August 11, 2021 • 54 mins
In the 1950s, two lonely, imaginative teenage girls became best friends. Before long they had convinced themselves that they were the most mad, genius girls in the world. And then they began to dream of murder.
—
Support the podcast by supporting its sponsors! Go to calm.com/criminalbroads for 40% off Calm’s entire library of soothing meditations. Or become a patron at patreon.com/criminalbroads.
Follow on Instagram: Instagram.com/criminalbroads
Find sources here: criminalbroads.com/sources/episode68
Music: Matthew Noble and Stereodog Productions (Dan Pierson & Peter Manheim). Intro and conclusion: “Guilty” by Richard A. Whiting, Harry Akst, and Gus Kahn, sung by Anna Telfer. Ad break: “The Great One Step” by Victor Dance Orchestra, via Free Music Archive, licensed under Public Domain Mark 1.0.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Is it a sin? Is it a crime?
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Loving you dear like I do.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
If it's a crime, then I'm guilty, guilty of loving you. Hello, everyone,
Welcome to another episode of Criminal Broads, a podcast about
wild women on the wrong side of the law. You
guys were doing a famous case today, you know, sometimes
(00:33):
every now and then we do a hashtag famous case
and then we plunge back into the waters of the
more obscure. While we're on the peak. We're on the
iceberg of the famous today, wobbling and hoping the global
warming doesn't melt us. Who will we make it through?
I think we will. Before I tell you a little
bit more about this case, I have a Sister anecdote
(00:53):
to read. Please keep trickling in as people listen to
our Sister series, which we did during the month of June,
and I asked for anecdotes about the spooky, supernatural, beautiful, amazing,
spiritual whatever it is bond between sisters, and I keep
getting great anecdotes. If you're a Okay, if you're listening
to this and you're doing your PhD in like the
(01:14):
folklore or psychology or something, maybe you should do your
dissertation on psychic sisters. Just an idea, okay. This is
an anecdote from Monique that she says it's okay to share.
She says, I lost my eldest sister, Sue to cancer
on February twenty ninth, twenty twenty. We come from a
(01:35):
large family. My sisters, Sue, Louise, and I were always
very close. I'm the youngest of the family and was
called Nicki as a child. As I got older, all
my siblings called me by my given name of Monique,
except for my sister Louise. She has continued to call
me Nicki. My siblings and I made it in time
to say goodbye to Sue before she passed. We were
(01:56):
all coming from different parts of the country. My eldest
brother and his wife made it just in time the
night Sue died. At one point, the hospital staff asked
us to leave the room temporarily while they made Sue
a little bit more comfortable. When everyone went back into
the room after the nurse was done, I decided to
sit out in the waiting room to gather my thoughts.
I heard my sister in law walk by, and I
(02:17):
just closed my eyes because honestly, I didn't want to
talk to anyone at that time. Then, as clear as day,
I heard someone say NICKI now I know it wasn't
my sister in law because she never called me by
my nickname. I was sure it was Louise who called me.
So I went back into Sue's room to see what
Louise wanted. She said she had not called me. So
(02:39):
I went and sat beside Sue's bed to tell her
that Louise was bugging me. Yeah, we are adults in
our fifties and sixties, but we still act like kids.
I took hold of Sue's hand and she took one, two,
three breaths, and she passed away. I am convinced Sue
called me by my nickname because I would think it
was Louise calling me. Sue knew I would respond immediately
(03:00):
to that. Sisters are remarkable. So that's a magical, beautiful
anecdote from Monique. Thank you so much for sending that
to me and saying I could share it with everyone. Okay,
so back to this case. This has been an a
very popular reader request for ages. I like clockwork, someone
(03:23):
will write in asking me to do this case. So
this is for all of you. This is for all
of you who have requested it, and all of you
are fascinated by this case. I didn't want to do
it at first because I was deeply scarred by the
movie Heavenly Creatures, because I didn't know what I was
getting into when I watched it, so I just thought
it was a movie about friendship. So it troubled me.
(03:44):
It very much troubled me. When we got to the
scene in the park, which you'll all know about in
about forty five minutes. Anyway, finally I couldn't resist it anymore.
The people had spoken, we're going to do this case,
so I hope I add some things to it that
you haven't heard before. If you're familiar with it, listen
all the way to the end, because oo, the note
I end on is one of the most haunting anecdotes
(04:06):
I have ever come across in my research. All right, everyone,
we're going to New Zealand in the nineteen fifties and
things are gonna get weird. Let's go. Pauline and Juliet
(04:34):
were the best of friends. They loved each other so
very much. They understood each other. They really understood each other,
and no one else did, not their schoolmates, not their teachers,
not their siblings, and certainly not their mothers. They were
both geniuses. They were incredible writers. They had the voices
(04:56):
of angels. They were going to be opera singers. There
were some one of the only people in the world
who had the capacity to see into the great beyond,
into what they called the fourth world. They were telepathic.
They were insane, and it was wonderful. It made them cool.
They were going to go to Hollywood and meet all
their favorite movie stars. They were going to kill Pauline's mother.
(05:22):
We have it worked out carefully and are both thrilled
by the idea, Pauline wrote in her diary. Naturally we
feel a trifle nervous, but the pleasure of anticipation is great.
(05:49):
Both girls lived a lonely life before they met each other,
and later, much later, when they were separated for good,
they'd lead lonely lives again. The loneliest live in the world,
some might say their respective lonelinesses started early. Juliet, whom
was born in nineteen thirty eight, a white British girl,
(06:11):
the privileged daughter of Henry and Hilda. Henry was a physicist,
a respected man with a PhD who would later work
on Britain's first nuclear bomb. Hilda was a cold, arrogant,
elegant sexpot, the sort of person who would gaze straight
past you at a party looking for someone more exciting
to talk to. Their daughter. Juliette was a sensitive child,
(06:34):
obsessed with fantasy worlds. She found it difficult to tear
herself away from her pretend games and return to real life.
She would much rather keep on being a fairy or
a queen. She was demanding, her mother said, although Hilda
didn't seem to have much patience for the work of
being a mother. When Juliette was five and a half,
her mom gave birth to her younger brother, and Juliette
(06:56):
resented the intrusion. By then, World War two was raging
and juliet had a nasty bout with pneumonia and bronchitis,
which was serious enough to be considered life threatening. So
Hilda sent Juliette away for her safety, for her health,
and maybe to get her out of Hilda's hair. It's
unclear where exactly juliet went. She may have spent some
(07:20):
time in Barbados. Hilda was vague about the whole thing.
She could never be trusted with the entire truth, especially
not when the truth made her look like a bad mother.
Juliet came back home bitter, feeling that she'd been abandoned
by her family, which she sort of had been. This
would not be the last time she would be separated
from her parents for months or even years, since juliet
(07:44):
was still in poor health and Hilda's health wasn't great either.
Henry Whom decided to take a job in New Zealand,
presumably to escape from England's gloomy weather. The family moved
there in the fall of nineteen forty eight, but Juliette
wasn't with them. She'd been sent there ahead of time,
like a package nobody cared all that much about, As
(08:04):
Hilda said later, like it was totally normal because of
Juliette's health. My husband and I had been apart from
her for thirteen months. Juliette was an excitable, difficult, temperamental kid,
and it was hard not to wonder if her parents
didn't mind being separated from her, if they liked life
better without Juliette in it. In New Zealand, the Whom
(08:27):
family didn't make the best impression. Locals found Hilda icy,
snobby and irritatingly superior about the fact that she was
from England and they weren't. Before long, Hilda was prowling
around looking for lovers. I have never seen a woman
so steaming, said one man who knew her. Henry wasn't
(08:48):
making a great impression either. At his new job as
the rector of Canterbury University College in christ Church. His
colleagues were starting to think he was a bit of
a well a spineless two face liar. But if appearances
meant anything, then the woms were doing great. They bought
a fancy house called Ilam and held parties full of
(09:08):
important guests. And Juliet. Sure, she was weird and spent
most of her time in dreamland, but she was elegant
and smart and lovely, and she spoke English with a
British accent. And everyone who knew her wanted to be
her friend. But Juliette didn't want to be anyone's friend.
She held herself aloof from her classmates at Christchurch Girls
(09:28):
High School, where she started in nineteen fifty two. As
one of her housekeepers said, Juliet could only love herself.
She seemed totally self sufficient, so everyone thought it was
weird when suddenly Juliete befriended a strange girl who was
angry and sarcastic. And if we're being totally frank from
(09:51):
the wrong side of the tracks, let's take a quick
(10:20):
break to hear from this episode's sponsor, Calm. Hi, everyone,
is anyone else really really stressed these days? Not that
there's anything to be stressed about. There has not been
a single thing wrong with this world for the past
year and a half. Right, We've all basically been emotionally
floating in a inner tube with a drink of choice
(10:42):
in our hand for the past eighteen months. Right, right,
We're fine. Everyone's fine anyway, If you sometimes are finding
that you're not fine, and if that is affecting how
you sleep, I got to tell you about Calm, the
number one mental wellness app, which will give you literal
tools that improve the way you feel well. Not literal tools,
(11:02):
not hammers and screwdrivers, but very intentional, useful tools that work.
Calm is an app that's full of guided daily meditations
and sleep stories that will send you to dreamland on
a freaking pillow of cotton candy and curated music tracks.
Really whatever you need for any time of day to
(11:24):
relax yourself. So if you're trying to fall back asleep
in the middle of the night, they have something for that.
If you're trying to take a nap, they have something
for that. I've used their sleep meditations and oh my gosh,
they just melt you into your mattress and you wake
up and you're like, what just happened. If you go
to Calm dot com slash Criminal Broads, you'll get a
limited time offer of forty percent off a Calm Premium subscription.
