Polkinghorne case: A summary of the Crown's case against murder accused
A summary of the case the Crown has presented in the murder trial of Philip Polkinghorne Video / Carson Bluck
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A summary of the case the Crown has presented in the murder trial of Philip Polkinghorne Video / Carson Bluck
NOW PLAYING • Polkinghorne case: A summary of the Crown's case against murder accused
A summary of the case the Crown has presented in the murder trial of Philip Polkinghorne Video / Carson Bluck
WARNING: DISTRESSING CONTENT
The defence has begun its closing address in the murder trial of Philip Polkinghorne, the Remuera eye surgeon accused of killing his wife Pauline Hanna and staging the scene to look like a suicide.
Ron Mansfield KC told the jury, “this has been a trial prosecuted by emotion, and where the victim was logic.”
Auckland Crown Solicitor Alysha McClintock spent all day closing the Crown’s case yesterday and jurors heard more from her this morning.
Warning: Some readers might find the contents of this live blog distressing.
KEY POINTS:
Retired eye surgeon Philip Polkinghorne has pleaded not guilty to murdering wife Pauline Hanna at Easter 2021.
The Crown alleges Polkinghorne, 71, strangled his wife and staged her death to look like a suicide at their Remuera home. The defence says there is no evidence of a homicide.
Herald reporter George Block is filing live from the Auckland High Court. Follow our live updates below.
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17 September, 04:44 am
Jury likely to begin deliberating tomorrow
There was no injury to the thyroid cartilage of the neck, one pathologist said, which would be expected in an older victim of strangulation, Mansfield says.
Justice Lang calls an end for the day, noting Auckland's weather is worsening and the jury needs to get home.
Mansfield will finish his closing address tomorrow morning.
The judge will sum up the case.
Justice Lang tells the jury members they will likely begin considering their verdict around 3pm tomorrow and should tell family and friends they will not be able to contact the outside world during deliberations in the jury room.
Court will resume at 10am tomorrow.
Pinned
17 September, 04:39 am
Hanna's bruise
The bruise on Hanna's right side under her temple was another non-specific injury that could have been caused within a week of her death, Mansfield says.
Setting up the hanging mechanism would have involved bending down and around the balustrade, and there could have been unsuccessful initial attempts, the defence lawyer says.
Hanna also went to the tip the day before her death, when she could also have suffered the injury.
Pinned
17 September, 04:37 am
The lividity, or the redness because of the pooling of blood in Hanna's legs, is entirely consistent with what Polkinghorne reported about the cause of her death, says Mansfield.
Pinned
17 September, 04:36 am
'Takes us nowhere'
"That's relevant, folks, because now the Crown seeks to rely on that of it being indicative of a homicidal killing rather than a death by way of hanging," Mansfield says.
The cluster of bruising on the back of Hanna's right arm could have been a result of moving the body from the scene, the pathologist also said. Kilak Kesha, who conducted the autopsy, acknowledged the arm bruises could have come from someone steadying her.
"Both agreed it's not specific, it takes us nowhere," Mansfield says.
Pinned
17 September, 04:33 am
Injuries consistent
The belt impression on the right side of Hanna's neck was entirely consistent with how Polkinghorne reported his wife to be positioned, Mansfield continues. The fact it disappeared had no significance, said the pathologists.
Facial congestion and petechiae (blood spotting) also did not help help with establishing a cause of death, Mansfield says.
Blood emerging from Hanna's right ear was not an injury; her ear was simply congested as a result of blood pooling due to neck compression.
Defence pathologist Dr Stephen Cordner considered the blood found only between her fingers could have been transferred from her ear when she was transported, Mansfield reminds the jury. Not one pathologist placed any weight on the blood found between her fingers, he adds.
Pinned
17 September, 04:28 am
Blood on the steps
Mansfield moves on to what the Crown said was Polkinghorne's attempt to plant evidence: blood on the steps examined by a defence forensic analyst two years after Hanna's death.
There was no evidence otherwise of any altercation with Hanna and the injury to his head could be described as non-specific, Mansfield says.
Polkinghorne always knew there was going to be the risk of contamination and the report furnished to the Crown makes that clear, the defence lawyer says.
But, consistent with an innocent man, he went to the expense of enlisting overseas expert Dr Timothy Scanlan to assess that area, Mansfield says.
