Pauline Hanna had been catching up with two of her oldest friends at a Hawke’s Bay restaurant in January 2020 when the light-hearted nature of the dinner and drinks took an abruptly dark turn. The then-61-year-old - who had about 14 months left to live - was silent as she outstretched her thumbs and put both hands around her neck.
“He tried to strangle me,” John Riordan recalled Hanna explaining as she broke the silence, moments after saying that she “had to be very, very careful” around husband Philip Polkinghorne because she wasn’t ever sure when he “would blow up”.
But it wasn’t the only hair-raising outcry jurors would learn about as they spent eight weeks sifting through whiplash evidence - facts, recollections and innuendo that jerked back and forth into one of two camps, a ceaseless tug-of-war of two starkly different narratives.
The other outcry came some time in the early 1990s, again in Hawke’s Bay, amid some family strife following the death of Hanna’s father. Hanna and her mother had raised their voices at each other and Hanna’s younger sister, Tracey, had entered the fray, trying to intervene.
Another gesture carrying a grim but unsaid meaning: this time Hanna raising her wrists in the air.
“All of the sudden she said that she’d tried to kill herself and [that] I didn’t know her and I didn’t know what was going on in her life,” the younger sister told jurors. “The world stopped. I couldn’t remember what was said after that.”
Tracey Hanna said she’s now ashamed she never had a follow-up conversation with her sister about her mental health, chalking it up to her youth and immaturity at the time and it being a less enlightened era when such discussions were misguidedly considered taboo. She buried the memory for decades, she said, until the shock news that Hanna had committed suicide. She realised that Hanna’s death closely followed their mother’s, just as the previous outcry had been some time in the wake of their father’s death.
Murder or suicide?
For Tracey Hanna, the defence narrative made perfect sense. She travelled all the way from her home in the United Kingdom to give evidence at the request of her widowed brother-in-law. For the Riordans - who spent long weeks in the crowded High Court at Auckland gallery steadfastly seated beside Hanna’s other sibling, Bruce - the Crown’s contention that Polkinghorne fatally strangled his wife before staging the scene to look like a self-inflicted hanging was the only explanation that rang true.
Two outcries by Hanna which, viewed in hindsight, both appeared to be foreboding premonitions of the violent end to her life on the morning of Easter Monday, April 5, 2021.
Despite being so disparate, the duelling narratives - suicide or murder - often crossed over and offered warped reflections of each other.
In the murder scenario, the focus was on Polkinghorne’s hidden life - a carousel of sex workers, meth pipes and hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of cash withdrawals as his id ran wild. Those advocating the suicide explanation emphasised Hanna’s hidden self-doubt and depression.
An audit that sifted through five years of the couple’s finances found that they had one joint account and several in Polkinghorne’s name only. From the ones operated by Polkinghorne alone, nearly $300,000 had been transferred to six women, three of whom were identified by witnesses as sex workers. Of that, $106,000 went to Sydney-based escort Madison Ashton, who by that time was a tabloid star due to failed bids in 2012 and 2015 for a piece of billionaire cardboard magnate Richard Pratt’s estate.
Another $440,000 in cash withdrawals were noted, almost $200,000 of which had been removed from cash machines in Australia. Travel records showed that neither Polkinghorne nor his wife were in Australia when many of the withdrawals were made - the clear insinuation by the Crown being that Ashton had access.
Emails show that Hanna initially knew about the paid liaisons with Ashton, participating in group sex with her husband, the escort and a male sex worker early on. But the Crown alleged that she had been in the dark about the serious intimate relationship that developed between Ashton and her husband, who vanished for several days in 2019 to secretly spend Christmas in Sydney.
In an undated WhatsApp message which Polkinghorne took a screenshot of in October 2018, Ashton said she had thought over his “idea about the future” but wasn’t yet ready for such an “important life decision”.
“You have been silent and iv [SIC] certainly not wanted to ask about Mrs P,” she wrote. “... I love you and I’ll be true always, that’s all I got right now x.”
Polkinghorne responded: “Darling that is sufficient for me more than sufficient. Let us love each other and leave the future to the future. I will try not to burden you with any of my ideas. Yours Philip.”
A year after the Christmas 2019 tryst, Polkinghorne got into an argument with Ashton as they discussed plans to spend Christmas 2020 together. Screenshots of the WhatsApp exchange were shown to jurors.
“You just love drama and I’m not f**king into it, serious Philip I’m not into it,” Ashton said. That message came after Polkinghorne suggested it might not be worth spending two weeks in a Covid-19 isolation hotel upon his return to New Zealand if Ashton had a booking with someone else while he was in Australia.
“...Thank you so much for f**king ruining Christmas and ruining the whole f**king thing f**k off. I don’t want to hear from you until I’m back in Sydney. I mean it I don’t wanna hear from you I’m really upset. And I’m so disappointed in you.”
