When the ‘corpus juris’ meets a corpus delicti: The appearance

As soon as I started to strike my mother I regretted it, but could not stop then (Parker).

After the first blow was struck I knew it would be necessary to kill her. I was terrified and hysterical (Hulme). [71]
In a case which received tabloid treatment (‘Gym Tunic Murderesses’; ‘Teen Passion Flares’; ‘Juliet and Pauline Are Both Crackers’) it is important to revisit the state of mind of the girls (aged 15 and 16), at least as one of them has tried honestly to reconstruct it. The historical crime novelist Anne Perry [72] (the former Juliet Hulme) has recalled that her friend Pauline was effectively bulimic and suicidal at the time of the Hulme family’s impending departure from New Zealand (early July 1954). Perry recalls of Pauline:
She was literally wasting away. I was afraid that she was seriously ill to the point where she might not survive. I believed at the time that her survival depended on her coming with us….I don’t want in any way to implicate or blame her….But she wished me to join her in this act and I believed that if I did not she would take her own life. I sincerely believed that her life was in the balance. Crazy as this sounds, I thought it was one life or the other. I just couldn’t face the thought of being responsible for her dying. And I made a very foolish choice. [73]
Perry adds that at this time she was being treated for a chest ailment (after full hospitalization for T.B. at the Cashmere Sanitorium) and was receiving respiratory drugs which have since been withdrawn due to the side-effect of tending to warp patients’ judgement.
Peter Jackson applied the clichéd term ‘fatal attraction’ to the girls and that is certainly how film reviewers have treated their friendship. However, film critic Nicholas Reid detected prurience in the film; arguing that “Jackson seems to be challenging us to be as shocked by the lesbian element as New Zealand was 40 years ago.” Reid’s concern was that Creatures consists of “dementia served up as entertainment” and, worse, that Jackson and Walsh “completely identify with the girls’ viewpoint”. [74] Jackson has confirmed the lapsarian intentionality of Creatures – that it is a “murder story about love, a murder story with no villains”, the story of an exhilarating friendship between two very imaginative teenage girls. He claimed, upon the film’s release, that it was time for Hulme and Parker to be viewed as human beings and not as ogres who blackened the reputation of their school and city.[75]
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