One of the killers behind one of New Zealand's most infamous murders has died in the Scottish Orkney islands.
Pauline Parker was 16 years old when she and her friend Juliet Hulme beat Parker's mother to death in a park in Christchurch, in 1954, before being convicted and spending five years in women's prisons.
The Orcadian newspaper reported that Parker was 88 when she died in retirement housing in the town of Kirkwall this month, where she had been living under the name of Hilary Nathan.
Author Peter Graham wrote a book about the case, published in 2011, and has told RNZ Pauline was known as Pauline Rieper when she was in school and the girls met.
"The Rieper family... her father Bert Rieper was the manager of a fish shop in Colombo Street, and her mother worked as a secretary, and the family home which was a dilapidated house in Gloucester Street, was run as a boarding house."
Parker had been hospitalised for a couple of years as a child with the serious disease osteomyelitis and still bore the scars, Graham said, and she was "something of a misfit" in school.
After speaking with various former classmates of the girls, he believed they formed their close bond initially as Hulme, who had weak lungs from childhood illness, and Parker were both allowed to sit out from sport together, and shared a love of fiction and imaginary worlds.
The plan to kill Parker's mother, who she had a fractious relationship with, came about after the girls' parents moved to put distance between them. Their defence argued their preoccupation with the imaginary had led them to construct their own sense of morality - which put their understanding of what they did to Parker's mother in a different light, Graham said. However the argument was not successful.
They served five years in different prisons, and their release included conditions that they live under new identities, Graham said.
Both remained fiercely private, even once their identities were discovered in their later lives.
Some UK media have reported Parker worked at a stable in the Orkney Islands, before retiring.
Juliet Hulme became best-selling crime writer Anne Perry, and died in 2023, aged 84.
The killing of Parker's mother, Honorah Parker (known as Honorah Rieper), inspired the Peter Jackson film Heavenly Creatures in 1994, staring Kate Winslet, Melanie Lynskey and Sarah Peirse.
