Notorious teenage killer who bludgeoned mother to death with friend and whose story inspired cult 90s Kate Winslet film Heavenly Creatures dies aged 88

A notorious teenage killer who bludgeoned her own mother to death with a friend has died at the age of 88.

Pauline Parker was just 16 when she and Juliet Hulme, 15, committed the murder in New Zealand in 1954 – a case that inspired a Kate Winslet film – and served just five years behind bars before being released under new identities.

Incredibly, the pair both landed in Scotland.

The Orcadian has now reported Parker, who went under the name Hilary Nathan, passed away while living in retirement housing in the village of St Margaret’s Hope, in Orkney.

Her death was registered in Kirkwall earlier this month.

Parker’s new life in the UK was exposed in a 2011 book which also said Hulme, under the name Anne Perry, had become a crime author and was living in Portmahomack, in Ross-shire. She died in 2023 after declining health following a heart attack.

The killing of Honora Reiper née Parker in Christchurch by her daughter and her childhood friend inspired the 1994 film Heavenly Creatures, starring Ms Winslet as Hulme and Melanie Lynskey as Parker. It was directed by Oscar-winning Peter Jackson.

Using a brick in a stocking they carried out the vicious attack at Victoria Park on June 22, more than seven decades ago.

The pair had met at Christchurch Girls’ High School and were said to have become so inseparable Parker’s parents became concerned by their co-dependency.

As the friendship turned to obsession, Hulme’s father said she would be send to South Africa to recover following a bout of tuberculosis.

Parker’s mother refused to allow the schoolgirl to leave the country with the teens becoming increasingly terrified of separation and hatched a plan to kill her.

A jury was told the coroner had recorded 45 separate head wounds in Ms Reiper and that the girls had killed her because she was a threat to their remaining together.

A psychiatrist also suggested they believed it to be their ‘moral right’ to kill her because of shared ’paranoia, delusions of grandeur and delusions of ecstasy’.

Just over two months after the killing, the teenagers were found guilty of murder but as they were both under the age of 18 they escaped the death penalty with Parker serving five years at Paparua prison near Christchurch and Hulme sent to Mt Eden, in Auckland, where she spent three months in solitary confinement, before a transfer to Arohata in Tawa, near the capital of Wellington.

On their release they were given new identities and later moved to Scotland. However, it is believed the pair never met after the murder.

Hulme became a successful crime author, writing about killings, justice and morality while Parker was initially a riding instructor in Kent. After her cover was blown, she moved north of the Border and ended up running a horse stable in Orkney.

Neither woman married or had children, but Hulme’s brother Jonathan told the Mail after her death: ‘My sister had deep regrets about what happened in her past and spent her life trying to make up for it.’

She once spoke herself of the toll of living a lie: ‘I had to give up my past - the hardest thing imaginable - and begin life in my new identity as Anne Perry, knowing even a tiny slip could unravel everything.’