- Madison Ashton refused to give evidence at the Philip Polkinghorne trial but cast a long shadow over the testimony.
- The Australia-based sex worker was paid more than $100,000 by Polkinghorne in a relationship that began with paid-for group sex and advanced to him giving her a diamond engagement ring in 2022.
- Ashton declined to appear as a witness because she says police disrespected her because of her occupation – and now says she would’ve been prepared to help gather evidence.
- Today Polkinghorne was acquitted of murdering Pauline Hanna. Ashton’s reaction was: “Unbelievable, unbelievable. I am shaking with shock.”
In the High Court at Auckland the jury was hearing a recording of Pauline Hanna venting about her husband, Philip Polkinghorne: “I know he loves me but he’s just a sex fiend he wants to have sex with everybody,” she had told her family.
That day Madison Ashton – the runaway witness and Polkinghorne’s former lover – was having a cocktail in Sicily celebrating her 50th birthday.
The high-class escort refused to appear as a Crown witness. She would have given explosive evidence about Polkinghorne’s methamphetamine use, how he had planned to leave his wife and marry Ashton – and the messages she had shared with the murder accused.
While “mainlining” on the Polkinghorne trial coverage she took a luxury cruise, walked through the Jardin Majorelle gardens in Morocco, visited London, Lisbon, and climbed the Acropolis in Athens.
Ashton says she fled to Europe to avoid giving evidence because she lost faith in the police investigation into Pauline Hanna’s death.
In an interview with the Herald, the sex worker says she now has some regrets about not appearing as a Crown witness.
She believes police “botched” the murder investigation by not taking her seriously and omitting crucial evidence she provided.
“They are not going to ask me the right questions, they will only waste my time. The stigma of him being with a sex worker has stopped them from doing their jobs properly,” Ashton says.
“They have never acknowledged that Philip and I were in a relationship, so the jury won’t have the full context. The police should admit their mistakes for not testing Philip for drugs [immediately after Hanna’s death] or having water-tight forensics.”
‘We talked about getting married’
The Herald has obtained personal correspondence between Polkinghorne and Ashton, videos and police interviews that confirms Polkinghorne was living a double life and actively planning a future with the escort.
“We talked about getting married, buying a house and having children,” Ashton says.
“You know what I really loved about Philip? He was intelligent and had a dry wit. I was so impressed that Philip and Pauline were in this mature avant-garde, cashed-up relationship that could also have strong boundaries, and no hysteria over sex.
“He had a job, and he wasn’t going to be a f***tard and ask me to quit mine, I thought I was having an equal relationship with someone on my level.
“Pauline and I had a lot of similarities; with me he wanted Pauline 2.0. We are tough, well-dressed women who worship our men.
“Most men don’t want an out and proud sex worker because they’re worried what everyone else will think. Philip wanted me so he looks like more of a man than he really is ‘like, f*** how did he wrangle her? But what I was in love with was clearly a myth,” Ashton says.
The Crown’s case was that Polkinghorne fatally strangled Hanna, staging it to look like a suicide. The Crown submitted that he was living a double life, obsessed with meth and in a relationship with Ashton in Sydney.
Polkinghorne’s defence was that Hanna, a Counties Manukau Health executive was exhausted during the Covid response, had a history of mental health issues, was on medication for depression then tragically took her own life.
On the first day of the eight-week trial, Polkinghorne pleaded guilty to methamphetamine-related charges.
From group sex to an engagement ring
Ashton says she was in a de facto relationship with Polkinghorne between late 2017 and June 2021.
In May 2011 Polkinghorne met Ashton and another escort for group sex with himself and Hanna, at a suite in Sydney’s Hotel Hilton.
In an email to Ashton, obtained by the Herald, Polkinghorne wrote: “Pauline is very excited although often nervous when such an evening starts. I would have liked her to have a male partner, but she loves women and that is fine with me.
“I just love watching her play and having a treat or two and am sure between the two of you she will have a great time. Then it will be my turn!”
A year later the couple had a five-some. Polkinghorne specifically requested a male escort and “not be too petite” female escorts with breast augmentation.
Ashton would later tell the murder inquiry detectives that Hanna “wore the pants” and wasn’t a doormat in her relationship with Polkinghorne. During a booking, Ashton says Pauline was a bit “icy” and barely spoke but was “chirpy” after she had sex.
