Philip Polkinghorne’s lawyer called two pathologists who believe the circumstances of Pauline Hanna’s death suggest she committed suicide. Video / Corey Fleming
Opinion by Steve Braunias
Steve Braunias writes for the Listener and Newsroom.
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 to the first closing performance in the grand Auckland opera of the Dr Philip Polkinghorne murder trial. Monday belonged to Crown prosecutor Alysha McClintock, whose closing address banged a louddrum of guilt, banged it all day, as she picked up the tiny figure of Polkinghorne and paraded him through courtroom 11 at the High Court of Auckland in the classic operatic role - a rich man who killed his wife to be with the woman of his erotic dreams, Madison Ashton, in the classic operatic role as courtesan.
Her performance was an unfinished work. She ran out of time. There is more to come on Tuesday. More tales of treachery and misdeed, more of the timeless war between men and women – more of La Polkinghorne, the opera. It’s a version of Verdi’s great work La traviata, about a courtesan who sells herself to the debauched ruling class: “Nothing in the world matters except pleasure!” It’s a riff on the film adaptation Pretty Woman, with Madison Ashton as Julia Roberts, hooker who meets old rich guy, not that Polkinghorne could pass for Richard Gere.
This reporter, this stoic diarist of a trial so epic that it has journeyed from winter to spring these past eight weeks, has received a great deal of correspondence, including several suggestions the trial ought to be made into a musical. But it’s too serious, too tragic, too intense for anything light-hearted or facile; opera gets to its noise and spectacle, its love triangle ending in death. McClintock’s aria on Monday was as black as her robe, as black as the curtains pulled across the windows of courtroom 11. “It’s not suicide. It’s murder,” she told the jury. “Pauline Hanna did not die by herself.” And then she repeated the chorus: “It’s not suicide. It’s murder”.
Hanna died on April 5, 2021. She was 63. Her husband, eye surgeon Dr Polkinghorne, manipulated her body to make it look like suicide, McClintock said, and later tried to manipulate his friends to view Hanna as someone on the edge, a sad drunk, a wreck. The prosecution case took four weeks. The defence took three weeks, and rested on Friday. Monday was the Crown’s return opportunity to throw everything at Polkinghorne, 71, and convince the jury that he strangled his wife to death, either on a fabulous methamphetamine surge of strength and demonic purpose, or, arguably worse, in cold blood.
There was a change in routine to court procedure. Rest breaks were allowed each hour as McClintock sang of Polkinghorne’s venality from 10am to 5pm. She stood facing the jury of 11, who nodded while staring into her hazel eyes (earlier in the trial Dr Kilak Kesha had turned to McClintock and asked what colour her eyes were: “Uh - hazel,” she replied). The public gallery was packed; alongside the merely curious were Hanna’s family and friends, and Polkinghorne’s family, including his son Taine, who wore an item of clothing surely in tribute to his sartorially dandified dad: a bowtie.
McClintock’s day-long address formed a libretto in three acts.
ACT 1
The inherent problem is set: eminent ophthalmologist Dr Polkinghorne, “a man of wealth and standing”, occupies two worlds, one where he “appears to be living a comfortable life” with Hanna in their $4 million home, and “another world centred around Madison Ashton. He saw her as his future.”
The hazel-eyed McClintock leaned towards the jury. “The two worlds,” she said, “were always going to coincide.”
As well, she suggested, Polkinghorne had formed a serious methamphetamine habit (stashes amounting to 37 grams were seized at his house), and was always awake, always wanting sex, always angry. Hanna had an unusual term for his fits of rage: “Philip,” she messaged friends, “is on the roof”. Little man, red-faced, “beastly”, “agitated”, “arrogant”, stomping his little feet on the roof, smoking P in his glass pipe emblazoned with the legend SWEET PUFF, driving all over Auckland in his Merc with the license plate RETINA to visit sex workers, plotting a new life with Madison Ashton - Polkinghorne sat in court ignoring everything McClintock said about him, and tapped away at the keyboard of his laptop. He wrote paragraph after paragraph, concentrating hard.
McClintock continued with her portrait, and talked of Polkinghorne claiming he was attending a three-day course in Auckland in the summer of 2019: “But he had hopped on a plane to Sydney, no doubt into the arms of Madison Ashton”.
And then she reminded the jury of something she identified as “the single most significant piece of evidence” throughout the entire trial. Two witnesses, John Riordan and his wife Pheasant, mimed Hanna showing them how Polkinghorne had put his hands around her throat, and hissed at her, “I can do this anytime I want”. Both the Riordans demonstrated the strangling when they appeared in the witness box. She looked vulnerable, a woman at risk. “What we know,” said McClintock, “is that Dr Polkinghorne was willing to attack Pauline by the throat”.
Things in Polkinghorne’s fast, busy, manic worlds were coming to a vanishing point. He wanted Madison Ashton. He wanted her all the time. “Pauline,” said McClintock, “was in the way”.
ACT 2
McClintock sometimes ran pictures on the five TV screens suspended from the courtroom ceiling and the first was a photo of Hanna’s body at the bottom of the stairs. She was covered in bedding. Polkinghorne had rang 111 and reported she had hanged herself. And so the ambient music of Act 2 was a kind of discordant racket, insinuating trumpets, skittering flutes, as McClintock set out to expose what she claimed was a set of lies, deceits, and outright bullshit, the first of which was suicide.
He was interviewed by police on the afternoon of Hanna’s death. At 4:28pm, at the College Hill police station, he took a rest break. Phone records revealed that he deleted the record of his Whats App messages with Madison Ashton. McClintock sang, “Why?”
Madison Ashton with Philip Polkinghorne.
Not long afterwards he visited a family friend and started “speaking ill of his wife”, as McClintock put it, in rather Victorian language. What he said was not Victorian, not discreet. “He told her Pauline wouldn’t f**one man, she’d f**k the whole team. He told her Hanna couldn’t get her clothes off fast enough”. McClintock sang, “Why?”
Three weeks after the death, he travelled to Mount Cook to rendezvous with Madison Ashton in the Matariki Room at a luxury lodge. No need for McClintock to ask why. “This,” she said, “is what he wanted. This is the life he wanted”.
The jury, as ever, paid close attention. This is a dream jury; they stay awake, they listen, they come armed with clipboards. As for Polkinghorne, he stopped typing, and sat with his head in his hands.
ACT 3
And so the death of Pauline Hanna. It was conducted in shadows. It was difficult to reconstruct. It was hard to see.
Polkinghorne later told police he went to sleep early on the last night of her life, but his devices showed he was awake, watching things on his phone, messaging Madison Ashton. “He almost certainly has a toot on the SWEET PUFF pipe that police found under the bed.” Someone in the public gallery laughed out loud at that but it wasn’t funny, it was the white delicious burning crystals fuelling Polkinghorne’s psychosis. “Either,” McClintock said, “he decided that Pauline was in the way and he strangled her, or whether he did that more spontaneously during an argument”.
The result was the same. He had extinguished her life with extreme violence. It was not suicide. “She was not a woman who had given up. Her husband had given up on her”.
He set about his evil ruse, his gross charade, of carrying her body down the stairs, propping her up on a chair (“Mind-boggling”, as McClintock put it), and stringing her up to a belt and a rope… Polkinghorne, in court, had stopped typing, quit holding his head in his hands, and sat with his eyes closed, his little feet in yet another mad pair of socks (circles, crescents), one little hand placed on top of the other. He wore a signet ring on his little finger. They looked like gentle hands.
Reporter Martha and friends are in Minginui introducing us to their favourite four-legged neighbours, wild but friendly horses that have had free reign of the place since 1870.