Why would you go to that cost and face that obvious criticism unless you were driven to prove you did not have an altercation with your wife, and his injury was not caused by this altercation? the defence lawyer asks.
The reality is, the evidence establishes his motivation to establish his innocence, knowing full well of the criticism he was opening himself up to, Mansfield says.
"It is not an attempt to plant evidence and should not be seen as such."
Mansfield says he needs to respond to all the points raised by the Crown to support "a motive that did not exist" so his closing will continue for about an hour tomorrow, he says.
Pinned
17 September, 04:21 am
The note
Polkinghorne naturally looked for a suicide note and found a note, which he showed to Ring, suggesting it might be a note Hanna had left. He was not clear where it was found, says Mansfield: he was just sharing with a friend a note he's found that he believes supports what he believes happened to his wife.
"This is not the act of someone seeking to manipulate another person."
Pinned
17 September, 04:19 am
Ring's distaste 'understandable'
That Alison Ring, Polkinghorne and Hanna's friend, found interactions with him after he was charged, 16 months after his wife's death, distasteful, was understandable, says Mansfield.
Ring did not want to know about the inner, private workings of her friends' relationship but Polkinghorne, isolated and faced with a murder allegation, maybe understandably thought he could speak openly about the situation, the lawyer says.
Pinned
17 September, 04:17 am
He's no 'master manipulator'
Mansfield says the suggestion that his client has tried to manipulate witnesses is based on the comments of Paul Adriaanse, his friend and barber.
During the conversation Adriaanse described in evidence, Polkinghorne simply advised him that no one needs to make a statement to police, which is true, says Mansfield.
Polkinghorne had no reason to influence Adriaanse into not making a statement, says Mansfield.
It does not show he's a "master manipulator of people".
Pinned
17 September, 04:16 am
Nothing about the search "unmask[ed] the murderer" as the Crown promoted, Ron Mansfield says.
"That is just scare tactics, and frankly quite bizarre," Mansfield says.
"All he wanted to know was what was causing this suspicion."
Nor was it an isolated search on Duck Duck Go – a search engine designed for privacy – there were other searches, Mansfield says.
STORY CONTINUES
Proceedings will resume at the slightly earlier time of 9.30am at the Auckland High Court today before Justice Graham Lang and a jury of eight women and three men.
Yesterday, McClintock said all the various pieces of hard and circumstantial evidence, woven together and followed to their conclusion, led to the conclusion Hanna did not hang herself, as Polkinghorne claimed.
“The Crown says once you fit everything together here you can be sure that suicide can be excluded here,” McClintock said.
“This was murder.”
McClintock, in her opening address to the jury 49 days ago, said the staged suicide was the crescendo of a double life Polkinghorne had been leading where he used meth heavily and spent thousands upon thousands on sex workers.
She said the killing was presaged by domestic violence, as recounted by family friends of Hanna’s who said she had told them her husband had placed his hands on her neck and told her he could do it again, any time.
The two worlds of Dr Philip Polkinghorne – in one the renowned eye surgeon and loving husband of Pauline Hanna, and in the other a shadow life involving meth, aggression and fantasies of a new start with his well-compensated escort mistress – were about to collide.
The result, prosecutors said as they devoted an entire day to delivering a closing address in his murder trial, was both violent and tragic.
“Here we have a man spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on sex workers and drugs in secret and trying to keep his second life away from Pauline Hanna,” Crown solicitor Alysha McClintock told jurors. “Dr Polkinghore has become aggressively more and more shambolic ...
“He’s obsessed with [Sydney escort] Madison Ashton. He’s thinking he’s setting up a life with her ... He’s haemorrhaging money, and money’s something he’s preoccupied with.”
And all the while, it was alleged, his methamphetamine dependency was increasing, resulting in friends and coworkers sometimes noticing a change in his behaviour, and Hanna was starting to have suspicions.
The Crown delivers the closing address in the murder trial of Philip Polkinghorne, accused of killing wife Pauline Hanna. Photos / Michael Craig
“There’s a tinder box ready to go up,” McClintock said this afternoon, theorising that it culminated overnight on April 5, 2021, with either a surprise attack on his wife as she slept or an argument that turned fatally violent.
Polkinghorne, 71, is now in the eighth week of his high-profile trial in the High Court at Auckland, where the Crown has accused him of fatally strangling his wife before staging the scene at their Remuera home in an attempt to make it look like a suicide. His lawyers, who are expected to give their own lengthy closing address either tomorrow or on Wednesday, have said it’s a clear case of suicide warped by police overreach and the Crown’s fascination with his sex life.
