Teenage killer who swapped New Zealand for Orkney dies aged 88
Mother-murderer Pauline Parker — whose 1954 crime inspired Kate Winslet film — later ran Burray stable
A woman behind one of New Zealand’s most famous murders has died in Orkney, The Orcadian understands.
Pauline Parker was 16 when she and friend Juliet Hulme bludgeoned Parker’s mother to death in a Christchurch park.
Both Parker and Hulme, who was 15 at the time of the 1954 killing, served five years in jail before being released under new identities.
In 2011, a book penned by New Zealand crime author tracked Parker down to Orkney, where she was running a horse stable in Burray under the name Hilary Nathan.
Her co-conspirator, Hulme, was traced to Portmahomack in Easter Ross, where she was living under the name Anne Perry and was a prolific and best-selling crime writer.
She died in 2023, having suffered declining health from a heart attack.
The death of Parker, aged 88, was registered in Kirkwall this month under the name Hilary Nathan.
It is understood that she was living in retirement housing at Braeburn Court in St Margaret’s Hope at the time of her death.
The killing of Honora Reiper (née Parker) by her daughter and her childhood friend inspired the 1994 film Heavenly Creatures, starring Kate Winslet and directed by Peter Jackson.
A brick in a stocking was used during the attack at Victoria Park, Christchurch, on June 22, 1954.
Parker and Hulme had met at Christchurch Girls’ High School and are said to have become inseparable to such an extent that the former’s parents became concerned by their co-dependency.
A jury heard that the two girls had killed Pauline’s mother because she was a threat to their remaining together.
A psychiatrist also believed that they had felt it was their “moral right” to kill Honora due to shared “paranoia, delusions of grandeur and delusions of ecstasy”.
On August 28, 1954, they were found guilty of murder.
Because both killers were under 18, they could not be sentenced to death, despite there being a penalty for murder in New Zealand at the time.
Parker served five years at Paparua prison, near Christchurch, and Hulme was initially imprisoned at Mt Eden, Auckland, and then at Arohata in Tawa, near Wellington.
The pair were both given new identities upon their release, and each later moved to the UK, both ending up in the north of Scotland as a coincidence.
It is believed that the pair never spoke after the crime.