The Search for Anne Perry

by Joanne Drayton

  Although Juliet and Pauline were older than either of these sets of children, the similarities are clear, and in the Parker–Hulme case there was the added teenage component. The arrogant rebelliousness so common in adolescence explains some of the girls’ conceited, surly behaviour, and self-righteous consternation when things were read out in court as facts that they felt were misconstrued or wrong. Juliet had no voice in court. She was frustrated and angry with her lawyer for not allowing her to rebut what she felt were gross distortions, especially in the prosecution’s depiction of her and Pauline as ‘dirty-minded little girls’.

  As Anne would say much later, ‘There was never, ever a sexual element to our friendship … It was the ’fifties, for goodness sake. I was naïve about such things. We were certainly not lovers.’48 Both Juliet and Pauline were visibly disturbed by this accusation, and by the interpretation of Pauline’s diary where she wrote of going to see George at 2am. ‘They thought this was a person … In court, I wanted to scream, [it’s] the toilet, you fool.’49 They felt misunderstood and misrepresented, and were visibly annoyed; and, to add yet another layer of complexity to any interpretation of the girls’ behaviour in court, because the defence case was that they were insane, this had to have had an impact on how they behaved and how they were perceived.

  Mary Bell has spoken about the unreality of the murder and the trial. ‘A lot of the time, anyway, I thought all of it had nothing to do with me, [it was] as if I wasn’t there, you know, or there but standing outside looking in.’50 Juliet and Pauline talked of the same sense of ‘unreality’ and disembodiment, and they had equally ill-formed — and, as it turned out, problematic — ideas about killing, death and consequence. They thought the killing would be immediate, just a single blow to Honorah’s head. For them, death was not final, but rather an abstraction uninformed by any personal experience. Their notion of consequence was also vague. They both had an idea that being caught might mean going to jail, but neither knew what that really entailed. In spite of their intelligence, they displayed an astonishing degree of naïveté in these three crucial areas.

  Surviving the crucible event together was paramount, and they believed Honorah Parker was the obstacle to achieving that. According to the research of developmental psychologist Laurence Steinberg, ‘teens take more risks not because they don’t understand the dangers but because they weigh risk versus reward differently … In situations where risk can get them something they want, they value the reward more heavily than adults do.’51 Juliet and Pauline knew they might be held accountable, but the reward of their companionship and future together seemed greater than the risk. Pauline was desperate to be overseas with Juliet, and Juliet felt a consuming obligation to, and investment in, their relationship. It was the first real, intense friendship either of them had had — and at that point in their life, it was everything.

  If Juliet and Pauline broke one of society’s greatest taboos by committing matricide, Hilda broke another, by abandoning her daughter. All through the trial she had been the scapegoat parent for scandalized condemnation. While New Zealand formed a special committee to establish ‘a long-term project for the investigation of juvenile delinquency in all its aspects’, Hilda was vilified in the media as the mother from Hell.52 She was a perfect target for public fear and vitriol. In the post-war years, a new animal known as ‘the teenager’ was emerging, along with a social phenomenon referred to as ‘the generation gap’ — which would soon prove to be less of a gap than a chasm. The morally loose, fickle mother of a ‘murderess’ must in some way be complicit in this frightening development. The media made sure their readers saw the link. ‘Left Without Goodbye Visit to Her Daughter,’ read the headline for the NZ Truth as she left the country.53

  Directly beside an NZ Truth article published on 23 September 1954, and tucked under the headline ‘Misconduct Among Children and Adolescents’ was a photograph of Hilda and Bill Perry fleeing New Zealand. The caption read: ‘JULIET HULME’S MOTHER IN SYDNEY: Mrs. Hilda Marion Perry, formerly Hulme, mother of one of the Christchurch teenage murderesses on arrival in Sydney, accompanied by a witness in the trial, Walter Andrew Bowman Perry. Both appeared shocked by the crowd of photographers.’ The article on misconduct, in the adjoining two columns, opened: ‘URGENT legislative action to impose control over the importation and sale of morally harmful literature is expected to be taken as a result of recommendations made in the report of the special committee which had been investigating misconduct among children and adolescents.’

