SPEAKER_00 0:44

Welcome to the Femme Fatal, a true crime podcast with an astrology twist. I'm your host, Stacey Dotson. Each week I'll be joined by a guest host because this femme fatale prefers not to work alone. Hey everyone. Welcome back to the Femme Fatal. Once again joined by my husband, Greg. Hey babe. Hey babe. Hi, everyone. Thanks for doing this. I'm coming to everyone live from my mom's hospital room. Can't miss a week on a podcast, so we gotta keep going. Before we start, I want everyone to picture this. It's 1994. A movie comes out directed by a guy nobody's really heard of yet, named Peter Jackson. It stars two unknown actresses. One of them is Kate Winslett in her very first film role, and another is Melanie Linsky, which is her first role ever. The movie is gorgeous and disturbing and dreamlike, and it's based on a real murder from 1954 New Zealand. Two teenage girls beat one of their own mothers to death with a brick wrapped in a stocking. Now that's wild enough on its own, but here's the part that makes this story worth telling on a podcast in 2026. One of those girls grew up, changed her name, moved to the UK, and became one of the best-selling mystery novelists in the world. She published 14 novels before anyone outside her inner circle knew who she really was. And the thing that finally outed her was that same movie. Her name is now Ann Perry. Her name then was Julian Marion Hume.

SPEAKER_03 2:23

Seems like there's more going on in New Zealand than Hobbits.

SPEAKER_00 2:26

Yeah. Well, I mean, you know, he is known for his hobbits. Did you ever see Heavenly Creatures? That's the movie.

SPEAKER_03 2:33

No, I've never seen Heavenly Creatures.

SPEAKER_00 2:35

You really should.

SPEAKER_03 2:36

It came out in '94. That was my senior year in college, so not a lot of movie watching going on at that time.

SPEAKER_00 2:43

What? That's when I was watching a lot of movies. Okay, but a big horror movie fan, I saw one of his first called Bad Taste. It's an old indie movie, and he actually stars in it. So if anyone is a big Peter Jackson fan and they've never seen that movie, I'd try to find it. Anyway, I recently re-watched Heavenly Creatures and I couldn't stop thinking about the story, so that's why I wanted to do this episode. You ready?

SPEAKER_03 3:09

I'm ready. Let's hear it.

SPEAKER_00 3:10

Okay, let's get into it. So Juliet Hom was born in London on October 28th, 1938, to a fairly accomplished family. Her father, Henry Rainsford Home, was a physicist. He later worked on Britain's nuclear weapons program. So Juliet grew up in a very smart intellectual household. She was a sickly kid, though. She had tuberculosis. And on top of that, London during her early childhood is getting bombed during the war. She reportedly had nightmares for weeks after experiencing bombshock as a small child. Now, the TB was serious enough that doctors kept telling her parents, get her somewhere warm. So she shuttled around from sanitariums in Wales and Scotland and then stints in the Caribbean and South Africa. Anywhere the climate may help her lungs. In 1948, when Juliet was about nine or 10, the whole family emigrates to New Zealand. Her father takes a position as a rector, basically, the head of the University of Canterbury in Christchurch. Now, the family actually lives in housing provided by the university, a place called Islam Homestead. So Juliet's recovering partially, and she eventually starts at Christchurch Girls High School. And this is where she meets Pauline Parker. Now, Pauline Yvonne Parker is a Christchurch girl born May 1938. So they're almost exactly the same age, but a very different background. And where Juliet's father is a university rector, Pauline's parents work as part-time house staff and gardeners for the university. So definitely different types of upbringing. So her father, Pauline's Herbert Reaper, and her mother, Honora, are not actually married. They were living together, but unmarried, which was really scandalous enough at the time. And that doesn't even come out publicly until the trial. Well, they were living together with children, but never married. Like they had their children, but they just never got married. And that was pretty scandalous back then, especially in such a conservative area called Christ Church, right?

SPEAKER_03 5:40

I could see that. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 5:42

Yeah. So Pauline also had a childhood illness. She had, and I'm gonna butcher this, osteomyelitis. Do you know what that is?

SPEAKER_03 5:52

You got it just right. Yes, I do.

