Pauline Parker, who at 16 was convicted with her friend Juliet Hulme of murdering her mother in Christchurch in 1954, has died in Scotland at the age of 88. Her death was registered in Kirkwall, Orkney, this month under the name Hilary Nathan, The Orcadian reported. At the time of her death she was living in retirement housing in St Margaret’s Hope.
The 1954 killing
On June 22, 1954, Parker and Hulme, then 15, attacked Parker’s mother, Honorah Parker, 46, on a secluded path in Victoria Park on Christchurch’s Port Hills, beating her to death with a brick inside a stocking. The two girls had formed an intense friendship and an elaborate shared fantasy world, and feared being separated.
At their trial, a jury rejected their plea of insanity and found them guilty of murder. Too young for the death penalty, they were detained “at Her Majesty’s pleasure” and served about five years. The case made headlines around the world and in 1994 became the subject of Peter Jackson’s film Heavenly Creatures, starring Melanie Lynskey as Parker and Kate Winslet as Hulme.
A new name and a quiet life
Parker was released in 1959 under the name Hilary Nathan and later moved to England. By the 1990s she was living in the village of Hoo in Kent, running a children’s riding school, and had become a devout Roman Catholic. She never spoke to the press, but in 1996 her sister released a statement saying she deeply regretted the crime and had “spent 40 years repaying it by keeping away from people.” She later moved to Orkney, where she ran a riding stable on the island of Burray.
Juliet Hulme took the name Anne Perry and became a best-selling crime novelist; her identity was revealed in 1994. She died in April 2023.