WARNING: DISTRESSING CONTENT
Two days before Christmas 2019, Pauline Hanna called her GP to report she was having bad thoughts.
“She was my last call of the day,” the physician recalled today at the murder trial of Hanna’s husband, Auckland eye surgeon Philip Polkinghorne. “She said that she is not feeling well, and her mother is in the hospital, and her husband has left her, and that she has some suicidal thoughts.”
The GP quickly wanted to know: “Do you have any [self-harm] plans?”
“No,” Hanna said. “I just don’t feel right.”
The call, along with Hanna’s longtime prescription for anti-depressants, has been repeatedly mentioned by Polkinghorne’s lawyers during cross-examination throughout the trial, which is set to wrap up its third week tomorrow. Today, however, marked the first time jurors heard about Hanna’s mental health evaluation directly from her doctor.
Polkinghorne, now 71, is accused of having fatally strangled his wife – possibly while high on methamphetamine and during an argument about his exorbitant spending on sex workers – before staging the scene inside their Remuera home on Easter Monday 2021 to look like a suicide. He has denied the accusation, with his lawyers arguing that Hanna’s mental health history – paired with an allegedly massive spike in job-related stress as she coordinated the Covid-19 vaccine rollout – made suicide the only plausible explanation.
The doctor, who cannot currently be identified due to a pending request for name suppression, said the December 23 call was followed up the next day, on Christmas Eve. Hanna said she was feeling better and had been in touch with the crisis team, the witness recalled, adding that the patient did not want any more help on the matter.
The doctor said she would have likely heard back from the crisis team had the issue not been resolved, but the lack of communication gave her assurance. She didn’t see Hanna again for the next 15 months prior to her death.
Jurors have previously been told that Hanna’s mother was suffering from dementia and died in February 2021, two months before her. The reference to her husband leaving her was an incident in 2019, explained to jurors by several witnesses, in which Hanna said she couldn’t reach her husband for several days and had to lie to his family about why he wasn’t spending Christmas with them.
The physician noted that Hanna was already on fluoxetine, an anti-depressant more commonly known by the brand name Prozac, when she enrolled at the doctor’s office in 2001. It was initially given to stabilise mood swings caused by her contraception, medical records state.
But as the years progressed, so did her dosage and her periodic reports of alcohol or depression issues. The doctor acknowledged, although seemingly reluctantly, that by 2010 it could be characterised as “chronic depression”. Anti-depressants are not like antibiotics, where you only take them until you’re feeling better, the doctor said, explaining that using the drug for 20 years suggests it was doing what it was intended for.
For about six months in 2013 and again in 2017, Hanna was prescribed a medication intended to reduce her consumption of alcohol after reporting drinking up to a bottle of wine a night and frequent blackouts. She was also given a frequently renewed prescription for weight loss.
During cross-examination of the doctor, defence lawyer Hannah Stuart noted that mixing the anti-depressant with alcohol is discouraged in literature about the drug because it was known to enhance the effects of alcohol, possibly leading to impaired judgment. The doctor was repeatedly riled at the suggestion the prescription had been irresponsible given Hanna’s references to alcohol use.
“If you look what is written on the paper, you will never give anyone nothing – even Paracetamol,” she said, explaining that many people use anti-depressants and continue to drink without side effects.
“You just have to observe.
“She was adamant that she wanted to continue these medications because she didn’t have any side effects.”
The doctor estimated that probably half of those who take Prozac drink alcohol as well without issue. Hanna, she added, had “absolutely beautiful liver function tests”.
The doctor also disagreed that the weight loss medication prescribed to Hanna could magnify depressive thoughts or that it was improper to keep Hanna on the drug even though it was intended for obesity and she weighed about 70kg.
“That’s quite a powerful cocktail of these medications, isn’t it?” Stuart asked.
“It’s not,” the doctor responded.
After slowly and methodically paging through years of re-upped prescriptions, the defence lawyer asked again about the dangers of mixing alcohol and anti-depressants.
“Yes, on paper,” the doctor reiterated as testimony wrapped up for the day. “In real life, and if you knew Pauline Hanna, you wouldn’t say that. I guess I don’t know how many of you have seen Pauline Hanna sitting in front of them and presenting the way she was.
“...It’s a reality of life it can go together.”
The defence is expected to continue cross-examination tomorrow.
The testimony came after a morning of tense cross-examination of a key witness for the Crown’s case: a close friend of Hanna’s who said she revealed a previous strangling attempt by Polkinghorne just over a year before her death.
Fellow defence lawyer Ron Mansfield KC suggested that Hawke’s Bay resident John Riordan never liked Polkinghorne and was “gilding the lily” – embellishing his testimony – to “stick the boot” in the defendant. Riordan, whose testimony closely matched that of his wife a day earlier, rejected the idea.
He also dismissed the lawyer’s insinuation that he was in cahoots with Hanna’s extended family to strategise his testimony – a response to Mansfield noting to jurors that the witness had been seen speaking with Hanna’s brother and sister-in-law outside the courthouse the day before. He had simply been asking how they were holding up, as a friend was expected to do, he said.
Riordan said he wanted to “see this court provide justice for Pauline”, but perjury was not the way he expected to get it.
The trial is set to continue tomorrow in a new courtroom. Justice Graham Lang ended court early today so that the High Court complex’s largest courtroom could be cleared out to accommodate a visit by the Supreme Court. The trial is expected to return to the larger courtroom after the Wellington-based appellate panel’s week of hearings is concluded.
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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 is 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.