Anne Perry has just finished reading from her latest murder mystery, “Traitors Gate,” and has asked the crowd in the packed, second-floor room at Borders Books and Music if anyone has any questions.
There’s a silence, followed by a few innocuous queries. Then a woman standing along the side raises her hand and says she’s glad to see Perry in person because her daughter in Arizona was so sure Perry had to be a man.
Why? asks a bemused Perry. Because, the woman says, your murders are so gory that my daughter is sure only a man could write them.
An electric gasp goes through the room.
Could there be anyone who doesn’t know, by this time, that when mystery writer Perry, now 56, was a 15-year-old named Juliet Hulme living in New Zealand, she helped her best friend murder her friend’s mother? That they used a brick wrapped in a stocking to bash the mother’s head 45 times, and that they were found guilty after a trial that lasted only six days?
And that until last summer, no one had ever connected Perry, who took her stepfather’s name when she was released from prison, with the girl who had stood centerstage in one of the grisliest murders in New Zealand history some 40 years ago?
Perry calmly answers the question at hand, pointing out that all her fictional murder victims are “offstage” when they’re killed, and she writes no gore until after the fact.
Finally, a woman sitting in the fourth row asks how the public revelation of her past has affected Perry.
As if relieved, Perry launches into a vivid recounting of what the last few months have been like.
“The worst time of my life,” she says. “Devastatingly awful.”
Later, sitting over a late dinner after signing several hundred books, Perry repeats herself.
“It’s been devastating. I was terrified to come on this (book) tour. I very near packed it in just before I came. But I can’t run away. All I can do is go through this and hope to come out the other side.”
And a few minutes later: “I didn’t think anyone would care after 40 years. Why would anyone be interested in what two teenagers did 40 years ago?”
But script writer Fran Walsh had found the case fascinating since she was a child and happened to read an “anniversary” story about the murder. She teamed up with director Peter Jackson to create the movie “Heavenly Creatures,” based on the 1954 murder. The movie has won critical acclaim and is up for an Academy Award for best original screenplay.
`Very close to cracking up’
For Perry, the movie led to a phone call last August that instantly changed her life from the secluded existence of a mystery writer living up the road from her mother in a tiny Scottish village to that of a character whose past now prompted such screaming headlines as “Murder She Wrote! Best-selling British author’s grisly Kiwi past revealed!” in the Sunday News of London.
Jackson and Walsh didn’t reveal Perry’s identity. But a New Zealand journalist tracked her down and, last summer, called Perry’s London agent to ask if Anne Perry was indeed the infamous Juliet Marion Hulme.
“She (the agent) called me, she said she needed to refute this story, this question she had gotten. I had to say, `I’m sorry but you can’t, it is true.’
“The next few days . . . I would have liked to have died, to have gone to sleep and just not wake up. I think I came very close to cracking. I would walk into town and wonder what I was doing there.”
Her immediate concern, she says, was her mother, who is 83 and has a bad heart.
As it turned out, her mother took it fine. “She wasn’t surprised, she said she had always thought it would come out at some time, and that now we must deal with it. And that we must tell the village before (the journalists) came.”
The dark secret that was so abruptly revealed after 40 years had its roots in the deep friendship formed between the 15-year-old Hulme (Perry) and Pauline Parker, 16.
Born in London, Perry was a sickly child. She had pnuemonia and then bronchitis. In 1953, after her family moved to New Zealand, she had to spend three months in a sanitarium for her lung problems. Pauline, a schoolmate, wrote to her faithfully. After she came home the two girls became inseparable, enclosing themselves in a vivid fantasy life, play-acting and writing stories about an imaginary world.
Then, in summer 1954, Perry’s life fell apart. Her father lost his job as administrator of Christchurch University and her mother left the country with another man who she would later marry. Perry and her 10-year-old brother were scheduled to leave for England.
Pauline wanted to go with her friend, but her mother refused. So the girls decided to kill her.
“My father lost his job, my mother was leaving and Pauline was ill,” Perry says. “I’m not going to put a name to it, I just knew she threw up after every meal. She lost weight dramatically, you could see her bones. I thought she was dying.
“And I was on a medication that affects your judgement. I can’t remember the name. But it was something you’re only supposed to take for three months, and I took it for nine months. I learned years later that it had been taken off the market.
“None of that makes it right. I suppose it accounts for the stupidity of it.”
Quite simply, she says, she believed Pauline’s life was hanging in the balance. They had to kill Honora Mary Parker, Pauline’s mother. She doesn’t remember the actual event.
“I don’t remember it. I don’t want to remember it, either. I mean, why would anyone want to remember something like that. I suppose I was in a pretty good daze.”
Pauline kept a diary that was used extensively in the trial and now, in the movie.
