and listed the television spots, radio interviews and newspaper articles where Anne had ‘repeatedly stated how sorry she is’. In response to the ‘single-minded and self-absorbed crusade of revelation, obfuscation, justification and attack’, he wrote:

  Quite the opposite is true. Ms. Perry’s discussion of her life has been open and candid … Far from obscuring the issues, I believe that Anne Perry illuminates for all, both in her books and in her life, the harrowing moral complexities that can attend a murder and its aftermath.82

  Meg suspected that the tone of John Darnton’s piece had been coloured by the fact that he had been abruptly cancelled, then reinstated. Don and Meg discussed the legality of his claims. They both felt a case could be made for libel, but it was a tricky situation and perhaps a public retraction might be more effective. Don felt there would be little sympathy for Anne’s case, especially from the media. ‘Expressions of worry, weariness, self-pity, being put upon, or of the media being reckless with her, or her mother’s, life and privacy are certain to backfire … As wearisome as it is to say “I’m sorry” over and over again forty years after the fact’, this was what she must do as the news spread. With the United States book tour just days away, Don had some recommendations:

  1) That Anne rest well before the tour. 2) That we reassure her that it’s all for the good, and that for the most part her story inspires people. 3) While she is right not to see the film or dwell on the crime, people understandably want to comprehend how such a thing could happen.83

  Anne was very upset by John Darnton’s article. It felt like yet another blow, and one that might have considerable impact because it had been published in one of the world’s most influential newspapers. She worried also about the reaction of Ken Sherman, her Hollywood agent; she had grown fond of him and looked forward to their conversations when she visited Los Angeles. But Ken wrote to reassure Meg of his continued commitment. ‘I can imagine how frustrated Anne is with all the press and just for the record it has no effect one way or the other in terms of my respect for her and desire to continue working with her.’84 Meg passed on his kind words, which she told him were ‘a big measure of balm … The New York Times piece seemed sadly mean-minded, and Anne found it rather bruising.’85

  By the time Meg received Don’s advice for the tour, Anne was already en route to Nottingham for an interview with a religious programme that aired on Sunday, 19 February 1995. She would be out of contact until the next day, but Meg told Don she would pass on his suggestions and fax him Anne’s thoughts in return. After Nottingham, Anne had a week’s rest before flying to New York. Just before Anne left Portmahomack, Kim Hovey contacted her to add new interviews to the tour list. ‘I am going to ring Kim in a moment. I’m angry that she’s involved Anne in two more US interviews yesterday,’ Meg told Don.

  Anne is seriously at the end of her rope, and I’m very concerned for her at the moment. Doing more interviews just frays her worse … I understand Kim’s had some flak from Miramax about Anne mouthing off about the film, and the last thing we need is a slanging match.86

  II

  When 10-year-old Juliet met her parents again in 1948, after a 15-month separation, the adjustment was difficult. It was hard to believe that something she had looked forward to for so long could be so awkward. ‘I felt very alien.’87 She found it difficult to know where she belonged, and felt loyal to both the Brownes and her own mother and father. She had learned to survive in another household without the pattern of school but with a rather more rigorous regime of parental discipline, and now she was abruptly returned to the unstructured free-thinking care of the Hulmes.

  In Christchurch, Juliet would be a day pupil at St Margaret’s College, a private school for girls. ‘I hated being a new girl.’88 She was taunted for being different, a foreigner, but that mattered less because she had the support, briefly before she retired, of the kindly headmistress, Stephanie Young, and she was able to live at home. She clung to her mother and needed constant reassurance, but, because her health was still a concern, after only a year her parents decided to send her back to the warmer climate of the North Island. This time she went to Queenswood School, a privately run Rudolf Steiner school in the Hawke’s Bay town of Hastings.

  If readjustment to life with her parents had initially been troubled and alienating, the strict boarding school routine and discipline she now encountered was a further shock. She felt completely distanced from both students and staff. Her English accent, her background, her experiences were different from anyone else’s. The children teased and bullied her mercilessly, and she hated it. ‘S
choolgirls can be terribly cruel, especially if there’s anything different about you.’89 But she was a challenging, even problematic child, and something of a misfit: intelligent, so that she stood out; imaginative, so that she seemed anti-social; unused to playground dynamics and the strictures of formal education, so that she appeared smug and arrogant; obviously physically ill; and bitterly homesick.