(11:46):
Yes for listeners of the show. Colm is offering a
special limited time promotion of forty percent off at Colm
dot com slash Criminal Brods. Go to clm dot com
slash Criminal Brods for forty percent off unlimited access to
calm entire library. You can be soothed. That's Calm dot
com slash Criminal Brads. Juliette's new friend her only friend,
(12:42):
was a girl named Pauline Reaper who liked to be
called paul She was sulky and obsessed with vengeance, and
she had wild, curly black hair. She was from a
working class background, unlike Juliette, and came from parents burdened
with their own problems. Her dad, Bert, had abandoned his
wife and two sons to run away with her mom, Honora,
(13:04):
who went by Nora. Nora was born into a wealthy
British family that had slid into poverty after her dad
went insane and died of what was probably syphilis. Nora
had four children, but one died at one day old
and another had mental problems and was sent to live
in an institution. Pauline had her health problems too. As
(13:25):
a child, she fell sick with something called osteomyelitis, inflammation
of the bone marrow in one of her legs. For
a while, it was unclear if she would make it.
She spent eight or nine months in the hospital and
it took three years for her leg to fully heal. Actually,
it never fully healed. She was left with a permanent
limp and her leg would still ache over a decade later.
(13:49):
On paper, Pauline and Juliette couldn't have been more different.
Juliette was tall and wealthy and beautiful, with perfect rich
girl bone structure and waves of small booth blonde hair
and long, elegant limbs. Pauline was short and stocky, and
working class, and appeared so grouchy in photos that it
could be hard to tell what she actually looked like.
(14:11):
In one photo of Pauline and some of her classmates,
all the other girls are smiling politely at the camera,
but Pauline is looking down at the ground, scowling. A
shadow falls over her face and you can't see her eyes.
Many many years later, Pauline would avoid photographs altogether. But
(14:31):
their differences were just on paper. The truth was that
the girls were surprisingly similar. Both had suffered from long,
lonely childhood illnesses, and in fact that's what led them
to bond. Initially, because of their medical history, the girls
weren't allowed to participate in sports or gem and so
in school they sat on the sidelines for hours, talking
and dreaming. Both of them had difficult relationships with their mothers.
(14:55):
Juliette felt abandoned by hers, while Pauline and Nora Joe
didn't get along most of the time. Nora would fly
into rages and scream at Pauline and then try to
make it up to her with little presence. In return,
Pauline was so rude to her mom that one of
her classmates remembers being shocked by it. But now juliet
(15:16):
and Pauline had found each other, they weren't alone anymore.
Pauline thought Juliette was pretty much the most gorgeous, elegant,
sophisticated creature of all time, and Juliette loved having an
acolyte as passionate as Pauline. Later the popular narrative of
their friendship would be that Juliette made all the rules
(15:36):
and Pauline followed them, but in reality the girls were
much more equal than it seemed in those early days.
They were both feverishly creative, susceptible to the same sorts
of deranged ideas and wild dreams, and as far as
the girl's biggest and deadliest idea, that one came straight
from Pauline. Their friendship got into fast and the way
(16:01):
that friendships between teenage girls often do. They giggled compulsively
over inside jokes. They stayed up way too late talking.
They took off their shoes and danced wildly in the grass.
They gave each other nicknames like Nigel and Philip or
Gina and Deborah. They snuck out of their houses and
had midnight picnics with wines, stolen from Juliette's parents. They
(16:22):
fantasized about their favorite actors. They were total weirdos, like
so many of us were as teenagers. There's nothing wrong
with being a weirdo, or spinning around in the grass
or convincing yourself that your favorite Hollywood actor is definitely
going to marry you someday. But Juliet and Pauline took
the intensity and strangeness inherent in teen girl relationships and
(16:45):
turned it up to an eleven. Together, they convinced themselves
that they were the most amazing, clever, genius girls the
world had ever seen. They were destined for something special,
and because they were so amazing and genius and special,
whatever they did, it was going to be morally right.
(17:24):
Here's a poem that Pauline wrote about herself and Juliet,
The ones that I worship there are living among two
beautiful daughters of a man who possesses two beautiful daughters,
the most glorious beings in creation. They'd be the pride
and joy of any nation. You cannot know, nor try
(17:46):
to guess the sweet soothingness of their caress. The outstanding
genius of this pair is understood by few they are
so rare Compared with these two, every man is a fool.
The world is most honored that they should deign to
rule and above us, these goddesses reign on high. I
(18:06):
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. Both
sets of eyes, though different, far hold many mysteries, strange impassively,
they watch the race of man decay and change, Hatred
(18:26):
burning bright in the brown eyes, with enemies for fuel.
Icy scorn glitters in the gray eyes, contemptuous and cruel.
Why are men such fools? They will not realize the
wisdom that is hidden behind those strange eyes. And these
wonderful people are you and I a bit grandiose right?
(18:49):
Referring to themselves as goddesses, as heavenly creatures? Compared with
these two, every man is a fool. As the girl's
friendship progressed, they moved further and further into their own
little world, where they were the goddesses of creation and
everyone else just didn't matter. They wrote furiously, creating imaginary
(19:09):
empires called Berovnia and Volumnia, which they populated with murderers
and rapists. They loved evil characters in their fiction and
in the movies they obsessed over. Evil was bold, Evil
was glamorous. Evil was the only way to live. They
seemed to think, at the very least, evil was cool.
(19:30):
Though sometimes they changed their minds about evil and got
religious in a vaguely fanatical sort of way. One day
they convinced themselves that they'd seen into another land. They
had this vision while staring at the ocean. Pauline described
it rapturously in her diary. Today, Julia and I found
the key to the Fourth World. We realize now that
(19:52):
we have had it in our possession for about six months,
but we only realized it on the day of the
death of Christ.
Speaker 2 (19:58):
We saw a gateway through the clouds. We sat on
the edge of the path and looked down the hill
out over the bay. The island looked beautiful, the sea
was blue. Everything was full of peace and bliss. We
then realized we had the key. We now know that
we are not as geni as we thought. We have
an extra part of our brain which can appreciate the
fourth world. Only about ten people have it. When we die,
(20:20):
we will go to the fourth world. But meanwhile, on.
Speaker 1 (20:23):
Two days every year, we may use the key and
look into that beautiful world which we have been lucky
enough to be allowed to know of. On this day
of finding the key to the way through the clouds,
they were spending most of their time at Juliette's home.
After all, Juliette was the one with the good food
and the wine, and the mom who had long evening
gowns that the girls could dress up in. Pauline wouldn't
(20:45):
have complained if she could have magically woken up one
morning as part of the whom family she adored, going
over to their mansion Islam and spent the night as
often as she could. When the Homes invited her to
their summer cottage, she was in heaven should tell Hilda
that her own mother was cruel and would beat her,
and Hilda seemed to revel in Pauline's love and encourage
(21:07):
its strange intensity. Sometimes Hilda would say that she wished
Pauline was her daughter too. By now, the girls were
sneaking out as much as possible and sleeping very little,
preferring to stay up and write furiously. After one too
many of these late nights outdoors in the cold, Juliet
came down with a bad case of tuberculosis and was
(21:28):
sent to a sanatorium. Her parents thought this was the
perfect time to scramble off to London and then the
US on a work slash pleasure trip. After all, Juliet
had nurses looking after her. She didn't need her parents there,
and so Juliet recovered alone in the sanatorium for a
hundred and twelve days. The only person who was there
(21:48):
for her was Pauline. Pauline visited when she could and
wrote letters as often as humanly possible. It would be
wonderful if I could get tuberculosis too, she wrote in
her diary. Often the girls would send each other two letters,
one as themselves and one as one of their fictional characters,
like Prince Charles of Berovnia or Lancelot Trelawny of Volumnia.
(22:12):
Their characters lived lives that were overflowing with seduction, rape, suicide,
and violence, as though someone had boiled down Hollywood's pulpiest
films into a thick jelly. They murdered right and left indiscriminately,
and they romanticized murder as one of their characters. Wrote,
(22:33):
I would like to kill someone sometime because I think
it is an experience that is necessary to life. As
juliet recovered, Pauline didn't dedicate all her energy to her friend.
She was also busy with a quintessential teenage activity, trying
to get herself a boyfriend. Her family had been taking
(22:54):
in borders to make extra money, just another way that
Pauline's family was so embarrassingly in to the elegant whom family,
and she and one of these boarders kept trying to
sneak off and have sex. One night, her dad caught
them and the border was sent packing, but Pauline kept
sneaking off to see him until finally they were able
(23:14):
to consummate the act. She didn't like this guy as
much as she liked Juliet, but she liked him enough
to be furious at her mother when her mother forbade
her from ever seeing him again. Speaking of fury, when
Juliette finally got out of the sanatorium, she was especially
cold towards her parents. She was convinced that they had
(23:35):
abandoned her and that Pauline was the only person in
the world who loved her. The girl's friendship started to
get more and more intense, so intense that all four
of their parents began getting a bit concerned about where
exactly this friendship was going. Juliet never went back to
school since she was still recovering, and so she was
spending more and more time in her troubling fantasy worlds,
(23:57):
and Pauline was now struggling with an eating disorder was
dropping weight at an alarming pace. What was going on?
Thought their parents. Finally, Henry Hume suggested to Bert that
he should send Pauline to a doctor. The doctor declared
solemnly that the girls were under the spell of a
lesbian attachment, but that it wouldn't last. With the vague
(24:19):
worry of lesbianism hanging over their heads, the homes and
the Reapers tried weakly to keep the girls apart, but
it didn't work. If Nora ever told Pauline that she
couldn't visit Juliette, Pauline would fly into a frenzy once
she raged in her diary, why could not mother die?
Dozens of people are dying all the time, thousands, so
(24:42):
why not mother and father too? People would always speculate
about whether or not the girls were lovers there was
certainly a strong homo erotic component to their friendship, but
Juliette would later deny that she was a lesbian or
that the girls had been romantically involved regardless of their
(25:03):
particular sexual orientation, though it was impossible to deny that
the girls were getting more and more sexual in their fantasies.
They decided that they were going to be sex workers.
They took naked photos of each other, and they obsessed
over their favorite Hollywood actors. They called these actors the Saints,
and they worshiped them. Their favorite actors were James Mason
(25:24):
and Guy Rolf. These two were the gods known as
Him and His. Their other favorite actors were Saints, and
they gave them all nicknames like he, It, This, That,
and who. They started making plans to travel to Hollywood,
where they would become famous writers and rub elbows with
(25:46):
everyone from Him to It, and they came up with
a new game. During their sleepovers, they'd act out how
each one of the Saints would make love. This kept
them awake for hours. They'd only get an hour or
two of sleep, and then they'd wake up and go
about their morning just a little bit more divorced from
(26:09):
reality than they had been the day before. The girls
weren't the only ones whose minds were full of sex.