SPEAKER_00 5:54

Osteomyelitis. It's a bone infection. So both girls had spent chunks of their childhood sick, isolated, sitting out gym class, and that's literally how they bond at first. Two girls who'd been through it medically who finally find each other. And from here, it escalates fast. They start writing together plays, stories, novels. They invent an entire fantasy kingdom called Barovnia, full of its own royal family, its own scandals and intrigue, almost like fan fiction royalty with murders and torrid romances built in. And they're plotting to get these stories published someday, maybe even made into movies in Hollywood. But it goes further than just creative writing. The girls invent their own private religion. They reject Christianity outright and create their own patheon of saints. They believe in something they call the fourth world, basically their own personal version of heaven, a place without Christians, where art and music are the highest values. And the wildest part, they believe they could occasionally access it. Like during months of intense feeling, they thought they'd briefly slipped into this other dimension together, and that their friendship itself was what let them in.

SPEAKER_03 7:15

They're really, really close.

SPEAKER_00 7:17

Yeah, and really creative. Pauline actually kept a diary. And so that's going to come into play later, but a very detailed diary. And of course, they have all their writings and stuff. So it's the kind of intense imaginative friendship a lot of teenage girls have dialed up to an extreme. And then both families start to notice the way the girls cling to each other, how absorbed they are, how Juliet becomes physically ill and withdrawn whenever Pauline isn't around. And it worries everyone. And at that time, this kind of intensity between two girls got read through one specific lens. People suspected it was sexual. And remember in 1954, homosexuality was treated as a mental illness. And a doctor actually told Pauline's parents her weight loss and obsession were from what he called a homosexual attachment to Juliet. Good old doctors in the 50s.

SPEAKER_03 8:16

So did they try to put leeches on and like leech the gay out of her or something like that?

SPEAKER_00 8:21

Not that I know of, but I'm sure they tried other things. So both families try to manage it rather than end it outright. Pauline keeps getting invited to stay at Islam for long stretches, but the pressure's building. Now, in 1953, Pauline doesn't get her usual invite to spend summer holidays at Islam. Already a bad sign. And then in 1954, and this is the part that lights the fuse, the whom marriage collapses. Juliet's father is forced to resign as rector after a conflict with the university board. Her mother Hilda's having an affair with a man named Walter Bill Perry. And yes, that name's gonna matter later. The plan becomes Henry will take Juliet back to England. Hilda will follow later with Juliet's brother Jonathan, presumably to eventually be with Bill Perry. At some point, there was also talk of sending Juliet to relatives in South Africa. And for Pauline and Juliet, this is catastrophic. They are about to be permanently separated on opposite sides of the planet. And Pauline actually begs her parents to go to South Africa too, so that they could eventually run off to Hollywood or New York and start publishing their writings. Now Pauline's mother, Honora, says no. And so according to Pauline's own diary, the girls worked it out carefully, her words, and decided that the one person standing between them, staying together, had to be removed. And that person was her mom, Honora.

SPEAKER_01 9:57

Wow.

SPEAKER_00 9:57

I know, intense.

unknown 9:59

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 10:00

Deep. Dark too.

SPEAKER_00 10:02

Yes, very dark. On June 22nd, 1954, Pauline invites her mother to join her and Juliet for tea and a walk in Victoria Park in Christchurch. At some point on a secluded path, Juliet drops a jewel stone on the ground, and when Honora bends down to pick it up, Pauline strikes her with the half brick wrapped inside a stocking. It does not go quickly. The two girls take turns hitting her. Investigators later determine Honora was struck at least 45 times in the head and neck.

SPEAKER_03 10:36

Goodness gracious. Do they show that in the movie?

SPEAKER_00 10:40

They do. They don't show it 45 times. So they run back covered in blood, hysterical, telling people Honora had simply fallen and hit her head on a stone. And it takes the police almost no time to find the actual murder weapon nearby, and then the story collapses immediately. Both girls are arrested that same day. Now, this is the part you specifically want to dig into. What actually pulled Juliet into a murder that was not her mother, the honest answer based on the trial record and later accounts is that it comes down almost entirely to the fear of separation. Juliet's whole world, the fantasy kingdom, the fourth world, the only person who fully understood her was about to be taken from her by distance. Honora was the obstacle, specifically blocking Pauline from going with her. In Juliet's mind, by every account, she later gave removing Honora was removing the only barrier for them staying together. There's also a wrinkle worth mentioning. Years later, Anne Perry herself claimed she had been on mood-altering medication for her tuberculosis at the time and suggested it affected her judgment. That's her own retrospective explanation. And so take that for what it's worth, right?

SPEAKER_01 12:00

Right.

