The Search for Anne Perry

by Joanne Drayton

  She stepped forward like a soldier over the trench out into the guns. She spoke to them and said: ‘You can’t go.’ … At some level that woman has to be credited with the courage to do that. She tried to save her girl and she hadn’t much weaponry. It is the most amazing story of gallantry.32

  The first headlines about the case were descriptive and restrained, but soon newspapers across New Zealand and abroad were ablaze with the story.

  At Christchurch Girls’ High School, the pupils of 5A were arriving back from physical education when they were ushered into a special room by Miss Stewart and given strict instructions not to give any school photographs to reporters. ‘Miss Burns came in and she said: “There will be no conversation about a certain event.”’ So 5A and the rest of the school ‘sat in Cranmer Square eating our lunch and talked of nothing else … You felt like the eyes of the world were upon you … It was an experience none of us had ever contemplated. Murders don’t happen in New Zealand for a start, and not in Christchurch.’33

  In the midst of the public furore, the Hulmes left Ilam homestead. Henry went on 3 July, as he had always planned to do, with their young son Jonathan. He had thought hard about whether to go, but after months of waiting for a position in England he had a job teaching mathematics at Cambridge and working part-time at Aldermaston. The need to begin work, to protect Jonathan from the destructive impact of the trial and to escape a disintegrating marriage and public disgrace bolstered his resolve to go. Henry’s virtual absence during the police investigation at Ilam is enigmatic. In his place stood Bill Perry, although it is unclear whether this came about because of paternal neglect, because Bill usurped Henry’s role, or perhaps even because of a gentlemen’s agreement to exchange places.

  Hilda and Bill might have left the country, too, but for the fact that they were subpoenaed by the Crown prosecutor to give evidence. They moved from Ilam, with its dozen rooms, servants’ quarters and attached flat, to the weekend cottage at Port Levy. In the weeks before the trial there was a public auction of the Hulmes’ ‘furniture and house-hold’ effects at Ilam. The sense of humiliation and loss must have been intense. As the NZ Truth reported, ‘The attendance was far larger than normally seen at such auctions and souvenir hunters paid fabulous prices for mementos from the Hulme home.’34 With the departure of the Hulmes something indefinable had ended for Christchurch. Gone, in some respects, was the comfortable, century-old fiction of a ‘little Britain’ at the edge of the Empire.

  Before Henry left, legal arrangements were made for Juliet. Terence Arbuthnot Gresson and Brian McClelland, as assistant, were appointed to defend her. Henry Hulme had known Gresson while he was studying at Cambridge University, and they had become reacquainted when Henry moved to Christchurch. Gresson also knew Hilda, after attending a number of social functions at Ilam. Following Henry’s departure, Hilda and Bill conducted arrangements for Juliet’s defence from Port Levy. When they met the lawyers, they drove nearly 50 kilometres in to Christchurch, much of it on dusty shingle roads.

  Pauline was represented by Dr Alec Haslam, with Jim Wicks his assistant. As the family lawyer, Haslam was an obvious choice, but he was also notable for having been a Rhodes scholar, and now, with his own practice in the city, an experienced lawyer.

  From the beginning, the counsel for the defence was compromised, as Brian McClelland has recalled. ‘When the killing happened they had not called on Terence [Gresson] at all. They let Juliet be interviewed by Detective Archie Tate. She had made a statement admitting that she had taken part in the killing. We couldn’t move a yard on the facts.’35 To compound the difficulties of a full and signed confession, there were the diaries. Although these were accepted as evidence against Pauline only, they were equally damaging to Juliet, a blueprint for shared adolescent treachery.

  The two defence teams, who chose to work together, found themselves in an almost impossible position. The facts were irrefutable; the only case they could offer was one of diminished responsibility, which had to be argued in such a way that it could be offered for both girls. Insanity was the strongest and most compelling defence, but ‘under section 43 of [New Zealand’s] Crimes Act everyone must be presumed to be sane at the time of doing or committing any act until the contrary is proved’.36 So the onus was on the counsel for the defence to satisfy the jury that their clients were insane.

