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Anne Perry, Novelist Whose Crime Inspired ‘Heavenly Creatures,’ Dead at 84

When she was 15 she killed her best friend’s mother, then went on to write dozens of books under a pen name.

Anne Perry

Thesupermat/Wikimedia Commons

Prolific crime novelist Anne Perry, whose real-life role in a homicide was the basis for the film Heavenly Creatures, has died in Los Angeles at the age of 84. Perry, who wrote more than 100 books after her 1979 debut, had a heart attack in December, according to Deadline. Perry was her pen name, which she adopted after serving five years in prison for conspiring with her best friend to kill the other girl’s mother when she was just 15 and living in New Zealand. She was played by Kate Winslet in the 1994 movie directed by Peter Jackson.

Read it at Deadline

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