SPEAKER_00 12:01

So Pauline's diary became the prosecution's most damning piece of evidence. She'd written out the plan in advance. She called the day of the murder in one entry the happy event. And so that destroyed any chance of them arguing this was some spur-of-the-moment panic. So the trial in Christchurch in August 1954 was an absolute media sensation. Nothing like this had happened in New Zealand before. And the defense for both girls was not guilty by reason of insanity. Psychiatrists for the defense argued the girls suffered from a shared delusional disorder, what's clinically called fully ado. Basically, a psychosis where two people, almost always in an extremely close relationship, reinforce and validate each other's break from reality. So the prosecution was not having that. Their position was, in their words, two highly intelligent and perfectly sane girls who killed in cold blood and tried to cover it up like sane people do. The girls didn't even help their own case. Witnesses describe them giggling, whispering, and flirting with each other in the courtroom, which that's pretty chilly.

SPEAKER_03 13:14

Not the best look when you're trying to prove that you're innocent of this crime.

SPEAKER_00 13:18

Right. Doesn't look good for insanity, right?

SPEAKER_03 13:21

Yeah, you're blowing kissy faces at each other across the courtroom in your prison jumpsuits.

SPEAKER_00 13:28

On August 28th, 1954, an all-male jury found both girls guilty of murder. So here's the critical detail about sentencing. Under New Zealand law, they were too young for the death penalty. Instead, they were sentenced to be detained at Her Majesty's pleasure, essentially in indefinite prison term with no fixed release date. As part of the conditions, the court ordered they never have contact with each other again after release. And the girls were kept strictly separated from each other in custody. One more gut punch detail: while Juliet was in prison, her family left. Her mother and Bill Perry left New Zealand for good in September 1954, just a couple of months after the murder. And by all accounts, Juliet received almost no visits and very little correspondence from her family the entire time she was incarcerated.

SPEAKER_02 14:25

That's terrible.

SPEAKER_00 14:26

Both Juliet and Pauline served about five years and were released separately in late 1959, each given a new identity by the state with explicit instructions not to reconnect. So they only served five years. It does. So after her release, Juliet, now in her early 20s, eventually made her way back to England. She worked for a time as a flight attendant, then spent time living in the United States, where in 1968 she joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Now, by most accounts, her faith became a genuinely central, stabilizing part of her adult life. Yes, here's where the name comes in. Her mother, Hilda, did end up marrying Bill Perry, that man that she'd been having an affair with back in New Zealand. Okay. So when Juliet needed a new identity, she took her stepfather's surname. So Juliet Marion Hume became Ann Perry. She eventually settled in Scotland in a small village and lived for periods with her mother, and she started writing. Her first novel, The Cater Street Hangman, came out in 1979. And that's 20 years after her release, 25 years after the murder. It introduced her recurring detective duo, Thomas and Charlotte Pitt, set in Victorian London. It sold well enough that she kept going. In 1990, she launched a second long-running series featuring an amnesiac investigator named William Monk. Now I kind of want to read that. That sounds interesting. I haven't read any of her novels.

SPEAKER_03 16:02

Yeah, that's good.

SPEAKER_00 16:04

By 1994, Anne Perry had published 14 novels under that name. She was known, respected, and increasingly successful historical mystery writer. And almost nobody knew that she was, you know, Anne Perry was actually Juliet Home.

SPEAKER_03 16:21

Until.

SPEAKER_00 16:22

Until. Then Peter Jackson's Heavenly Creatures comes out in 1994. It premieres at Venice and wins the Silver Lion, gets an Oscar nod for best screenplay, launches Kate Winslett's entire career, and you know, Kate played Juliet, and is widely considered the film that proved Jackson was a serious filmmaker years before Lord of the Rings. Fun fact, Jackson has a cameo. He shows up briefly as a homeless man whom Juliet's character kisses outside a theater. And apparently he puts himself into every one of his movies, very Hitchcockian. At the time the film came out, it was not widely known that Ann Perry, the novelist, was Juliet home. But journalists started digging, and a few months after the film's release, they tracked her down. She actually found out the press knew in a phone call. She was literally about to call her own lawyer about something unrelated when someone reached out first to confirm the connection. And by her own account, there was just dead silence on the line for a moment before she essentially said, Yeah, it's true.

SPEAKER_03 17:31

Wow. So she fessed up to it.

SPEAKER_00 17:33

She fessed up, yeah. She owned up. So she later said, It seems so unfair. Everything I had worked to achieve as a decent member of society was threatened. And once again, my life was being interrupted by someone else. So, I mean, I don't know. What she did was so bad.

SPEAKER_03 17:51

So it's like, uh sorry the murder you did a quarter of a century ago is inconveniencing your life of luxury and fame right now. Aww.