  In order to investigate the viability of an insanity plea, the defence employed the expert opinion of Dr Reginald Warren Medlicott. At a little over 30 years old, Medlicott was a prodigy in psychiatric health in New Zealand. For seven years he had been the superintendent of Ashburn Hall, a privately owned psychiatric unit near Dunedin. His rising star began with a Rockefeller Fellowship, which gave him a year-long residency at a university hospital in Cleveland, Ohio. After returning to New Zealand he lectured at Otago University’s School of Medicine and was a visiting psychiatric physician at Dunedin’s Public Hospital. He was a member of the Royal Australasian College of Physicians. His early reputation was impressive, but his experience for the task was limited. He had never given psychiatric evidence at a trial.

  While at Paparua, Juliet and Pauline were examined by numerous doctors and psychiatrists. Medlicott saw them separately on 27 and 28 June, and again on 11 and 12 July. These visits lasted between one-and-a-half and two-and-a-half hours. On 14 July, the hearing was held in the Magistrates’ Court and the case was referred to the Supreme Court for a trial beginning in late August.

  After the hearing, the girls were separated at the request of Gresson, to see if there were any discernible changes in their behaviour. Juliet remained at Paparua Prison and Pauline was sent for a week to Mt Eden Prison in Auckland. Medlicott interviewed both girls again separately on the eve of the Supreme Court trial. ‘He also interviewed Herbert Rieper, Hilda Hulme, Dr Francis Bennett, Pauline’s sister Wendy and Pauline’s grandmother Amy Parker.’37

  The relationship between Medlicott and the girls was not an easy one. They were, after all, meeting to establish madness. Certainly, both Juliet and Pauline had discussed the naïve idea that a plea of insanity was their best defence and would lead to a swifter release. Juliet admitted to one attending doctor ‘that if they were found insane they would probably be out of mental hospital by the time they were 18 or 19 … They could not see themselves getting out of prison — if they were found sane and convicted — as early as that.’38 From the beginning, they played up to Medlicott’s diagnosis — and he was aware of this: ‘When the girls were first interviewed the writer knew that they were trying to prove themselves insane.’ Medlicott believed he had rumbled their deceitful plan to act as though they were mad, but this was not entirely the case.

  Medlicott read their letters, which formed a ‘childishly imaginative’ story that spanned 30 or 40 years but was communicated in a few weeks of correspondence between the girls. He also read Pauline’s diaries, as well as sections of both girls’ novels written in the exercise books. In them he found an abundance of disturbing material. As well as the obvious evidence in their writing, there was the unstable behaviour he had personally observed.

  ‘Both the girls could consciously hallucinate almost at will, hearing music and voices and seeing fleeting scenes,’ he would recall in a 1955 article for the British Journal of Medical Psychology. Pauline told him: ‘You’re an infuriating fool, displeasing to look at and have an irritating way of speaking.’ After his physical examination of her, she hurled back, ‘I hope you break your flaming neck.’39

  Juliet was more subtle in her superciliousness. ‘You do think, don’t you?’ she sneered. Their arrogance and contempt were, he admitted later, ‘so severe I had to restrain myself’.40 In addition to this, almost everything they wrote challenged his Edwardian sensibilities. As educational behaviourist Colleen McLaughlin has written, ‘If girls are to become “nice girls” in the eyes of society then they should be calm, controlled, quiet and not aggressive … aggression in girls is not seen as “normal” and may be seen as an
indication of a more deep-seated problem.’41

  Medlicott read their behaviour, and especially their writings, as proof of a pathological narcissism. He was both astonished and bemused by their reasons for going to the United States.

