Pauline Parker, who with her friend Juliet Hulme killed her mother in a Christchurch park in 1954, has died in Orkney at the age of 88, RNZ reports, citing The Orcadian newspaper. She died this month in retirement housing in Kirkwall, where she had lived under the name Hilary Nathan.
Parker was 16 when the two girls beat Honorah Parker to death in one of New Zealand's most notorious murder cases. Both served five years in separate prisons and were released on condition that they take new identities.
Hulme later became the best-selling crime novelist Anne Perry and died in 2023. The case inspired Peter Jackson's 1994 film Heavenly Creatures. Author Peter Graham, who wrote a book on the killing, told RNZ that both women remained intensely private after their identities became known.
Source: RNZ