Anne Perry is some sort of writer, who's books I'm not familiar with.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Perry

What I am familiar with is the Peter Jackson movie Heavenly Creatures. This movie, based on a true story, is about 2 girls who murder the mother of one of the girls. This happened in New Zealand in 1954.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parker–Hulme_murder_case
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavenly_Creatures

One of those girls was Anne Perry, who was known as Juliet Hulme at the time.

What does this have to do with Mormonism?

Well, supposedly, Anne Perry converted to Mormonism in 1968. This, I only found out yesterday. (I was trying to remember which of the girls became a famous writer.)

I was always told that anyone who ever committed murder could not be baptized. So much for discernment.

I don't know if she's still a cult member, but here's an article from the Ensign, dated January 1984.

https://www.lds.org/ensign/1984/01/anne-perry-lds-british-novelist-with-a-commitment-to-morality?lang=eng

I know without a doubt that I asked every person I interviewed for baptism the specific question: "Have you ever committed murder?"

-- In California at that time we then went into describing what we meant by "murder" exactly which included abortion which was a very VERY big issue in California at that time (not surprisingly we NEVER gave the "abortion" addition to the questioning to MALES). Those who said yes to abortion ended our interview right their and we had to set up an appointment with the Stake President. I knew of some that ceases interest in the church immediately because of shame and others who saw a SP and went ahead with the baptism quickly, others fell out of interest after the SP interview.

I very much think Anne Perry didn't go through ANY of that because she held her secret identity close to her chest till much later in life when it was revealed by a journalist. Soooooo .... she lied obviously.

What galled me the most was -- even after the movie AND all the press she got over the "revelation" of her past -- the LDS church still held her up (both the Ensign article you mention and the cover story of her "faithfulness" in the Church News.

Get this -- I MURDERER who makes a living writing about grisly murder mysteries (fully repentant??? I would think NOT).

While I do not judge her for her sexual orientation -- if you study her life I think you'll find that while she was a "good example" of prosperous righteous mormonism -- she was co-habitating with her lover of the same sex -- I do find her disgusting on the point of her promoting herself within mormonism -- and successfully so -- even when her life was a hypocracy of "mormon standards"

She sounds similar to another Mormon sociopath who whacked his brother, and then his wife, and is serving life (was a former bishop and MD living his bold-faced lies in Pleasant Grove, Utah,) Martin MacNeill. May they both rot in hell.

What I'd like to know is how this Anne Perry pseudonym of a person managed to avoid prison time? Duping Mormons seems to be a past time of sociopath personalities - look how these people gravitate to this religion (starting with Joe Smith himself.)

Ted Bundy, serial killer, joined the Mormon church in 1974, just as he began his killing spree where he raped and murdered at least 100 women cross country - including Salt Lake City in his wake.

She & her accomplice did 5 years in prison. & I'm not even sure it was real prison or a juvenile facility. But it was only 5 years.

I don't think the authorities in 1954 New Zealand knew what to do with 2 teenage girls who'd murdered someone. They were found to me mentally competent. So it had nothing to do with mental insanity.

She served her time -- as a juvenile.

She changed her name after serving time.

She became an author of murder mysteries -- very successful.

Mormonism snarfed her up and baptized her with her new identity.

Much later her identity was exposed.

TSCC still continued to market this tithing-worthy member (well after disclosure by the press).

I have read on another board that she had (has?) amnesia for the murder and circumstances surrounding it.

I wouldn't be surprised, given some of the quirkiness of her writing. And the name-change.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 07/07/2015 08:16PM by me.

The poster boy for murderer to mormon, Eldgidge Cleaver was trotted out as the convert of the century in the 80s. He was the grand marshall or featured speaker or something along those lines at the Provo Freedom Festival when I lived there. Turns out mormonism was just another stop on his never-ending list of churches who thought they had turned a former Black Panther to God. Maybe you'd have to be a child of the 60s to even remember who he was, but he was on the lamb for years after the shootout in San Francisco.

i found out who he was when I was in high school, from my TBM mother. I was going to do a paper on Angela Davis, because I disagree with her politically on a number of points. I thought it would be an interesting project.

Well, my TBM mother flipped out, & said I should do a paper on Cleaver. Being that I was already a secret unbeliever, I was mortified.

I ended up doing my paper on something entirely different. What, I can't even remember all these years later.

Last thing I heard was about 5 years ago and she was still an active member, living in a remote part of the UK.

I knew a very TBM Margaret Hulme who wrote childrens books. She was from California. Wonder if there's a relationship there? I'm not sure she's still alive.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/07/2015 05:50PM by madalice.

Was she English?

Juliet/Anne is a Brit who moved to NZ as a teenager.

