SOURCE: "Writer Perry Faces Up to Dark Secret of Murder," in Star Tribune, March 5, 1995, p. IF.

In the following interview, Perry discusses her involvement in a 1954 murder in New Zealand.

Interviewing Anne Perry, the detective novelist who harbored the dark secret of her identity as an adolescent murderer, is frustrating. It's like trying to capture the mist that rolls off the mountains in the Scottish Highlands where she makes her home.

It is not that she is reluctant to talk. Far from it. The words come out in compulsive torrents. With little prompting she speaks about her early years, her childhood pneumonia and bronchitis, the "courage and love" of her parents, her deep attachment to her father, a time of trial in prison, her epiphanic conversion to the Mormon church in northern California.

It's that when all the words are added up, she has shed little light on...