When the ‘corpus juris’ meets a corpus delicti: The appearance
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- The Gothic Castle of Law and “Legal Lust” : A Rush to Judgment
- He was so shocked that tears were rolling down his face during cross-examination….Convinced that the two girls were evil, he strove to have them locked away for as long as possible.[
- Conclusion: “Tragic if not Ridiculous”
In fact, there were significant differences between the two cases. First, Leopold and Loeb came from similar social, economic and cultural backgrounds and had known each other since they were young children. They were both Jewish, and their victim was chosen at random from a group of Jewish children. There was no immediate or overt threat to the continuation of their relationship at the time they decided to kill someone. Juliet and Pauline were from different social and economic backgrounds and their victim was a close family member, killed for specific reasons. [124] The Gothic Castle of Law and “Legal Lust” : A Rush to Judgment? Many modern scholars, anxious to decenter law, are exploring judicial anxiety over homosexuality in the context of law deploying an unthinkable ‘homogenital’ body in a dominant discourse which has institutionalized heterosexuality as the norm (hetero-normativity). How truly, for instance, Peter J. Hutchings writes of Blackstone’s “Gothic castle of law” – that the criminal law is haunted and inflected by the spiritual (Judeo-Christian theology) such that this spectral element of religious legality has become the real subject of secular Western law via the codification of a historically contingent morality in canon law. [125] This concept has been described as “the predominantly scriptural tradition of modern law”, one which has striven to deny its own “unwritten history of legal affections and repressions as they motivate both judgment and law” – viz., the “fantasmatic structure of the normative enterprise of legality”, in the pithy phrasing of Peter Goodrich and David Gray Carlson.[126] In this paradigm the human body stands before the law as guilty (i.e. as the subject and object of legal lust). In Mieke Bal’s phrase, the body is “the site of lust and the trap of legal lust.”[127]] The Hulme-Parker case is doubtless an exemplum of Pierre Legendre’s notion (as Anton Schutz has it) of “legal history, conceived as a history of reference to the unconscious”[128] , and of his scholarly ‘excavations’ of “a legal theatre of legal cruelty” which exposes “the unexpected, but incomparably intense, psychoanalytic weight or undercurrent from which legal matters cannot be detached or abstracted.”[129 ] From the privileged standpoint of almost fifty years on from the trial it becomes possible to make several observations about the conduct of that event. As the homicide was not technically a ‘sex-crime’, the Crown Prosecutor’s use (read ‘abuse’) of the girls’ presumed lesbianism as a prejudicial weapon against Hulme and Parker (= as a potent emblem of moral evil) was, from an ideal concept of due legal process, a most unfortunate tactic and one which usefully played upon the then very recent Hutt Valley Elbe Milk Bar Gang sex scandal, in which about 59 adolescents (‘milkbar cowboys’) in the stultifying new town of Lower Hutt had been caught engaging in sexual misconduct, at various times, in darkened movie theatres and on the banks of the Hutt River. This shocking outbreak of adolescent hormones led to the New Zealand Parliament establishing, on 20 July 1954, a Special Committee on Moral Delinquency in Children and Adolescents (The Mazengarb Committee, so named because it was chaired by Dr O.C. Mazengarb, QC of Wellington), a matter of days after the committal proceedings for Hulme and Parker. ( It was , incidentally, an election year.) The Committee commenced its evidencial hearings on 3 August and suspended them for the period covering the Hulme-Parker trial (the Committee took the overnight ferry to attend two days of the trial in Christchurch), reconvening on 30 August (the Monday on which Adams J should have put the jury out ) ,by which time the fate of indefinite imprisonment for Juliet and Pauline was published nationally and internationally.[130] Michael Stace (whose father ,Nigel, served on the Committee) undertook a doctoral study of this matter and pointed out that “The Report was concerned with adolescent sexual morality”[131] and concluded his thesis noting that “the criminal legal form is presently more intertwined with social management and the pragmatic accomplishment of social order than with the reaffirmation of fundamental values” and that such management is often effected “through the morality attaching to sexuality.”[132] The Hulme-Parker trial occurred in this regrettable atmosphere of intense moral fervour and Glyn Strange argues that it was this case which pushed Crown Prosecutor Alan Brown (1897-1961) on to severe mental illness which “completely changed his personality and ruined his career.”[133] A cheerful, positive man, Alan Brown recalls the fictional Indian barrister Sir Darius Xerxes Cama , described by Salman Rushdie as “a staunch Cantabrigian rationalist and an eminent barrister-at-law” who had dedicated his life “to what he called, in an intentionally oxymoronic flash of wit, ‘the miracle of reason’.” [134] Alas, the miracle of reason proved elusive and difficult to master in this case, and Hulme-Parker came up in Alan Brown’s first year as Crown Prosecutor, so that this man of Apollonian reason was faced with the blatantly Dionysian girls. Glyn Strange has noted that Brown “found it difficult to distance himself “ from this spectacular and stressful trial – as the father of two daughters “he could scarcely believe what he was hearing”: He was so shocked that tears were rolling down his face during cross-examination….Convinced that the two girls were evil, he strove to have them locked away for as long as possible.