Pauline Parker

Pauline Parker died in October 2026 at the age of 88. The Orcadian reported on 23 October 2026 that her death had been registered in Kirkwall under the name Hilary Nathan and that she had been living in retirement housing at Braeburn Court in St Margaret's Hope, Orkney. 1News, Stuff and the NZ Herald reported her death on 24 October 2026. The exact date and cause of death have not been made public, and no funeral or memorial arrangements have been announced.

Pauline Yvonne Parker was born on 26 May 1938 in Christchurch, New Zealand, the third of four children of Herbert Detlev Rieper (1894 to 1981), who came from Tasmania and had German roots, and Honorah Mary Parker (1909 to 1954), who had emigrated from England with her mother in 1927. An older brother died shortly after birth in 1936. Her sister Wendy was born in 1937, and the two were so close as children that they were often mistaken for twins. A younger sister, Rosemary, was born in 1949 with Down syndrome and grew up in a care home.

Her parents worked as household and garden staff and were not married. Herbert Rieper had married another woman in 1915 and never divorced, a fact revealed only at the 1954 trial. Until then Pauline was known as Pauline Rieper. As a child she suffered from osteomyelitis, and she loved horses, owning one as a child.

Parker attended Christchurch Girls' High School, where she met Juliet Hulme in the early 1950s. After her release from detention in 1959 she studied at the University of Auckland and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in 1964. She then spent a year at the New Zealand Library School in Wellington, where classmates later recalled her as private and secretive. In England she later retrained as a teacher.

Parker and Hulme built an intense friendship and a shared imaginary world, writing stories and plays and describing a private paradise they called the Fourth World. Both families grew worried by the closeness of the relationship. In 1954 the Hulme marriage collapsed, Henry Hulme resigned as rector of Canterbury University College, and it was decided that Juliet would go to relatives in South Africa. The girls wanted to stay together and saw Honorah Parker as the obstacle.

Pauline's diary recorded the plan in detail. On 22 June 1954, after afternoon tea at the kiosk in Victoria Park, the girls walked with Honorah down a secluded path and struck her repeatedly with half a brick in a stocking. They ran back to the tea rooms saying she had fallen and hit her head. Police found the weapon nearby and the diary at the Rieper home, and the girls were charged with murder.

The trial in Christchurch in August 1954 drew international attention, with speculation about the girls' sanity and the nature of their relationship. The defence argued that they were insane, but the jury rejected this and on 28 August 1954 found both guilty of murder. Because they were under 18 they could not be sentenced to death and were instead detained. Parker served her sentence at Paparua prison near Christchurch. Both were released in 1959. Reports have long claimed that they were forbidden to contact each other again, though the then Secretary for Justice, Sam Barnett, said no such condition existed. Less than four months after the conviction, the case was cited as evidence of moral decline in the Mazengarb Report on juvenile delinquency.

On release Parker took the name Hilary Nathan and spent several years in New Zealand under official supervision, studying in Auckland and training as a librarian in Wellington. In 1965 she moved to England, where she worked in a London library before giving up the profession. She retrained as a teacher and taught children with special needs at Abbey Court School in Strood, Kent, serving for most of that time as deputy headmistress, with former employers describing her career as untarnished. From 1986 she ran the Abbots Court riding school at Hoo, near Rochester, and lived alone nearby.

After her identity became public in 1997 she later moved to the Orkney Islands, where she ran a horse stable on Burray. In her final years she lived in retirement housing at Braeburn Court in St Margaret's Hope.

Parker never married and had no publicly known children. She lived a solitary life and, according to her sister Wendy, had no television or radio and paid no attention to coverage of the case. She never gave an interview. Wendy described her as deeply religious and said she had failed in an attempt to become a nun, adding that she was nonetheless living like one in her own way.

As teenagers Parker and Hulme rejected Christianity and invented their own religion and saints. In adulthood Parker became a devout Roman Catholic and was a regular worshipper at the English Martyrs' Roman Catholic Church in Strood. Through her sister she expressed deep remorse for killing her mother. Wendy said that it took Pauline about five years to realise what she had done.

The Parker-Hulme case shaped New Zealand debates about youth, morality and sexuality in the 1950s, feeding directly into the Mazengarb Report. It was later reinterpreted by writers including Julie Glamuzina and Alison Laurie, whose 1991 book Parker and Hulme: A Lesbian View examined how the girls' relationship was treated. Above all the case is remembered for the death of Honorah Parker, a 45 or 46 year old mother killed by her own daughter.

The case has been retold many times. Peter Jackson's 1994 film Heavenly Creatures, co written with Fran Walsh, starred Melanie Lynskey as Pauline and Kate Winslet as Juliet and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. Earlier and later works include the 1958 novel The Evil Friendship, the French film Mais ne nous delivrez pas du mal (1971), Beryl Bainbridge's novel Harriet Said (1972), Michelanne Forster's play Daughters of Heaven (1992), Peter Graham's book So Brilliantly Clever (2011, later titled Anne Perry and the Murder of the Century) and Angela Carter's radio play The Christchurch Murder, broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 2018. The NZ Herald podcast A Moment in Crime revisited the case in 2024.

Debate has continued over whether the girls were mentally ill at the time, whether they were treated as they were because of assumptions about their sexuality, and whether conditions on their release were properly reported. Juliet Hulme's brother Jonathan told the NZ Herald in 2024 that he believed his sister had a major psychotic disorder at the time. The publication of Parker's whereabouts in 1997 and again in 2011 also raised questions about the privacy of people who have served their sentences.