WARNING: DISTRESSING CONTENT
Just hours after the wife of Auckland eye surgeon Philip Polkinghorne was found dead in the couple’s Remuera home, he sat down in a police interview room and, in a fast-paced cadence, shared his thoughts on a number of topics that had a tendency to stray off the subject at hand.
But the detective interviewing him kept steering the conversation back to the discovery of Pauline Hanna’s body, and eventually to another topic: How he received the horizontal scrape on his forehead.
“Well, I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve got no idea. I can’t even feel it.”
He then asked the detective how it looked.
“It’s horrible,” he said.
The somewhat strange and arguably erratic interview gave jurors in the High Court at Auckland a first chance to hear Polkinghorne in his own words, other than his proclamation at the start of his murder trial last week that he’s not guilty. Prosecutors began playing the three-hour recording this afternoon and will continue it tomorrow morning.
Police began investigating Hanna’s death as suspicious almost immediately after arriving at the couple’s home on the morning of April 5, 2021. The bright orange nylon rope that Polkinghorne indicated his 63-year-old wife had used to hang herself didn’t appear able to support the weight of a person - at least not in the way it was found tied in a series of loose “granny knots” to an upstairs balustrade - detectives quickly suspected.
In his interview with one of those detectives a short time later, Polkinghorne also expressed his doubts about the set-up.
“I was surprised that the balustrade would take a weight - shall we say a dead weight - of 70kg,” he said, referring to his wife’s weight.
He riffed off the thought several times: “I still think the 70kg on that balustrade is a hell of a weight... I thought a sudden dead weight of 70kg would have shifted it.”
He also gave his opinion, at length, on the belt that he said he found loosely around her neck, attached to the rope.
“I would have thought that - I don’t know much about that sort of stuff, but I would have thought it had to be tight to do the business,” he said. “But I don’t know.”
Authorities found two ropes at the home, one of which was in a tangled coil on the stairway. It was that rope that Hanna used to kill herself, Polkinghorne told the detective, adding that he didn’t have any recollection of a second rope found tied to the balustrade when police arrived.
“It looked awful just hanging there. It just was awful,” he said of his decision to untie the rope. “It was offensive to me - the rope.”
But the rope was still there, hanging from the balustrade, Detective Sgt Ilona Walton interjected.
“Oh, no, it wasn’t,” Polkinghorne replied. “I’m 99% sure I did it, I thought before you guys arrived... I thought I undid that at the top and either left it on the landing upstairs or dropped it down.”
Through most of the section of the interview viewed by jurors today, the surgeon’s body language looked relaxed - although it could alternately be interpreted as exhausted or peppered with the nervous ticks of someone still in shock - as he reclined on the couch and talked a mile a minute.
He said it was his habit to wake up every morning and serve his wife breakfast in bed (”She’s the only person I know who can drink a cup of tea lying on her back”), and that’s what he was preparing to do when he discovered her body. They often slept in separate rooms, he said, because of snoring issues.
“She was cold and I could tell she was dead right away,” he said, adding that he panicked and had to use the landline because he couldn’t operate his mobile phone. “I just didn’t know what the hell to do. ... I was trying to get her down flat. As I did so I dropped the phone. That crashed all over the tiles. I’m sobbing uncontrollably. It was just horrible.”
His sister arrived and they put Hanna in a reclining position, putting a pillow under her head, he said. Hanna’s legs buckled as he tried to remove her from the chair she was found in, he said.
“I practically fell on her or something,” he said. “It was a dog’s breakfast, what I did there.”
On April 4, the night before her death, he thought she had been “pretty good, really”, he said.
“I thought we were” - he paused to collect his thoughts - “relating pretty well,” he explained. “The night before [April 3] was less, um, compatible. Everything was, uh, less friendly, shall we say.”
Sometimes when his wife drinks she gets argumentative, he said, explaining that the two had a disagreement on the 3rd about who might use their Coromandel bach. When she started drinking and would “niggle” him about something, the best tactic was to ignore her and not engage, he said.
“Last night was much more amicable,” he added. “We were on the same page with everything.”
He estimated she had drank a bottle and a half of wine - too much, he added - but he’s never seen her intoxicated that night or ever, he said. But looking back she probably was intoxicated, he added moments later. In his frequent asides, he sounded like someone in a long-term relationship well acquainted with his partner’s peccadillos, such as her tendency to get over-emotional during unrealistic medical dramas.
He did, however, put his head in his hands and sob later on in the interview while asking the detective if he could visit his wife in the mortuary.
“I didn’t say goodbye to her today,” he explained.
A short time later, defence lawyer Ron Mansfield KC asked Justice Graham Lang to end the day about 30 minutes early, explaining that it had been a long day for his client. As the jurors left the courtroom for the day, it appeared Polkinghorne had been crying in the courtroom as well.
The taped interview had followed a flurry of witnesses earlier in the day as the Crown case made an abrupt shift from the scene examination evidence that dominated the first seven days of testimony.
Just over three weeks after Hanna’s death and Polkinghorne’s interview, Auckland-based Detective Sergeant Lisa Anderson took a trip to a lavish Mt Cook chalet where the surgeon was staying. She was there to execute a search warrant, she said, explaining that Polkinghorne came to the door alongside Australian sex worker Madison Ashton.
Prosecutors have alleged Polkinghorne was leading a “double life”, spending large amounts of money on Ashton and other sex workers, before strangling his wife and staging the scene to look like a suicide.
READ LIVE UPDATES FROM TODAY’S TESTIMONY
Two other witnesses said that Polkinghorne was a regular visitor to their small apartment complex on a quiet Northcote Point street, where he visited a neighbour of theirs believed to be a sex worker. His visits stood out, both witnesses said, noting that he drove a white Mercedes with a personalised registration plate that read RETINA.
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.
Glen Wright continues to deny the offending and claims the victims conspired against him.