(26:29):
Hilda had taken a lover. She even had him move
into a flat on the grounds of Islam. Years later,
the family gardener would say that once he was called
over to look at a clogged drain by the flat,
and he discovered that the source of the clog was
a whole lot of condoms. It didn't take the girls
(26:50):
long to suspect that Hilda was having an affair. They
could see how she and her lover acted around each other.
This was perfect, the girls thought to themselves. All they
had to do was catch the two of them in
the act and then blackmail them for money, which they
would then use to fund their trip to Hollywood. There
was instability in both families in those days, and it
(27:11):
was emerging more and more. Juliette's dad was in trouble
at work, and his colleagues were trying to get him
out of there. In Pauline's house, tensions were high between
Pauline and her mother because Nora had promised Pauline that
if her behavior improved, she would be allowed to see
that guy again, the border whom Pauline slept with, and
(27:31):
so Pauline tried really hard to improve herself. But one day,
when Pauline secretly talked to her lover, she found out
that her mom had called him and forbidden the two
of them from ever seeing each other again. This was
a betrayal, Pauline thought, just another reason to think her
life would be a lot better without her mom. As
(27:53):
the girls schemed about their mothers blackmailing them, freeing themselves
from them, running away to Hollyod without them, the girls'
families were counting down the days until this strange and
codependent friendship would be over for good. It was going
to be over because the entire Home family was leaving
the country. Henry and Hilda had quite the bombshell to
(28:15):
drop on their daughter. They were getting divorced, Henry was
quitting his job, and they were all moving back to England, well,
everyone except Juliette. That is. They were sending juliet to
South Africa for her health quote unquote and to separate
her from Pauline. And though they never said this, but
their behavior consistently demonstrated it, to separate her from themselves.
(28:42):
The girls were shocked at this news. What was going
to become of their schemes, their dreams, their plans. One
thing was certain. They refused to be separated. We sink
or swim together, Pauline wrote in her diary. They started
discussing their options. Clearly, if Juliette was being sent to
(29:03):
South Africa, Pauline would have to go too. The Whom
parents allowed Pauline to think that this was a possibility
in a sort of HM, sure, dear, we'll definitely pay
for your ticket kind of way. But Pauline took all
of this very, very seriously. Before long, she had convinced
herself that the only reason she wouldn't be able to
go to South Africa with Juliette was her mother. Her
(29:25):
mother wouldn't let her go. Now, this part was certainly true.
There was no way Nora would have let Pauline go
to South Africa with Juliette. But the whom parents definitely
wouldn't have let the girls travel together either. They were
just trying to placate the girls by implying that, oh, yes,
you two will totally be on the same ship to
South Africa. If Juliette's parents hadn't been so cowardly If
(29:51):
they had openly said no, Pauline, You're not coming with us,
then maybe this story would have a very different ending.
But instead, Pauline put the entire responsibility for her unhappiness
on her mother's overburdened shoulders. Anger against my mother boiled
up inside me, as it is she who is one
of the main obstacles in my path, she wrote in
(30:13):
her diary. Suddenly a means of ridding myself of this
obstacle occurred to me. If she were to die dot
dot dot, the death should seem natural or accidental, she mused.
She broached the idea to Juliette. Juliette was skeptical, but
did not, as Pauline wrote, disagree violently. The girls were
(30:38):
going farther and farther off the rails. In those days,
they were smack in the middle of their teenage years.
Pauline was sixteen, Juliette was fifteen, and now they were
dreaming about wiping out the entire world. They made a
list of people to kill that added new saints to
their pantheon, with nicknames like her Yours Mine, which either
(31:00):
one neither other. Rico Hollander, Elsa Mora, Christopher Robin and
Hugo did. They started shoplifting. They convinced themselves that they
were telepathic. Then they decided that they were certifiably insane.
We realized why we have such extraordinary telepathy, and why
people look at us the way they do, and why
(31:21):
we behave as we do, Pauline wrote, It is because
we are mad. We are both stark, raving mad, there
is no doubt about it, and we are thrilled by
the thought. They were sleeping less and less obsessed with
the Saints and the game in which they acted out
the Saints' sex lives. We have now learned the piece
(31:41):
of the thing called bliss, the joy of the thing
called sin, Pauline wrote. They talked of murder. They called
it moiter moider as a fun little inside joke, but
the idea of the moiter itself was no joke. They
had it all planned out. They'd take Nora for a
(32:02):
walk in the park and bash her over the head
with something and then claim that she'd fallen off the path.
And then one day the girls decided to put this
idea into action. Come for a walk with us, mommy,
Pauline said. Nora agreed, delighted at the chance to bond
with her difficult daughter. The night before their walk, Pauline
(32:27):
wrote in her diary, I feel very keyed up, as
though I were planning a surprise party. Mother has fallen
in with everything beautiful, and the happy event is to
take place tomorrow afternoon. So next time I write in
this diary mother will be dead. How odd yet how pleasing. Grouchy, sullen, difficult.
(33:05):
Pauline could not have been more lovely. On June twenty second,
nineteen fifty four, the day of her mother's death, she
woke up and pulled out her diary right away. The
day of the happy event, she scribbled, I'm writing a
little of this up. On the morning before the death,
I felt very excited, and the night before Christmas ish
(33:26):
last night, I did not have pleasant dreams, though I
am about to rise in the house. Pauline was a
veritable ray of sunshine, sweet to her parents, charming to
her sister. It was a wonderful way for everyone to
start the day at the humehouse. Juliette was also being
a little ray of sunshine. She chirped goodbye to her
(33:49):
mother and left with a spring in her step and
half of a brick in her purse. When she got
to Pauline's house, the girls prepared the murder weapon. They
slipped it into one of Pauline's stockings and nodded the
stockings so that the brick wouldn't fall out if anyone should,
you know, swing it around, and then, with the brick
now in Pauline's purse, the two girls set off with Nora.
(34:12):
She took them to a little tea shop right near
Victoria Park, where they nibbled on buns and cake. Then
they set off into the sunny afternoon. What was Nora
thinking as she walked along. She must have been feeling relieved.
She and her daughter were finally getting along with each other.
Tea and cakes and a lovely walk in the park
(34:34):
with her beloved child. Yes, Victoria Park was rather wild
and lonely, and yes, she and Pauline had their differences,
but maybe this was the start of a new era
for them. Maybe Nora and her daughter could finally become close,
especially since juliet was about to vanish from their lives.
(34:55):
Thank God. Yes, it seems very likely that as Nora
walked along through the trees, she was happy. Juliette was
walking ahead of them, just like the girls had planned.
When no one was looking, she dropped something in the path,
a little pink stone that she'd removed from a piece
(35:16):
of jewelry earlier. She called Nora to come over and
look at the delightful little stone. Dutifully, Nora walked towards
her and bent down to exclaim over the pink stone,
and behind her, Norah's own daughter slipped the brick out
of her purse, held it high, and brought it crashing
(35:38):
down on the back of her mother's head. The girls
had thought that murder would be easy. They thought it
would take one blow, bam, one blow, and Nora would
fall to the ground dead, and they'd tell everyone that
she slipped and they'd move on with their lives. But
(35:59):
death wasn't that simple. They hadn't counted on how badly
people want to live. Nora fought back, fought back against
her daughter, trying to block the blows with her hand,
but the blows kept coming so many that the tip
of her finger was almost completely severed. Eventually she fell
(36:22):
to the ground. There, Juliette took her turn with the brick,
then Pauline took the brick again, and Juliette grabbed Nora's
throat and held her against the dirt as Pauline hit
her mother over and over. Nora wasn't quiet, she was moaning, gurgling.
(36:43):
There was blood everywhere, oozing from her head, dripping down
the path. Eventually, the girls just left her there, still gurgling,
and ran back up to the tea shop. They were
splattered in blood and breathing hard. Has been hurt, Pauline yelled,
it's mommy, she's terribly hurt. She's dead. She's covered with blood,
(37:07):
yelled Juliette, Please somebody help. Juliette was nearly hysterical and
Pauline was white faced. But when the kind tea shop
lady helped them clean up, juliet said, oh dear, isn't
she nice? And the two girls started giggling uncontrollably. The
kind tea shop lady thought that was kind of strange,
(37:27):
but of course the poor DearS were in shock. When
she asked the girls what had happened, Pauline explained that
her mother had fallen and bumped her head multiple times.
At that, Juliette broke in, don't think about it, she said,
it's only a dream, we'll wake up soon. At first,
(38:07):
Pauline took the blame happily. Juliet had quote unquote confessed
to detectives that she'd been farther down the path when
the accident happened and had come rushing back only to
find Pauline cradling her mother's bloody head, and she really
had no idea what had happened. Pauline willingly supported Juliette's
story of innocence. Oh, yes, she said, Juliette hadn't been there. Yes,
(38:29):
she Pauline had hit her mother with the brick, But
juliet hadn't been there at all, and that was the
important part. Hilda was delighted when she realized that Pauline
would take the entire blame for whatever nastiness had just
happened in Victoria Park. To be safe, though, Hilda destroyed
Juliette's diary after taking a peek inside and realizing that
(38:50):
it was full of shall we say, incriminating evidence. Still,
another diary would doom Juliette. As Pauline waited in one
day detective's office, she found herself a piece of scrap paper,
and she started writing on it. She was loath to
miss a day without scribbling in her beloved journal. The
moiter had been successful, she wrote, but now she found
(39:13):
herself in an unexpected place. Anyone would think I'd been good,
she wrote, I've had a pleasant time with the police.
I am taking the blame for everything. As soon as
she finished writing, the detective who'd been watching her, grabbed
the paper and read it. One sentence stood out to him.
