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

WHEN THE ‘CORPUS JURIS’ MEETS A CORPUS DELICTI: The appearance

and representation of Law's violence as purveyed in the Hulme-Parker trial

[1954] and narrated in Peter Jackson's Heavenly Creatures [1994].

Bruce Harding
[In] th’Antipodes of England.

The people there are contrary to us,

As thus: here, heaven be prais’d, the magistrates

Govern the people; there the people rule

The magistrates.
(Richard Brome, The Antipodes [London, 1640], Act 1, sc.3)

The tragic killing, in 1954, of a New Zealand woman by her daughter and that daughter’s well-connected friend has been immortalized in the 1994 film Heavenly Creatures (screenplay by Fran Walsh and Peter Jackson) which was itself inspired by a 1991 non-fiction study (Parker & Hulme: A Lesbian View). In fact that book had first led to Michelanne Forster’s commissioned play Daughters of Heaven (1992), and the case, which was linked at trial to the 1924 Leopold-Loeb murder[1] , had received even earlier treatment in the form of a chapter in Tom Gurr and H.H. Cox’s Famous Australasian Crimes (1957) and in their 1958 novel Obsession (which was clearly inspired by Meyer Levin’s novel Compulsion [New York: Simon & Schuster, 1956] which dealt with Leopold and Loeb).[2] These background details are important inasmuch as the core thematic of Heavenly Creatures is a bold filmic re-statement of the defence argument in the Hulme-Parker trial that both girls suffered from shared exogenous paranoia and communicated insanity when they ‘bricked’ poor Honora Parker to death in Christchurch’s Victoria Park on Tuesday 22 June 1954.[3]

Although Peter Jackson elided the legal process and any representation of matters of arrest, confession and trial from Heavenly Creatures, his Silver Lion Award-winning (1994 Venice Film Festival) movie constitutes a little-appreciated act of cinematic rebellion, a recursion to and radical re-thinking of the judicial management of that deeply troubling case. In short, the argument I shall pursue in this paper is that Jackson and Walsh’s screenplay proffered a revisionist cinematic reconstruction of the whole Hulme-Parker affaire (in both senses of that term) in order to challenge the judicial handling and guilty verdict of the all-male jury in this matter. To underwrite this claim, some reasonably detailed discussion of the state of criminal law and operational jurisprudence in New Zealand at the time of Pauline Parker and Juliet Hulme’s Supreme Court trial in August 1954 is in order.