McClintock was unable to cram the entire Crown closing address into one day. She’s expected to finish this morning, at which point it will be decided if jurors are sent home for the day or if defence lawyer Ron Mansfield KC goes immediately into his closing address.
Polkinghorne murder trial: finances and sex workers
Four weeks into the murder trial of Philip Polkinghorne, the focus has turned to his finances and the hundreds of thousands of dollars he gave to sex workers. Video | Carson Bluck
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The Crown solicitor acknowledged to jurors today that the allegations against the eye surgeon were both bizarre and unusual. But with the only two viable explanations being suicide or murder, the circumstantial evidence points strongly at the former, she said. Most of the afternoon was spent weaving together the circumstantial threads that led her to believe so.
“The single most significant piece of evidence in this trial is that Dr Polkinghorne had tried to strangle Pauline Hanna before,” McClintock said, referring to an outcry in 2020 that two of her longtime friends recalled being present for. “There was no challenge – none – to the fact that she said that he’d done it and that she demonstrated he’d done it.”
She read aloud transcripts of John and Pheasant Riordan’s evidence about the incident, in which they recalled Hanna putting her own hands around her neck to demonstrate.
Polkinghorne case: The former eye surgeon’s defence
Philip Polkinghorne’s lawyer called two pathologists who believe the circumstances of Pauline Hanna’s death suggest she committed suicide. Video / Corey Fleming
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NOW PLAYING • Polkinghorne case: The former eye surgeon’s defence
Philip Polkinghorne’s lawyer called two pathologists who believe the circumstances of Pauline Hanna’s death suggest she committed suicide. Video / Corey Fleming
“Sadly, John Riordan was right [when he told her], ‘If he’s done it once, he’ll do it again’,” the prosecutor said.
The defence insinuated during cross-examination of the witnesses that Hanna was drunk and might have been lying. Whether she was intoxicated or not has no real relevance, but it would make no sense at all for her to have lied to her friends, McClintock argued.
“She did nothing ... but defend him, paper over his bad behaviour over and over again,” she explained. “She defends him constantly. Why would she lie about that?”
Polkinghorne, she said, “wants to make this all about her state of mind”.
“Don’t look at me, he says, look at her. I ask you to look at him. Look at his behaviour.”
You can read the full recap of the first day of the Crown’s closing address here.
Justice Lang instructed jurors early on Friday, after the final witness had left the courtroom, to return to the High Court at Auckland on Monday for the Crown’s lengthy closing address. The defence will give a closing address on Tuesday, with deliberations expected to start Wednesday.
Jurors are probably distrustful regarding timing predictions by now, Justice Lang joked of the unusually lengthy trial, which was initially scheduled to be finished in six weeks but now has the potential – depending on how long the jury deliberates – of stretching into a ninth week. However, the plans from this point on are relatively firm, he said.
Polkinghorne, now 71, was charged with murder in August 2022 – 16 months after wife Pauline Hanna, 63, was found dead in their Remuera home. The defence has been adamant that her death was exactly as it initially seemed – a suicide by partial hanging in the entryway of their home that had taken place sometime overnight while Polkinghorne was sleeping. The Crown, however, has presented a much more nefarious picture in which the surgeon strangled his wife of 24 years and then staged the scene to look like a suicide.
The Crown delivers the closing address in the murder trial of Philip Polkinghorne, accused of killing wife Pauline Hanna. Photos / Michael Craig
Prosecutors spent more than four weeks calling evidence that focused on, among other things, Polkinghorne’s methamphetamine usage, the hundreds of thousands of dollars he spent on sex workers, his alleged “double life” with Sydney escort Madison Ashton and an alleged prior outcry by Hanna in which two witnesses said she reported her husband had strangled her non-fatally.
Ashton did not testify and neither did Polkinghorne. His sister, who arrived at the scene before paramedics and police, was also not called by either side to the witness box.
The defence has sought to dismiss much of the sex and drugs evidence as irrelevant. The past two-and-a-half weeks have focused largely on Hanna’s mental health, which included a decades-long prescription for Prozac, revelations in her own emails noting at-times-intense work stress, a call to her GP in December 2019 reporting thoughts of suicide and an alleged outcry to her sister in the early 1990s about a previous attempt at self-harm.
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.