SPEAKER_00 18:01

Well, I don't know if she was luxurious and famous, but she was successful.

SPEAKER_03 18:05

I guess so.

SPEAKER_00 18:06

Uh you know, forty-five blows. Right?

SPEAKER_03 18:11

It's pretty intense.

SPEAKER_00 18:12

It was intense. What's fascinating here is that it coming out didn't affect her being an author in a negative way. It was the opposite. Her UK publisher later reported that she sold 25 million copies of her books over her career. Her biographer says 26 million, but you know. She kept publishing steadily for another 30 years after being outed, and she ended up with 102 published books by the time she died.

SPEAKER_01 18:41

Wow.

SPEAKER_00 18:42

So it was the Pitt novels, the Monk novels, a World War I series, and a young adult series, and Christmas novellas. I kind of want to read that. Is that something that's on the Hallmark Channel in July?

SPEAKER_01 18:58

It could be.

SPEAKER_00 18:58

Oh, she regularly landed on the New York Times bestseller list. Yeah, a lot of readers and critics started reading her novels after it came out. And of course, her novels are full of murder, family secrets, miscarriages of justice, and dark themes like infanticide through the lens of which she actually lived through. It became part of the mythology around her work rather than something that ended her career. So she never really hid from it again after 94. She did interviews, appeared on talk shows, discussed it directly. And in 2006, she stated publicly that while her relationship with Pauline had been intensely obsessive, the two of them were never lesbians, addressing head-on the speculation that had followed the case for 50 years. So briefly, because you know it's part of the same story, Pauline had gone to the UK for a time too. She became a devout Roman Catholic and eventually settled into a quiet, reclusive life for years, running a small children's writing school. She took a new name as well, and as of recent reporting, lives in a remote part of the Orkney Islands in Scotland. She's still alive. The two women, despite both ending up in Scotland at different points, are not believed to have had any contact with each other since the trial in 1954. And by choice, not by any legal restrictions or anything like that.

SPEAKER_02 20:26

Oh, it's been forever since I've seen you. Oh, how have you been? Hey, remember that time we murdered your mom? Oh my goodness.

SPEAKER_00 20:34

Sad. Sorry, Honora. What a way to go. So, in a statement released through her sister in 1996, Pauline expressed deep remorse, saying it took her about five years in prison to actually fully grasp what she had done. So Ann Perry died on April 10th, 2023, at age 84. She was living in Los Angeles at the time. And she spent the back half of her life by a long majority of it, actually, celebrated novelist, person of faith, and until 1994, a woman who was had a completely buried second identity. In 2009, she received a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Agatha Awards, mystery fiction's biggest honor. And she was a repeat guest of honor at ButcherCon, one of the genre's most major conventions. So you ready to hear about some astrology?

SPEAKER_02 21:30

Yeah, sure.

SPEAKER_00 21:31

Ann Perry was born October 28th, 1938. She has a son in Scorpio. Scorpio's son is most associated with secrets, with intensity, with transformation, with things buried and reborn. And a look at this literal life, a woman who buried an entire identity for 40 years, who underwent one of the most extreme reinventions imaginable. New name, new continent, new. Faith, new self, and who built a career writing about exactly the kind of things Scorpios are obsessed with murder, hidden motives, justice, what people are capable of when they think no one's watching. You could not design a more Scorpio biography if you tried. Scorpios don't do anything halfway when they love, they love with total absorption. So she also has a Mercury in Scorpio. And Mercury is how you think and communicate. And in Scorpio, that mind gets a reputation for being sharp, probing, and brutally honest when it wants to be, sarcastic, even cutting, with very little patience for surface level pleasantries. People with displacement tend to say the true thing rather than the comfortable thing that tracks with her work. Her novels are cozy mysteries. They dig into infanticide, incest, miscarriages of justice, institutional corruption. Her biographer actually pointed out that once people knew Anne Perry's history, they started reading those dark, unflinching themes as direct echoes of her own past. Scorpio Mercury doesn't look away from the ugly stuff, it interrogates it. It does track, yeah. She has a Venus in Sagittarius, and Venus is how you love. And in Sagittarius, that tends to be expansive, idealistic, almost philosophical. Love as a grand belief system rather than something practical or contained. Think about the fourth world, a literal invented heaven that she and Pauline believed their bond could grant them entry into. That's Venus and Sagittarius in its most extreme form. Love treated as a doorway to something transcendent, a whole belief system built around a relationship. It's romantic in the truest sense of the word, embracing, idealistic, borderline religious.

