Philip Polkinghorne appears in the High Court at Auckland. Photo / Jason Oxenham
WARNING: DISTRESSING CONTENT
When a detective confiscated Dr Philip Polkinghorne’s mobile phone as part of a search warrant 11 days after his wife’s suspicious death, the Auckland eye surgeon at first volunteered a series of incorrect passcodes before police gave up and went about trying to hack the device themselves.
They were successful and the trove of evidence that resulted – including a seemingly secret internet query one day after Pauline Hanna’s death, regarding strangulation – was presented to jurors this afternoon as the fourth week of Polkinghorne’s high-profile murder trial concluded.
Prosecutors also revealed a long chain of WhatsApp messages between the surgeon and Sydney escort Madison Ashton in the immediate aftermath of Hanna’s death.
“Honestly I really love you,” Ashton told him three days before his wife’s service. “Do not wear a f**king bow tie at the funeral. Keep the hat.”
Polkinghorne, 71, is accused of having fatally strangled Hanna, 63, inside their Remuera home before staging the scene to look like a suicide by hanging and calling 111 around 8am on April 5, 2021. The case against Polkinghorne is circumstantial, but prosecutors suggested he might have lashed out at his wife while high on methamphetamine and during an argument about his exorbitant spending on sex workers or his “double life” with Ashton.
The defendant has pleaded not guilty to the charge, and his lawyers have insisted Hanna’s death was indeed a suicide.
In a police interview hours after emergency responders arrived at the couple’s home, Polkinghorne said that he and his wife had slept in separate rooms that night. He went to bed around 11pm then woke up around 5am, reading in bed before getting up for his daily ritual of presenting his wife breakfast in bed, he told police, explaining that he found her body in the home’s entryway shortly thereafter.
But data extracted from his phone indicates he appeared to be awake and on his phone during at least part of the early morning hours.
After turning his phone off at 11.16pm on April 4, the device was unlocked at 1.10am on April 5 and encrypted messaging app WhatsApp was accessed, police found. Police were unable to find those messages. The phone was then put into airplane mode, which cuts the phone off from the cellular network, at 1.11am. The notes app on the phone was accessed from 1.17 to 1.19am.
The photos and videos folder was accessed numerous times that morning: from 1.19 to 1.20am, from 1.45 to 1.49am, from 2.04 to 2.05am and from 2.23 to 2.42am before the phone display was turned off at 2.44am. The phone was next turned on and unlocked at 6.46am.
Detective Andrew Reeves walked jurors through his examination of Polkinghorne’s phone, along with phones belonging to Hanna and Ashton.
Records show the ophthalmologist made three identical searches in quick succession soon after his interview with police ended: “how to delete icloud storage”.
The next day he went to the website for DuckDuckGo, an app designed to conduct web searches that cannot be traced. But because he searched through the website instead of the app, police were able to trace the search. It read: “leg edema after strangulation”. Edema is a clinical term for swelling.
Jurors were handed a thick booklet of the many WhatsApp messages between Polkinghorne and Ashton starting at 4.28pm on April 5, 2021, less than 12 hours after Hanna’s death was reported. Much of the communications were trivial in nature. But on April 7 Ashton sent a link to a Stuff article titled “Remuera death: More answers expected Tuesday as post-mortem carried out”.
On April 10, Ashton sent a link to an article in which Polkinghorne spoke with Herald reporter Carolyne Meng-Yee, telling her he was being treated as a “person of suspect” by police. He added: “Our relationship wasn’t fine, it wasn’t fine at all, it was perfect.” The entire article was reproduced in the evidence booklet.
“Did you give an interview???? Did you use those words !!!!!” Ashton wrote to Polkinghorne, adding: “Person of suspect?!”
Polkinghorne replied: “What do you think? Not a chance”.
Ashton gave the funeral wear advice on the 12th, stating also that she was on a flight, and one day later she sent a photo of a dirty refrigerator and suggested: “Let’s come up with home duties who does what”.
Polkinghorne replied: “I am good at ironing and grocery shopping putting the rubbish out and can cook. I am very good at judging shakes and can freeze bananas. I can water plants wash dogs pick up pooze [sic], point out imperfections. I am a natural at ignoring the obvious, spotting expired milk, reading history.”
The next day Polkinghorne told Ashton he had tried going home “only to be turfed out” – a reference, it would seem, to police still being there.
Ashton then sent multiple messages on April 15 before Polkinghorne replied at 5.08pm: “Will call in about two hours”.
Ashton replied 50 minutes later.
“I just remembered that you’re at the service. I would’ve big day x,” she wrote.
The detective interpreted the message to be a typo meaning it would have been a big day.
Reeves said he found about 150,000 images on Polkinghorne’s phone, thousands of which were adult pornography or sexual in nature. Among them were photos of Ashton and four other women – two of them previously described by witnesses as sex workers – that bank records show Polkinghorne gave nearly $200,000 to over a five-year period.
On a USB drive belonging to the defendant, the detective found multiple saved images of knot-tying techniques. One of the things that first caught investigators’ attention as they responded to the 111 call was the looseness of the rope tied around an upstairs balustrade. It has been repeatedly referred to as a group of “granny knots”. As a surgeon, Polkinghorne was accustomed to tying much more complicated knots, the defence pointed out earlier in the trial.
Prosecutors ended the day by having the detective briefly turn his focus to Hanna’s phone.
A search of the device showed a calendar app entry titled “dinner with PJP” – a frequent abbreviation she used referencing her husband. The dinner was scheduled to take place at 7pm on April 5. But by that time she was dead, and Polkinghorne was receiving messages from Ashton.
Jurors are set to return to court on Monday for week five of the trial, at which point Reeves will continue discussing Hanna’s devices before cross-examination by the defence.
The Crown is nearly finished calling witnesses and will likely wrap up by early next week, Justice Graham Lang told jurors today. But the defence is also expected to call numerous witnesses. While the schedule currently seems “on target” to finish in six weeks, the court should have a better indication by the end of next week whether it will need to last longer, he said.
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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.
The Police Association supports cameras but worries about costs.