Pauline Parker, one of New Zealand's most notorious teen killers, has died in a nursing home in Orkney, Scotland. She was 88.
Parker was 16 when she and her friend Juliet Hulme beat Parker's mother to death in a park in Christchurch in 1954. She was convicted and spent five years in women's prisons before being released under a new identity.
Life in Orkney under a new identity
A 2011 book by New Zealand crime author Peter Graham tracked Parker down to Orkney, where she was running a horse stable in Burray under the name Hilary Nathan. This month she died in a retirement home in Kirkwall.
Graham told New Zealand broadcaster RNZ that Parker was known as Pauline Rieper when she met her accomplice at school. He said: "Her father Bert Rieper was the manager of a fish shop in Colombo Street, and her mother worked as a secretary, and the family home which was a dilapidated house... run as a boarding house."
The murder and its aftermath
Parker had been hospitalised as a child with osteomyelitis, a serious bone infection, and was "something of a misfit" at school. Graham, after speaking with former classmates, believed the killers formed their bond because Hulme, who also suffered from poor health, and Parker were both allowed to sit out sport together, sharing a love of fictional stories.
A brick in a stocking was used during the killing of Parker's mother, Honora Rieper, by her daughter. The pair were found guilty of murder, but because both were under 18 they avoided the death penalty, which was still used in New Zealand at the time. They served their sentences at separate prisons and are not thought to have spoken since their conviction.
The case inspired the 1994 film Heavenly Creatures, starring Kate Winslet. Hulme was later traced to Portmahomack in Easter Ross, where she lived under the name Anne Perry and became a best-selling crime writer. She died in 2023 after failing to recover from a heart attack.