  They would go to Hollywood, choose their actors and supervise the filming of their novels … Ambitious plans are not unusual in adolescents but there was more than usual neglect of reality here. Their books were mostly unfinished and untyped and they were completely uncritical about them. When Juliet started writing she used to read her novel chapter by chapter to her mother but later guarded her writings from everyone and was, like Pauline, completely contemptuous of anyone’s opinion … In actuality their writings, although profuse and imaginative, did not show talent and there was nothing to suggest that they would be published.42

  They had both been sickly, spoilt children who went into early adolescence already more ‘strongly narcissistic’ than most, and their meeting had been a confluence of ego and self-centredness. ‘Each acted on the other as a resonator increasing the pitch of their narcissism.’43 In his mind he likened their act of senseless violence and brutality to the activities of the Nazi SS, and saw their combined act of murder as being similar to that perpetrated by Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, the sons of Chicago millionaires, whose random crime spree ended in the gratuitous killing of a 14-year-old schoolboy. In Juliet and Pauline’s case, it was the threat of separation that turned their narcissism murderous.

  Leopold and Loeb’s case shared another similarity: their relationship was homosexual. For Medlicott, ‘There was no doubt about the fact that the friendship [between the girls] was homosexual’ and that this was directly connected to the build-up of pressure and paranoia.

  Repressed homosexuality has a special role in persecutory paranoia, but there is some reason to believe that homosexuality might be prominent in other types of paranoia. The homosexual relationship between Leopold and Loeb has been mentioned, and Burr (1935) states that he cannot recall a case of paranoia in which he really knew the conduct of the patient and did not discover that he was homosexual.44

  Although the girls flatly denied any homosexual conduct, and Medlicott did not believe their relationship had found physical expression, he was convinced it was a significant factor in their pathology. Their narcissism, paranoia, anxiety and homosexuality caused them to transpose the normal codes. ‘Their moral values became reversed and they embraced evil as good.’

  In his 1955 article, Medlicott often used the word ‘evil’. He wrote of the girls’ ‘morbid preoccupation with evil’, the point where ‘they openly embraced evil’, and ‘the crowning of evil’ when Diello became Emperor of Borovina in one of their ceremonies. He was convinced that the girls were lost souls. ‘In earlier times one would have said they had become “possessed” by evil spirits.’45 The problem was that Medlicott’s use of the word ‘evil’ belonged more in a Judeo-Christian theological debate than in a clinical diagnosis or psychological discussion, especially one published in a medical journal. Medlicott’s mixing of medical and religious paradigms influenced his analysis of the girls’ behaviour and was not helpful to the case.

  However, his diagnosis of madness provided perfect ammunition for Gresson and Haslam, who had their work cut out for them. In consultation with Medlicott, they decided to argue a case of folie à deux, where delusional beliefs are transmitted from one person to another, resulting in a shared psychosis. They could find no successful precedent for such an approach other than ‘just one case in England in which a judge ruled out insanity on the basis that no medical evidence had been called’.46 Not only was this an extremely difficult case to argue, but the legal definition of insanity barely resembled that of the medical one. The judge at Juliet and Pauline’s trial went to great lengths to explain the ramifications of the narrower legal definition.

  The insanity which is to relieve a person from criminal responsibility must be, in the words of the act, such as renders the person in question ‘incapable of understanding the nature and quality of the act or omission, or of knowing that such act or omission was wrong’.47

  The prosecution was led by the newly appointed Crown prosecutor for Christchurch, Alan Brown. Brown was a seasoned criminal lawyer, with three decades of experience as partner in a local law firm, and years under his belt working with the previous prosecutor. This was his first murder trial since his appointment in February of that year, and he was keen to make his mark. Brown was assisted by Peter Thomas Mahon, a promising young Christchurch lawyer who had joined Brown’s law firm as a partner in 1941, served in the Second World War, then rejoined the firm to work ‘with Brown and the previous Crown Prosecutor’.48 The prosecution was a honed team, well experienced at working together.