I am taking the blame for everything. The police went
(39:38):
to arrest Juliette at that, and Juliette quickly changed her
story and admitted that she was guilty too. As the
police worked on the case, they uncovered a little detail
about Pauline's parents. They had never actually been married. This
meant that the most shocking part of the whole affair
for Pauline wasn't the fact that her mother was dead
(39:58):
or that she was now under a r No, it
was the news that her real last name wasn't Reaper,
it was Parker. Her real name was Pauline Parker. She
was absolutely dumbfounded to hear that. As far as the
whole Moider situation, hey, at least Juliette was there. The
girls gossiped to each other in their cell and sassily
(40:21):
asked the guards for tea. At trial, the girl's lawyers
did their best to argue that the girls had been
insane at the time of the murder. They were lost
in a fogli adieux, haunted by paranoia, strung out on
delusions of grandeur. One of the psychiatrists who interviewed them
and tried to argue that they were insane found the
(40:42):
girls unbearably arrogant in person. He wasn't going to let
all his feelings be known at trial, of course, but
my god, those girls were really insufferable. They were pleased
that they'd murdered Nora. He found. There's nothing in death,
juliet told him. After all, she wasn't a very happy
woman the day we killed her. I think she knew
(41:05):
beforehand what was going to happen and didn't seem to
bear any grudge. One day, after these sorts of gruesome interviews,
that psychiatrist went to his friend's house, asked for a
huge glass of whiskey, and told his friend that he'd
never encountered such pure evil as he had in those
two girls. Juliette's father wasn't at the trial, he'd left town,
(41:30):
abandoning his daughter as per usual, saying that he needed
to start a new job in England, and taking Juliette's
brother with him. Hilda did go to the trial, and
she sat next to her lover every day, which made
people gossip wildly. In court, the girls whispered to each
other and were sometimes a scene giggling. They watched the
(41:50):
various witnesses with what one journalist described as contemptuous amusement.
The prosecutor argued that the murder was intentional. On the
the girls were clearly sane. It was a coldly, callously
planned and premeditated murder, he said, committed by two highly intelligent,
but precocious and dirty minded little girls. A pathologist tested
(42:14):
about just how horrific Nora's wounds had been. She had
forty five external injuries, and most of them were very serious.
He said, some of them went all the way down
to the bone. The girls had done a good job
of murder. During the prosecutor's closing statement, Juliette put her
fingers in her ears. The jury deliberated for two hours
(42:38):
and twelve minutes, and Juliette had a faint smile on
her face when they walked back into the courtroom, but
after she looked closely at their expressions, her smile vanished. Guilty,
said the fore man. The girls were sentenced to be
held in prison until quote her Majesty's pleasure, that is, indefinitely,
(42:58):
and punishment of punishments. They were sent to different prisons.
After the trial was over, Hilda scrambled out of New Zealand,
never mind that her daughter was locked up. Hilda had
places to go, people to see. Anyway, Juliet was refusing
to talk to her. She told the press that what
Juliet had needed most was love, care, attention, and affection,
(43:23):
and then she grabbed her lover and skipped town. People
may have thought Hilda was pretty much the worst mother ever,
but most of the public's hatred was reserved for the girls. Sure,
there were a few people who were sympathetic to them,
and others who desperately wanted to date them, but most
people thought that the girls were unbearable, cold, arrogant, delusional,
(43:44):
and unrepentant. One of the people who couldn't stand them
was a policewoman who once heard Juliette whisper to Pauline
the old girl took a bit more killing than we thought.
Another was one of their psychiatrists, who later wrote a
paper about them. They mattered intensely to each other, and
no one else in the world mattered at all or
(44:05):
was worthy of any consideration. He wrote. It was supremely
important to them that they should not be separated, perhaps
more important than life itself, and certainly more important than
anyone else's life. In prison, the girls weren't allowed to
(44:38):
write to each other, even though they were hundreds of
miles apart. Now they maintained their delusional sense of superiority
to the rest of the world. Juliet studied Italian and
read poetry. Pauline cut murder stories out of magazines and
refused to work, telling a staff member, I am a
special case here. They were fa better than the other
(45:01):
women behind bars. They thought everyone else was in there
for petty, embarrassing crimes like solicitation. They were there for
the greatest, the most magnificent crime of all, murder. One
thing did break through Juliette's icy exterior, though Her dad
had married again, and he sent her a letter telling
(45:22):
her that. And his letter was so cold and callous
that prison authorities intercepted it, sent it back to him
and told him to try it again, this time with feeling.
Juliet was shocked by the news. Her entire life had
been a series of unpleasant surprises from her parents, and
this was just one more reason for her to feel
(45:43):
separate from them, abandoned by them. She was halfway across
the world from them, doing time, and they were embarking
on romances. Neither Juliet nor Pauline ended up doing a
lot of time, though. In November of nineteen fifty nine,
five and a half years into their sentences, they were
secretly released. They were given new names, and they went
(46:06):
their separate ways as authorities kept the press in the
dark for another month or so. For years, there was
a rumor circulating that they had been released on one
condition that they could never talk again, But this wasn't true.
They could have talked to each other the day they
got out of prison. They could have immediately found each other,
(46:27):
hugged each other, moved to Hollywood together, but they didn't.
They stayed away from each other like repelling magnetic fields.
Juliette moved back to England to be close to her family,
and then she eventually made her way to Hollywood alone,
where she worked odd jobs and became a Mormon. In
her spare time, she continued writing novels. Pauline became Roman Catholic,
(46:53):
tried to become a nun, then went to library school
and worked as a librarian. Her father never forgave her.
The rest of his life was miserable. People pointed at
him wherever he went and whispered, there goes the man
whose daughter killed his wife. But time moved on and
the world kept turning, and both of the girls eventually
(47:15):
and successfully vanished into their new lives. Most people around
them had no idea who they'd been, what they'd done.
(47:43):
Of course, plenty of writers and journalists were still very
interested in the story of the Parker Whom Murder, as
it came to be called. You couldn't deny that it
was a juicy one. Two teenage girls form an intense
homoerotic bond that results in fantasy worlds and grandiose delay,
and then they end up killing one of their mothers. Wow.
(48:03):
Novelists wrote novels about it, playwrights wrote plays about it.
Hollywood came sniffing around the story, and so it was
inevitable that journalists would join the fray too and start
to wonder, well, where are the girls now. In nineteen
ninety four, a journalist finally tracked down Juliette. What he
(48:24):
found was extraordinary. She was living in England under the
name Anne Perry, and she was an extremely successful murder
mystery writer. She had sold so many books that she
was able to buy herself a mansion in the English countryside,
which she decorated in the Italian style. There she employed
(48:46):
two part time secretaries, an assistant, a housekeeper, and three gardeners.
She filled her best selling books with grisly homicides and
with musings on the nature of good versus evil. In
many of her books, murder is depicted as something not good,
but something that passionate people do. People who care, boring, weak,
(49:11):
pathetic people don't murder. They don't have it in them.
Juliet always said that being discovered as Anne Perry was
a nightmare, but it was great for her book sales.
She started giving interview after interview, and in each one
she rewrote the past so that it became a bit
more flattering. She claimed that she had become extremely remorseful
(49:36):
for her crime in prison, but no one who knew
her in prison remembered any sign of remorse. She said
that she had been on heavy medication for tuberculosis at
the time of the crime, medication that altered her mood.
This was not true either. She said that Pauline had
been so unhealthy before the murder, so under the thrall
(49:58):
of her eating disorder. She Juliette worried that Pauline might
kill herself or just straight up die if Juliette didn't
support her in every single way, So of course she
had to join her on the day of the murder.
She was really just being a good friend. In two
thousand and six, she told The Daily Mail that she
never thought about the murder or about Nora. She was
(50:22):
somebody I barely knew, she said. There's a documentary about
her life, and in it, one of her friends says
that Juliette doesn't talk much about her childhood. She doesn't
believe she had a childhood. Now that Juliette was discovered,
someone had to figure out what had happened to Pauline.
(50:44):
If it was shocking to discover that juliet was a
rich and famous author, it was equally shocking to discover
that Pauline had become a total recluse. She was living
in a tiny English village under the name Hillary Nathan,
as close to being a nun as one could be
without actually being a nun. She was very religious and
spent most of her time alone. She had worked as
(51:06):
a teacher and then retired, and now she ran a
riding academy for girls. But when she wasn't doing that,
she retreated back into her life of solitude and prayer.
After her identity was discovered, she moved to remote Scotland
and tried to regain her anonymity. Every now and then
a journalist would come knocking at her door. She reacted
(51:27):
to them with absolute rage. Pauline has never given an
interview and probably never will. Juliette won't stop talking, it seems,
in interview after interview. Juliette has always insisted that she
has nothing to say to Pauline, that she never dwells
on the past. Does Pauline have things to say to
(51:51):
Juliet though? Does she dwell on the past. After she
moved from England to Scotland, people got the chance to
peek inside her English house and they saw that Pauline
had painted a huge mural on one of her bedroom walls.
The mural was full of little scenes featuring two girls,
(52:13):
one with blonde hair, one with dark hair. The girls
are wearing theater masks, and the blonde girl is usually smiling,
while the dark haired girl looks troubled, grief stricken, agonized.
In one section of the mural, the blonde girl sits
on a winged horse about to fly away, as the
(52:36):
dark haired girl clings desperately to the horse's leg, trying
to keep them on the earth. In another section, two
girls are growing like flowers from the same green stalk
as a huge axe comes down from the sky and
splits them in half. Perhaps the most haunting image is
the one of the two girls surrounded by flames. Maybe
(53:00):
they're rising out of the fire like the phoenix rising
from the ashes. But maybe, and this seems more likely
given Pauline's Catholicism, maybe it's the fires of hell and
they're burning up in it. And if you look closer
at the girls' theater mask faces, you'll see the scariest part.
(53:23):
As they burn, they're looking at each other and they're smiling.
(53:51):
The end my dear now traumatized listeners, run, don't walk
to Instagram dot com slash criminal broads to see photos
of the You know you want to inspect it and
psychoanalyze it and tell me all your thoughts at criminal
broads atmail dot com. Thank you so much for listening
for your support. As always, if you'd like to support
(54:12):
the podcast, leaving a review is wonderful. Becoming a patron
at patreon dot com slash criminal Brods is also wonderful.
And supporting the sponsors like Calm. You might not think
it has anything to do with me, but it actually
really helps the podcast. If you support the sponsors, it's
all wonderful. Or just keep on being your lovely selves
and I'll meet you here next week. Until then, have
(54:33):
a good one. Bye bye. Maybe I'm wrong, Maybe I'm
wrong loving you do my guide. If it's a crime,
then I'm guilty, guilty, loving
Is it a sin? Is it a crime?