  There was a growing sense of confusion and panic about the ‘baby boomer’ generation and its immediate predecessors, whose ideas about themselves and the world were being shaped by a rising wave of global popular culture in the form of books, pamphlets, magazines, comics, records, radio, film, theatre, travel — and the beginnings of television. Authorities on both sides of the Tasman were left gaping. In Australia, Liberal MP KM McCaw urged the legislative assembly of New South Wales to form an expert committee and make their own enquiries into juvenile delinquency:

  Current revelations of widespread juvenile delinquency in New Zealand, following similar experiences in South Australia, must give every parent cause for serious thought. Is this delinquency something new? Is it the particular product of our modern way of life, can it be arrested and how extensive is it?54

  In preparation for leaving New Zealand, Hilda Hulme changed her surname by deed-poll to Perry. She was under no obligation to publish the fact or to inform anyone, but a journalist made the point that this was usually done. ‘In a statement to the “Truth” during this weekend, Mrs Hulme did not disclose this change, but confirmed the fact that she proposes leaving New Zealand in a few days’ time.’55

  She and Bill left New Zealand two weeks after the trial, flying first from Christchurch to Sydney. Even close friends and associates were unaware of the details of their plans, and only four people went to the airport to see them off: defence lawyers Terence Gresson and Brian McClelland and ‘two intimate friends, a man associated with the legal profession in Christchurch and his wife’.56

  The press was unsure how the couple would travel from Australia to the United Kingdom. It was noted that their suitcases were labelled ‘Melbourne’ and it was believed they were planning to travel by sea, but when passengers on the Christchurch to Sydney flight were quizzed, they said they had been told the Perrys were flying to London via Singapore. The subterfuge seemed to have worked.

  But the photograph taken in Sydney clearly shows the stress on their faces, which are grim and drawn — especially Hilda’s. Although there is an aspect of glamour in the orchid pinned to her shoulder, the heavy grey winter coat is clearly meant for travel to an approaching English winter.

  Speaking on behalf of his de facto partner, Bill Perry said, ‘We firmly believe that Juliet is mad. We’ve evidence of two psychiatrists to say so. Mrs Perry is sorry to leave Juliet but she believes that her son has now greater need of her.’57 It seemed too clipped and perfunctory to feel sincere, but by this stage there was almost nothing they could say or do that would shed a positive light on their actions.

  When Hilda did plead for clemency on the basis ‘that it was not right to send her 16-year-old daughter, Juliet Hulme to gaol for murder “because what she most needed was love, care, attention and affection”,’ the media undermined her.58

  Mrs Perry’s published concern for her daughter’s welfare is difficult to reconcile with the fact that she went to see the girl only occasionally after her arrest and then only, it is understood, after a message had been passed that her daughter wanted to see her … It is a little incongruous, to say the least, that Mrs Perry having left New Zealand under the circumstances she did should express her concern for her daughter’s welfare, her objections to the alleged inhumanity of her sentence and her own intentions of ‘going on a trip in search of rest and peace’.59

  Henry Hulme saw his daughter immediately before he left New Zealand in July, readers were reminded.
Little mention was made of the fact that he had been absent from proceedings since the beginning of July.

  Even so, it is hard to reconcile Hilda’s actions with any concept of unconditional affection. Her visits to see Juliet were intermittent, and she absented herself from further care for her daughter in New Zealand as quickly as she could. Not to consider her actions in context, however, skews the picture. Hilda was a social pariah, as was Bill Perry. If they ever wanted to construct a life together, they had to leave. New Zealand was not her home; she was an expatriate far from her extended family and her son. Her parental obligations were split, and it was probably her own sense of self-preservation that tipped the scales.

