WARNING: DISTRESSING CONTENT
In January 2021, three months before her death, Pauline Hanna approached a longtime friend who had also spent a career climbing the corporate ladder and unburdened herself about her latest professional predicament.
Hanna had been asked to take on a leadership role responding to the Covid-19 pandemic, and although she didn’t want it, she had been passed over for roles in the past so didn’t think she could afford to say no, Gillian Reid explained as the fifth week of testimony in the Philip Polkinghorne murder trial came to a close.
“She felt she wasn’t achieving the standards she had set for herself,” Reid, who became an Anglican priest after leaving the corporate world, recalled of the “unusual” conversation. “She was working longer and longer and harder and harder.
“She did not look well. This was a woman who was very stressed and struggling to handle what was going on around her.”
The testimony came as the defence took control of the witness list for the first time, endeavouring to flip the narrative of the trial by emphasising Hanna’s struggles with work stress and depression over the eye surgeon defendant’s drug use and extra-marital sex life.
Polkinghorne, now 71, is accused of having fatally strangled Hanna, 63, inside their Remuera home before staging the scene on the morning of April 5, 2021, to look like a suicide by hanging. Prosecutors have suggested the defendant was high on methamphetamine when he lashed out at his wife of 24 years, possibly during an argument over his exorbitant spending on sex workers or his “double life” with Sydney escort Madison Ashton.
Much of the first five weeks of the High Court at Auckland trial have focused on those themes. But prosecutors announced this morning that they had finished their case in chief after having called roughly 60 witnesses, passing the baton to defence lawyer Ron Mansfield, KC, to give an opening address and call anyone else to the witness box who he felt jurors should hear from.
The list of defence witnesses, jurors learned, will be long – likely stretching the trial past the six weeks that had initially been allotted.
Mansfield emphasised during his lengthy address today that there was no physical evidence indicating anything other than a suicide by hanging had taken place. He suggested to jurors that salacious details about his client’s drug use and sex life was a distraction – an audacious attempt to pitch a motive when the Crown couldn’t even prove an assault had occurred.
He acknowledged jurors might think his client a selfish, “silly old fool” who was living a lie, but that doesn’t make him a murderer, he said.
“You might think that [behaviour] might have added to the burden that Pauline was living with at the time, rather than providing a motive for a murder that never took place,” Mansfield explained.
Reid was asked today to speak on what has emerged as a major defence theme throughout cross-examination of Crown witnesses: whether Hanna might have been overworked and stressed to the point of self-harm.
Reid emphasised that she didn’t see Hanna again after that January conversation, so if other witnesses have said she seemed to be in high spirits and proud of her work in the weeks before her death both can be true. She might have caught the friend, whose Coromandel bach was about half a kilometre from her own, at a low point, she said.
But at that point, Hanna did not seem well and others in the small, tight-knit beach community noticed it too, the witness said. She had lost weight and would change her outfits several times a day, which indicated to Reid that Hanna was struggling with self-esteem.
“If it’s that bad, just give it up and walk away,” she remembered advising the friend of the job stress. “She felt she had to carry on working.”
Jurors also briefly heard this afternoon from Polkinghorne’s first wife, who sought and was granted name suppression. Polkinghorne never acted in a threatening, controlling or violent way during their marriage, she acknowledged. Mansfield suggested the two had separated because she felt isolated and they grew apart during a two-year stint living overseas, but on that point she disagreed.
”Philip had an affair,” she explained. “It broke up the marriage.”
Polkinghorne’s three adult children sat in the crowded courtroom gallery today, the first time they have done so.
The first witness of the day was Hanna’s younger sister, who lives in London. She also touched on the defence’s mental health theme, recalling a moment sometime in the early 1990s when she said Pauline Hanna had revealed a previous suicide attempt. It was within a year or so of their father dying, she explained.
The memory was buried for 30 years but her memory was triggered after her sister’s death, which came less than two months after their mother died, she said.
Her tone was confrontational when prosecutor Brian Dickey wondered aloud why there was no indication of a suicide attempt from other witnesses or in medical records.
“Are you suggesting that I’m lying about this?” she twice asked Dickey. “I take offence to that.”
The prosecutor replied calmly but undeterred: “Take all the offence you like but try to answer the questions.”
Jurors also had questions today – four of them. In written notes to the judge, they asked about the approximate time of death, whether panic buttons in the Polkinghorne household alluded to in previous testimony were real, the results of the “rape kit” taken during autopsy and asking why Ashton, the Sydney sex worker so often mentioned, hadn’t been called to testify when she was on the Crown witness list.
The judge said he assumed by rape kit the jury was referring to the results of a medical exam kit. He said the group had already heard the analysis of samples taken from Hanna’s body and there was nothing more he could add. As for the panic buttons and the time of death, he said there has been no evidence on those subjects.
His response to Ashton having not testified was equally restrained.
“I cannot say anything about it,” he said. “Further, you cannot speculate as to why that is the case.”
The trial is set to resume on Monday morning, when the defence will continue calling witnesses. One person the defence will not call is Polkinghorne himself, his lawyer said today, suggesting that allowing him to do so would have resulted in more distractions about his sex life and drug use.
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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.
The Herald will be covering the case in a daily podcast, Accused: The Polkinghorne Trial. You can follow the podcast at iHeartRadio, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, through The Front Page feed, or wherever you get your podcasts.