In chez moi we have every Anne Perry book ever written because DW loves her, particularly because she's LDS. Some years ago when I told her the story that Anne Perry had helped murder a woman when she was a teen, she wouldn't believe me. In a story I once read about her, it said that the Mormons had to seek special instruction from SLC in order to get her baptised. I think the fact that she had been charged and imprisoned as a minor is what allowed them to baptise her. Back then, even the US charged minors as minors. (Now all US minors, it would appear, are charged as adults and imprisoned along with other adult offenders. It is a sad thing.)

It was a very strange case, but a few women have spoken out about how these kinds of friendships blur the lines of reality and fantasy. My HS best friend, who later became my stalker, was obsessed with this movie and I would venture to say that we sometimes blurred the lines of reality and fantasy with some disastrous results. An intense friendship between very broken adolescents with emotional and mental health issues can be destructive. It's easy to dwell in a cave of secrecy, obsession, and delusion in these cases. Most people don't expect girls to snap and act out violently and when they do, it's positively shocking. Girls tend to engage in social aggression rather than violent aggression, although the latter is probably more common than we think. The Slenderman stabbing comes to mind here.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/womens-life/11586493/The-darker-side-of-female-friendship.html

She knew about the adolescent murder, and was OK with still reading her books.

When my friend found out Perry was Mormon, she stopped buying them. "Why didn't you tell me?!"

exact same thing happened to me.

Oh em gee! I knew about the teenaged murder but not that she is mormon.

I am floored. I have read her for years. I've got some soul-searching to do now.

Unofficially, her favorite story from the BoM involves Nephi retrieving the plates from Laban.

I wonder why?

When I was a young mother, a visiting teacher who was also a friend arrived at my house with a companion. Guess who? Anne Perry. We chatted for maybe 45 minutes. When they returned several weeks later, I'd bought a copy of one of her books and we chatted again and she signed it for me.

Little did I know that she was infamous until reading this thread. I Googled her to make sure it was the same woman, and it definitely was. I remember my friend house sitting for "Anne" in a remote cottage in the U.K.

Now that I think about it, the movie would have been released just about the same time as our chat. Never would have suspected. She came across as intelligent, educated, and well-spoken. I remember she made several comments during a Relief Society lesson that made me think "She has the vocabulary of a write."

What a shocker to learn of her hidden identity.

Anne and her friend had an obsessive relationship.

Among other things, they thought they were superior to everyone else, that they were truly "heavenly creatures," forced to live in a world where everyone else was their inferiors.

This is not abnormal for teenage girls (and boys) to think this way.

When Anne's parents decided to move to England and take her friend with them, thw two girls were delighted.

When the friend's mother said "no way" the two girls decided to kill the mother, who after all, was an inferior creature, trying to meddle in the affairs of heavenly creatures.

This IS abnormal behavior for teenage girls.

The girls killed the mother, were caught immediately, and the court dealt with them the best they knew how. The justice system of NZ had never encountered a case like this before. The girls served their time and were released, and, understandably, weren't such close friends any more.

Anne's attraction to Mormonism might have been due to the fact tht the Mormons offer to make you superior to everyone else You will be elevated, exalted, if you just do as you are told.

I am sure both girls ended up regarding this as a huge black hole of an anomaly in their lives. I don't think they themselves understood why they did what they did. At the time it seemed like nothing, absolutely nothing was as important as the fact that they must not be separated, and the friend's mother stood in the way.

So they killed the mother, and they ended up being separated after all.

And Anne became a Mormon

Homo-erotic friendships weren't all that rare in British society in decades/centuries gone by.

But for a young girl to kill the mother is quite rare, wonder what hidden abuse brought that on?
Good parents usually do not get killed by their children.

It's baffling.

I remember reading a book that gave all the details a person would want, but it still left me shaking my head.

There were some strange things about both families.

Anne Perry's mother was having an affair, and her lover actually lived in the same house with the family, with everyone, including her husband and daughter (Anne) knowing what was going on. They were being "civilized" about the whole thing, with the idea that eventually Anne's mother would divorce her husband and marry her lover.

Anne's friend's household was definitely lower class, a drab apartment, and a mousy withdrawn mother (the lady the girls killed) It would be only natural for the friend to want to be a part of Anne's household. Anne's family was definitely upper class.

The friendship seemed on an equal basis, with neither girl playing a dominant role.

The girls did NOT think of themselves as lesbians or think of the relationship as sexual, although Anne got very upset when she found out during the trial that her friend had been having sex with a male. It could be nothing more than the fact that both girls had decided that their friendship was more important than anything, and here Anne's friend was having an affair and Anne didn't know about it.

Another curious thing that turned up: Anne's friend's parents were not married. They had been living as man and wife for years, but they were not married. Something about Anne's father having been married before and couldn't afford a divorce so he was still technically married to his first wife.

All very interesting, but still no answers. Two middle class girls who had never done anything violent before and would never do anything violent again.