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Loving you dear like I do.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
If it's a crime, then I'm guilty, guilty of loving you. Hello, everyone,
Welcome to another episode of Criminal Broads, a podcast about
wild women on the wrong side of the law. You
guys were doing a famous case today, you know, sometimes
(00:33):
every now and then we do a hashtag famous case
and then we plunge back into the waters of the
more obscure. While we're on the peak. We're on the
iceberg of the famous today, wobbling and hoping the global
warming doesn't melt us. Who will we make it through?
I think we will. Before I tell you a little
bit more about this case, I have a Sister anecdote
(00:53):
to read. Please keep trickling in as people listen to
our Sister series, which we did during the month of June,
and I asked for anecdotes about the spooky, supernatural, beautiful, amazing,
spiritual whatever it is bond between sisters, and I keep
getting great anecdotes. If you're a Okay, if you're listening
to this and you're doing your PhD in like the
(01:14):
folklore or psychology or something, maybe you should do your
dissertation on psychic sisters. Just an idea, okay. This is
an anecdote from Monique that she says it's okay to share.
She says, I lost my eldest sister, Sue to cancer
on February twenty ninth, twenty twenty. We come from a
(01:35):
large family. My sisters, Sue, Louise, and I were always
very close. I'm the youngest of the family and was
called Nicki as a child. As I got older, all
my siblings called me by my given name of Monique,
except for my sister Louise. She has continued to call
me Nicki. My siblings and I made it in time
to say goodbye to Sue before she passed. We were
(01:56):
all coming from different parts of the country. My eldest
brother and his wife made it just in time the
night Sue died. At one point, the hospital staff asked
us to leave the room temporarily while they made Sue
a little bit more comfortable. When everyone went back into
the room after the nurse was done, I decided to
sit out in the waiting room to gather my thoughts.
I heard my sister in law walk by, and I
(02:17):
just closed my eyes because honestly, I didn't want to
talk to anyone at that time. Then, as clear as day,
I heard someone say NICKI now I know it wasn't
my sister in law because she never called me by
my nickname. I was sure it was Louise who called me.
So I went back into Sue's room to see what
Louise wanted. She said she had not called me. So
(02:39):
I went and sat beside Sue's bed to tell her
that Louise was bugging me. Yeah, we are adults in
our fifties and sixties, but we still act like kids.
I took hold of Sue's hand and she took one, two,
three breaths, and she passed away. I am convinced Sue
called me by my nickname because I would think it
was Louise calling me. Sue knew I would respond immediately
(03:00):
to that. Sisters are remarkable. So that's a magical, beautiful
anecdote from Monique. Thank you so much for sending that
to me and saying I could share it with everyone. Okay,
so back to this case. This has been an a
very popular reader request for ages. I like clockwork, someone
(03:23):
will write in asking me to do this case. So
this is for all of you. This is for all
of you who have requested it, and all of you
are fascinated by this case. I didn't want to do
it at first because I was deeply scarred by the
movie Heavenly Creatures, because I didn't know what I was
getting into when I watched it, so I just thought
it was a movie about friendship. So it troubled me.
(03:44):
It very much troubled me. When we got to the
scene in the park, which you'll all know about in
about forty five minutes. Anyway, finally I couldn't resist it anymore.
The people had spoken, we're going to do this case,
so I hope I add some things to it that
you haven't heard before. If you're familiar with it, listen
all the way to the end, because oo, the note
I end on is one of the most haunting anecdotes
(04:06):
I have ever come across in my research. All right, everyone,
we're going to New Zealand in the nineteen fifties and
things are gonna get weird. Let's go. Pauline and Juliet
(04:34):
were the best of friends. They loved each other so
very much. They understood each other. They really understood each other,
and no one else did, not their schoolmates, not their teachers,
not their siblings, and certainly not their mothers. They were
both geniuses. They were incredible writers. They had the voices
(04:56):
of angels. They were going to be opera singers. There
were some one of the only people in the world
who had the capacity to see into the great beyond,
into what they called the fourth world. They were telepathic.
They were insane, and it was wonderful. It made them cool.
They were going to go to Hollywood and meet all
their favorite movie stars. They were going to kill Pauline's mother.
(05:22):
We have it worked out carefully and are both thrilled
by the idea, Pauline wrote in her diary. Naturally we
feel a trifle nervous, but the pleasure of anticipation is great.
(05:49):
Both girls lived a lonely life before they met each other,
and later, much later, when they were separated for good,
they'd lead lonely lives again. The loneliest live in the world,
some might say their respective lonelinesses started early. Juliet, whom
was born in nineteen thirty eight, a white British girl,
(06:11):
the privileged daughter of Henry and Hilda. Henry was a physicist,
a respected man with a PhD who would later work
on Britain's first nuclear bomb. Hilda was a cold, arrogant,
elegant sexpot, the sort of person who would gaze straight
past you at a party looking for someone more exciting
to talk to. Their daughter. Juliette was a sensitive child,
(06:34):
obsessed with fantasy worlds. She found it difficult to tear
herself away from her pretend games and return to real life.
She would much rather keep on being a fairy or
a queen. She was demanding, her mother said, although Hilda
didn't seem to have much patience for the work of
being a mother. When Juliette was five and a half,
her mom gave birth to her younger brother, and Juliette
(06:56):
resented the intrusion. By then, World War two was raging
and juliet had a nasty bout with pneumonia and bronchitis,
which was serious enough to be considered life threatening. So
Hilda sent Juliette away for her safety, for her health,
and maybe to get her out of Hilda's hair. It's
unclear where exactly juliet went. She may have spent some
(07:20):
time in Barbados. Hilda was vague about the whole thing.
She could never be trusted with the entire truth, especially
not when the truth made her look like a bad mother.
Juliet came back home bitter, feeling that she'd been abandoned
by her family, which she sort of had been. This
would not be the last time she would be separated
from her parents for months or even years, since juliet
(07:44):
was still in poor health and Hilda's health wasn't great either.
Henry Whom decided to take a job in New Zealand,
presumably to escape from England's gloomy weather. The family moved
there in the fall of nineteen forty eight, but Juliette
wasn't with them. She'd been sent there ahead of time,
like a package nobody cared all that much about, As
(08:04):
Hilda said later, like it was totally normal because of
Juliette's health. My husband and I had been apart from
her for thirteen months. Juliette was an excitable, difficult, temperamental kid,
and it was hard not to wonder if her parents
didn't mind being separated from her, if they liked life
better without Juliette in it. In New Zealand, the Whom
(08:27):
family didn't make the best impression. Locals found Hilda icy,
snobby and irritatingly superior about the fact that she was
from England and they weren't. Before long, Hilda was prowling
around looking for lovers. I have never seen a woman
so steaming, said one man who knew her. Henry wasn't
(08:48):
making a great impression either. At his new job as
the rector of Canterbury University College in christ Church. His
colleagues were starting to think he was a bit of
a well a spineless two face liar. But if appearances
meant anything, then the woms were doing great. They bought
a fancy house called Ilam and held parties full of
(09:08):
important guests. And Juliet. Sure, she was weird and spent
most of her time in dreamland, but she was elegant
and smart and lovely, and she spoke English with a
British accent. And everyone who knew her wanted to be
her friend. But Juliette didn't want to be anyone's friend.
She held herself aloof from her classmates at Christchurch Girls
(09:28):
High School, where she started in nineteen fifty two. As
one of her housekeepers said, Juliet could only love herself.
She seemed totally self sufficient, so everyone thought it was
weird when suddenly Juliete befriended a strange girl who was
angry and sarcastic. And if we're being totally frank from
(09:51):
the wrong side of the tracks, let's take a quick
(10:20):
break to hear from this episode's sponsor, Calm. Hi, everyone,
is anyone else really really stressed these days? Not that
there's anything to be stressed about. There has not been
a single thing wrong with this world for the past
year and a half. Right, We've all basically been emotionally
floating in a inner tube with a drink of choice
(10:42):
in our hand for the past eighteen months. Right, right,
We're fine. Everyone's fine anyway, If you sometimes are finding
that you're not fine, and if that is affecting how
you sleep, I got to tell you about Calm, the
number one mental wellness app, which will give you literal
tools that improve the way you feel well. Not literal tools,
(11:02):
not hammers and screwdrivers, but very intentional, useful tools that work.
Calm is an app that's full of guided daily meditations
and sleep stories that will send you to dreamland on
a freaking pillow of cotton candy and curated music tracks.
Really whatever you need for any time of day to
(11:24):
relax yourself. So if you're trying to fall back asleep
in the middle of the night, they have something for that.
If you're trying to take a nap, they have something
for that. I've used their sleep meditations and oh my gosh,
they just melt you into your mattress and you wake
up and you're like, what just happened. If you go
to Calm dot com slash Criminal Broads, you'll get a
limited time offer of forty percent off a Calm Premium subscription.
(11:46):
Yes for listeners of the show. Colm is offering a
special limited time promotion of forty percent off at Colm
dot com slash Criminal Brods. Go to clm dot com
slash Criminal Brods for forty percent off unlimited access to
calm entire library. You can be soothed. That's Calm dot
com slash Criminal Brads. Juliette's new friend her only friend,
(12:42):
was a girl named Pauline Reaper who liked to be
called paul She was sulky and obsessed with vengeance, and
she had wild, curly black hair. She was from a
working class background, unlike Juliette, and came from parents burdened
with their own problems. Her dad, Bert, had abandoned his
wife and two sons to run away with her mom, Honora,
(13:04):
who went by Nora. Nora was born into a wealthy
British family that had slid into poverty after her dad
went insane and died of what was probably syphilis. Nora
had four children, but one died at one day old
and another had mental problems and was sent to live
in an institution. Pauline had her health problems too. As
(13:25):
a child, she fell sick with something called osteomyelitis, inflammation
of the bone marrow in one of her legs. For
a while, it was unclear if she would make it.
She spent eight or nine months in the hospital and
it took three years for her leg to fully heal. Actually,
it never fully healed. She was left with a permanent
limp and her leg would still ache over a decade later.
(13:49):
On paper, Pauline and Juliette couldn't have been more different.