  Juliet was at boarding school between the ages of 11 and 12, holidaying with her parents three times a year, unable to see them casually or at weekends. ‘I used to get so upset. I’d missed three years of school, I was a swot, and swots are not popular. I was unused to school discipline and walked with my head in the air.’90 When it became obvious that Juliet was intensely unhappy, she was brought back home and enrolled locally at Ilam School.

  Since their arrival in Christchurch the Hulmes had lived first in a house on Hackthorne Road in Cashmere, then briefly in Rapaki Road on Murray Aynsley Hill, and finally in the rector’s residence, a huge homestead known as Ilam in the affluent suburb of Upper Riccarton. The stylish two-storey brick-and-stucco house, with tennis court, greenhouse and orchard, was set in 16 hectares of park-like grounds at the end of a long shingle drive lined with enormous trees.

  The beautiful Ilam Stream meandered through the property, surrounded by carefully manicured lawns, luxurious flowerbeds and vast areas of azalea and rhododendron gardens. In spring these were a mass of dazzling colour — purple, pink, flaming red, orange, creamy lemon, yellow — and the air was saturated with scent. Away from the house — and across the little footbridge that passed a fountain and a waterwheel — was an extensive woodland area where daffodils bloomed in August and September, followed by bluebells in October.

  The original old rambling homestead, built by the wealthy John Charles Watts-Russell in 1858, was razed to the ground by fire before the present one was built in 1914 by Edgar Stead, an ornithologist, keen gardener and hybridist, who planted the azalea and rhododendron gardens. When he died in 1949, Ilam was bought by the government as part of the new site for the University of Canterbury, on the condition that the gardens were kept in perpetuity. Canterbury University College, as it was then known, maintained the Ilam gardens, opening them occasionally to the public, and used the homestead as accommodation for its first full-time rector, Henry Hulme, and his family.

  Henry was in the job only a few months before he committed a serious tactical error. He was used to a milieu that accommodated dissention and debate, and in this context he was an intellectual prima donna rather than a politician. At Whitehall he had headed teams working on important war projects; in small, faux-Oxbridge Christchurch the biggest issue at that time was where to locate the School of Forestry. Henry might have been decommissioned, but he was not psychologically disengaged from the ethos of war.

  Moreover, his appointment was a mismatch. Henry was too condescendingly British, intellectual and military; Christchurch too isolated, inward-looking and parochial. So he was thinking big rather than small when he voted against his own College Council regarding the site for the proposed school. He failed to understand the significance of scale in what novelist and theatre director Ngaio Marsh called this ‘cranky little coda, at the bottom of the world’.91 His conduct damaged his relationship with his colleagues, and the reverberations continued as more conflicts arose to rattle the Neo-Gothic halls of Canterbury University College.

  Those who got to know Henry found him kind and likeable, but he was a difficult man to get to know. Equally, Hilda was admired by some for her social charm and generosity, and disliked by others for being opinionated and aloof. Their social position created an enormous barrier in a city polarized by class into ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’. Strait-laced, chintzy 1950s Christchurch cultivated a stuffy, pretentious Englishness that was oddly refracted through a colonial lens.

  Seen through this lens, the Hulmes were both attractive and repellent. They were a reminder of upper-middle-class Britishness and the lingering romance of croquet played on perfect English lawns. It was love and hate mixed with envy. The Hulmes arrived with privilege and were given the best. They lived in one of the Garden City’s most spectacular homes, and the doors of society were thrown open for them.

  Hilda was immediately welcomed as a figure of respectability in the community. ‘She played a prominent role in the life of the University’ and became vice-president of the Christchurch Marriage Guidance Council and its representative on the Canterbury Council of Social Services.92 She worked as a marriage guidance counsellor, wrote newspaper articles, spoke publicly and organized a lecture series on the subject of the family.

