Finally, in the fourth week of the Dr Philip Polkinghorne murder trial creating history at the High Court of Auckland as the sleaziest recital ever heard in a public place of a
Remuera ophthalmologist’s appetite for sex, matters turned to the most intoxicating and obsessively desired thing known to the human race: money.
Wealth provides the constant background hum to the case of the eye surgeon accused of killing his wife Pauline Hanna at their big expensive white-walled Remuera home on April 5, 2021. Lowlifes charged with murder fail to intrigue the public. Polkinghorne‘s case has become a national event. He drove a white Merc, owned a summer home in Coromandel, took canal holidays in Europe. Too little has been heard about shopping but on Wednesday, courtroom 13 was transformed into a kind of sex supermarket.
The prosecution itemised Polkinghorne’s alleged spend on sex workers over the years. It got to the check-out counter and wished to print a receipt. The total sum was immense, generous, not seemingly restrained by budget or conscience: in the years before Hanna’s death, he gave six women (three identified as sex workers) $296,646.23.
Polkinghorne told police he loved Pauline and that their marriage was happy, stable. Crown prosecutors have devoted quite a lot of the trial to establishing Polkinghorne’s considerable interest in sex workers. One detective appeared in the witness box solely to say she found Polkinghorne with Australian escort Madison Ashton in a hotel in Mt Cook 25 days after Hanna’s tragic death. Two residents of an apartment block on Auckland’s North Shore shared their constant sightings of Polkinghorne arriving to meet a sex worker called Alaria. Another witness, Paul Adriaanse, Polkinghorne’s barber (he cut hair at his Remuera apartment), talked about a woman he knew called Lee. Figaro’s great opera The Barber of Seville sheds light on the less than exemplary behaviour of the barber’s wealthy clients; Adriaanse, the barber of Remuera, told the court, “Lee was a prostitute, and Phil [Polkinghorne] paid to have sex with her.”
Yes, that’s generally how that transaction works; but to what extent, what was the total cost? How much did he spend at the sex supermarket? Crown prosecutor Brian Dickey called a police forensic accountant to check-out. Margaret Skilton accessed Polkinghorne’s banking records. She placed the items in the bagging area – bank transfers to Madison Ashton totalled $106,131, bank transfers to Lee totalled $35,905, bank transfers to Alaria totalled $55,850…There were other payees who went only by their surnames. Dickey: “We should say these are all females, aren’t they?”
Skilton: “Yes.”
Skilton wore a black and white hooped dress in the witness box and turned her heart-shaped face towards Dickey as he asked her about the rest of her sums. She gladly obliged. In one year, Polkinghorne’s salary from private practice Auckland Eye was $756,496.54. His cash withdrawals in a single year included $49,000 in 2019 and $84,100 in 2020.
The proceeds of a house Pauline had owned in Papatoetoe and then sold came to $1,022,000; according to Skilton, Polkinghorne used $500,000 from the sale to purchase shares and paid some of the remainder to two women, including Ashton. The dreadful inference, as teased out from Dickey, is that Polkinghorne took from his wife to give to a prostitute.
Dickey is the former Crown solicitor. He has made a special comeback to prosecute Polkinghorne. He can cut a deceptively casual figure in court. His hair has never encountered that foreign object known as a brush, and there was something jarring about him one day in the opening week of the trial – he wore a new pair of black leather loafers with a buckle. It was the closest he has ever looked to resembling an Auckland w**ker.
The reality is that he is a good Kiwi joker without a trace of pretension but behind his relaxed demeanour is a firm and absolute commitment to prosecution. A hallmark of his style is his feeling for alleged victims. Before he finished leading Skilton through her evidence in chief, and leaving her to the not very tender cross-exam mercies of Polkinghorne’s defence lawyer Ron Mansfield, he asked her about the accounts in Hanna’s name.
Earlier in the trial, Hanna’s niece Rose said her aunt suspected Polkinghorne had swindled her assets and she no longer had access to them.
Hanna had one bank account, Skilton said. It was in overdraft for $91.
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.
