Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-25086632-20151123071037/@comment-70.27.71.181-20151124024724

Master Moridin, there's a very famous N.Z. murder case in which a teenager and her best friend (not too sure if there was a sexual element in it; possible, maybe even probable) killed the teenager's mother. The thing is, it's almost cruel to the daughter and not cruel enough to the friend. It's the Parker-Hulme murder case; Peter Jackson made the movie 'Heavenly Creatures' from it. It happened in 1954, when Pauline Parker was 16 and Juliet Hulme was 15. Both had had bad bouts of ill health and were drawn together by it; they also had fantastic imaginations beyond all telling. They created in their minds a kingdom where one was the queen and the other a gypsy (the friend was upper upper class, the daughter lower class), and the storyline went on and on and on, as they worked their favorite and unfavorite actors and singers of the day into the mix. The daughter spent five years in jail and went into solitude immediately thereafter. The friend served five years in jail and went on to become the writer Anne Perry, with forty years of living under her alias and making money from her popular murder books. It's there, and a book about the crime was published in the past five years, I think, or a little further back, if you have any interest in it. I find the way the two women's lives turned out, so differently from each other, distasteful. Ms. Hulme became a Mormon in 1968. Ms. Parker became a Roman Catholic almost immediately, I believe, though I'm not sure exactly when. The case is there, and it may not be all that well known. If I hadn't been impressed by Peter Jackson's movies, I'd never have found 'Heavenly Creatures' and then I recalled reading about the case. Otherwise, I'd never have remembered it as anything but a vague curio in the back of my mind.