Retired eye surgeon Philip Polkinghorne has pleaded not guilty to murdering wife Pauline Hanna in 2021.
The Crown alleges Polkinghorne, 71, strangled his wife and staged her death to look like a suicide at their Remuera home but the defence says there is no evidence of a homicide.
Steve Braunias is an award-winning New Zealand journalist, author, columnist and editor.
OPINION
The immediate and obviously transfixing attraction of the Dr Philip Polkinghorne murder trial currently playing at the High Court of Auckland is lotsa sex, and beneath that there is the deep appealof its setting in Auckland’s mansioned eastern suburbs, but even deeper and more compelling in sometimes ghastly ways is the trial’s absolute fixation with class. To be precise, the ruling class.
Very many New Zealand trials are concerned with acts of the desperate poor. Polkinghorne’s trial is obsessed with acts of the desperate rich — dining at the members-only Northern Club (annual fee, $1200), holidaying at summer homes (insane to downplay these expensive seaside retreats as baches) in Coromandel, all the while zonked on prescription meds and hitting the Pinot and stoking up the glass barbecue to smoke sh*tloads of P.
White mischief in the white-walled, multi-chimneyed homes of white-collar professionals, who are pretty much all white. The trial has a faint whiff of old money and a stronger stink of the tasteless nouveau riche. Well, better nouveau than never, as Groucho Marx observed, and much of the public excitement in this unfolding case is that it parts the curtains of Auckland’s moneyed elite to offer a view of their private lives. So far, after three weeks, much of the view has consisted of a Remuera ophthalmologist madly rutting.
Philip Polkinghorne appears at the Auckland High Court for the beginning of week three in the Polkinghorne murder trial. Photo / Jason Oxenham
Dr Polkinghorne — “Polk”, or “Polky”, to quote from witnesses, some friendly, most hostile — has been presented by the Crown as so rampant in his ambitions to engage in group sex that I have got away with characterising the small baldy in my regular portraits of the trial as a “malignant sex dwarf” and “odious sex midget”. Rest assured I have similar zingers ready to roll as the Crown continue to connect his conduct to the central accusation that he killed his wife Pauline. She died by suicide, argue his defence. Polkinghorne is represented by Ron Mansfield KC, who stated in his opening address to the jury: “He simply went to bed and when he got up he found her dead.”
Police treated her death on Easter Monday morning, April 5, 2021, as “unexplained”, and opened an investigation filed as Operation Kian. Dr Polkinghorne was charged with murder 16 months later.
He sits in court modelling one mad pair of socks after another. Wednesday was the maddest — bright, shocking pink — but it complemented the carnival atmosphere created by a mob of over 70 who filled the courtroom with high boisterous spirits. There was something medieval about it. The peasantry had come to ogle at an accused landowner. Strangely, the mood changed the next day.
The public gallery felt sour, fractious. The trial was forced to pack up on Thursday afternoon and move out of roomy courtroom 11 to petite courtroom 13. We are now all in each other’s faces and yesterday’s vibe was serious, mature, knowledgeable, with courtroom 13 distilled to about 30 hardcore regulars, including the nice lady from Howick, the nice lady from Remuera, and the nice lady from Raglan. The courtroom windows look out onto Parnell Rise, that gateway to the fabled east; the Polkinghorne home is up and over, above the placid waters of Ōrākei Basin. They had a cleaner. She worked four hours a day twice a week. She did the ironing, cleaned the four bedrooms and four bathrooms, to keep the house as immaculate as Pauline herself — every witness who knew her has remarked in court on her appearance, her insistence on dressing to the nines, never wanting to be seen by anyone before she put on her make-up and did her hair. These repeated observations buy into the Crown case that Pauline would not have died in the manner Polkinghorne has described — in a dressing gown, naked beneath it, slumped forward on a chair with a belt around her neck. This is the diva theory, that she was too glamorous to be seen in such a dishevelled way, even in death.
Polkinghorne's lawyer Ron Mansfield. Photo / Michael Craig
Mansfield is advancing his theory that Pauline was under immense stress from her senior role administering the Covid-19 vaccine response, and was, besides, unbalanced by drinking too much and taking various prescription medicines for depression, weight loss, and alcohol dependency.
Her doctor appeared as a witness yesterday. She rather blithely confirmed the medical records of prescribing Prozac, Duromine, Naltrexone, Disulfiram and Fluoxetine. The doctor was cross-examined by Hannah Stuart, who made a very refreshing substitute for Mansfield. The man from Waimate has a loud voice which he delivers in a great big rural honk.
“June 17, 2019,” said Stuart. “More Prozac.”
The doctor, who has interim name suppression: “Yes.”
As for Dr Polkinghorne, he had other drugs in mind. A friend and former colleague, eye surgeon Susan Ormonde, gave evidence of inviting Polkinghorne to her house for lunch the day before his wife’s funeral. Ormonde’s husband was there as well. They used to stay with Polkinghorne and Pauline at their summer home at Ring’s Beach in Coromandel. Ormonde is an ophthalmologist, too.
“Philip dealt with the back of the eye,” she said, “and I deal with the front of the eye.” She has a long, dramatic widow’s peak, and a straightforward manner.
Polkinghorne said to her at the lunch, “I’m worried some things will come out.”
She asked, “What things?”
“Mine and Pauline’s sex life,” he said, “and drugs.”
She asked, “What drugs?”
“Meth,” he said. “Have you tried it?”
“No,” she replied.
He said, “You should.”
Interesting lunch! Ormonde worked with Polkinghorne at private practise Auckland Eye; another colleague gave evidence, and essentially described the place in 2019 as a total shitshow. The board, said chair Mark Connelly, was “battered and bruised” after two shareholders made a “sudden and controversial departure”. They each received payouts of $650,000. Meanwhile Polkinghorne, himself a shareholder and co-founder of Auckland Eye, was nearing retirement and agitating for his own handsome payout.
That’s the thing about the ruling classes. It always comes down to money. The bananas were rotting in the fruit bowl in the Polkinghorne kitchen, in photos taken on the day of Pauline’s death; the three catbowls were filled to the brim, on the floor next to her body; three slices of bread had been placed in the toaster. If only the toast could talk. What tales they could tell of life, and death, in a house out east, among the doctors and the lawyers and the rest of our professional overlords with their doors and curtains and security gates shut tight, lest anyone sees what secrets lie within.
