Anne Perry has died at 84 in Los Angeles, according to the author's French publisher, 10/18.

She was the inspiration for Peter Jackson's film Heavenly Creatures as Perry helped beat her friend's mother to death as a teenager.

Anne Perry was 15 years old when she and her friend Pauline Parker murdered Pauline's mother in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 1954. Honora Mary Parker died after being hit with a brick about 20 times, in a killing that horrified and gripped the nation.

The two girls planned the murder to avoid being separated when Parker's parents planned to transfer her overseas when she was 16 years old.

Joanne Drayton, Perry's biographer, stated that the trial attracted lurid curiosity. They were too young for the death penalty as teens, so they were imprisoned instead.

Perry departed New Zealand after she was released from jail five years later and worked as a flight attendant for a while. She also became a Mormon before moving to live in a small Scottish community.

She began writing under the pen name she had taken after being released from jail (Juliet Hulme), and her first novel was published in 1979.

Perry went on to have a successful career, publishing many works, including a Victorian detective series with a main character named Thomas Pitt and another with an amnesiac private investigator named William Monk.

The details of the 40-year-old murder were dramatized by New Zealand filmmaker Peter Jackson in Heavenly Creatures, a 1994 Academy Award-nominated film starring a young Kate Winslet as Perry.

Perry was said to have spent the last several years in Los Angeles promoting cinematic versions of her various writings.