If she does not bother us, we certainly won’t bother her about her past.”Apart from a few mutterings about Anne cashing in on her notoriety, she and her mother are thrilled by the local reaction. And if, as in Anne’s case, we find out something curious, we are understanding people. Historically, fishing villages like ours have attracted visitors. We are used to people passing through and we take each one as they come If someone arrives, they leave their past behind them We don’t like to pry. We’ve made a decision to welcome her and her mother and that is all there is to it.”Finlay Munro, 70, a chain-smoking local academic who wrote the official history of Portmahomack at his home on Rockfield Farm, said: “Like many places in the Highlands, people here have a strong sense of privacy.

The lassie has been in prison and has had to move from place to place She fits in here. What business is it of ours, what good could be achieved by raking up the past?’ “The sentiment is shared by the fishermen who gather on the pier each afternoon to study the swell before sailing east past dolphins and porpoises to Tarbat Ness to empty their lobster crails. Jim Mitchell, 39, said: “Perhaps if she had been born and bredhere it would be different but, for me, there is no question of trying to make her some kind of hate figure. But then almost as quickly folk began saying, `Och, it was 40 years ago in another hemisphere. He explained: “At first there was an overwhelming feeling of astonishment – that someone among us, someone so welcomed, a devoted Mormon who gave out hampers to old people at Christmas, could be guilty of matricide. That, they reasoned, was good enough for folk in a place like Portmahomack.David Wilson, 40, a solicitor who lives in the village and works in the nearby town of Invergordon, spends Wednesday nights in the Caledonian Hotel bar, drinking the local Glenmorangie whisky.

The offerings came from local people who were moved by Anne’s frank admission that what she did was “wrong, very wrong”. She had admitted her guilt, made amends by serving her prison sentence and got on with her life. Worse, they thought they might be forced to move to yet another new home.But instead of chanting mobs and egg-spattered windows, Anne and her mother began to receive cakes, followed soon afterwards by what Marion Perry describes as “virtual love letters which I will cherish until my dying day”. With memories of the Jamie Bulger murder still fresh, the two women feared they would become the victims of a hate-filled backlash similar to that directed at the two-year-old’s killers and other notorious British murderers such as Myra Hindley. In it, counsel for the prosecution alleged that the two girls were lesbian lovers and had coolly planned the murder so that they could live together.They were convicted and sentenced to be detained “at Her Majesty’s pleasure”. But after five years in jail the authorities gave the pair new identities and released them on condition that they never see each other again.When news of the film appeared in a Scottish tabloid last August, residents of Portmahomack at first dismissed the report Then Anne and her mother confirmed the details A stunned silence descended on the village. One of the most sensational trials in New Zealand’s history followed.

“But on that morning we knew the game was up.”The film Heavenly Creatures, which opens in Britain tonight, relates how on 22 June 1954 in a Christchurch park, 15-year-old Anne Perry – then known as Juliet Hulme – helped her best friend, Pauline Parker, 16, to murder her mother by crushing her skull with a brick. “For 40 years Anne and I had managed to keep our secret,” Marion Perry recalls. Soon, she was so content that she persuaded her 83-year-old mother, Marion, to follow her.The two women lived together, Anne writing best-selling Victorian detective stories, Marion hoping against hope that her daughter’s increasing literary success would not draw attention to her past That hope proved forlorn. One of its most respected residents was a murderer.
Anne Perry, 56, moved to Portmahomack in 1989.