Juliette was tall and wealthy and beautiful, with perfect rich
girl bone structure and waves of small booth blonde hair
and long, elegant limbs. Pauline was short and stocky, and
working class, and appeared so grouchy in photos that it
could be hard to tell what she actually looked like.
(14:11):
In one photo of Pauline and some of her classmates,
all the other girls are smiling politely at the camera,
but Pauline is looking down at the ground, scowling. A
shadow falls over her face and you can't see her eyes.
Many many years later, Pauline would avoid photographs altogether. But
(14:31):
their differences were just on paper. The truth was that
the girls were surprisingly similar. Both had suffered from long,
lonely childhood illnesses, and in fact that's what led them
to bond. Initially, because of their medical history, the girls
weren't allowed to participate in sports or gem and so
in school they sat on the sidelines for hours, talking
and dreaming. Both of them had difficult relationships with their mothers.
(14:55):
Juliette felt abandoned by hers, while Pauline and Nora Joe
didn't get along most of the time. Nora would fly
into rages and scream at Pauline and then try to
make it up to her with little presence. In return,
Pauline was so rude to her mom that one of
her classmates remembers being shocked by it. But now juliet
(15:16):
and Pauline had found each other, they weren't alone anymore.
Pauline thought Juliette was pretty much the most gorgeous, elegant,
sophisticated creature of all time, and Juliette loved having an
acolyte as passionate as Pauline. Later the popular narrative of
their friendship would be that Juliette made all the rules
(15:36):
and Pauline followed them, but in reality the girls were
much more equal than it seemed in those early days.
They were both feverishly creative, susceptible to the same sorts
of deranged ideas and wild dreams, and as far as
the girl's biggest and deadliest idea, that one came straight
from Pauline. Their friendship got into fast and the way
(16:01):
that friendships between teenage girls often do. They giggled compulsively
over inside jokes. They stayed up way too late talking.
They took off their shoes and danced wildly in the grass.
They gave each other nicknames like Nigel and Philip or
Gina and Deborah. They snuck out of their houses and
had midnight picnics with wines, stolen from Juliette's parents. They
(16:22):
fantasized about their favorite actors. They were total weirdos, like
so many of us were as teenagers. There's nothing wrong
with being a weirdo, or spinning around in the grass
or convincing yourself that your favorite Hollywood actor is definitely
going to marry you someday. But Juliet and Pauline took
the intensity and strangeness inherent in teen girl relationships and
(16:45):
turned it up to an eleven. Together, they convinced themselves
that they were the most amazing, clever, genius girls the
world had ever seen. They were destined for something special,
and because they were so amazing and genius and special,
whatever they did, it was going to be morally right.
(17:24):
Here's a poem that Pauline wrote about herself and Juliet,
The ones that I worship there are living among two
beautiful daughters of a man who possesses two beautiful daughters,
the most glorious beings in creation. They'd be the pride
and joy of any nation. You cannot know, nor try
(17:46):
to guess the sweet soothingness of their caress. The outstanding
genius of this pair is understood by few they are
so rare Compared with these two, every man is a fool.
The world is most honored that they should deign to
rule and above us, these goddesses reign on high. I
(18:06):
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. Both
sets of eyes, though different, far hold many mysteries, strange impassively,
they watch the race of man decay and change, Hatred
(18:26):
burning bright in the brown eyes, with enemies for fuel.
Icy scorn glitters in the gray eyes, contemptuous and cruel.
Why are men such fools? They will not realize the
wisdom that is hidden behind those strange eyes. And these
wonderful people are you and I a bit grandiose right?
(18:49):
Referring to themselves as goddesses, as heavenly creatures? Compared with
these two, every man is a fool. As the girl's
friendship progressed, they moved further and further into their own
little world, where they were the goddesses of creation and
everyone else just didn't matter. They wrote furiously, creating imaginary
(19:09):
empires called Berovnia and Volumnia, which they populated with murderers
and rapists. They loved evil characters in their fiction and
in the movies they obsessed over. Evil was bold, Evil
was glamorous. Evil was the only way to live. They
seemed to think, at the very least, evil was cool.
(19:30):
Though sometimes they changed their minds about evil and got
religious in a vaguely fanatical sort of way. One day
they convinced themselves that they'd seen into another land. They
had this vision while staring at the ocean. Pauline described
it rapturously in her diary. Today, Julia and I found
the key to the Fourth World. We realize now that
(19:52):
we have had it in our possession for about six months,
but we only realized it on the day of the
death of Christ.
Speaker 2 (19:58):
We saw a gateway through the clouds. We sat on
the edge of the path and looked down the hill
out over the bay. The island looked beautiful, the sea
was blue. Everything was full of peace and bliss. We
then realized we had the key. We now know that
we are not as geni as we thought. We have
an extra part of our brain which can appreciate the
fourth world. Only about ten people have it. When we die,
(20:20):
we will go to the fourth world. But meanwhile, on.
Speaker 1 (20:23):
Two days every year, we may use the key and
look into that beautiful world which we have been lucky
enough to be allowed to know of. On this day
of finding the key to the way through the clouds,
they were spending most of their time at Juliette's home.
After all, Juliette was the one with the good food
and the wine, and the mom who had long evening
gowns that the girls could dress up in. Pauline wouldn't
(20:45):
have complained if she could have magically woken up one
morning as part of the whom family she adored, going
over to their mansion Islam and spent the night as
often as she could. When the Homes invited her to
their summer cottage, she was in heaven should tell Hilda
that her own mother was cruel and would beat her,
and Hilda seemed to revel in Pauline's love and encourage
(21:07):
its strange intensity. Sometimes Hilda would say that she wished
Pauline was her daughter too. By now, the girls were
sneaking out as much as possible and sleeping very little,
preferring to stay up and write furiously. After one too
many of these late nights outdoors in the cold, Juliet
came down with a bad case of tuberculosis and was
(21:28):
sent to a sanatorium. Her parents thought this was the
perfect time to scramble off to London and then the
US on a work slash pleasure trip. After all, Juliet
had nurses looking after her. She didn't need her parents there,
and so Juliet recovered alone in the sanatorium for a
hundred and twelve days. The only person who was there
(21:48):
for her was Pauline. Pauline visited when she could and
wrote letters as often as humanly possible. It would be
wonderful if I could get tuberculosis too, she wrote in
her diary. Often the girls would send each other two letters,
one as themselves and one as one of their fictional characters,
like Prince Charles of Berovnia or Lancelot Trelawny of Volumnia.
(22:12):
Their characters lived lives that were overflowing with seduction, rape, suicide,
and violence, as though someone had boiled down Hollywood's pulpiest
films into a thick jelly. They murdered right and left indiscriminately,
and they romanticized murder as one of their characters. Wrote,
(22:33):
I would like to kill someone sometime because I think
it is an experience that is necessary to life. As
juliet recovered, Pauline didn't dedicate all her energy to her friend.
She was also busy with a quintessential teenage activity, trying
to get herself a boyfriend. Her family had been taking
(22:54):
in borders to make extra money, just another way that
Pauline's family was so embarrassingly in to the elegant whom family,
and she and one of these boarders kept trying to
sneak off and have sex. One night, her dad caught
them and the border was sent packing, but Pauline kept
sneaking off to see him until finally they were able
(23:14):
to consummate the act. She didn't like this guy as
much as she liked Juliet, but she liked him enough
to be furious at her mother when her mother forbade
her from ever seeing him again. Speaking of fury, when
Juliette finally got out of the sanatorium, she was especially
cold towards her parents. She was convinced that they had
(23:35):
abandoned her and that Pauline was the only person in
the world who loved her. The girl's friendship started to
get more and more intense, so intense that all four
of their parents began getting a bit concerned about where
exactly this friendship was going. Juliet never went back to
school since she was still recovering, and so she was
spending more and more time in her troubling fantasy worlds,
(23:57):
and Pauline was now struggling with an eating disorder was
dropping weight at an alarming pace. What was going on?
Thought their parents. Finally, Henry Hume suggested to Bert that
he should send Pauline to a doctor. The doctor declared
solemnly that the girls were under the spell of a
lesbian attachment, but that it wouldn't last. With the vague
(24:19):
worry of lesbianism hanging over their heads, the homes and
the Reapers tried weakly to keep the girls apart, but
it didn't work. If Nora ever told Pauline that she
couldn't visit Juliette, Pauline would fly into a frenzy once
she raged in her diary, why could not mother die?
Dozens of people are dying all the time, thousands, so
(24:42):
why not mother and father too? People would always speculate
about whether or not the girls were lovers there was
certainly a strong homo erotic component to their friendship, but
Juliette would later deny that she was a lesbian or
that the girls had been romantically involved regardless of their
(25:03):
particular sexual orientation, though it was impossible to deny that
the girls were getting more and more sexual in their fantasies.
They decided that they were going to be sex workers.
They took naked photos of each other, and they obsessed
over their favorite Hollywood actors. They called these actors the Saints,
and they worshiped them. Their favorite actors were James Mason
(25:24):
and Guy Rolf. These two were the gods known as
Him and His. Their other favorite actors were Saints, and
they gave them all nicknames like he, It, This, That,
and who. They started making plans to travel to Hollywood,
where they would become famous writers and rub elbows with
(25:46):
everyone from Him to It, and they came up with
a new game. During their sleepovers, they'd act out how
each one of the Saints would make love. This kept
them awake for hours. They'd only get an hour or
two of sleep, and then they'd wake up and go
about their morning just a little bit more divorced from
(26:09):
reality than they had been the day before. The girls
weren't the only ones whose minds were full of sex.
(26:29):
Hilda had taken a lover. She even had him move
into a flat on the grounds of Islam. Years later,
the family gardener would say that once he was called
over to look at a clogged drain by the flat,
and he discovered that the source of the clog was
a whole lot of condoms. It didn't take the girls
(26:50):
long to suspect that Hilda was having an affair. They
could see how she and her lover acted around each other.