SPEAKER_03 23:56

I could see that with the whole fourth world.

SPEAKER_00 23:59

The fourth world, yeah. That's so creative, though. Very creative.

SPEAKER_01 24:03

It really is.

SPEAKER_00 24:05

So okay, Mars and Libra. Mars is your drive, your aggression, how you fight and get what you want. In Libra, that energy doesn't come out as direct confrontation. Libra avoids open conflict. It comes out sideways, passive aggression, charm used as a weapon, a need to provoke a reaction in others while maintaining the appearance of pleasantness. Witnesses at the trial describe Pauline and Juliet giggling, whispering and flirting with each other in court, almost performing for the room, getting a rise out of everyone watching while seeming on the surface perfectly composed. That's a very Libra Mars way of expressing intensity, indirect charming on the surface, and quietly enjoying the effect it has on people. And lastly, her moon was in Capricorn. The moon is your emotional core, what you actually need to feel safe. And in Capricorn, this placement is famously guarded, controlled, and deeply self-reliant. People with it often learn early not to lean on anyone. They build their emotional security through achievement, structure, and discipline rather than open vulnerability. Look at the back half of her life. A woman who, after an unimaginable rupture, methodically built a new identity, a stable faith practice, and a wildly disciplined career, 102 books. Almost entirely on her own terms without ever publicly unraveling. That's a Capricorn moon signature move. Take the chaos and build something controlled and lasting out of it. So, summing up, Scorpio, Sun, and Mercury for the secrets and the unflinching mind, Sagittarius Venus for a love that reached for something almost mythic, Libra Mars for a sideways intensity that read as charm right up until it didn't, and a Capricorn moon that let her rebuild an entire life with total discipline after the worst things she ever did. What gets me the most about this story isn't even the murder. It's the 40 years on the other side of it. Like 14 novels written and published by a woman nobody suspected, and then even 30 more years of work after the whole world found out it's not really a story about crime. It's really a story about what someone did with the rest of their life after coming to terms with the worst thing they ever did.

SPEAKER_03 26:28

I think she still got off easy.

SPEAKER_00 26:30

Oh yeah, for sure.

SPEAKER_03 26:32

Five years and then a successful career afterwards. I mean, I'm sure she, you know, had dark times and reflected on her deeds and all that.

SPEAKER_00 26:41

You know, she just I don't want to say got lucky because obviously she's a talented writer. Yeah. You know, she got lucky that the courts let her out and gave her the ability to change herself and to live a decent life. You know, as far as we know, she didn't do anything horrible again after that.

SPEAKER_03 27:03

True. And you should be given a second chance. I understand that, and I believe in that, but I don't know. This whole story is just it's just weird.

SPEAKER_00 27:11

It is a weird story, but the movie's so good. You gotta see it.

SPEAKER_03 27:16

I'll have to check it out sometime. Maybe we can uh watch it together. Did she ever start her own family or have kids or anything like that?

SPEAKER_00 27:22

Or no, Anne Perry never married, she never had any kids. She lived a fairly solitary life centered on her writing, her Mormon faith, and a small circle of close friends, mainly her brother and a couple of others. But Pauline, this is interesting, she also never married and had any children, but she did live for years with a companion named Joan, described in some sources as a friend from her Kenrick circle, Kenrick being a British social group for lesbian and bisexual women. And then Joan, I guess, passed away, and then Pauline is still alive, but you know, not in any relationship.

SPEAKER_03 28:01

She's gonna be what her mid-80s now, right?

SPEAKER_00 28:04

Yeah, they were the same age. And so Anne Perry passed away, what, like two, three years ago? She was 84, so makes Pauline like 87-ish. Yeah, so that's Anne Perry. And if you watch Heavenly Creatures, everyone, which you should, Kate Winslett and Melanie Linsky are both incredible in it. And that claymation fourth world sequence. He really did prove himself to be able to direct fantasy films. It's an amazing movie.

SPEAKER_03 28:32

All right. Well, I'll definitely have some context whenever I get around watching Heavenly Creatures.

SPEAKER_00 28:37

Well, thanks, babe. I gotta get back to doing my thing here.

SPEAKER_03 28:41

All right. Well, love you, babe. Thank you for letting me be part of your podcast again. Talk to you soon.

SPEAKER_00 28:46

Love you. Thanks. Bye. Bye. The Femme Fatal. Created and hosted by Stacy Dodson, produced by Mark Williams, music by Marcia Yingling, Chad Chane, and Greg Loicano.