All About the Pauline Yvonne Parker and Juliet Hulme Case

"Dutiful Daughters"

Pauline & Juliette

"There are living amongst two dutiful daughters
Of a man possesses two beautiful daughters
The most glorious beings in creation...
And above us these goddesses reign on high.
"I worship the power of these lovely two
With that adoring love known to so few.
'Tis indeed a miracle, one must feel
That two such heavenly creatures are real.
...And these two wonderful people are you and I."
by Pauline Yvonne Parker

June 22, 1954

Victoria Park

And then it was done.

For just a moment, a thick silence oozed onto the packed dirt path that cut through the undergrowth of the steep Port Hills at Cashmere. It seeped into the ground and welled up again, lapping at the body of the 45-year-old woman who lay there, her skull crushed by a half brick wrapped in an old stocking. It rose in a torrent, swallowing the two blood spattered young girls who stood there, 15-year-old Pauline Yvonne Parker, the slain woman's daughter; and Juliet Hulme, her 16-year-old companion.

Pauline Parker school photo

And in the instant before they drowned in it, the two rushed screaming from the scene, scrambling across the old rustic bridge, and up again, up the steep hill, collapsing at last in front of the old tea kiosk at Victoria Park where moments before they had sipped soft drinks and munched on precious little cakes with the woman.

"Please, help us!" they shrieked as the proprietress of the place stepped outside. "Mummy's been hurt."

In fact, Mummy was dead. She had been murdered. The two young girls who now seemed to be drowning in a sea of grief and panic, had, it would soon be learned, carefully plotted her death.

It was, for them, the only way that the two, a pair of precocious and artistically gifted outcasts, who had formed a relationship on wild flights of fantasy, a relationship charged with unbounded adolescent passion and considered by the community to be at best, unwholesome and, perhaps, according to the grimly sanctimonious mores of the time, unnatural, could remain together. It was the only way they could chart their course together to their mystical "Fourth World," a place that, as Juliet would later be quoted as saying, "was even better than heaven."

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