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
Big, loud, crowded, happy, anxious, nosy, drugged, violent, adorable, shimmering, extremely rich and extremely poor and extremely horny Auckland. The murder trial of Dr Philip Polkinghorne has played out this past fortnight as akind of weird love letter to the city of sales and marketing, money sparkling on the waters of the Waitematā, money lapping towards the sensual hips of Rangitoto, money coming in on the tide and offering itself to the landed gentry of Herne Bay and Mission Bay and Ōrākei Basin.
Auckland’s power and wealth burn brighter than all of New Zealand’s one-horse towns, eg Wellington. The city is the setting and also the star of Polkinghorne’s trial. Courtroom 11 in the High Court at Auckland has heard stories of Polkinghorne gunning his Mercedes-Benz over the harbour bridge every Friday to meet a sex worker on the city’s North Shore.
The action crossed live to the eastern suburbs on Friday morning when the judge, jury, prosecution, defence, a security detail of detectives and uniformed police, and the hardest working people at every trial, journalists, went to the Remuera address where Pauline Hanna was either murdered or killed herself.
The house is at the top of a rise with intimate views down onto Ōrākei Basin. Willows on the shore looked wispy in thin winter sunlight. A scene visit is a rara avis of criminal trials – I’ve never been to one in all my years stationed in court – and it took considerable planning for Justice Graham Lang to allow it to proceed. He choreographed which rooms the jury could see and in what order. He told them: “Don’t touch anything.” He choreographed which rooms the media could see: none. We had to wait outside. There were further instructions not to photograph him or the lawyers as they got out of their vehicles. I watched the judge and the lawyers as they got out of their vehicles (a VW Golf, a beat-up Toyota), and can exclusively, possibly even lawlessly, report that they get out of their vehicles like everyone else.
Philip Polkinghorne's defence team, led by Ron Mansfield KC (right) with Harrison Smith, at the home in Upland Rd, Remuera. Photo / Jason Dorday
It was a big house but no bigger than the neighbouring properties and smaller than the many enormous mock-Tudor piles with quaint little attic windows. The streets of the eastern suburbs are paved with gold; it was a zone of keypad security gates and gilded cages, of Porsches and BMWs; afterwards, I walked down to the lovely shores of Ōrākei Basin, and along to the shops and cafes of Ōrākei Village, where an orange Porsche 911 Carrera was leaving just as a white Tesla with the licence plate TOLD YOU was arriving. O garish Auckland! Back in the 1980s, the late Stephen Stratford wrote an essay for Auckland’s Metro magazine with the classic headline: “Wellington: why they hate us, and why we pity them”. It’s as true now as it was then, and the same sentiment belongs to the rest of New Zealand – everyone hates Auckland, its flash and cash, its good life.
Polkinghorne, an eye doctor with a holiday bach in Coromandel, is representative of Auckland’s educated professional classes earning fantastic coin, and epitomises it, too. Neighbours at the Northcote apartment block where he travelled to keep his Friday sex appointments took notice of him. Of course they took notice of him. The licence plate of his Merc read RETINA, and he swanned out of the car bearing gifts of champagne and lingerie.
The house at Upland Rd was the focus of the trial on Friday. Photo / Jason Dorday
Polkinghorne’s house is an architecturally designed series of white boxes. A large oak leaf stuck to the wet railings of the upstairs balcony. The letterbox instructed, “Address mail only”. There were little conifers and a white camellia and two potted succulents. You could look through the downstairs windows and see a truly horrible abstract painting in yellows and reds on a wall near the front doorway; it was here that emergency services discovered Pauline’s body. She had been covered with a duvet. A hand was visible in police photos and so was the top of her dark hair. She was lying on the floor next to three cat bowls filled to the brim. Police also found an empty wineglass smeared with red lipstick, an orange rope hanging from a balustrade, pillows flung on the floor and an ottoman on its side in the bedroom where Pauline spent her last night, traces of methamphetamine in the unflushed toilet in her en suite, and numerous bags of methamphetamine – Polkinghorne’s murder trial began last Monday when he pleaded guilty to possession of methamphetamine, and a methamphetamine pipe.
The house was north-facing. You could look through the upstairs window into the master bedroom – it would offer wonderful views of dear old Rangitoto stretching itself out in the harbour – and form morbid pictures of what happened up there on the morning of Easter Monday, April 5, 2021, when Pauline died.
Polkinghorne’s version is that he woke up and headed downstairs to make tea and toast. He found Pauline dead. She was slumped forward in a chair with a leather belt around her neck, attached to a dangling orange rope. The police version is he killed her and then carried out what is delicately known in criminal law as after-death conduct: ie, he staged an incredibly elaborate hoax that she died by suicide. In this scenario, he ran around the house fetching a leather belt and a length of rope, dragged the body down the carpeted stairs, balanced his dead wife on a chair, and then garrotted her. With the cat bowls filled to the brim, and three pieces of bread in the toaster, he dialled 111 and said: “My wife’s hanged herself.”
Philip Polkinghorne’s trial continues into the death of his wife, Pauline Hanna. Photo / Michael Craig
The jury went through the house, and then it was the turn of Crown prosecutors Brian Dickey and Alysha McClintock, as well as Polkinghorne’s lawyers, Ron Mansfield, KC, and his right-hand man Harry Smith, who is so surely sick of being told he has a passing resemblance to his namesake Harry Styles – same good skin, similar pout – that it does not bear repeating. What were the lawyers seeing on their tour? You see what you want to see and I suppose Mansfield and Smith imagined they saw a house where two educated professionals loved each other, but Pauline drank too much, work stress was becoming intolerable, and she felt depressed.
As for McClintock and Dickey, I suppose they saw a house where Pauline suffered terrible psychological torment at the hands of an angry husband who demanded sex every morning. “Pauline would lie back and pretend she was sleeping,” a friend of hers told the court on Friday. “Then he would bring her marmalade on toast.” The court also heard an audio recording of a dinner Pauline attended in Hawke’s Bay at her brother’s property, called Longlands; these Longlands Tapes caught the family discussing Pauline’s unhappy marriage, as she talked about how she felt despair and disgust at Polkinghorne’s sex drive. “So here’s the real oil,” she said. “I used to join the prostitutes and be part of the f***en thing and so I would have been with so many odd men and dah-dah-dah … I did that because I wanted to make sure he didn’t go off the rails ... But now I can’t do it any more. Three years ago I could. I had to drink two bottles of wine before I go with another man. And it’s just revolting. I hate it.”
The house will look lovelier in summer, with the big pōhutukawa outside it in scarlet bloom, and Ōrākei Basin baked blue in bright sunlight. Auckland at its best, not merely a place where some people have a lot of money; it’s truly the most beautiful city in New Zealand, a watery, subtropical knock-out, good times for everyone on the shores and the islands and the volcanoes and the basins. Ōrākei Basin was at high tide when I left the scene visit. I rested on a jetty and scoffed Woolworths Choccy Fingers – I offered the packet to the judge, prosecution, defence, and the security detail of detectives and uniformed police, but they did not accept. There was a ramp for jetskis. Kingfishers flew over the water. I looked up to the house where Pauline died. The poor woman was 63.
