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But by the time I was about 8, I was ill again, and they said that I wouldn't survive another British winter. Obviously, my mother pulled me through the night. When I was about 6, I became very, very ill indeed, so ill that the doctor told my mother he'd come back and sign the death certificate in the morning because there was nothing else that anybody could do. I was born in London a few months before the war. Who I was could be summed up, I suppose, fairly briefly. GROSS: Before we talk about the murder, tell us something about who you were then. And, you know, I'm thinking obviously about the murder that you were involved with when you were 15 years old. GROSS: (Laughter) I want to ask you about something that happened in your own life that really not only was quite a revelation about your life but also gives a whole new meaning, in a way, to the fact that you're writing mystery novels. And since I now know how old you are, I know that you've had time to understand that that's true. And I think that's something that many people feel when they have grown away from the person that they used to be and yet still have to live with whatever that person has done because we all change as time goes by. PERRY: I think it'd be very frightening, a sense of being disoriented and thinking, well, how can I be to blame for something that in a sense was not me and yet was me? And you have to come to terms with it. GROSS: What did you imagine it would be like for this detective to learn that he was hated for certain actions that he had taken earlier in life, actions he no longer remembered? And looking back on it, of course, it may be all sorts of other things, but he has to discover himself without knowing why he has done what he has done. And so often, as one of my mother's favorite sayings, if you just knew the one thing more, you know why somebody does what they do, it all falls into place and becomes not necessarily acceptable but at least understandable because almost everybody who does something - it seemed to them at the time to be the best course for them. PERRY: Very unnerving indeed because he learns what he has done but not why he has done it. Himself through the eyes of others, and that could be a very unnerving experience. TERRY GROSS: He's in the position of having to learn who he is by seeing what other people think of him. The most important mystery that faced him was the mystery of his own identity. When Monk was introduced in the novel 'The Face Of A Stranger,' he was just regaining consciousness from an accident to find he had totally lost his memory.

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Terry began with her latest book, her 20th, called 'The Sins Of The Wolf.' It was the fifth in her series featuring Detective William Monk. Terry spoke to Anne Perry in 1994, just months after her story had come out. Perry was English but was sent to New Zealand as a girl to recover from tuberculosis. She had changed her name and moved across the ocean after spending 5 1/2 years in a New Zealand prison. Perry's involvement with the murder would have remained a secret if not for the 1994 Peter Jackson film 'Heavenly Creatures,' starring a young Kate Winslet and Melanie Lynskey, which dramatized the incident. When Anne Perry was 15 years old, she helped her best friend murder that friend's mother. In 1998, the Times of London included her on the list of 100 masters of crime of the past century, placing her alongside Agatha Christie, Raymond Chandler and Arthur Conan Doyle. She was the author of several historical mystery series featuring central characters Thomas Pitt and William Monk. Today we're going to remember Anne Perry, a popular mystery writer who for decades kept secret her participation in a murder as a teenager.