Another day in the trial of the century until someone else is accused of murder in even more lurid circumstances, another prostitute. More revelations were heard in the opening day of
week three in the trial of Dr Philip Polkinghorne – “Phil,” “the Doc”, “Polky”, as he was known to those who have appeared in the High Court of Auckland this month and talked about the little livewire ophthalmologist, with his big swinging-dick energy, his white Merc, his mad socks, his murder charge.
Now everyone feels as though they know Polky. He is possibly the most famous living New Zealander. He is a national marvel, a legacy news media box-office sensation.
The nation that can produce someone as wholesome as Dame Lisa Carrington can also produce Polky, accused not just of murdering his wife at their Remuera home on Easter Monday, April 5, 2021, but then of acting on the gross idea, the Crown argues, to manoeuvre her body down the stairs into a position to make it look like she died by suicide.
Anyway, hookers. The court has already heard about Polky visiting a sex worker called Alaria most Fridays in Northcote, and a police detective gave evidence of travelling to beautiful Mt Cook 25 days after Pauline’s tragic death and finding him in a hotel room with a sex worker called Madison. The court was also played a tape recording of Pauline telling her brother and his family, “He screws prostitutes when he’s in Sydney.” It made her feel miserable, humiliated. She confessed that she was present on some of these occasions for group sex: “I used to join the prostitutes, and dah-dah-dah and dah-dah-dah.” The dah-dah-dahs drew a veil over these appointments; on Monday in courtroom 11, the veil opened for a glimpse of Polky at it with another sex worker called Lee.
The rest of the High Court felt deserted. There were only three other cases. The temptation was not very great to call in on Refrigerant Recovery NZ Ltd vs The Trust for the Destruction of Synthetic Refrigerants, and I rode the elevator – broken for two long weeks, now thankfully fixed – up one level to the familiar hothouse of courtroom 11, where the Crown is wishing to present Polky as an angry sexaholic strung out on meth, and defence lawyer Ron Mansfield KC is wishing to present Pauline as a sad woman who succumbed to stress and despair.
Polky’s hairdresser was called as a witness on Monday morning. Paul Adriaanse has experienced a strange career arc: he worked as a mental health clinician, then became a barber. He cut hair in his unit in Remuera. He said he met Polkinghorne (“Phil”) through a woman at their gym. “Lee was a prostitute,” he explained, “and Phil paid to have sex with her.”
Crown prosecutor Brian Dickey, who has a bad cold and spent the day with a tissue pressed to his snoot, led the evidence in chief. He asked Adriaanse whether he had met with Polkinghorne since Pauline’s death, and he told an elliptical story of coming home one day to find the eye doctor waiting for him.
“I asked him, ‘What the hell happened?’ He was really upset. He was distraught, and had been advised to say nothing. He said I shouldn’t talk to police either but I said if they come to see me, I’ll tell them my version. I’ve got nothing to hide.”
Polkinghorne is 71. His barber seemed around that age. Dickey asked him what he thought Polkinghorne meant about not talking to police, and he answered, “It was about Lee.”
The barber and the ophthalmologist, Kiwi boomers, talking of serious matters in Remuera, that affluent suburb out east with its swimming pools and private schools, above the smooth waters of Ōrākei Basin and beneath the smooth slopes of Mt Hobson; their conversation had ranged from death to grief to secrecy to transparency to police to sex workers; Dickey asked, “And then what happened?”
He said he cut Polky’s hair.
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