[135] Strange adds that Brown palpably suffered from the accumulated stress of past overwork and that “an inherent instability may have contributed, but there is little doubt that it was this case that precipitated his illness”, for after the trial, “Brown’s mental health collapsed.”[136] As tragic as all this undoubtedly was, it also underlines just how provisional and fallible the administration of justice can become. Had Adams J not so clearly backed up the Crown Prosecutor the defence might have been emboldened to have presented a more nuanced insanity defence (given that the obligation upon the accused in this is only to a standard of ‘on the balance of probabilities’) and with the Australian case-law previously cited. Off-setting the advantage to the accused of this low threshold standard, however, in cases raising specialized defences such as insanity the Crown are granted the privilege of speaking last to the jury (e.g. in being able to call specialist medical evidence in final rebuttal) which places the defence at a distinct disadvantage not typical in many standard murder trials. In addition the defence were doubtless unlucky to have struck F.B. Adams, a patriarchal puritan, rather chauvinist and a man very much stuck in his time, almost certainly reacting with renewed repugnance to the defence’s insistence on the girls’ sexual ‘deviance’. In addition, the folie simultanee concept was almost certainly viewed with deep suspicion – being a relatively new concept of insanity in this neo-colonialist jurisdiction, it would have seemed like new-fangled psycho-babble, especially when the defendants appeared outwardly ‘normal’ in the courtroom. Finally, Adams J’s decision to hold the conclusion of the trial on Saturday August 28 would have even been rather unusual in 1954, calling into question his case-management and prompting the image of pushing jurors to ‘rush to judgment’ on the same day as a major provincial rugby fixture in their city. (The jurors sat for 2 hours 13 minutes and a number of them plus some counsel were seen at Lancaster Park to watch this game.) Such an apparently pressured verdict would certainly lead today’s Court of Appeal to over-turn the verdict and order a re-trial. [137] * * * *
Nigel Andrews insightfully described Heavenly Creatures as “about panic in New Zealand’s answer to Metroland” generating the death-blow which was really “aimed at grown-up totems and taboos.”[138] In the words of Gurr and Cox, “the crime of the Murdering Girls struck Christchurch with cataclysmic force”.[139] Gurr and Cox’s rhetoric is revealing of then-current attitudes, being produced three years after the trial. Their chapter on the case is redolent with sneaking prejudice with regard to factors presumed relevant to the girls’ quasi-madness: it is noted that the Rieper-Parker menage produced a blue baby with a heart defect and “a mongoloid, a flat-faced, drooling imbecile, who had been placed in an institution”, and Juliet is described as having been “bomb-shocked in the blitz at the age of two.”[140] Other film critics have explored how Heavenly Creatures partakes to some extent in purveying the girls’ dizzying madness: Chris Watson has drawn attention to the ‘hysterisation’ of Juliet and Pauline’s behaviour in the film, noting Jackson’s recurrent use of “a swirling camera technique to suggest the transports of hysteria” which they undergo, and counterpointed “by incorporating romantic opera music.”[141] Watson shares Nicholas Reid’s belief that Heavenly Creatures pruriently constructs the girls as lesbians, arguing that the film concentrates “on the characters’ sexual behaviour as catalyst for, and cause of the murder”[142], possibly including Hilda Hulme’s liaison with Bill Perry as a criminogenic factor. Jackson has been criticized for his use of mock-Gothic/serio-comic fantasy episodes (e.g. Diello executing Dr Bennett and the Anglican Vicar when visiting the Cashmere Sanitorium, and the scene in which Pauline’s parents die very mock-dramatically at their dining table) and for the richly-fantastic clay-mation Borovnian scenes which punctuate the film at several critical junctures. This criticism seems to me seriously misguided if we can view Heavenly Creatures as a broadly naturalistic exercise in exploring the Gothic imagination, so that the latter narrative pericopes stress Juliet and Pauline’s Fourth World envisionings, and the other sequences serve also as filmic alienation devices deployed to emphasize to cinemagoers just how intense and febrile their fantasies were. Such viewer alienation-awareness commenced towards the end of the Easter 1953 Port Levy episode after Juliet learned that her parents were about to abandon her again for four months. Juliet runs off hysterically up a nearby hill and when Pauline locates her crying friend there is lightning followed by bursts of bright sunshine and then a Monty Pythonesque cloud-parting (cf. Monty Python and the Quest for the Holy Grail [1975]) which is succeeded by the wholesale transformation of the quotidian Banks Peninsula landscape into a humanized Northern Hemisphere world of English lawns, garden statuary, formal flower beds, a grazing unicorn and several fantastically large Monarch butterflies arching and swooping around them. This visually impossible moment – which unfolds as the girls cling together in their dowdy print-smocks and 50s cardies – is Peter Jackson’s very potent means of informing and instructing viewers that Pauline and Juliet are henceforth in the grip of a folie à deux/simultanee mindset. After this clever sequence, Jackson piles on an impressive array of images which amount to an adroit handling of their shared imaginal world (e.g. the dissolve between Juliet and Pauline standing on the Ilam balcony and their digital transformation into plasticine figures holding Borovnian goblets, or in the visual linkage made between the ring and the fantasy execution of John the boarder on the Borovnian drawbridge and that of the pink stone and the real and very untidy execution of Honora in Victoria Park on the Cashmere Hills). Another vivid instance of the slippage (or loose boundaries) between a heightened and darkly romantic imagination and reality emerges when Bill Perry arrives at Ilam, via the clever juxtaposition (through quick dissolves) of Juliet’s fantasy of a terminally ill man on an ambulance stretcher with the boring ordinariness of the hearty man’s real arrival in a stylish car. Expressly Gothic tropes are employed, one might wickedly suggest in an ironic counterpoint to the gothic nature of the impending arrest and trial process (e.g. the night of storm and thunder when Dr Hulme visits Mrs Rieper and the flash of lightning which plays across Henry Hulme’s face as he nervously adverts to Pauline’s “unwholesome attachment” to his daughter). Jackson proffers a deeply sensitive portrayal of the girls’ joint trauma, their excitability and despair, as in the scenes when they run at high pitch from a screening of The Third Man and are later shown bathing, tearfully discussing how Pauline can join Juliet in South Africa, or when Jackson cross-cuts between Pauline’s monochrome dream of ecstatically running onto an ocean liner with Juliet to join the Hulmes and Juliet’s powerful singing of Puccini’s ‘Sono Andati’(La Bohème) on the balcony at Ilam in images tinted with a rich red hue (powerfully suggestive both of their attachment and of the blood about to be spilled to secure it). Both of these linked events occur on the night of 21 June 1954 , their last night of innocence and freedom before they succumbed, with infinitely tragic results, to acting on their joint compulsion psychosis the next day. As Colin Wilson has pointed out, a study of most crimes gives the impression that the ‘values’ that led the murderer to make his act of choice were based upon absurd miscalculation. The murderer is usually absurdly confused about the pressures of life in society, about the meaning of his own life and in general. He is probably more confused than most of us; but it should be recognized that he only suffers from a more acute form of the bewilderment that we all feel in the face of existence.[143] It should be obvious from the foregoing that Heavenly Creatures is a bold and brave cinematic incursion into the realms of existential psychology (with its finessed probing into the pathos of life for Juliet Hulme and Pauline Parker from 1952-54) and a robust interrogation of the meta-narratives of Western parenthood and filiation as well as a superb cinematic evocation of Wilson’s profound point that the M’Naghten Rules take insufficient cognisance of human mental complexity – that if we broaden our perceptions to admit our “total ignorance” of human nature, the line blurs so that this ignorance “does not constitute insanity; but insanity is only an extreme and distorted form of this ignorance.”[144] Jackson depicts Hulme and Parker as daughters of wrath whose orgè , or loss of self-command, led to the painful and joint lesson that parenthood casts an irredeemable spell upon its offspring. But, beyond his film’s extraordinarily empathic presentation of Pauline Parker and Juliet Hulme’s shared existential dilemma in 1954, it was Jackson’s genius to have elided the legal process from his moving portrait, thereby maintaining our focus upon the girls’ (and Mrs Parker’s) tragic plight, which serves ,radically, to query the conduct, field assumptions and outcome of the legal process which they underwent. But, perhaps most usefully, Heavenly Creatures highlights, and implicitly indicts, the unsettling counter-violence of that legal system and what Peter Goodrich has termed “the indicative silence of the legal text as to its role as discourse, as intervention into the order of discourse and the hierarchy of social meanings”[145] which it upholds. In Dr Medlicott’s all-too-adequate words, “Comments [about the trial] from throughout New Zealand and overseas almost unanimously found the normalising of two very abnormal girls tragic if not ridiculous.” [146] ENDNOTES:
10. R.W. Medlicott, ‘The Parker-Hulme, Leopold-Loeb Cases and the Concept of Omnipotence’, New Zealand Law Journal, Vol.37:22 (5 December 1961), 345-348 at 345. Dr Medlicott added “I was satisfied that in the period leading to the crime and immediately following it they were disturbed in mood, activity and thought patterns to a degree consistent only with the diagnosis of psychosis. Their psychoses were identical and the term folie-a-deux applicable”. Medlicott wrote of the duo in terms of “persistent, organised delusions, the preservation of clear and orderly thinking, and absence of hallucinations” (ibid., 346). Cf. Thomas S. Satz, Psychiatric Justice (New York: Macmillan, 1965) and Jay Kat, Joseph Goldstein & Alan M. Dershowitz, Psychoanalysis, Psychiatry and the Law (New York: The Free Press, 1967). 11.Sayre, ‘Mens Rea’, 998-99 & 1000. 12.C.S. Kenny, Outlines of Criminal Law ( Cambridge & London: CUP; 12th ed. 1926), pp.42-43.
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