The jury in Philip Polkinghorne's murder trial has viewed footage from October 17, 2020, showing three people, including one believed to be Polkinghorne, entering Auckland Eye.
Opinion by Steve Braunias
Steve Braunias writes for the Listener and Newsroom.
Retired eye surgeon Philip Polkinghorne has pleaded not guilty to murdering 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 the great thrilling weight of the State is about to come to a rest in its case against Dr Philip Polkinghorne, the little formerly dynamic ophthalmologist charged with the murder ofhis wife, allegedly strangling her to death and then contriving (a rope, a belt, a chair) to make it look like suicide.
Pauline Hanna died on April 5, 2021. Polkinghorne was charged 16 months and 11 days later – his lawyer Ron Mansfield KC provided the exact scornful count – and the Crown case has taken 22 days over five weeks. Its 61st and likely final witness appeared on Wednesday afternoon in the High Court at Auckland. One last piece of the jigsaw, one last brick in the wall.
It’s a strange looking jigsaw. It has lots of nude selfies on it. It’s a strange looking wall too, which is to say the Crown case actually more resembles a tonne of bricks dumped over the writhing figure of Polkinghorne in an attempt to bury any last shred of decency in his character.
The trial has played out as a ghastly melodrama, so very scandalous, peeling back the layers of decent Remuera society (Polkinghorne earned about $750,000 from Auckland Eye, now the most famous ophthalmology clinic in New Zealand but possibly not in a good way) to reveal group sex and other pastimes. The evidence has often travelled a long way from the scene of Hanna’s death at her big empty home overlooking the placid waters of Ōrākei Basin (in a note to self, listing his exercise goals, Polkinghorne vowed to take more walks around the basin).
The prosecution argues Polkinghorne killed his wife in some kind of methamphetamine rage, that he was angry and out of control, that he had plans to shack up with a sex worker, that he wanted Hanna out of the picture. And so each witness came armed with a brick. There was the neighbour of a sex worker in Northcote, who gave evidence of seeing Polkinghorne arrive for a regular Friday afternoon appointment. Lockdown meant a long period of coitus interruptus but the day after Auckland went from Level 4 to Level 3, Polkinghorne showed up: “I remember thinking, ‘Oh yeah, that didn’t take long’.”
Mansfield has said the Polkinghornes had an open marriage, no secrets, all good, but there was the private eye with a very deep, very whispery, very sexy voice whose every utterance sounded like soul singer Barry White (”Take it off...Take it all off!”), and who said Hanna messaged him about her suspicions that her husband was having an affair.
Philip Polkinghorne and his defence team, including Ron Mansfield KC (left), arriving at the High Court at Auckland. Photo / Michael Craig
There was Hanna’s brother Bruce, a straight arrow from Hawke’s Bay, who could be heard on a tape recording of a family dinner where he tried his best to comfort Hanna as she opened up about how miserable she was in her marriage: “He wants to have sex with everybody and he videos it and I’ve got videos and he’s really hurt me to the extent that sometimes I thought why am I living with him and I love him and he loves me and actually it’s just his malfunction... I’m not going to let him destroy me.”
And there was Hanna’s friend Pheasant who clearly expressed real loathing for Polkinghorne but whose most memorable contribution in the witness box was wordless. She mimed something Hanna showed her one night over dinner – the time Polkinghorne allegedly put his hands around her neck and threatened her.
There were all the phone messages between Polkinghorne and sex worker Madison Ashton. They planned to rendezvous in Sydney at Christmas 2020. It didn’t work out. “If you want to work during the time I am in Sydney,” he scolded her, “I should cancel my trip. You work and I will stay in New Zealand.”
She replied: “I am just so unbelievably devastated that you think so lowly of me and that you would think I would do that. I have no bookings. You have a gutter mentality sometimes when it comes to me and my occupation...That I would work over Xmas, it’s such a disgusting suggestion. Thank you so much for f***ing ruining Xmas. F*** off.”
They patched it up to the extent that four months later, he wrote glowing reviews in response to her nude selfies: “Breasts bulging in perfect unison”, etcetera. He also enclosed a kind of CV of his household duties. “I am good at ironing and grocery shopping... I can water plants... I can freeze bananas.” Let the record state that Polkinghorne, 71, can freeze bananas. The messages were sent a few days after Hanna’s death.
There was so much more. It was a pile-on, kind of crude, not exactly subtle, and sometimes the weight of evidence felt crushing and sometimes it felt irrelevant, and anyway it just kept coming. You could sense the determination and also the frustration. The 16 months and 11 days to arrest Polkinghorne for murder was re-enacted in court on Wednesday, when the marvellously patrician figure of Detective John Kennedy arrived in the witness box and preferred to stand, thank you, tall and gaunt in an olive sports jacket, his hands behind his back, and described how he placed Polkinghorne under arrest at the College Hill police station at 7.55am on August 16, 2022.
It marked an important end. But like the Crown case, due to close on Thursday in courtroom 11, it was really just the beginning.
