In 1954, in the conservative city of Christchurch, New Zealand, two teenage girls—16-year-old Pauline Parker and 15-year-old Juliet Hulme—committed one of the country’s most notorious crimes by brutally murdering Pauline’s mother, Honorah Rieper, in Victoria Park. Bound by an intense, obsessive friendship forged in shared illnesses and elaborate fantasies, the pair had created a fictional “Fourth World” of saints and eternal youth, viewing Honorah as an obstacle to their inseparable future when Juliet’s family planned to leave New Zealand. On June 22, after tea at a park kiosk, they lured the unsuspecting woman into the woods and bludgeoned her to death with a brick wrapped in a stocking, delivering 45 blows in a frenzied attack. Their diaries, seized by police, revealed meticulous planning and delusional justifications, leading to a sensational trial that captivated the nation, diagnosed them with “folie à deux” (shared psychosis), and convicted them of murder—though spared the gallows due to their youth. Sentenced to indefinite detention, they were released in 1959 under new identities; Juliet reinvented herself as crime novelist Anne Perry, who died in 2023, while Pauline lived reclusively. The case sparked moral panics over juvenile delinquency and homosexuality, inspiring Peter Jackson’s 1994 film Heavenly Creatures and enduring as a chilling study of adolescent obsession and unchecked fantasy.

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