Retired eye surgeon Philip Polkinghorne has pleaded not guilty to murdering his 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.
And so now we wait. The jury will be sent out at around 10.30am or not much later on Thursday in the High Court at Auckland to deliberate, to eat the courtroom diet ofKrispie biscuits, to try to reach a verdict in the murder trial of Dr Philip Polkinghorne.
Thursday will mark day 35 of a trial that began in the dead of winter. It has made an eminent surgeon the most famous ophthalmologist in New Zealand history, possibly in world history – who can name another ophthalmologist? Who can even pronounce it, or spell it? And will anyone want to become an ophthalmologist after everything we’ve heard these past eight weeks?
On Wednesday, the defence concluded its closing defence. Prosecution had argued that Polkinghorne killed his wife Pauline Hanna; defence argued she died by suicide. The judge then gave his summing up.
The jury will return at 10am to listen to two pieces of audio evidence. The first is the 111 call Polkinghorne made from his Remuera home on April 5, 2021, to howl that Hanna had hanged herself.
The second is a recording made of Hanna discussing the wild sex life of her husband, herself, and other invited parties. Justice Graham Lang will then ask the jury to retire. The end is nigh, or nighish.
Long trial. Weird trial. This reporter, this diarist so very stout in his determination to write daily portraits of what goes on in courtroom 11, has not experienced a trial like it. No one has. We will not see its like again, unless another ophthalmologist with a fondness for lots of P and hookers is right now implicated in a house of horrors.
It was Remuera noir, it was copies of Simply Living magazine beneath the bed next to a glass methamphetamine pipe emblazoned with the legend SWEET PUFF, it was a specialist quack on $750,000 a year spending close to $300,000 on sex workers and dreaming of shacking up with one of them, it was not exactly the greatest police investigation in New Zealand history, it was a tragic opera that seized the nation – it was the memorable little figure of Polkinghorne, ophthalmologist, bedroom satyr, blue-eyed and persistently vividly socked.
More than anything, obviously, it was the death of Hanna.
Her family and friends wore a white ribbon to court. You know what that means. Polkinghorne’s son wore bowties and persistently vivid socks to court. His dad knew what that meant and must have been touched by the gesture.
The trial came to two halts on Wednesday. The first halt was at 1.12pm, when Ron Mansfield KC completed his closing address in defence of Polkinghorne. This is how it ended, how this revered tabloid hack wanted it to end: not with a bang, nothing lowercase about it, but with a roisterous whooping BANG.
Mansfield got loud. He shouted, he hollered, he very nearly screamed. He was one man on his feet yelling in a full courtroom.
I rated it as magnificent, the proper way and the right way to end a trial as immense as the grand 34-day opera season of Polkinghorne, and after he sat down, exhausted, and the deafened jury left for tea and yet more Krispies, I shook his hand in congratulations, just as I had shaken the hand of Crown prosecutor Alysha McClintock when she finished her analytical, unshouty closing address on Tuesday.
Both addresses were memorable. Mansfield wrote better. McClintock spoke better. McClintock can go on, and on; Mansfield prefers to go on, and on, and on, and [etc]. One of the addresses was consistently better quality. My handshake with McClintock was the more sincere.
“He loved her!”, Mansfield roared at the jury. “You cannot convict a man of murder when he did not do it! All the evidence clearly confirms that this was death by way of suicide! We all want Justine!” What? Mansfield corrected himself: “Sorry. We all want justice!”
Philip Polkinghorne appears during his murder trial at the High Court at Auckland. Photo / Michael Craig
His address summarised the main points of his defence. Hanna had no injuries consistent with a homicidal strangling. Everything Polkinghorne said in the long police interview on the day of Hanna’s death could be corroborated.
Hanna was stressed, tired, burnt out. She was also anxious that her husband was seeing someone and would leave her. She mixed wine with sleeping pills but could not sleep on the night of April 4, 2021.
Mansfield’s writing is at its best in short little bursts. They read best as single paragraphs.
“There is no more lonely place than the early hours of the morning when you can’t sleep.
“It is dark.
“It is desperate.
“She got up.
“She got the rope.
“She secured it.
“She tied it to the belt around her neck so she could suspend herself.”
Hanna’s brother Bruce was not in court for this part of Mansfield’s address. Her best friend Pheasant Riordan was in court but probably, hopefully, disassociating.
There was a 45-minute break for lunch. More or less as ever, I went to the nearby estate of Old Government House, and knocked back a few powerful cups of instant coffee from my flask.
Matthew Hooton sat at another table with about a dozen wimps. They were very animated, probably gossiping about something frivolous, like politics. The murder trial of Polkinghorne is more important than that. It is a matter of life and death.
The Crown case (eg Polkinghorne killed his wife to live in de facto bliss with sex worker Madison Ashton and her many Chihuahuas) and the defence case (eg two pathology reports stated that the cause of death was hanging) were summarised and the trial came to its second halt for the day when Justice Lang cleared the court at 4.31pm.
The jury will return at 10am to listen to the two pieces of evidence. And then we wait.
