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When Anne Perry published the first of her 60 novels, all noir crime literature, she already knew what it is to kill a human being, she knew prison inside and had shed her skin aboard an identity chosen to escape her past in New Zealand (her native country). He didn't want to go back, or talk about who he was, or give clues about what happened the day he blew up three lives. Three lives: hers, that of her friend Pauline Parker and that of Honorah Rieper (Pauline's mother), to whom Perry crushed the head of 20 barks in a shady corner of Victoria Park, in the city of Christchurch.

The story of these three women is vulgar and splendid (in unequal proportion) until the day when the two teenagers decide to simplify the trauma of their separation without knowing that it was bulging. It starts like this: Anne Parker was still called Juliet Marion Hulme, daughter of the president of the University of Canterbury in New Zealand and a marriage counselor mother busy hiding her relationship with Walter Perry.

In the spring of 1954, Anne/Juliet's parents announced that they would leave New Zealand to settle in South Africa, where she had lived a few years earlier with her maternal uncles to treat the tuberculosis that was causing her childhood. Returning to South Africa meant leaving Pauline behind. Young Juliet senses the apocalypse. Where will she go without her best friend? How is life possible without being together? They were 15 and 16 years old and traveled aboard an obsessive, tremendous, complicit and disturbed relationship, between songs by tenor Mario Lanza, Orson Welles films and fairy books. They inhabited a world of their own where they already tried the first pseudonyms: Gina and Deborah.

Convinced that they should not separate, they tried to convince Pauline's mother to travel to South Africa as well. The refusal swept their spirits and they decided to take revenge. They planned the assassination of Honorah Rieper with foolish rigor, investing in the action and in the alibi a useless time, because everything went backwards. And for years it was the most recurrent topic of conversation in New Zealand.

With the corpse at her feet, Pauline screamed out of the park for help. "My mother fell apart! My mother fell apart!" When the police arrived they found the victim disfigured and a few meters away the murder weapon. Within minutes the case was solved. Pauline hurriedly confessed exculpating Anne/Juliet, but in the police search at the parents' home they found the teenager's diary, where she had pinned down the preparations for the murder. They were sentenced to five years' imprisonment in separate prisons. Anne/Juliet got out of jail a little early and shot out to England, where her mother and lover were. She studied, worked as a flight attendant, became a Mormon, began writing detective novels, moved to a town in Scotland, Portmahomack, changed her name to Anne Perry and made a place in literature successfully.

Life went smoothly. Everything in order. The past remained hidden under a thick layer of oblivion. But in 1979 a young New Zealand director, Peter Jackson (later made The Lord of the Rings, King Kong, The Hobbit, The Beatles: Get Back) chose his story of a young assassin to adapt it to the cinema. After a few investigations he discovered that behind that triumphant writer was hiding the teenager who years ago burst the skull of her best friend's mother with a solid brick.

The crime writer Anne Perry.Begoña Rivas

Finding Pauline was harder. He remained under surveillance in New Zealand until 1980. Then it vanished. She entered a Catholic convent and years later appeared because of the clues she was giving to the librarian of a town in the southeast of Great Britain. He had changed his name. She now existed as Hilary Nathan. She lived alone. He cared for horses and gave riding lessons. She was a voracious reader. The most consistent user of the county library. The two fled, each in their own way, thousands of kilometers from the country to end up residing less than 10 hours away by car, on another island. No one knows if they saw each other again. Pauline never talked about it. Anne Perry only referred to it when journalists annoyed her, to defend herself by arguing that she had already served her sentence.

Jackson's film is titled Heavenly Creatures. The premiere was in 1994. The relationship was strange, fraught with domination and delusions. Journalists threw the cape on homosexuality to wind up an excessive story. No one knows if they met again. Anne Perry sold more than 25 million copies of her books. Some of his novels were exactly best sellers: The Fires of Highgate Rise, A Dark Sea or The Crimes of Cater Street. He made two characters with a lot of magnet for his detective and mystery sagas: William Monk and Charlotte and Thomas Pitt. She died in Los Angeles last April: millionaire, discovered, alone. Pauline (Hilary Nathan) lives.

"I don't plan to write about the crime I committed. What we committed. Enough has been said. And more than 60 years have passed. It wouldn't make any sense," Perry told this newspaper in 2015. Of the murders that cross the pages written by the writer, none resembles the one she committed. Those of his fictions are more sophisticated. The extreme fantasy of killing she tested in real life, as a teenager, against her best friend's mother. The rest of his biography is a precise combination of resistance, camouflage and writing.

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