WARNING: DISTRESSING CONTENT
It was a haunting moment rarely heard in murder trials.
Jurors in the trial of Auckland eye surgeon Philip Polkinghorne listened to the voice of his alleged victim today as prosecutors played a recording of wife Pauline Hanna describing to her family how he was “bloody arrogant”, unfaithful, an “angry man” and a “sex fiend” who didn’t react well to stress.
“I love my husband but he is somebody who is very angry with the world when the world doesn’t go his way,” she said in the 2019 conversation with her brother and niece, recorded without her knowledge just over 17 months before her death. “ ... He is out of control because he doesn’t understand how to control himself, but he loves me more than anything in the world. I’m his brick. He is mine.
“But there will be a point. If it continues next year, I’ll say no ... I am only 63 in February, and I’m not prepared to put up with it until I’m 93.”
But the recording, which lasted roughly 20 minutes, was followed almost immediately by a series of revelations from the defence regarding Hanna’s decades-long battles with mental health. She had attempted to commit suicide in 1992, reported severe depression a decade later and was referred to a crisis team in December 2019 after reporting suicidal thoughts, defence lawyer Ron Mansfield KC pointed out.
The extraordinary, back-to-back courtroom bombshells came on day nine of Polkinghorne’s six-week trial in the High Court at Auckland, which began last week with prosecutors sharing their theory that the surgeon strangled Hanna in their Remuera home before staging the scene to look like a suicide on the morning of April 5, 2021. The surgeon had a methamphetamine habit and had squandered a significant amount of money on sex workers, which his wife might have been confronting him about when she was killed, Crown Solicitor Alysha McClintock has suggested.
But the defence has been adamant that it was a death by hanging from a woman whose longtime struggle with depression had recently been amplified by her high-intensity job helping to roll out the nationwide distribution of the Covid-19 vaccine.
In the recorded conversation, Hanna’s adult niece suggested she was in an abusive relationship. She encouraged Hanna to leave Polkinghorne and come to live with them.
“We have two spare rooms,” the relative said. “He won’t know where to find you.”
But Hanna insisted her husband loved her.
“He’d be lost without me,” she said. “ ... He becomes so remorseful and he cries.”
The niece told her aunt it was like night and day when she was on her own compared to when her husband was with her.
Hanna conceded she’d had “a s*** year”.
“I’m f***ing hot, and I’m bloody good at what I do, and I have a heap of men who would like to ask me out,” she said. “But I don’t want to because I love him. I’m not going to put up with him forever. I’m not a doormat.”
She revealed to her family that she used to join Polkinghorne in threesomes with prostitutes and has “been with so many old men”, but she only joined him “because I wanted to make sure he didn’t go off the rails”. She stopped about three years ago, she said.
“I had to drink two bottles of wine before I would go with another man,” she said. “It’s just revolting and I hate it.”
But her husband had “a sexual appetite that’s extraordinary” and needed to have sex every day, which meant meeting up with prostitutes. A girlfriend in Auckland, she said, would be “a different story”.
She recalled how Polkinghorne had turned on her one night recently and told her everything wrong with her, causing her to stay up all night crying then lash out at co-workers the next day.
“He does get so s***ty,” she said. “It’s not fair and I’m not going to stuff myself up for the rest of my life. I’ve got the most amazing role ... I’m not going to let him destroy me. He hates the fact that I’ve got power.”
But her criticism of her husband eased when other family members joined in.
“Please don’t think that Philip’s a beast, he’s not. He’s a very complex character,” she said. “I am emotionally bullied at the moment ... but it’s temporary.”
She added later: “Please don’t hate Philip. He is a good man. I know at the moment he’s also going through a lot of stress and he doesn’t handle it and he reacts.”
Hanna’s niece said she was concerned for her.
“I’m safe, darling. Please think I’m safe,” Hanna responded. “... I’m not physically battered but emotionally battered.”
The recording was played during the cross-examination of Hanna’s brother Bruce Hanna, who she was visiting at the family’s farm near Hastings at the time of the recording.
The defence used the cross-examination as an opportunity to reveal to jurors for the first time a timeline of Hanna’s mental health history. The 1992 suicide attempt, Mansfield noted, came soon after the death of her father. Pauline Hanna’s death was two months after the death of her mother.
She had been prescribed anti-depressant medication since 2001, with her most recent prescription filled two months before her death, according to the defence. In 2004, she was referred to a specialist after reporting severe depression at Remuera Village Medical Centre. In 2011, she was referred to a psychiatrist and in 2013, she was diagnosed with alcohol-dependent syndrome.
She was reportedly drinking a bottle of wine a night over the previous 10 years and had frequent memory loss while affected by alcohol, Mansfield said, noting that she was prescribed drugs designed to discourage alcohol consumption and treat alcohol withdrawal.
A medical note in March 2019 noted that her alcohol consumption was “above sensible limits” and in December of that year she was referred to a crisis team after she was reported to be “distressed and experiencing suicidal thoughts but had no plans”. In a follow-up that month, she said she was in touch with the crisis team and was feeling better.
Bruce Hanna said he knew of none of that.
Mansfield also hinted during his cross-examination of his client’s former brother-in-law that Bruce Hanna’s testimony might have been influenced by money. If Hanna’s death was deemed a homicide, Polkinghorne wouldn’t get the life insurance payout and, because his wife had no children, the money might go to her extended family, the lawyer outlined.
“It’s ridiculous, really,” the witness said when Crown prosecutor Brian Dickey asked him what he thought of the theory.
The Crown later called to the witness box Donna Baker, a former friend and colleague of Pauline Hanna’s who had worked with her at Counties Manukau Health. She recalled a conversation with Pauline Hanna over drinks in March 2020 in which her friend revealed more vulnerability than she had spoken of previously.
“She told me she wasn’t happy in her marriage and hadn’t been in a long time,” Baker recalled, adding that Hanna also expressed her displeasure over the threesomes and a woman in Australia. “She didn’t tell me she was going to separate, but certainly there was an undercurrent of unhappiness in the marriage.”
During cross-examination of both witnesses this afternoon, the defence pointed to emails suggesting Pauline Hanna was under a great amount of stress in her job, especially after she took on the vaccine rollout role. It’s not a job she wanted, she specifically stated in one email cited by the defence.
In the email, Pauline Hanna told her family the work atmosphere had been “incredibly brutal” lately and she warned there was a chance she might end up “in the national media and open to scrutiny and review”. Her brother didn’t recall the email but said there had been some concern about a botched $20 million contract in China, possibly involving Covid PPE, in which the wrong product was sent. In another message, she noted that it was her first full day off in eight weeks.
Baker said she was no longer working closely with Pauline Hanna after the Covid crisis hit, but she never thought of her as someone stressed by work.
“She would walk into a room and you’d think she was the chief executive. She was excellent at her job,” Baker said, adding later: “Paula always worked long hours. She thrived on it.
“She had such high standards, there was no way she was going to leave anything undone.”
READ LIVE UPDATES FROM TODAY’S TESTIMONY
Jurors will briefly return to the courthouse tomorrow morning before getting on a chartered bus to Remuera, where they will walk through the Polkinghorne home, Justice Graham Lang told the group today. Testimony is expected to resume early in the afternoon.
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.
The Police Association supports cameras but worries about costs.