The Real Heavenly Creatures Inside The Parker - Hulme Murder

The Teen Killers Who Shocked New Zealand

- Judy Kean

This month marks 65 years since two distressed and bloodcovered teenage girls ran out of a wooded area in Christchurch’s Victoria Park, crying for help.

The couple who owned the tea kiosk in the park recognised them; they’d left the tearooms just a few minutes earlier after eating there with an older woman.

One of the girls wailed, “Please help us, Mummy is hurt, covered in blood,” so Agnes Ritchie took them inside the kiosk while her husband Kenneth, thinking the woman had suffered a fall, headed off down the path they’d just come from, to see if there was anything he could do.

A few minutes later and about 130 metres down the path, he found the battered body of Honorah Rieper (45). Her severe injuries suggested that this was no accident. The police were called and they discovered half a brick in a bloodied stocking thrown under some nearby trees.

So began the investigation into a case that has gone down as one of the most intriguing in New Zealand’s criminal history and that is still a subject of fascination all these years later.

Known as the Parker-Hulme murder, the case shocked the nation because perpetrators Pauline Parker and Juliet Hulme were teenage girls, and the victim was Pauline’s mother. It was June 1954 and this kind of thing just didn’t happen in New Zealand.

“The city of Christchurch is reeling,” wrote a commentator. “Teenage girls don’t go around murdering their mothers.”

Honorah’s daughter Pauline (16) was the first one taken away for questioning (at the time, both mother and daughter used the surname Rieper, but when it was realised that Honorah wasn’t married to her partner, Herbert Rieper, the courts used the legal surname of Parker for both the victim and the accused).