  She offered ‘good’ advice to parents raising children and to married and engaged couples. People listened avidly to her immaculate enunciation on the subject, aired frequently on national radio. In 1951, she was a regular panel member, along with Helen Holmes and Eileen Saunders, of Candid Comment, a women’s programme broadcast on 3YA. The trio discussed religious education in schools, school uniforms, discipline in the home and child-rearing. Hilda’s work at the Marriage Guidance Council meant she moved among the city’s social and religious élite, mixing with churchmen such as Anglican Bishop Alwyn Warren as well as prominent lawyers, psychologists and doctors.

  Juliet and brother Jonathan, now seven years old, had the run of the Ilam grounds. Jonathan was at Medbury School, and Juliet at the local school and then St Margaret’s College again, until her parents decided to move her to Christchurch Girls’ High School in May 1952. Juliet had not settled especially well at St Margaret’s, and the Hulmes believed she might be more academically extended at the bigger, public school. Before Juliet started, she was given an intelligence test that gave her a score of about 170, when the ‘average’ score was somewhere between 90 and 110. Juliet’s mother was on the Christchurch Girls’ High School board, so when she entered 3A, the top academic stream, Juliet was in an enviable position.

  3A was bristling with talented young minds. ‘It was a strange class because we were led to believe we were a picked bunch,’ remembers a fellow classmate. ‘We were … pushed every class from day one, and it was quite overbearing.’93 The girls in 3A were tipped to be the next generation of women leaders and suburban matrons.

  But not everyone in 3A came from a privileged background. Among the less advantaged was 14-year-old Pauline Yvonne Rieper. A quiet, more mature girl, she was a little dumpy and frumpy, but extremely bright. Admired as the only one who could get perfect scores in Latin tests, she was regarded as a character by her fellow students: fervid, distant at times, and self-contained because she had spent so much of her childhood sick.

  Pauline was born on 26 May 1938, the second daughter of four children to Honorah and Herbert Rieper. Their first child, a son, was a ‘blue baby’ who died almost immediately; the last, a Down’s Syndrome girl, Rosemary, born in March 1949, when Honorah was 41. In between were Pauline and her older sister, Wendy Patricia, just 15 months apart. Their father, Tasmanian-born Herbert Rieper, had lived a colourfully covert life. In 1910, aged 16, he had begun his adventure by coming to New Zealand, then enlisting in the New Zealand Expeditionary Force in 1915 and serving in Cairo, where he met the enchanting Louise McArthur, an Englishwoman born in India and eight years his senior. They married in Cairo and moved to New Zealand, settling in Napier, then shifting to Raetihi. They had two children.

  It was at Raetihi, in the office of a firm where they both worked, that Herbert met and fell in love with Honorah Mary Parker, nearly 15 years his junior. He and Honorah ran away together, leaving Louise at Raetihi. By 1936, they were established at 21 Mathesons Road in Phillipstown, an industrial part of Christchurch. Honorah, the daughter of chartered accountant Robert William Parker and his wife Amy, was born on 18 December 1907, in a genteel suburb of Birmingham.

  Herbert never got a divorce, so, although he and Honorah lived as man and wife and their children took the surname Rieper, they were never married. There was nothing about the Riepers that suggested their p
assionate beginning or ruinous secret, but they were always short of money. Herbert slipped the occasional few pounds to his other family, and Pauline’s bad health added to the daily struggle of surviving on a working-class wage.

  When Pauline was almost five, she was diagnosed with the bone infection osteomyelitis in her left leg. She spent nine months in hospital and nearly lost her life to the debilitating disease, which, even after several operations, left her in severe pain and barely able to walk. For two years after she left hospital, her leg discharged and had to be dressed twice a day.

  When Pauline finally returned to primary school, she was so far behind that she had to be given individual tuition. Her rehabilitation became part of the Riepers’ way of life. There were dressings and painkillers — aspirin and codeine — which she took until her teenage years, and, because she was immobile for long periods of time, Herbert introduced her to craft-modelling in wood and plasticine. What started as a distraction rapidly became a passion.