WARNING: DISTURBING CONTENT
About an hour after emergency responders arrived at Philip Polkinghorne’s Remuera home in April 2021 to find his wife Pauline Hanna dead, the then-68-year-old eye surgeon sat down with Constable Alexander Rowland while his wife’s body remained nearby and gave a sworn statement.
He described her battles with depression, her exhaustion and his discovery of her apparent suicide.
But soon after the statement ended, the constable recalled today, a police colleague turned to Rowland and quietly scribbled “1C″ on his hand. It was police code for “suspicious circumstances”.
Jurors in the High Court at Auckland had the full five-page statement read aloud to them today as prosecutors spent a second day calling witnesses in what is anticipated to be Polkinghorne’s six-week murder trial.
Hanna, 63, was found covered by a duvet in the entryway to the couple’s home on Easter Monday three years ago. A bright orange rope dangled from a bannister a floor above, with another orange rope tangled on the nearby stairway. A pillow had been placed under her head.
Prosecutors have said from the outset of the trial that the suicide scene seemed staged, with a more likely explanation that the defendant strangled his wife while high on methamphetamine - possibly as she confronted him over his spending on sex workers. The defence, meanwhile, has suggested to jurors that police jumped to a mistaken conclusion early on and latched on to the false impression until Polkinghorne was arrested a year and a half later.
In the signed statement read to jurors, Polkinghorne described his wife to police as someone who worked from 7am to 10pm seven days a week in her role “assisting around the logistics of the Covid-19 pandemic”.
“Pauline has been on and off depressed for several years,” he added. “She takes some anti-depressant medication. I’m not sure what it’s called. She has been taking it for several years. I’m not sure if she still has been taking it recently. She also has suffered from bulimia about five years ago. She has been taking weight reduction medication also.
“Pauline has been exhausted in recent times. This has been mainly from working such long hours.”
But his wife had never self-harmed or even talked about doing so, he added, explaining that she had a “four-wheel drive holiday” planned for the South Island in the next 10 days. Recently, he also said, she had been taking sleeping medication on top of about a bottle of wine she’d drink each night.
Polkinghorne said the last time he saw his wife alive was when he went up to bed around 10pm the night before. He remembered waking up around 5am but staying in the separate bedroom where he slept, reading, until about 7.45am.
“I went into the kitchen to make tea and toast. I had planned to wake Pauline after that,” he said. “That’s when I discovered Pauline in the corridor by the front door.”
Polkinghorne said he found a pleated belt around her neck and realised it was his own. She had been using it recently, he said, “because a cord on her dressing gown had come off”. The belt, he said, was tied to a nylon rope with “granny knots”.
“I was very flustered. I knew she was deceased,” he said. “...I tried to call 111 on my cellphone but I was so flustered I couldn’t get it to work. I used my landline in the kitchen to call 111.
“Once that call was ended... I undid the belt and rope from around Pauline’s neck and then went upstairs to undo the knot from the cord... I’m not sure at what point I’ve done this but I rolled up the belt that was around Pauline’s neck and put it in the kitchen.”
He concluded the statement: “I have no idea as to why this happened. I have a mark on my forehead, with some dry blood around it. I have no idea what it’s from. I did not even know I had it there.”
Former Crown solicitor Brian Dickey, who is working alongside current Crown solicitor Alysha McClintock to prosecute the case, repeatedly focused on the forehead injury today as a succession of first responders visited the witness box in the High Court’s largest courtroom. The injury was described as more of a graze than a deep cut and “no bigger than the size of a golf ball”.
Paramedic Hannah Matheson said Polkinghorne appeared surprised when she told him about the injury and asked if he wanted help cleaning it up.
But overall he was calm and collected when she first arrived at the house, she recalled.
“[He] wasn’t crying, didn’t seem distressed, was answering our questions appropriately,” she explained.
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A trainee paramedic who was with her described Polkinghorne’s voice as “shakey” but without tears.
He did, however, seem to get more emotional as he talked to people on the phone informing them of his wife’s death, multiple first responders said. By the time paramedics were leaving and police were taking over, he was wailing, officers recalled.
During cross-examination, defence lawyer Ron Mansfield KC got witnesses to agree that people’s reactions to distressing situations run the gamut, from visible distress to calmly trying to assist authorities. It’s also not unusual for people in shock to not realise they’ve been injured, he pointed out.
Despite the early suspicions about the death, Constable Rowland said Polkinghorne looked to be in disbelief that his wife had taken her life.
“Did she seem like she wanted to give up to you?” he recalled the defendant asking his sister.
Like Polkinghorne, Hanna also had what seemed like a fresh cut - hers to the bridge of her nose, Detective Brooke Everson testified.
There were “obvious markings” on the side of her neck in “criss-cross type patterns”, the detective said, adding that there was blood between her forefinger and middle finger but no apparent cut. An acrylic nail was later found in her robe pocket.
The belt on her dressing gown was intact and tied around her waist, the detective noted. The recollection contrasted with Polkinghorne’s earlier statement that his wife had recently begun using his pleaded belt because the cord on her dressing down had come off.
Testimony is set to resume tomorrow when the trial continues before Justice Graham Lang and the jury.
Craig Kapitan is an Auckland-based journalist covering courts and justice. He joined the Herald in 2021 and has reported on courts since 2002 in three newsrooms in the US and New Zealand.
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