WARNING: DISTRESSING CONTENT
“I just need you to know, if anything happens to me ... ”
It was January 2020, roughly a year and a half before Pauline Hanna died under suspicious circumstances, when she told one of her closest friends those words immediately following a text in which she indicated her long-philandering husband, eye surgeon Philip Polkinghorne, was acting “beastly”.
That’s what jurors in the High Court at Auckland were told today as a second week of testimony wrapped up in Polkinghorne’s ongoing murder trial.
Polkinghorne, now 71, is accused of having strangled Hanna, 63, in their Remuera home before staging the scene on the morning of Easter Monday 2021 to look like a suicide by hanging. But the defence has been adamant that the surgeon was unfairly maligned by police due to the couple’s unconventional open marriage, failing to take into account Hanna’s history of depression and suicidal thoughts.
In a truncated day of evidence, jurors heard from two of Hanna’s friends – both, like her, high-achieving healthcare industry administrators. The two witnesses were called this afternoon, after a rare site visit to the scene of the alleged crime earlier in the morning.
Police, lawyers, multiple media organisations and even Justice Graham Lang lingered on the quiet residential street outside the upmarket home as jurors were led through the interior by a detective, who was not allowed to talk to them. Some brought evidence books with them containing an architectural layout of the home and photos of the rooms as they looked on the day Hanna’s body was found.
They filed back on to a chartered bus, accompanied by courthouse security, after less than 30 minutes.
Back in the courtroom, Margaret White explained the context of the “if anything happens to me” conversation.
It began with a quick exchange of texts – a typical form of communication as the two mixed work and friendship – around 9pm on January 23, 2020.
“Hi sorry can t den [sic] anything tonight. Philip has decided to be beastly,” Hanna wrote her friend, signing off with “P”. She followed up a short time later with: “I need to talk”.
“She was very upset,” White recalled of the phone call that followed. “He’d become enraged. I wish I could remember more. I absolutely recall her saying, ‘I just need you to know, if anything happens to me ... ’”
There was no indication during the call, or ever during the 17 years they had known each other, that Polkinghorne was being physical with Hanna, the witness said. But she was worried enough about the ominous statement that White said she discussed with her husband the possibility of Hanna coming to stay with them.
White acknowledged under cross-examination from defence lawyer Ron Mansfield KC that her “sense” during the call was that Hanna had been drinking that night. Hanna was someone who enjoyed a glass of wine and would sometimes “have a couple extra” when upset about her relationship, but White said she never considered it to be problem drinking.
Mansfield hinted during his questioning that the incomplete “if anything happens” statement might have been an oblique reference to suicidal ideation. He asked White if Hanna had elaborated on what “beastly” meant.
“No, she didn’t,” White responded. “She was very upset. She was crying and she couldn’t say a lot because he [Polkinghorne] was there.
“She assured me: ‘It’s fine. It will pass’.”
That was a common refrain from Hanna, White said, as the friends discussed her turbulent marriage over years of walks, phone calls and coffee dates.
“Mostly, the whole time I’ve known Pauline ... she had always talked about his infidelities,” she said of Polkinghorne. “That was something she was always unhappy about but seemed to accept it, bizarrely.”
White said she often questioned Hanna about why she chose to stay with Polkinghorne, including after an incident in December 2020 – one month before the “beastly” text – in which Polkinghorne had vanished for days and Hanna had to lie to his family about why he wasn’t there for Christmas.
“I thought she deserved better,” she testified. “When they were good, Pauline was so happy and would understandably want that to last, but it didn’t last.”
But on the last time she saw Hanna, at a birthday dinner in February 2021, she seemed to be in a good place, White recalled.
“She was good,” she told jurors. “It had been a tricky time the year before, but she was in quite good spirits. Things with family were on a much better footing. She felt they [her and Polkinghorne] were actually in a much better place.”
The defence responded with what has become a standard line of questioning for witnesses who knew Hanna. Did they know she attempted suicide in 1992? Did they know she had been prescribed depression and anxiety medication for over a decade? Did they know she was referred to a crisis team in December 2019 after reporting suicidal thoughts? Every witness so far has said no, they did not know.
Mansfield also delved more today into Hanna’s work stress, noting she was sending work emails at all hours of the night in the final weeks of her life. He pointed to emails from earlier in the Covid-19 pandemic in which she said she was being bullied at work and that she never wanted to take on the role of overseeing the rollout of the vaccine.
White and HeathSource chief executive Clare Thompson, the other witness to testify today, both said Hanna was a high achiever who showed an immense amount of pride in her work. Everyone in the healthcare industry was under the pump during lockdown, they said, but Hanna had a reputation as a “troubleshooter”.
“She had all this going on in her private life, and professionally she always delivered,” White explained.
“ ... Work at times was extremely difficult. Pauline was the type that would get the difficult challenges that other people weren’t able to see through. She thrived on it.”
White later added, after more questioning from Mansfield: “We had a similar work ethic, which is not healthy, admittedly.”
Thompson’s testimony was in a lot of ways similar to White’s. The two weren’t as close as Hanna was to White, but they had been friends for about a decade and would spend time together outside the office.
“Pauline was a very sociable person,” she said. “She was larger-than-life. She was a happy person.”
She was also open about her home life, Thompson said, including challenges in her relationship with Polkinghorne. At one point, she recalled Hanna telling her she had “broken into” her husband’s laptop after fearing infidelity and found photos of him with another woman. They discussed the possibility of hiring a private investigator – something, jurors learned earlier in the week, Hanna had inquired about but didn’t follow through on.
The relationship wasn’t great but Hanna couldn’t see herself as a single woman in her 60s, Thompson recalled her saying. And there were also concerns about finances.
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“She said that Philip had asked her to sign forms that she didn’t understand,” Thompson testified. “When she asked what they were for, he became evasive. She was worried he was doing something underhanded – that she wouldn’t be able to access the money.”
The trial is scheduled to last four more weeks.
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.
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