  If anyone could be described as a ‘hanging judge’, then arguably it was the stiff, intractable Francis Boyd Adams. He came from a distinguished legal family in Dunedin, where he was Crown prosecutor for many years, had published books on criminal law and was appointed as a judge of the Supreme Court in 1950. As the Christchurch Press later noted, ‘There is little doubt that Mr Justice Adams, a staunch religious man, had little sympathy for the girls. “He was,” [remembers] Brian McClelland, “an unsympathetic judge to put it mildly” … a clever man but absolutely as hard as nails.’49

  The Parker–Hulme trial, as it became known, opened in Christchurch’s Supreme Court on Monday, 23 August 1954. The proceedings, which would run for six days, were comprehensively reported in newspapers throughout New Zealand and overseas. A media contingent of 11 reporters followed the case daily. Most of the journalists were New Zealand-based, but there were also reporters from Australia and the United Kingdom.

  ‘Trial Given Prominence in U.K. Papers’ said a headline in the Christchurch’s Star-Sun. ‘Not for many years has news from New Zealand received such prominence as the newspapers are giving to the Christchurch murder trial. Each day of the trial most newspapers have published at least half a column, generally on the front page … the two tabloid newspapers, the “Mirror” and the “Daily Sketch”, have been given extensive display to the trial on their inside pages.’50 It was as if a giant Catherine wheel of scandal had been lit and the sparks were flying around the world.

  The girls were taken to the Supreme Court early each day to avoid the prying eyes of sightseers crowded around the entrance to the public gallery on Armagh Street. The van backed up flush with the doorway so that the girls could be taken through the court and upstairs to the cells. On the first two days of the trial, bystanders and media gathered outside the courthouse caught glimpses of the pair on the first floor at the barred cell windows, watching photographers aiming camera lenses at them. This ended when court staff taped brown paper over the bottom half of the windows.

  Pauline, described by newspapers as ‘dark and sullen looking’, wore a brown dress and small brown hat for the duration of the trial, while Juliet, described as ‘taller, fair, with high cheek bones and a slant to her eyes’, was dressed in a green coat and pale green paisley scarf.51 With the exception of an occasional hour or two, each day of the trial the public gallery filled to capacity with over 100 people. The rear section was ‘packed mainly with fashionably dressed women who scrambled and jostled one another for seats the moment the doors were opened … the same faces were seen day after day’.52

  It was something of a public freak-show. When the girls entered or left the dock, spectators ‘stood and craned their necks for a better view’.53 Numerous times the court crier had to silence outbursts of laughter from the public gallery. While Juliet and Pauline were in the dock they sat on either side of a police matron. Occasionally they smiled and murmured to each other, sometimes they were visibly upset, but mostly they sat with their heads down; Pauline’s sometimes almost touched her knees.

  The trial began after the empanelling of an all-male jury. Although women were legally able to sit on juries, they were not automatically called for service and had to make a speci
al application to be included in a panel. In this case, too, the seriousness of the charge would have contributed to an all-male selection. Fourteen jurors were challenged — nine by the defence and five by the prosecution.

  The Crown case for the prosecution occupied most of the first two days. In an hour-long opening address, Alan Brown laid out their argument, the gist of which was that the girls had ‘conspired’ to entice Honorah to a secluded section of Victoria Park with the intention of murdering her. They carried with them the weapon they used to beat her to death. Their motive was to remove the one obstacle that was preventing Pauline from accompanying Juliet to South Africa. Brown claimed that the prosecution’s evidence would prove that this was a murder ‘coldly and callously planned, and perpetrated by two highly intelligent, perfectly sane, but precocious and dirty-minded little girls’.54 The Crown would call 17 witnesses.

  The police and medical witnesses described the location and what they found. The shocking account of the state of Honorah’s body, already given at the Magistrates’ Court hearing, was read out again. Dr Colin Pearson, the pathologist who had examined the body on the evening of the murder and conducted the postmortem the next day, told the court that Honorah had died of ‘shock associated with multiple injuries to the head and fractures of the skull’.55

  He then produced a comprehensive report which listed a total of 45 ‘discernible injuries’, which he detailed, explaining that ‘a single blow may produce a number of lacerated wounds’.56 On the face and scalp he had identified 24 such wounds. There were crushing injuries to the skull and bruising to the neck, which suggested that the head had been held immobile on the ground during the beating. Most of the wounds were serious, Pearson concluded, and it would have taken only a few to render the victim unconscious.