Polkinghorne then said he’d ring her in 90 minutes, once he was finished with his surgery. He had something important to say, he told her. She blocked the surgeon, then unblocked him and agreed to talk the next day after he said: “God you have never done that before”.
Ashton went on to say Polkinghorne had been mistaken about her planning to see a client while he was scheduled to be there.
“... That I would work over our Christmas, it’s such a disgusting suggestion from you, i’m shocked that this would actually come from you,” she said. “And your wording, and the vibe, as if I am a Neanderthal.
“... You have a gutter mentality sometimes when it comes to me and my occupation, in how you communicate and some of your concepts that are in your mind. I accept this is something that is not ideal about you, but you are not perfect but you are very lovable. Kind and patient, sexy and many other attributes ...”
‘Going to last 100 years’
Police seized Polkinghorne’s mobile phone days after his home was taped off and turned into a crime scene, finding that all WhatsApp messages prior to the morning of his wife’s death had been irretrievably deleted aside from the ones for which he had saved screenshots. When they went to seize Ashton’s phone, just over three weeks after Hanna’s death, they found her with Polkinghorne in a posh Mt Cook Village chalet.
Polkinghorne began receiving messages from Ashton again at 4.28pm on April 5, the day of his wife’s death, following a three-hour interview with police. Many of the messages were trivial in nature - marketing blasts that she appeared to send out to all followers. But on April 7 she sent a link to an article about his wife’s death.
On April 10, Ashton sent a link to another 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 printed for jurors, and the Crown quoted from it during their opening address. “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.”
Three days before his wife’s funeral, Ashton told him: “Honestly I really love you ... Do not wear a f**king bow tie at the funeral. Keep the hat.”
On April 23, she told him, “If you passed away I wouldn’t leave the house ever again,” to which he replied: “Darling you and I aren’t going anywhere. We are going to last 100 years.”
As they planned their meeting at the Mt Cook chalet - 25 days after his wife’s death - preparing to meet for the first time in over a year due to Covid lockdown restrictions, Ashton worried, “Okay sounds like you’re breaking up w th [sic] me what the f***.”
Polkinghorne replied: “F*** no! Christ never, I am not trying to push you in any direction. I haven’t come this far to walk away.”
Ashton had been slated to testify for the Crown and was poised to be the star witness. But as the weeks passed and with only a few witnesses left on their list, prosecutors admitted to Justice Graham Lang while out of earshot of the jury that Ashton was no longer co-operating and could not be found to serve her a summons. All they knew, lawyer Brian Dickey said, was that she wasn’t in New Zealand or Australia.
Jurors sent the judge a note asking where she was after the Crown called their last witness. There was a brief debate about what to tell them before it was agreed with lawyers from both sides to keep it vague.
“I cannot say anything about it,” he said after the group filed back into the courtroom. “Further, you cannot speculate as to why that is the case.”
‘Hurt, hurt, hurt’
In April 2020, one year before her death, Hanna drafted and sent herself a vulnerable email she intended for no one else to see. No one else did notice it - not even police - until a defence-hired IT expert was given access to conduct his own searches of her laptop in July this year.
“I am never good enough despite my efforts - today is the 25th day in a row - but I am not adding any value,” she wrote, noting that she was tired and not herself after working “15/6 hours x4 over Easter”. “I want desperately to tell someone and cry and ask for help but everyone seems to think I’m amazing and does not want to know that I have foibles and failings.
“I have tried to bring up with Philip but he tells me he hasn’t got time to go over the negative tonight = he has enough. I must stand on my own two feet but I don’t know today if I have two feet or what they look like.
“So I have had 3 glasses of wine and a beautiful dinner thanks to PJP [Polkinghorne’s initials] - but I don’t know what to do with myself.. So I will go to bed and not sleep. V. unusual for me - and it builds up - who knows what might follow. Have to tell someone even if no- one but God ever sees this.”
Polkinghorne’s shoulders heaved and he hid his face behind his hands, weeping as his lawyer read the email aloud.
Every single witness who knew Hanna described her as meticulously put together. Colleagues described the high-ranking health administrator, who had recently taken a lead role in distributing the Covid-19 vaccine, as a “troubleshooter” who had a reputation for enjoying challenges and getting the toughest jobs done. She said that work was her “happy place”, one colleague said.
But Hanna’s hidden side, sometimes revealed to family but more often expressed in notes to herself, was one of self-doubt and anxiety.
Another document found on her computer appeared to be rough notes for a March 2019 letter that was intended for her husband. She drafted it after an argument in which Polkinghorne had said their two and a half decades together had been a waste.
“Throughout my life because I was painfully shy I was continually hurt, cried my self to sleep often,” she wrote, going on to describe her father’s death with one word: “Devastation”.