  Juliet was abandoned by both her parents at the beginning of the most ‘horrific’ experience of her life. On Friday, 3 September 1954, she was flown by an Air Force plane to Whenuapai airbase, where she was met by Superintendent Horace Hayward and escorted to Mt Eden. It had been a ‘chilling moment’ standing in the dock listening as court officials clustered around Judge Adams to discuss the sentence, but this was worse. The building was intended to be terrifying. Modelled on the Victorian Dartmoor and Pentridge prisons, it was constructed by prison labour over a period of 35 years, beginning in the latter part of the nineteenth century.

  With massive grey stone walls, ugly Colonial Gothic castellations, and menacing watch-towers, it was the perfect expression of a prison designed to punish. Changing views on the incarceration of prisoners meant that some were calling for the prison’s closure even before its completion in 1917. Conditions worsened over the years — suppurating walls, a leaking roof, poor ventilation, high humidity and overcrowding. In summer, the prison was like an oven; in winter, the mildew-laden dampness and cold seeped into the bones. Outrage about the state of what the media called a ‘brutal Victorian fortress’ forced the government, in 1951, to agree to the prison’s demolition. This was indefinitely postponed the year before Juliet’s imprisonment because of a lack of funds.

  The stale smell of cooking, disinfectant and carbolic soap, mixed with body and food waste, came in sickening waves as steel door after steel door banged shut and were bolted behind her. Juliet was formally accepted into the prison, given a shower and handed her prison clothes, which consisted of a coarse pair of denim jeans, a woollen cardigan, plain prison underclothing, and a ‘print frock to wear out of working hours’. Prison officials explained that she would be kept in solitary confinement for the first three months: this was referred to as her ‘settling-in’ period. During that time she would only be able to see approved visitors for half an hour a week, and immediately her workday ended she was shut in her cell until lights-out. The ‘special visitors’ included Dora Sagar, an official prison visitor, and Felicity Maidment and her husband Professor Kenneth Maidment, who were Auckland friends of the Hulmes.

  Juliet’s stone cell was ‘eight feet long by six feet wide [2.4 by 1.8 metres], with walls 14 feet [4.2 metres] high’.60 At the top of one wall was a tiny barred window ‘out of eye range’. In The Ballad of Reading Gaol, Oscar Wilde wrote ‘that little tent of blue/Which prisoners call the sky’. Juliet could not even see that. Against one wall was a narrow wooden cot, with a straw mattress, six blankets and a pillow. There was a stool and a small cabinet in which to stow a few personal possessions. There was no heating or air-conditioning, and no running water or proper toilet facilities. The concrete floor was partly covered by a small mat.

  While in solitary confinement she rose at 5.45am, ‘slopped out’ the pan she used as a toilet, then washed in cold water, ate her breakfast of porridge and went to work. ‘It was cold, there were rats, canvas sheets and calico underwear. I had to wash out my sanitary towels by hand.’61 (When she worked in the laundry she had to wash out other women’s sanitary towels.) Her working day ran from 8am to a little after 4pm and, according to Felicity Maidment, consisted of ‘scrubbing & polishing black corridor floors. Two or three times a week she spends in the sewing room’ and she also worked in the prison laundry.62 Both Juliet and Pauline sewed, making clothes for the prison and mental hospital services, and worked in the laundry. This was part of an initiative in the 1950s to make hard labour productive, and to impart skills and training that would be useful for prisoners when they were released.

  ‘There are no labour saving appliances in prison laundries other than hand-turned mangles’ boasted an article in NZ Truth.63 Juliet carried huge, heavy bundles of wet canvas sheets, and propelled the industrial-sized mangles until she collapsed. She was off her medication for tuberculosis, which was determined after medical tests to be inactive, but she was still unwell. The stress, the work, the damp conditions and the remnants of the disease proved too much. After a spell in the prison infirmary, suffering from exhaustion, a heavy chill and respiratory problems, Juliet was shifted to a lighter work regime, mostly in the sewing room, making uniforms under the supervision of Grace Powell. Juliet had few visitors, few letters, and no contact with prisoners other than during work hours, and even this was kept to a minimum.