“Philip manipulated me to try and boss him around he liked to watch me, and Pauline have sex with other escorts,” Ashton says.
“Once Philip was getting drinks and I was in the spa with Pauline, I asked her, ‘Do you really want to be here’? ‘We can just fake it or kill time for four hours and go home.’ I wasn’t going to make someone be with me just for their partner.
“She should have told him to ‘F*** off’ but she was so in love with being in love.”
Ashton said Hanna responded by telling her she was “fine” with the group sex.
The day Pauline Hanna died
In a statement to police, Ashton said that on Easter Monday in 2021 Polkinghorne rang her distressed and crying. He said: “I found the body.”
Ashton later told police: “[Philip] said, she had come back to the house and committed suicide to punish him.”
Ashton remains frustrated with how police were dismissive of her and this is partly why she did not give evidence at the trial.
Just three weeks after Hanna’s death Ashton had a secret tryst with Polkinghorne at the Mt Cook Lakeside Retreat, even though he knew he was being treated as a suspect in Hanna’s death.
Ashton says that when police arrived to execute a search warrant at the $2895-a-night Matariki Room, which has views across the Ben Ohau range, the officers were hostile to her and treated her like a criminal.
They confiscated two of her mobile phones, one with her clients’ contacts, the other she claims contained crucial evidence about her relationship with Polkinghorne and his admission of methamphetamine use.
“The NZ police’s view of me was already tainted, they treated me like I was nothing,” Ashton recalls.
“They should have stopped me at the airport and told me he was still married.”
In June 2021, two months after Hanna’s death, Ashton stopped contact with Polkinghorne. She claims he attempted to take his own life with sleeping pills. Ashton posted on Instagram: “Fake attempt, narcissist playbook 101. Seen it a couple of times before but doesn’t give a s*** about the deceased.”
Ashton believes Polkinghorne displayed a callous indifference to Hanna’s death, saying that in her view, “Philip couldn’t give a f*** that Pauline’s dead, he has maintained an absolute disregard for her death the entire way through.”
“In my opinion even if he didn’t kill her, he drove her to kill herself.”
‘He is a liar’
Over time Ashton says Polkinghorne told her things that simply didn’t add up. She turned detective and uncovered more lies and infidelity.
“I thought he was f***ing divorced. He said Pauline was living with another man.
“Pauline never knew he was cheating on her and was preparing to leave her.”
Ashton says she believes Polkinghorne had narcissistic traits.
“I don’t know if I will ever be able to get past it or live with the sorrow and heartbreak for what she went through. She thought she had a great life, but it was a charade.”
She says he had also told her that Hanna was an only child, who stood to inherit $5 million from her mother’s estate (when in fact Hanna had a brother and sister).
“In December 2019, he wasn’t at a men’s retreat, he was with me in Sydney. Why didn’t the Crown show the photo of him wearing a Santa hat? Meanwhile poor Pauline was having suicidal thoughts and thought about driving into a lorry. He is a liar.”
In 2018, while Ashton believed Polkinghorne was preparing to marry her, she would later discover he was still hooking up with other sex workers.
Two days after Hanna’s death, Polkinghorne booked a Kiwi international porn star - a close friend of Ashton’s.
Polkinghorne then booked a third escort in July 2021 and took her skydiving in Queenstown. During the August 2021 Covid lockdown the woman had stayed with him at his Rings Beach holiday house for a month. The sex worker says he treated her as his “lockdown wife” and was sexually demanding.
The trial was told Polkinghorne gave women - including three already described to the jury as sex workers - nearly $300,000 in the five years leading up to Hanna’s death.
The defence argued Hanna was far from financially helpless – having spent over $110,000 from 2016 to 2018 on personal items and services such as clothes, hair, skincare and dry cleaning.
Ashton says her transactional relationship with Polkinghorne began in 2011, but it was not until six years later that they started a long-distance transtasman relationship.
“I thought they were separated so I thought this was a clean break. When Philip started to see me by himself, we sort of got into a routine. He would come over to Sydney every month or so,” Ashton told police.
Ashton says Polkinghorne gave her hundreds of thousands of dollars over the years, including paying for her Sydney apartment and a six-figure sum for her legal fees in a trademark dispute.
