Anne Perry and the Murder of the Century

Anne Perry and the Murder of the Century by Peter Graham, 325 pages

On a sunny winter day in 1954, Honorah Rieper went for a walk in a park in her hometown of Christchurch, New Zealand, with her teenage daughter, Pauline, and her daughter's close friend, Juliet Hulme.  A short distance down the path, the two girls began taking turns bludgeoning the older woman with a brick wrapped in a stocking.  When the stocking broke, they used the bare brick to finish her off.  They then ran up the path and sought help, claiming Honorah had fallen and struck her head on a stone.  Even the first person to reach the body knew this was a lie, but the truth took longer to ascertain, and may never be fully known.  What could possibly have motivated two girls, particularly intelligent girls of seemingly good families and decent upbringing, to have committed such a bloody and unnatural crime?

The question remains open to this day.  The simple answer is that Juliet was being sent by her family to South Africa, and the Hulmes had allowed the girls to believe that the only obstacle to Pauline joining her was her mother's permission, which she refused to give (as the Hulmes knew she would).  The girls therefore decided to remove this obstacle to their happiness.  How the girls were able to coldly plot matricide, and why they believed that they would get away with it, is the complicated part, involving matters of sin and madness.  Anne Perry and the Murder of the Century is Peter Graham's attempt to unravel some of the threads of the case, following its consequences even fifty years later, including the Peter Jackson film Heavenly Creatures and the career of Juliet Hulme as a world famous mystery novelist.  Graham does a remarkably solid job, drawing upon a wide array of sources while generally refraining from unwarranted speculation and avoiding sympathizing too much with his subjects.