This was perfect, the girls thought to themselves. All they
had to do was catch the two of them in
the act and then blackmail them for money, which they
would then use to fund their trip to Hollywood. There
was instability in both families in those days, and it
(27:11):
was emerging more and more. Juliette's dad was in trouble
at work, and his colleagues were trying to get him
out of there. In Pauline's house, tensions were high between
Pauline and her mother because Nora had promised Pauline that
if her behavior improved, she would be allowed to see
that guy again, the border whom Pauline slept with, and
(27:31):
so Pauline tried really hard to improve herself. But one day,
when Pauline secretly talked to her lover, she found out
that her mom had called him and forbidden the two
of them from ever seeing each other again. This was
a betrayal, Pauline thought, just another reason to think her
life would be a lot better without her mom. As
(27:53):
the girls schemed about their mothers blackmailing them, freeing themselves
from them, running away to Hollyod without them, the girls'
families were counting down the days until this strange and
codependent friendship would be over for good. It was going
to be over because the entire Home family was leaving
the country. Henry and Hilda had quite the bombshell to
(28:15):
drop on their daughter. They were getting divorced, Henry was
quitting his job, and they were all moving back to England, well,
everyone except Juliette. That is. They were sending juliet to
South Africa for her health quote unquote and to separate
her from Pauline. And though they never said this, but
their behavior consistently demonstrated it, to separate her from themselves.
(28:42):
The girls were shocked at this news. What was going
to become of their schemes, their dreams, their plans. One
thing was certain. They refused to be separated. We sink
or swim together, Pauline wrote in her diary. They started
discussing their options. Clearly, if Juliette was being sent to
(29:03):
South Africa, Pauline would have to go too. The Whom
parents allowed Pauline to think that this was a possibility
in a sort of HM, sure, dear, we'll definitely pay
for your ticket kind of way. But Pauline took all
of this very, very seriously. Before long, she had convinced
herself that the only reason she wouldn't be able to
go to South Africa with Juliette was her mother. Her
(29:25):
mother wouldn't let her go. Now, this part was certainly true.
There was no way Nora would have let Pauline go
to South Africa with Juliette. But the whom parents definitely
wouldn't have let the girls travel together either. They were
just trying to placate the girls by implying that, oh, yes,
you two will totally be on the same ship to
South Africa. If Juliette's parents hadn't been so cowardly If
(29:51):
they had openly said no, Pauline, You're not coming with us,
then maybe this story would have a very different ending.
But instead, Pauline put the entire responsibility for her unhappiness
on her mother's overburdened shoulders. Anger against my mother boiled
up inside me, as it is she who is one
of the main obstacles in my path, she wrote in
(30:13):
her diary. Suddenly a means of ridding myself of this
obstacle occurred to me. If she were to die dot
dot dot, the death should seem natural or accidental, she mused.
She broached the idea to Juliette. Juliette was skeptical, but
did not, as Pauline wrote, disagree violently. The girls were
(30:38):
going farther and farther off the rails. In those days,
they were smack in the middle of their teenage years.
Pauline was sixteen, Juliette was fifteen, and now they were
dreaming about wiping out the entire world. They made a
list of people to kill that added new saints to
their pantheon, with nicknames like her Yours Mine, which either
(31:00):
one neither other. Rico Hollander, Elsa Mora, Christopher Robin and
Hugo did. They started shoplifting. They convinced themselves that they
were telepathic. Then they decided that they were certifiably insane.
We realized why we have such extraordinary telepathy, and why
people look at us the way they do, and why
(31:21):
we behave as we do, Pauline wrote, It is because
we are mad. We are both stark, raving mad, there
is no doubt about it, and we are thrilled by
the thought. They were sleeping less and less obsessed with
the Saints and the game in which they acted out
the Saints' sex lives. We have now learned the piece
(31:41):
of the thing called bliss, the joy of the thing
called sin, Pauline wrote. They talked of murder. They called
it moiter moider as a fun little inside joke, but
the idea of the moiter itself was no joke. They
had it all planned out. They'd take Nora for a
(32:02):
walk in the park and bash her over the head
with something and then claim that she'd fallen off the path.
And then one day the girls decided to put this
idea into action. Come for a walk with us, mommy,
Pauline said. Nora agreed, delighted at the chance to bond
with her difficult daughter. The night before their walk, Pauline
(32:27):
wrote in her diary, I feel very keyed up, as
though I were planning a surprise party. Mother has fallen
in with everything beautiful, and the happy event is to
take place tomorrow afternoon. So next time I write in
this diary mother will be dead. How odd yet how pleasing. Grouchy, sullen, difficult.
(33:05):
Pauline could not have been more lovely. On June twenty second,
nineteen fifty four, the day of her mother's death, she
woke up and pulled out her diary right away. The
day of the happy event, she scribbled, I'm writing a
little of this up. On the morning before the death,
I felt very excited, and the night before Christmas ish
(33:26):
last night, I did not have pleasant dreams, though I
am about to rise in the house. Pauline was a
veritable ray of sunshine, sweet to her parents, charming to
her sister. It was a wonderful way for everyone to
start the day at the humehouse. Juliette was also being
a little ray of sunshine. She chirped goodbye to her
(33:49):
mother and left with a spring in her step and
half of a brick in her purse. When she got
to Pauline's house, the girls prepared the murder weapon. They
slipped it into one of Pauline's stockings and nodded the
stockings so that the brick wouldn't fall out if anyone should,
you know, swing it around, and then, with the brick
now in Pauline's purse, the two girls set off with Nora.
(34:12):
She took them to a little tea shop right near
Victoria Park, where they nibbled on buns and cake. Then
they set off into the sunny afternoon. What was Nora
thinking as she walked along. She must have been feeling relieved.
She and her daughter were finally getting along with each other.
Tea and cakes and a lovely walk in the park
(34:34):
with her beloved child. Yes, Victoria Park was rather wild
and lonely, and yes, she and Pauline had their differences,
but maybe this was the start of a new era
for them. Maybe Nora and her daughter could finally become close,
especially since juliet was about to vanish from their lives.
(34:55):
Thank God. Yes, it seems very likely that as Nora
walked along through the trees, she was happy. Juliette was
walking ahead of them, just like the girls had planned.
When no one was looking, she dropped something in the path,
a little pink stone that she'd removed from a piece
(35:16):
of jewelry earlier. She called Nora to come over and
look at the delightful little stone. Dutifully, Nora walked towards
her and bent down to exclaim over the pink stone,
and behind her, Norah's own daughter slipped the brick out
of her purse, held it high, and brought it crashing
(35:38):
down on the back of her mother's head. The girls
had thought that murder would be easy. They thought it
would take one blow, bam, one blow, and Nora would
fall to the ground dead, and they'd tell everyone that
she slipped and they'd move on with their lives. But
(35:59):
death wasn't that simple. They hadn't counted on how badly
people want to live. Nora fought back, fought back against
her daughter, trying to block the blows with her hand,
but the blows kept coming so many that the tip
of her finger was almost completely severed. Eventually she fell
(36:22):
to the ground. There, Juliette took her turn with the brick,
then Pauline took the brick again, and Juliette grabbed Nora's
throat and held her against the dirt as Pauline hit
her mother over and over. Nora wasn't quiet, she was moaning, gurgling.
(36:43):
There was blood everywhere, oozing from her head, dripping down
the path. Eventually, the girls just left her there, still gurgling,
and ran back up to the tea shop. They were
splattered in blood and breathing hard. Has been hurt, Pauline yelled,
it's mommy, she's terribly hurt. She's dead. She's covered with blood,
(37:07):
yelled Juliette, Please somebody help. Juliette was nearly hysterical and
Pauline was white faced. But when the kind tea shop
lady helped them clean up, juliet said, oh dear, isn't
she nice? And the two girls started giggling uncontrollably. The
kind tea shop lady thought that was kind of strange,
(37:27):
but of course the poor DearS were in shock. When
she asked the girls what had happened, Pauline explained that
her mother had fallen and bumped her head multiple times.
At that, Juliette broke in, don't think about it, she said,
it's only a dream, we'll wake up soon. At first,
(38:07):
Pauline took the blame happily. Juliet had quote unquote confessed
to detectives that she'd been farther down the path when
the accident happened and had come rushing back only to
find Pauline cradling her mother's bloody head, and she really
had no idea what had happened. Pauline willingly supported Juliette's
story of innocence. Oh, yes, she said, Juliette hadn't been there. Yes,
(38:29):
she Pauline had hit her mother with the brick, But
juliet hadn't been there at all, and that was the
important part. Hilda was delighted when she realized that Pauline
would take the entire blame for whatever nastiness had just
happened in Victoria Park. To be safe, though, Hilda destroyed
Juliette's diary after taking a peek inside and realizing that
(38:50):
it was full of shall we say, incriminating evidence. Still,
another diary would doom Juliette. As Pauline waited in one
day detective's office, she found herself a piece of scrap paper,
and she started writing on it. She was loath to
miss a day without scribbling in her beloved journal. The
moiter had been successful, she wrote, but now she found
(39:13):
herself in an unexpected place. Anyone would think I'd been good,
she wrote, I've had a pleasant time with the police.
I am taking the blame for everything. As soon as
she finished writing, the detective who'd been watching her, grabbed
the paper and read it. One sentence stood out to him.
I am taking the blame for everything. The police went
(39:38):
to arrest Juliette at that, and Juliette quickly changed her
story and admitted that she was guilty too. As the
police worked on the case, they uncovered a little detail
about Pauline's parents. They had never actually been married. This
meant that the most shocking part of the whole affair
for Pauline wasn't the fact that her mother was dead
(39:58):
or that she was now under a r No, it
was the news that her real last name wasn't Reaper,
it was Parker. Her real name was Pauline Parker. She
was absolutely dumbfounded to hear that. As far as the
whole Moider situation, hey, at least Juliette was there. The
girls gossiped to each other in their cell and sassily
(40:21):
asked the guards for tea. At trial, the girl's lawyers
did their best to argue that the girls had been
insane at the time of the murder. They were lost
in a fogli adieux, haunted by paranoia, strung out on
delusions of grandeur. One of the psychiatrists who interviewed them
and tried to argue that they were insane found the
(40:42):
girls unbearably arrogant in person. He wasn't going to let
all his feelings be known at trial, of course, but
my god, those girls were really insufferable. They were pleased
that they'd murdered Nora. He found. There's nothing in death,
juliet told him. After all, she wasn't a very happy
woman the day we killed her. I think she knew
(41:05):
beforehand what was going to happen and didn't seem to
bear any grudge. One day, after these sorts of gruesome interviews,
that psychiatrist went to his friend's house, asked for a
huge glass of whiskey, and told his friend that he'd
never encountered such pure evil as he had in those
two girls. Juliette's father wasn't at the trial, he'd left town,
(41:30):
abandoning his daughter as per usual, saying that he needed
to start a new job in England, and taking Juliette's
brother with him. Hilda did go to the trial, and
she sat next to her lover every day, which made
people gossip wildly. In court, the girls whispered to each
other and were sometimes a scene giggling. They watched the
(41:50):
various witnesses with what one journalist described as contemptuous amusement.
