She was my first murderer. I’ve interviewed people who survived all manner of terrorists and lunatics: a woman who was the last person to be rescued from the rubble of the World Trade Centre; a woman severely injured in the 2005 London underground bombings. People, miracles each one, who, like my father, survived the Holocaust.
Anne Perry was my first murderer. As far as I know. She has died, age 84, in Los Angeles. We spoke in 2012, on the release of a book, The Search for Anne Perry, by New Zealand biographer Joanne Drayton. By then a successful writer of — you couldn’t make it up — murder mysteries, Perry had been outed in 1994 amid hype around Peter Jackson’s film, Heavenly Creatures, as Juliet Hulme, the “gym tunic murderess”. In 1954, 15-year-old Perry and her friend Pauline Parker murdered Parker’s mother. Honorah Rieper was battered to death with a brick in a stocking after tea at a kiosk in Christchurch’s Victoria Park. Heavenly Creatures went to town on the girls’ obsessive friendship, their fantasy world, their deluded dreams of fame and fortune. When Hulme’s parents separated and the girls were to be parted they hatched a plan.
Getting to speak to Perry involved endless careful requests, samples of work, proposed questions. I wrote in the Listener, “It feels like a small, unnerving glimpse into what it must be like to be Anne Perry: her words constantly scrutinised for subtext, her demeanour judged.”
Once on the phone from her remote village in Scotland, Perry talked about everything from her outing — “I would rather have kept my privacy, I think” — to string theory to the effects of five years in Mt Eden prison. “If you look at my life and situation now… You’ve probably seen photographs of me?” she said brightly. “I would say it hasn’t done me any harm.”