The last payment had been for $5580 on January 5, 2021, exactly three months before Easter Monday, when Polkinghorne called 111 to report his wife’s death.
She also told her accountant that if Polkinghorne was giving her money it wasn’t for sex work but in a “domestic context”.
“I remember saying to Philip ‘I always wanted a guy like you, I didn’t think I’d end up with the guy’.”
Ashton said her relationship with Polkinghorne cooled soon after police raided their Mt Cook retreat in April 2021. But they remained in contact and attended couple’s therapy in February 2022.
“He wanted to marry me as soon as we started dating, so he bought me an engagement ring in 2022 which he left at Auckland airport for me to collect. I phoned Diamonds on Richmond, and told them Philip was charged for murder, they could keep it.”
Trips to Sydney became more frequent for Polkinghorne, as he developed feelings for Ashton. Ashton, too, admits falling for him.
“I loved him because I thought he was my friend, I wasn’t looking for a relationship, he presented himself as single and available. He had to f***ing convince me. I wanted a 50/50 relationship, someone I respected.”
Ashton believed Polkinghorne’s “divorce” from Hanna was finalised in the first quarter of 2018.
“I was blown away; my first reaction was don’t think for a minute I will hook up with you. I remember saying he had better give Pauline everything she deserved, I felt he completely blindsided her. He told me during the negotiations of this ‘fake divorce’ that Pauline begged him [to allow her] to attend his son Ben’s wedding.”
In an email allegedly written by Polkinghorne in October 2018 and later published by Ashton on social media, he purportedly declared he would end up a multi-millionaire with cash and assets worth $6 million to $7m if he and Hanna ended their marriage.
“She will include her inheritance in the mix if we live together for the next few months... that way she has time to plan her future and yes, she wants to stay married to me,” the email released by Ashton said.
“If it doesn’t work out, we will depart amicably, sell the house, and split the assets roughly 65:35 in my favour. That way I would end up with about 6-7 million. I said I would discuss this with you when I am in Sydney before agreeing to anything,” the email says.
Throughout Polkinghorne and Ashton’s transtasman relationship the pair had “virtual” dinners twice a week and he would make a table setting for Ashton. They stayed in touch with daily texts, and video chats from his bed.
From his Remuera home Polkinghorne showed off his culinary skills, his eye surgeries and his naked body.
Ashton’s videos of her playing and shopping at the supermarket with their “children,” chihuahuas, Brock, Daddy and Chanel.
She showed Polkinghorne where she grew up and introduced him to her two children, who she is now estranged from.
Polkinghorne’s meth habit
On the day the murder trial began, Polkinghorne pleaded guilty to methamphetamine-related charges. Police found 37 grams of meth seized at his Upland Rd Remuera house, and a P pipe was found under his bed.
Ashton says she took recreational drugs with Polkinghorne. However, she believes he formed a serious drug habit some time after 2017.
She says he was emaciated when she saw him at Mt Cook three weeks after Hanna’s death.
“With meth you appear completely normal, but his moods were erratic, and he took it when we had sex,” Ashton says.
“He and Pauline were heavy drinkers but highly functional.
“The first time he tried it I was fast asleep, but I got up because it was freezing. All the windows were open and he was standing there naked. He said, ‘I want to try this stuff, but I don’t know how to do it.’ It didn’t take long for him to love it.”
At one point she contacted Polkinghorne’s son Ben in London to say she was concerned his father was using methamphetamine too often. In a text seen by the Herald she claimed:
“Hey Ben, he’s to stop this... the 26gm they found was for personal useage, he had lied for a year he wasn’t doing it at all when the reality is he was smashing it.
“I don’t want him to contact me ever, I will never contact him again,” her text said.
Today Ashton says she has nothing left to say to Polkinghorne – and regrets Hanna never had the courage to leave him.
“I am sorry she never got to be herself. Pauline died never knowing the truth, I wish she had just called me.”
Carolyne Meng-Yee is an Auckland-based investigative journalist who won Best Documentary at the Voyager Media Awards in 2022. She worked for the Herald on Sunday from 2007-2011 and rejoined the Herald in 2016 after working as an award-winning current affairs producer at TVNZ’s 60 Minutes, 20/20 and Sunday.