On a midwinter afternoon in 1954, three people had tea in a kiosk above this park and then walked down into the bush. The woman was Honora Parker, 45. Her daughter Pauline, 16, walked at her side with a slight limp. Some yards ahead, fifteen-year-old Juliet Hulme, the daughter of the rector of Canterbury University College, carried a handful of coloured pebbles she had been collecting from the roadside for days.
The girls had not chosen this path by accident. For weeks they had been planning to kill Honora, and they had planned the outing carefully. Pauline had suddenly turned sweet on her mother, helping with the housework, so that when she asked for a farewell trip to the Port Hills, Honora, delighted by the change, readily agreed. The plan was to lure her to a secluded, steep part of the hillside, strike her on the head, and make it look like a fall.
Juliet rounded a bend in the track, out of sight of the Parkers, and scattered the pebbles. When Honora caught sight of a pink one and bent to pick it up, Pauline pulled the half-brick, fitted into the foot of an old stocking, from her coat pocket, and swung. Juliet came sprinting back and took the brick and hit her too. Doctors later counted forty-five wounds to Honora's head and face.
Why her own mother? Because Juliet's parents were divorcing and Juliet was being sent to South Africa, and the girls, certain they were geniuses bound for America to sell the novels they wrote together in their private "Fourth World", had been refused by every adult. "Anger against Mother boiling inside me as she is the main obstacle in my path," Pauline had written in April. In June, under the heading "The Day of the Happy Event," she noted that the pair would use "a brick in a stocking rather than a sandbag," and that she felt "keyed up as if I was planning a surprise party."
When the diary was found in Pauline's bedroom, the case was over. "I killed my mother," she told police. "Had made up my mind to do it some days before. I don't know how many times I hit her; a great many, I imagine." The girls ran back to the kiosk covered in blood, gasping that Mummy had fallen. While help was fetched, they washed at the sink; the kiosk owner heard them laughing.
Both were convicted, too young for the death penalty, and served five years apart, forbidden to contact each other again. One became the crime novelist Anne Perry. The other vanished under a new name. Peter Jackson's film _Heavenly Creatures_, which took its title from Pauline's own diary poem about "two such heavenly creatures," and shot its murder scene on a track much like the one you are standing on, launched Kate Winslet and brought the story back to the world forty years on.
The kiosk is long gone. The track is still here, quiet, under its tall pines. Somewhere along it, a woman bent down once for a pretty stone, and never stood up again.