In June, 1954, Rieper was killed by the girls while out for a walk together on a remote trail. Her mother, Honora Rieper, said no, and a plan to remove the obstacle was hatched.

When Hulme was to leave for South Africa, following her parents' split, Parker wanted to come along. In school, Juliet Hulme developed an intense friendship with Pauline Parker, and the girls became inseparable. You have to acknowledge that someone has moved on and changed and evolved and developed a useful contributing life apart from the thing they got horribly wrong.' 'It just seemed to me you can't leave someone in a prison of association forever. 'I felt compelled in a way to challenge the way that she was perceived,' said Drayton during an interview this week from Auckland, where she now lives. The story is recounted in The Search for Anne Perry, a new book by academic and literary biographer Joanne Drayton who spent many of her formative years in Christchurch, in the shadow of the infamous local case. 'I hope you're sitting down, because there's something we didn't know about Anne,' Meg Davis, Perry's Canadian-born literary agent, told her boss that day.

And those around her, who for the most part had been kept completely in the dark about Perry's past, were stunned. (Hulme was played by Kate Winslet.) Forty years later, Perry – living in the Scottish Highlands and a prolific author of Victorian crime fiction – was distraught to learn that her past had caught up with her.

Perry's identity came to light in the resurgence of interest in the killing surrounding the release of Peter Jackson's 1994 film Heavenly Creatures, which was based on the 1954 case. crime writer Anne Perry was revealed not quite a decade ago to be one and the same as Juliet Hulme, one of two teenage girls convicted in a sensational New Zealand murder case. In a plot twist worthy of one of her own murder mysteries, bestselling U.K.

The Gin Queens by Ann Perry