The prosecutor argued that the murder was intentional. On the
the girls were clearly sane. It was a coldly, callously
planned and premeditated murder, he said, committed by two highly intelligent,
but precocious and dirty minded little girls. A pathologist tested
(42:14):
about just how horrific Nora's wounds had been. She had
forty five external injuries, and most of them were very serious.
He said, some of them went all the way down
to the bone. The girls had done a good job
of murder. During the prosecutor's closing statement, Juliette put her
fingers in her ears. The jury deliberated for two hours
(42:38):
and twelve minutes, and Juliette had a faint smile on
her face when they walked back into the courtroom, but
after she looked closely at their expressions, her smile vanished. Guilty,
said the fore man. The girls were sentenced to be
held in prison until quote her Majesty's pleasure, that is, indefinitely,
(42:58):
and punishment of punishments. They were sent to different prisons.
After the trial was over, Hilda scrambled out of New Zealand,
never mind that her daughter was locked up. Hilda had
places to go, people to see. Anyway, Juliet was refusing
to talk to her. She told the press that what
Juliet had needed most was love, care, attention, and affection,
(43:23):
and then she grabbed her lover and skipped town. People
may have thought Hilda was pretty much the worst mother ever,
but most of the public's hatred was reserved for the girls. Sure,
there were a few people who were sympathetic to them,
and others who desperately wanted to date them, but most
people thought that the girls were unbearable, cold, arrogant, delusional,
(43:44):
and unrepentant. One of the people who couldn't stand them
was a policewoman who once heard Juliette whisper to Pauline
the old girl took a bit more killing than we thought.
Another was one of their psychiatrists, who later wrote a
paper about them. They mattered intensely to each other, and
no one else in the world mattered at all or
(44:05):
was worthy of any consideration. He wrote. It was supremely
important to them that they should not be separated, perhaps
more important than life itself, and certainly more important than
anyone else's life. In prison, the girls weren't allowed to
(44:38):
write to each other, even though they were hundreds of
miles apart. Now they maintained their delusional sense of superiority
to the rest of the world. Juliet studied Italian and
read poetry. Pauline cut murder stories out of magazines and
refused to work, telling a staff member, I am a
special case here. They were fa better than the other
(45:01):
women behind bars. They thought everyone else was in there
for petty, embarrassing crimes like solicitation. They were there for
the greatest, the most magnificent crime of all, murder. One
thing did break through Juliette's icy exterior, though Her dad
had married again, and he sent her a letter telling
(45:22):
her that. And his letter was so cold and callous
that prison authorities intercepted it, sent it back to him
and told him to try it again, this time with feeling.
Juliet was shocked by the news. Her entire life had
been a series of unpleasant surprises from her parents, and
this was just one more reason for her to feel
(45:43):
separate from them, abandoned by them. She was halfway across
the world from them, doing time, and they were embarking
on romances. Neither Juliet nor Pauline ended up doing a
lot of time, though. In November of nineteen fifty nine,
five and a half years into their sentences, they were
secretly released. They were given new names, and they went
(46:06):
their separate ways as authorities kept the press in the
dark for another month or so. For years, there was
a rumor circulating that they had been released on one
condition that they could never talk again, But this wasn't true.
They could have talked to each other the day they
got out of prison. They could have immediately found each other,
(46:27):
hugged each other, moved to Hollywood together, but they didn't.
They stayed away from each other like repelling magnetic fields.
Juliette moved back to England to be close to her family,
and then she eventually made her way to Hollywood alone,
where she worked odd jobs and became a Mormon. In
her spare time, she continued writing novels. Pauline became Roman Catholic,
(46:53):
tried to become a nun, then went to library school
and worked as a librarian. Her father never forgave her.
The rest of his life was miserable. People pointed at
him wherever he went and whispered, there goes the man
whose daughter killed his wife. But time moved on and
the world kept turning, and both of the girls eventually
(47:15):
and successfully vanished into their new lives. Most people around
them had no idea who they'd been, what they'd done.
(47:43):
Of course, plenty of writers and journalists were still very
interested in the story of the Parker Whom Murder, as
it came to be called. You couldn't deny that it
was a juicy one. Two teenage girls form an intense
homoerotic bond that results in fantasy worlds and grandiose delay,
and then they end up killing one of their mothers. Wow.
(48:03):
Novelists wrote novels about it, playwrights wrote plays about it.
Hollywood came sniffing around the story, and so it was
inevitable that journalists would join the fray too and start
to wonder, well, where are the girls now. In nineteen
ninety four, a journalist finally tracked down Juliette. What he
(48:24):
found was extraordinary. She was living in England under the
name Anne Perry, and she was an extremely successful murder
mystery writer. She had sold so many books that she
was able to buy herself a mansion in the English countryside,
which she decorated in the Italian style. There she employed
(48:46):
two part time secretaries, an assistant, a housekeeper, and three gardeners.
She filled her best selling books with grisly homicides and
with musings on the nature of good versus evil. In
many of her books, murder is depicted as something not good,
but something that passionate people do. People who care, boring, weak,
(49:11):
pathetic people don't murder. They don't have it in them.
Juliet always said that being discovered as Anne Perry was
a nightmare, but it was great for her book sales.
She started giving interview after interview, and in each one
she rewrote the past so that it became a bit
more flattering. She claimed that she had become extremely remorseful
(49:36):
for her crime in prison, but no one who knew
her in prison remembered any sign of remorse. She said
that she had been on heavy medication for tuberculosis at
the time of the crime, medication that altered her mood.
This was not true either. She said that Pauline had
been so unhealthy before the murder, so under the thrall
(49:58):
of her eating disorder. She Juliette worried that Pauline might
kill herself or just straight up die if Juliette didn't
support her in every single way, So of course she
had to join her on the day of the murder.
She was really just being a good friend. In two
thousand and six, she told The Daily Mail that she
never thought about the murder or about Nora. She was
(50:22):
somebody I barely knew, she said. There's a documentary about
her life, and in it, one of her friends says
that Juliette doesn't talk much about her childhood. She doesn't
believe she had a childhood. Now that Juliette was discovered,
someone had to figure out what had happened to Pauline.
(50:44):
If it was shocking to discover that juliet was a
rich and famous author, it was equally shocking to discover
that Pauline had become a total recluse. She was living
in a tiny English village under the name Hillary Nathan,
as close to being a nun as one could be
without actually being a nun. She was very religious and
spent most of her time alone. She had worked as
(51:06):
a teacher and then retired, and now she ran a
riding academy for girls. But when she wasn't doing that,
she retreated back into her life of solitude and prayer.
After her identity was discovered, she moved to remote Scotland
and tried to regain her anonymity. Every now and then
a journalist would come knocking at her door. She reacted
(51:27):
to them with absolute rage. Pauline has never given an
interview and probably never will. Juliette won't stop talking, it seems,
in interview after interview. Juliette has always insisted that she
has nothing to say to Pauline, that she never dwells
on the past. Does Pauline have things to say to
(51:51):
Juliet though? Does she dwell on the past. After she
moved from England to Scotland, people got the chance to
peek inside her English house and they saw that Pauline
had painted a huge mural on one of her bedroom walls.
The mural was full of little scenes featuring two girls,
(52:13):
one with blonde hair, one with dark hair. The girls
are wearing theater masks, and the blonde girl is usually smiling,
while the dark haired girl looks troubled, grief stricken, agonized.
In one section of the mural, the blonde girl sits
on a winged horse about to fly away, as the
(52:36):
dark haired girl clings desperately to the horse's leg, trying
to keep them on the earth. In another section, two
girls are growing like flowers from the same green stalk
as a huge axe comes down from the sky and
splits them in half. Perhaps the most haunting image is
the one of the two girls surrounded by flames. Maybe
(53:00):
they're rising out of the fire like the phoenix rising
from the ashes. But maybe, and this seems more likely
given Pauline's Catholicism, maybe it's the fires of hell and
they're burning up in it. And if you look closer
at the girls' theater mask faces, you'll see the scariest part.
(53:23):
As they burn, they're looking at each other and they're smiling.
(53:51):
The end my dear now traumatized listeners, run, don't walk
to Instagram dot com slash criminal broads to see photos
of the You know you want to inspect it and
psychoanalyze it and tell me all your thoughts at criminal
broads atmail dot com. Thank you so much for listening
for your support. As always, if you'd like to support
(54:12):
the podcast, leaving a review is wonderful. Becoming a patron
at patreon dot com slash criminal Brods is also wonderful.
And supporting the sponsors like Calm. You might not think
it has anything to do with me, but it actually
really helps the podcast. If you support the sponsors, it's
all wonderful. Or just keep on being your lovely selves
and I'll meet you here next week. Until then, have
(54:33):
a good one. Bye bye. Maybe I'm wrong, Maybe I'm
wrong loving you do my guide. If it's a crime,
then I'm guilty, guilty, loving
Popular Podcasts
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Are You A Charlotte?
In 1997, actress Kristin Davis’ life was forever changed when she took on the role of Charlotte York in Sex and the City. As we watched Carrie, Samantha, Miranda and Charlotte navigate relationships in NYC, the show helped push once unacceptable conversation topics out of the shadows and altered the narrative around women and sex. We all saw ourselves in them as they searched for fulfillment in life, sex and friendships. Now, Kristin Davis wants to connect with you, the fans, and share untold stories and all the behind the scenes. Together, with Kristin and special guests, what will begin with Sex and the City will evolve into talks about themes that are still so relevant today. "Are you a Charlotte?" is much more than just rewatching this beloved show, it brings the past and the present together as we talk with heart, humor and of course some optimism.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.