Ray William Johnson: True Story Podcast - This Teen Murder Influenced The Lord of The Rings Movies

Episode Date: June 22, 2025

Anne Perry—born Juliet Hulme—became infamous in 1954 at just 15 when, alongside her close friend Pauline Parker, she brutally murdered Parker’s mother, Honorah, in Christchurch, New Zealand, bludgeoning her with a brick wrapped in a stocking as part of a plan to avoid being separated from her friend. Convicted in August of that year, the teens each served five years in prison. After her release, Hulme reinvented herself as Anne Perry, moving to the UK and becoming a bestselling author of historical crime fiction under her new identity. Her secret past remained hidden until the 1994 release of Peter Jackson’s film Heavenly Creatures

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Let me explain. Now it all starts with this girl. Her name's Juliet. And Juliet is 15 living in New Zealand. But one day, back in 1954, the worst happens to her. Her parents tell her that they're getting a divorce. Not only that, but that also means the family has to move. And so Juliet, she's...

starts to panic. Because this apparently means she would have to move to South Africa. She doesn't want to move there. I mean, moving there would mean she has to move away from her only friend in the world. This girl, Pauline. So when Pauline hears this news about the divorce and that Juliet might move, she starts panicking too. And so the two girls go and beg Juliet's parents to bring Pauline to South Africa with them. And surprisingly, this works. Juliet's parents agree to bring Pauline to South Africa as long as Pauline's mom agrees. And so Pauline goes to ask her mom permission. And we'll just call her Pauline's mom. And of course, Pauline's mom is like, absolutely not. And this devastates both Pauline and Juliet. I mean, they're best friends. They

can't be apart. Now what are they going to do? And so Pauline comes up with an insane plan to keep them together. They're going to murder Pauline's mom and make it look like an accident. I mean, if Pauline's mom is dead, then she can't keep Pauline from moving. And so one afternoon, they put this awful plan into motion. Juliet heads over to Pauline's for lunch. And there, she gives her a brick she found in her garage. And Pauline puts that brick in a stocking.

Sometime later, the two girls and Pauline's mom, they all end up at a local park called Victoria Park. This is the actual park. It's a photo of it. Once they're there, they're all three walking along one of the pads. And Juliet intentionally drops some sort of decorative stone on the ground. And she hopes that Pauline's mom sees it and goes to check it out. Well, wouldn't you know, this works. Pauline's mom sees the stone on the ground and she bends down to pick it up.

As soon as she's down there, suddenly, pow, Pauline hits her with the brick and the stocking. And Pauline's mom screams and she tries to fight back. But one of the girls' whole, holds her down while the other hits her again and again. Then they switch and take turns hitting her, and it is brutal. And after more than 20 hits, Pauline's mom is no longer moving, because she's not going to make it. So the two girls, they run to get help, and they run all the way to this little cafe that's in the area. And there, they're like, help, there's been an accident, and someone has fallen.

And someone at the cafe calls the police. And so pretty quickly, police get to the scene. And these guys aren't stupid. I mean, they can see right away that this wasn't an accident. And so, bam, they arrest both the girls. Here's Pauline's mugshot. And here's Juliet's mugshot. And ultimately, they both confessed to what they did.

And a month later, they go to trial, and they're both found guilty of murder. And they're sentenced to an indefinite length in prison, in separate prisons away from one another, and they're banned from ever speaking to each other ever again. And five years go by, and Juliet serves her time, and she gets out of prison, and she's around 20 years old now. And there's not much she can do now except try and start a new life. And so she changes her name. And Juliet moves around a bit, to England, to the United States, to Scotland, and she makes new friends, and she gets in new relationships, but she never tells anyone about her past that, you know, she murdered her friend's mom when she was 15 years old. She keeps

that a secret from everyone. And at some point, she gets really into writing, and she starts writing fiction stories. And it turns out, she's really good at this. And she does this for years. And in 1979, she's around 40 years old now. She publishes her first novel. It's a crime novel about some girls who got murdered. And this novel is a success. Like, it sells well enough. And so she publishes another one, and then another one, and then another one. And she becomes, an actual full-time novelist. And over the years, she publishes more than a hundred crime novels, and she becomes extremely successful at this, writing under the name Anne Perry. And she sells more than 26 million books worldwide. Here's actually a picture of her in real life. And as Juliet, aka Anne Perry, becomes very accomplished at writing murder mysteries, she still hasn't told anyone about.

her dark past, so no one knows that at one point she was in prison for committing murder herself. Until... Until this guy gets involved. His name's Peter Jackson. You know Peter Jackson, he directed the Lord of the Rings trilogy, the Hobbit movies, King Kong, a bunch of other stuff. So before he famously did all that, he had only done a few movies. And, you know, they're good, but they're sort of goofy. One is like a gory movie about zombies. The other involves a lot of puppies. The other involves a lot of puppets, but all that changes in the 90s, when Peter takes interest in a locally famous true crime story from the 50s, the murder of Pauline's mom. He wants to make a movie about that. And so he co-writes and directs a whole ass drama about the incident. It's called Heavenly

Creatures, and a young Kate Winslet actually plays the role of Juliet. And so that year in 1994, the movie comes out, and it does pretty well. I mean, people really really. like it. It even gets nominated for an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay, but you know, it loses to Pulp Fiction. Regardless, this proof to everyone that Peter Jackson could do a serious movie, not just movies about zombies or goofy puppets. And it's apparently then that people start looking at him as a legitimate director, and he eventually gets hired to direct the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Maybe that's a stretch, but, you know, that's what they say. But Peter directing Lord of the Rings is not the only thing Heavenly Creatures leads to. All this attention the movie gets reignites interest in this

decade's old murder case, and journalists see it, and they start thinking, hmm, I wonder where Juliet and Pauline are now. Like, whatever happened to them. And so they start investigating, and they find that back in 1959, Pauline, she was eventually released from prison, and she went on to live a normal life in England. However, Juliet, of course, did not go on to lead a normal life. She became this famous crime novelist, Anne Perry, who had managed to keep her past a complete secret from everyone for all these years. And so these journalists are like, oh shit, that's the same girl who committed murder in the 50s. And kaboom, they expose her and they blow up her spot. And I'm sure she is horrified. I mean, this was a secret she successfully kept for decades.

and now the whole world knows she was a teenage killer. This is going to destroy her career probably. Here's the thing, though, it's kind of a scandal for her, but it doesn't really destroy her career or even affected at all. From what I can see, she does like a few interviews about it. She basically explains that, you know, it happened in the past when she was a teenager and that she really doesn't remember much of it. And after that, she goes right back to writing her crime novels,

like it was no big deal. And she remained an extremely successful author until her death in 2023. In fact, at some point, you've probably seen some Anne Perry books at like an airport kiosk.