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Hollywood beckons Parker-Hulme killer Internationally acclaimed crime writer Anne Perry was once known as Juliet Hulme, one half of Christchurch’s most infamous murder duo. She is now off to Hollywood SPACIOUS: Anne Perry’s house has been converted from the remains of an old barn. Italian chandeliers hang from the ceiling.
SHE’S BEST known in Christchurch for one of the city’s most infamous murders – the Parker-Hulme case – the teenager who killed her best friend’s mother and sparked the story for Peter Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures. But in Britain, Anne Perry, who she changed her name to, is a multi-million selling crime novelist. Now, she’s left her Scottish Highland idyll and has moved to Hollywood in her quest to have more of her novels adapted for television, Britain’s Daily Mail has reported. Perry, who has been dubbed the “queen of Victorian crime” and has sold more than 25 million books worldwide. “I’ll miss the views and I’ll miss my gardens,” said the 78-year-old, as she reminisces about Tyrn Vawr, her four-bedroom property on the outskirts of the peaceful Easter Ross fishing village of Portmahomack in the Scottish Highlands. “Fortunately, it’s all in my mind and in photographs, so I can go back any time I want.” Perry moved into Tyrn Vawr a quarter of a century ago and has written most of her books there. But in Christchurch she is remembered for the shocking murder of friend Pauline Parker’s mother, Honora Parker, in 1954. With Pauline, her school friend at Christchurch Girls High School, Honora was lured
INFAMOUS: Anne Perry, formerly Juliet Hulme (right), is selling her Scottish Highlands home.
to the Port Hills near Victoria park, where they bashed her over the head with a brick in a stocking. Both girls were jailed for five years. They were considered too young for the death penalty. Hulme disappeared from New Zealand after her release. In 1994, Peter Jackson turned the story into the film Heavenly Creatures and Kate Winslet played Hulme’s character. Perry has said of her part in the killing that she “made a profoundly wrong decision”. Having been told that she
would be going to live in South Africa, and with Parker’s mother standing in the way of the two teenagers both moving there, she feared Parker would take her own life “and it would be my fault”. Perry told The Daily Mail: “I was guilty and it was the right place for me to be,” she said of the jail sentence. Upon release, Perry took various jobs and for a time lived in the United States, before settling in Portmahomack. She published her first book under the name Anne Perry in 1979.
It was The Cater Street Hangman, the first in her Inspector Pitt series, which two decades later was turned into an ITV television movie starring Keeley Hawes. Perry, who has written more than 50 novels and who published the 32nd Inspector Pitt story last year, has done most of her work while living at the Scottish home, which she is particularly attached to because she built it herself – practically from scratch. It is now on sale for offers over £440,000 (NZ$790,000). Originally, she explains, “it
was a wreck next door to the house I was living in. I heard they had got planning permission to make it into a shop that would mend motor-cycles and lawnmowers and I thought: ‘Not next to me you don’t’. “So I bought it in self-defence and then I looked at the ruins and thought it would make a marvellous house.” In the course of her writing career in Scotland, Perry spent most of her time at work in her special study, which has windows on three sides. The contemporary look of the property belies the fact that it has been converted from the remains of an old barn. Built in the shape of an H, the property has a spacious kitchen, library and sun room, and a conservatory that looks out on to a courtyard with a pond and water feature. Upstairs, there are views of the Scottish Highlands. “You can see five counties,” Perry explains: “Caithness, Sutherland, Ross, Invernessshire, and Moray.” The dining room is capable of seating 20 people and a pair of Italian chandeliers hang from the ceiling in the grand hall. A keen lover of wildlife, Perry has sought to protect the beautiful surroundings she has enjoyed for future generations by buying up a neighbouring 7ha field and creating a trust to ensure it isn’t built on.
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