The Collaborators

As schoolmates in Christchurch, Juliet Hulme, 15, and Pauline Parker, 16, often collaborated in the writing and production of amateur plays--plays which, according to equally amateur critics, were "not bad at all." They both liked detective stories, and as if to strengthen their status as best friends, both had been visited by similar misfortune: each had missed long periods at school through illness. They also both wanted to go to America "to have novels published and filmed," but their parents would not let them.

One day three weeks ago, Pauline and Juliet, like many other fashionable New Zealanders, sat taking tea with Pauline's mother at a restaurant in lofty Victoria Park. After tea the two girls and Mrs. Parker took advantage of the brisk, sunny afternoon to stroll down the park's winding hillside track. A few minutes later, Pauline and Juliet came racing back to the restaurant. Mrs. Parker, they said, had fallen and was desperately injured. When the doctor arrived, Pauline's mother, her face and head cruelly cut and bruised, was already dead.

It was a shocking end to an afternoon of quiet enjoyment, but for respectable Christchurch a worse shock was still to come. That evening the police stopped by at Ham, the official residence of Dr. Henry Hulme, rector of staid Canterbury University College, and arrested Pauline Parker on suspicion of murder. Next day they came back and picked up Dr. Hulme's daughter Juliet on the same charge. Near the blood-soaked ground where Pauline's mother had lain, police found a brick and near it a bloodstained stocking in which the brick had been inserted and swung like a bludgeon.

Last week, in seven grisly hours at the Christchurch lower court, the police charged that Juliet and Pauline had killed Mrs. Parker with the brick-filled stocking. Their principal evidence: confessions from both girls, and excerpts from Pauline's own diary, in which Mrs. Parker's death was listed as the "Day of the Happy Event." Dozens of people die every day, sometimes thousands, said the schoolgirl's diary: so why not Mother too?

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