She wrote of the plans to “moider” her mother, and said “we have worked it out carefully and are both thrilled by the idea.”
And later: “I feel very keyed up as though I were planning a surprise party. Next time I write in this diary, Mother will be dead.”
`Devastatingly sorry’
The assumption at the trial was that the girls’ relationship was lesbian, with the prosecution describing them as “dirty-minded little girls.” They were sentenced to indefinite terms and sent to separate prisons. They each served 5 1/2 years and have never seen each other since, Perry says.
In prison and off the medication, she says, she faced the realization that she had done a terrible thing.
“I got out of bed and down on my knees, and acknowledged that, yes, I had done this, and it was wrong. And I was totally and profoundly devastatingly sorry.
“I had three months of solitary confinement. Then they put me on hard labor, scrubbing in the laundry, canvas sheets. I reckoned I deserved it. We lived on brown bread, porridge and hash.”
No one came to see her while she was in prison.
Her family, she says, “left straightaway. The best thing they could do was go away and make a life so when I came out, there would be somewhere for me to go.”
And now, decades later, Perry is talking about all this-over and over and over.
She has written 18 books, all mysteries set in the Victorian era, and reportedly has a $1 million contract with Ballantine Books for eight books in the next three years.
This is her fifth U.S. book tour in the last six years, but before the questions were all about her writing, the research she does for her mysteries and her fictional sleuths. Now she’s confronting her past.
No, she says, the murders she writes aren’t related to the one in her own life-it just happened that the first thing she was able to publish was a murder mystery. But yes, one of the characters she writes about, Detective Monk, suffers from amnesia and she herself has these blank spots in her life. And yes, the descriptions of prison life in one of her books, “The Sins of the Wolf,” are close to her experience.
She answers each question in great detail. She’s on a schedule that has her up at 4:30 or 5 a.m. almost every day and still going late in the evening. On this night in Chicago, her face grows steadily whiter with fatigue as the words rush out of her, but she makes no effort to end the session.
“I’m just trying to get through this with as much dignity and grace as possible,” she says. “I do think it’s getting easier as the days go on. I have been met with a great deal of kindness.”
She has just gotten a seven-page letter from a young girl asking for advice. The girl thinks she’s a lesbian, and doesn’t know what do to. Perry doesn’t know how to respond. It brings up one of the aspects of the trial that she remembers bitterly and resents.
“I’m not a lesbian. It wasn’t a lesbian relationship with Pauline. I’m not bisexual either. Strictly men. This may be a silly remark to make, but I don’t know much about lesbians. Nor do I want to.”
Move to California
Perry’s faith has been her touchstone, especially in the last few months. She became a Mormon in the late 1960s, when she was living in California.
“I don’t know how I would have survived without my faith,” she says. “If faith means anything, it must be there when the going is tough.”
She moved to California when she was 27, after living in England with her mother and stepfather (now dead) for the first six years after getting out of prison. She had taken her stepfather’s name of Perry and says Anne “was just a garden variety name.”
She worked at various jobs: limousine dispatcher, insurance underwriter, medical secretary. She kept trying to write and kept getting rejection slips. Finally she moved back to England, figuring she could live on less money and spend more time writing.
She was 38 when her first book was accepted. Some 3.2 million of her books have now sold, and “Traitors Gate” has been on the Chicago Tribune’s best-seller list.
It’s only been within the last few years that Perry’s reputation as a mystery writer started taking off, and the money started coming in.
“Up until six or seven years ago, I didn’t make enough to pay any income tax,” she says. “They say money doesn’t make you happy. Well, it makes me feel good; it’s how you spend it that makes you happy. You know a person who’s having a tough time, you can just quietly give them something and say, `Don’t worry about it.’ “
She bought a dark green used Jaguar a couple of years ago, “and it does feel nice to drive. . . . I’ve spent years driving bangers around. And then I bought a second one, yes, another Jag, 16 years old, for 1,400 pounds, that’s less than $2,000 your money. That’s there for us all to drive, my neighbor, my secretary, whoever needs it.
“And I can buy pretty things for myself as well. This sweater, it’s cashmere and I’ve never had a cashmere sweater before. I bought it in Minneapolis, it was $170. I thought, why not? It’s very lovely to be able to walk in and say, `I’ll have that one and that one,’ and not have to always say, `How much?’ “
Now it’s, “How long?”-How long before life returns to normal? And will it?
“No, it won’t be the same,” Perry says. “I’ve learned a lot about myself, I’ve been forced to reassess everything. But the things you’re most afraid of in life, if you turn your back to them, they’ll swamp you. If you face them, you’ll find perhaps they’re not quite as bad as you’ve feared.
“It’s becoming easier as the days go on.”