  She was ill, isolated and in despair. ‘I remember I used to lie on my bed and feel physically sick every night from the smell and the nervous tension. If I fell asleep, I’d have nightmares about what had happened. I felt so alone.’ To stay sane, she used to imagine things and recite poetry; sometimes when desperate to go to sleep she would count ‘one, two, three, four … one, two, three, four — over and over again — just to shut things out’.64 One night, after months in prison, she had a moment of revelation, an epiphany of sorts, when she fully accepted and understood what she had done. ‘Don’t run away, I told myself. I faced what I had done. I knew it was wrong. There was no evasion. I had done a terrible, vile thing.’65 She got out of bed, knelt down and prayed: ‘I just begged for forgiveness. I said sorry again and again — I really meant it. It was a monumental moment [that] I knew was right.’66

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  I

  Although the reviews of The One Thing More were not as enthusiastic as Anne might have hoped for, she was delighted by the response to her 2001 Pitt, The Whitechapel Conspiracy. She was writing with greater fluidity than ever before, and the territory was familiar. Don Maass’s espionage path for the Pitts was also paying off. ‘It’s a beauty,’ said the New York Times, ‘brilliantly presented, ingeniously developed and packed with political implications that reverberate on every level of British society … Pitt delivers Perry’s most harrowing insights into the secret lives of the elegant Victorians who have long enchanted and repelled her.’ Publishers Weekly was also impressed, giving the book a starred review: ‘Edgar-Award winner Anne Perry pulls out the stops and delivers one of the finest performances of her career … This is a mesmerizing and suspenseful tale, rich in period detail, rife with articulate and believable characters.’1

  The Whitechapel Conspiracy opens in a crowded courtroom at the Old Bailey with Superintendent Pitt in the dock being cross-examined by Ardal Juster for the prosecution. It is Pitt’s evidence in the witness stand that results in John Adinett, a decorated soldier, being sent to the gallows for killing his friend. When Pitt is inexplicably redeployed in Whitechapel to investigate anarchist groups, the connection between Adinett’s trial and secret terrorist plots soon becomes horrifyingly clear. Although the Pitt series was never intended to plumb Anne’s psyche and experiences in the way the Monk novels do, his role does evolve. ‘Pitt speaks for me a lot, especially in the later books.’ Pitt is fairly straightforward — but he joins special branch and has to face ethical dilemmas. ‘One is always thinking and you put it into your characters — these are the thoughts that have passed through my mind.’2

  In The Whitechapel Conspiracy Anne not only presents Pitt with a pivotal dilemma, she also gives him the dangerous task of challenging the establishment. Institutional corruption occurs because people are too afraid to interrogate the status quo: ‘It frightens people to question things.’3 She places her detectives in ambiguous situations that test their core principle
s of courage, nobility and honour, and adds vulnerability and doubt to give them depth. ‘Doubt is crippling, but without it, we have no intelligence. You need it in order to get rid of it. You have to test things against doubt.’4

  At some point, all Anne’s major characters are pitted against the powers that be. This external conflict is mirrored by an internal struggle.

  [Take] your series main characters and [stand] them at the edge of the abyss, face to face with the ultimate power of evil, the Devil, if you like. Ask them what they really believe. If they tell the truth, then they are free. But if they lie, then they are over the edge into the darkness … So this had better be the truth! What is precious? What matters more than anything else? What is beautiful, everlasting, worth living or dying for?5

  Her characters do not always live up to this test of self-discovery, because people do not know how they will act until they are challenged. ‘We none of us know ourselves. We don’t really know other people. It’s a big learning curve and it’s something really interesting to write about.’6

  The Whitechapel Conspiracy is marked by the rich, complex and involved style of writing she admires in such contemporary detective fiction doyens as Michael Connelly, Jeffery Deaver and Robert Crais. Her author models are ‘mostly American men’ who ‘show unexpected compassion for their characters — true gentleness is a great strength’.7