In a made-for-reality-TV tale, romance novelist Nancy Brophy, who once wrote an essay "How to Murder Your Husband," was recently arrested for the actual murder of her husband. It is rare for murder mystery writers to be plotters of real murder, but there have been some noted instances. Anne Perry, one of my favorite authors for her Thomas Pitt and William Monk historical mystery series set in Victorian England, is a convicted murderer, for example. Born Juliet Marion Hulme in 1938 England, Hulme/Perry was convicted at age 15 in 1954 for participating in the murder of her friend's mother but, due to her young age, served only a five-year sentence. At the time of the murder, Hulme's parents had moved the family to New Zealand, but they were in the process of divorcing, and Hulme was going to be sent to South Africa to stay with relatives. Hulme was obsessively close to her friend Pauline Parker at the time (Hulme denies implications of a lesbian relationship), and the two girls did not want to be separated. Somehow their shared devotion and fantasies came to include eliminating Pauline's mother. The two went for a walk with Pauline's mother on an isolated path where Hulme dropped an ornamental stone so that the older woman would lean over to retrieve it. Pauline had planned to hit her mother with half a brick wrapped in a stocking, and the two girls assumed that one blow would kill her. But it took more than 20 blows. After her release from prison, Hulme became a flight attendant, lived in the U.S. for a bit, and eventually settled in a Scottish village with her mother. She created a new name, Anne Perry, using her stepfather's surname and launched a successful writing career with her first mystery novel, The Cater Street Hangman, published in 1979. The 1994 film "Heavenly Creatures," with Kate Winslet as the teenage Juliet Hulme, is based on the Hulme-Parker murder. Here's an even creepier killer author story: Noted Chinese crime writer, Liu Yongbiao, 53, received the death penalty this year for the murder of four people in a case that had gone unsolved for nearly two dozen years. The author and an accomplice had killed a couple and their grandson in November 1995 at their family-owned hostel in order to cover up the murder of one of the guests during a robbery. Police finally were able to crack the case by using DNA evidence from a cigarette at the crime scene. "I’ve been waiting for you all this time," Liu told officers when he was arrested in August 2017 at his home. He later admitted that he had used the gory details of the crimes as inspiration for his novels. Maybe he wanted to get caught; his novel The Guilty Secret is about a writer who commits a string of murders! If you don't hold her past against her, check out Anne Perry's many excellent books at https://www.amazon.com/Anne-Perry/e/B000APAS2A
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