How Two Teens’ Obsessively Close Friendship Led To One Of New Zealand’s Most Infamous Murders

It’s June 1954 in Christchurch, New Zealand, and best friends Juliet Hulme and Pauline Parker face the unthinkable. The obsessively close pair have been threatened with permanent separation from each other — so they hatch a deadly plan to stay together. The teenagers target Parker's mother and commit a terrible crime... This shocking murder would haunt the girls for the rest of their lives — even after Hulme changed her identity and became the bestselling historical crime novelist Anne Perry. And the case is once again in the limelight after Perry's death.

Haunted by the past

Even after her wild success as a novelist, Anne Perry — the former Juliet Hulme — was never able to outrun her sensational true-crime past. "Why can't I be judged for who I am now, not what I was then?" she lamented to The Guardian in 2003. "I had to give up my past — the hardest thing imaginable — and begin life in my new identity as Anne Perry, knowing even a tiny slip could unravel everything."

Everything unraveled

The past she tried to escape from began when Hulme was born on October 28, 1938, in London, England. Her parents were Hilda and Dr. Henry Hulme — the latter was a physicist who would go on to help create the hydrogen bomb. Then, when Hulme was six, her parents had a son named Jonathan. After Jonathan’s birth, however, Hulme became seriously ill.

A fateful trip overseas

Apparently, the young girl began to suffer from both bronchitis and pneumonia. At one point, she became so ill that a medic was reportedly prepared to sign a death certificate for her. But at eight years old, Hulme was sent thousands of miles across the world to live in the Bahamas with people she didn’t know. Hulme’s parents, it seems, had hoped that hotter climates may be of benefit to their daughter’s health.

A deadly best friend

Just a few months after arriving in the Bahamas, though, she was sent away again — this time to the Bay of Islands, a subtropical area in New Zealand. Finally, when Hulme was 13 years old, her father found a job as a clergyman at Canterbury University College on the country’s South Island, and the teen was duly reunited with her family. Then Hulme met a girl named Pauline Parker.