Putting to one side the vastly entertaining gossip of sex, sex and more sex in the murder trial of Remuera ophthalmologist Dr Philip Polkinghorne, and as such take away the smug puritanical
disapproval of a lively little left-handed fellow who busily applied himself to living his best libidinous life, then much of what remains is science.
Science will either work to liberate Dr Polkinghorne from the accusation of killing his wife Pauline at their home on Easter Monday morning, April 5, 2021, or damn him to hell. Science dominated proceedings at the High Court of Auckland on Tuesday. Science duly damned him as well as liberated him; the thing about science is that it’s just as contested as gossip.
The Crown alleges that Dr Polkinghorne strangled his wife to death. His defence is that she hanged herself. Her body was examined by pathologist Dr Kilak Kesha at Auckland City Hospital. He is a familar presence at the High Court; I have seen him appear as an expert witness many times. But I have never seen Dr Kesha cross-examined the way Dr Polkinghorne’s lawyer Ron Mansfield KC tore into him on Tuesday. It was intense. It was full-on. Mansfield is otherwise a harmless fellow who sticks to a vegetarian diet in courtroom 11, scoffing from a brown paper bag of nuts and an apple a day, but it was as though he performed an autopsy on a living person.
Dr Kesha appeared as the Crown’s 37th witness in the third week of its case against Dr Polkinghorne. Courtroom 11 has become a gallery of the entranced. Its public gallery on Tuesday was standing room only until a bunch of first-year louts from the University of Auckland law school realised there were a few seats at the far end of the court, and made a ruckus stomping their way past the regulars who attend the most scandalous show in town.
Dr Kesha is Auckland’s Dr Death. He has performed about 4000 autopsies. He trained on the dead in Connecticut, Baltimore and Detroit. “I systematically dissect every organ,” he said. He has quite possibly met Dr Polkinghorne, who told police about going to the hospital morgue to collect eyes from donors.
His evidence in chief was led by prosecutor Brian Dickey. I have seen them talk about death many times. Dr Kesha has a relaxed, straightforward manner, and wears his hair long at the back. He said Pauline had an abrasion on the bridge of her nose, and a cluster of bruises on the back of her right arm. She also had small pinpoint haemorrhages on her neck, sometimes visible in people who have epileptic fits, episodes of violent coughing, and hiccups (!), but most commonly from obstruction of the veins in the neck. Police say Dr Polkinghorne strangled Pauline; his version is that he found her body slumped on a chair with a belt tied around her neck, and the belt was attached to a rope fixed from an upstairs balustrade.
There was a bit more from Dr Kesha’s autopsy report, e.g. a bruise on her scalp meant that either something hit her head or her head hit something, and then the subject turned to the impression the belt had made on Pauline’s neck. That is: what impression? He said there was no impression made by the belt when he examined her body the day after her death and when Dickey asked what that suggested to him, I wrote down the time of Dr Kesha’s answer in my Warwick 3B1 notebook because I wanted to record the exact moment of a statement so incredible that it felt like a turning point, a fork in the road, the tolling of an ominous bell. Dr Kelak’s answer, at 10.51am: “It suggests to me that most likely the belt was placed on the neck after death.”
All along the police theory is based on the outrageous proposition that Dr Polkinghorne staged Pauline’s suicide, that he scurried around their large, boring house with the ugly two-seater couches and awful paintings to fetch a chair and a rope and a belt. Here, at 10.51am on August 13, was forensic evidence in support of it, from no less an authority than Dr Death. Justice Lang called for morning tea just after this revelation. I ate a slice of homebaked banana cake and drank from my thermos of instant coffee in a state of high excitement.
But then Mansfield stepped up. Trials, bloody hell. You never know what’s around the corner. Things began in a collegial manner. “You say the impression on the neck is inconsistent with a hanging,” said Mansfield. “Shall we just explore that?” It wasn’t as though Dr Kesha had a choice. For the next hour he experienced an onslaught. Mansfield is in the form of his life at the Dr Polkinghorne trial and provided a cross-examination masterclass – a shame the law school oafs had already hoofed it.
Mansfield asked about Dr Kesha attending the police investigation at the Remuera house on the morning of Pauline’s death.
“You saw what was clearly a belt impression on her neck, didn’t you.”
Dr Kesha: “Yes.”
“Consistent with Pauline taking her life by her own hand?”
Dr Kesha: “Correct. It’s a possibility.”
“If the belt was removed one-two hours after her death, that might explain why the impression was there on the 5th [of April] and not the 6th?”
“It’s possible.”
Dr Polkinghorne told 111 that he removed the belt as soon as he found Pauline’s body, and cut the rope.
Mansfield ramped up the cross-examination even more. The customarily unflappable Dr Kesha very often replied in quite a flappable manner. Mansfield pressed him on why it seemed that his evidence on Tuesday was the first time he said the position of the belt’s impression - horizontal, rather than upwards that would be consistent with a hanging - might have some significance. “I told police on day one!”, he shouted.
But there was nothing in his original report. “Why not?”
Dr Kesha: “I wasn’t asked.”
Mansfield sighed, and said: “It’s not a matter of being asked. You’re an expert in this area. If this was of significance, why didn’t you refer to it?”
Dr Kesha: “Well, I didn’t refer to toxicology, and I thought that was relevant, too!”
There were more angry exchanges, shouts, scorns. Things eventually calmed down. Mansfield asked, almost gently, “Does your overall conclusion remain that suicide by hanging is a plausible explanation?”
Dr Kesha: “That’s correct.”
The storm had passed. The final hour of cross-examination saw Mansfield and Dr Kesha sail together across an ocean of agreeableness. Yes, Dr Kesha agreed, there was nothing on Pauline’s body that indicated it had been dragged downstairs. Yes, Dr Kesha agreed, she had no injuries indicating she was punched or kicked or forced into a wall. Yes, Dr Kesha agreed, there were no injuries you might expect to see in a manual strangling…
Throughout, Dr Kesha flipped through a police booklet illustrated with photos of Pauline taken at post-mortem. The jury, too, as well as the judge and lawyers, looked at the photos. Dr Polkinghorne sits behind Mansfield. He also looked at the photos of his wife’s body. By day’s end, he had closed the booklet, and sat with his head in his hands.
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.
