A summary of the case the Crown has presented in the murder trial of Philip Polkinghorne Video / Carson Bluck
WARNING: DISTRESSING CONTENT
The two worlds of Dr Philip Polkinghorne - in one the renowned eye surgeon and loving husband of Pauline Hanna, and in the other a shadow life involving meth, aggression and fantasies of a new start with his well-compensated escort mistress - were about to collide.
The result, prosecutors said as they devoted an entire day to delivering a closing address in his murder trial, was both violent and tragic.
“Here we have a man spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on sex workers and drugs in secret and trying to keep his second life away from Pauline Hanna,” Crown solicitor Alysha McClintock told jurors. “Dr Polkinghore has become aggressively more and more shambolic...
“He’s obsessed with [Sydney escort] Madison Ashton. He’s thinking he’s setting up a life with her. ... He’s haemorrhaging money, and money’s something he’s preoccupied with.”
And all the while, it was alleged, his methamphetamine dependency was increasing, resulting in friends and coworkers sometimes noticing a change in his behaviour, and Hanna was starting to have suspicions.
“There’s a tinder box ready to go up,” McClintock said this afternoon, theorising that it culminated overnight on April 5, 2021, with either a surprise attack on his wife as she slept or an argument that turned fatally violent.
Polkinghorne, 71, is now in the eighth week of his high-profile trial in the High Court at Auckland, where the Crown has accused him of fatally strangling his wife before staging the scene at their Remuera home in an attempt to make it look like a suicide. His lawyers, who are expected to give their own lengthy closing address either tomorrow or on Wednesday, have said it’s a clear case of suicide warped by police overreach and the Crown’s fascination with his sex life.
McClintock was unable to cram the entire Crown closing address into one day. She’s expected to finish tomorrow morning, at which point it will be decided if jurors are sent home for the day or if defence lawyer Ron Mansfield KC goes immediately into his closing address.
The Crown solicitor acknowledged to jurors today that the allegations against the eye surgeon were both bizarre and unusual. But with the only two viable explanations being suicide or murder, the circumstantial evidence points strongly at the former, she said. Most of the afternoon was spent weaving together the circumstantial threads that led her to believe so.
“The single most significant piece of evidence in this trial is that Dr Polkinghorne had tried to strangle Pauline Hanna before,” McClintock said, referring to an outcry in 2020 that two of her longtime friends recalled being present for. “There was no challenge - none - to the fact that she said that he’d done it and that she demonstrated he’d done it.”
She read aloud transcripts of John and Pheasant Riordan’s evidence about the incident, in which they recalled Hanna putting her own hands around her neck to demonstrate.
“Sadly, John Riordan was right [when he told her], ‘If he’s done it once, he’ll do it again’,” the prosecutor said.
The defence insinuated during cross-examination of the witnesses that Hanna was drunk and might have been lying. Whether she was intoxicated or not has no real relevance, but it would make no sense at all for her to have lied to her friends, McClintock argued.
“She did nothing ... but defend him, paper over his bad behaviour over and over again,” she explained. “She defends him constantly. Why would she lie about that?”
Polkinghorne, she said, “wants to make this all about her state of mind”.
“Don’t look at me, he says, look at her. I ask you to look at him. Look at his behaviour.”
The prosecutor also pointed to an exchange of texts and a phone call between Hanna and another longtime friend, Margaret White, around the same time as the strangulation outcry to the Riordans. Hanna texted that her husband was being “beastly” before White recalled her saying over the phone, “I just need you to know if anything happens to me...” before trailing off.
Then there was an accidentally recorded conversation with her brother and niece in 2019 in which Hanna described her husband as “an angry man”. Later that year, she asked her niece who was planning to stay at their Remuera home if she could instead put her up in a hotel.
“PJP is on the ceiling,” she wrote, referring to her husband by his initials. “I don’t want you to experience that.”
The point, McClintock said, is that “anger is a theme” in the defendant’s life.
“Anger is a bubbling issue at this point in time in the relationship,” she said, adding that it wasn’t constant but “it was there in this year or so prior to her death”.
“Despite her love for him, at times she’s scared of him, it seems.”
There were a number of “bubbling tensions” in his life, McClintock said, that are important for understanding why Polkinghorne lashed out at his wife in one of two scenarios - either amid an argument about his double life or in a premeditated surprise attack while she was sleeping.
One tension, she said, was Hanna’s suspicions about infidelity.
The evidence showed she was aware of him seeing sex workers in Australia and had even accompanied him five years earlier, but in the candid recorded conversation with family she said that experience had been “revolting” and hadn’t been repeated in years because she could no longer do it. By 2020, it was clear through web searches, conversations with friends and her contacting of a private investigator that she suspected her husband was having an affair.
“This is not about him being a poor husband,” McClintock said, adding: “I think he’d fail that test”.
But it goes to whether Polkinghorne wanted her “out of the picture” enough to kill her, she said.
Another point of tension point was finances, the prosecutor said, noting that Hanna was so worried she had secretly taken out a $2500 loan in the months before her death to pay her bills.
Meanwhile, she noted, Polkinghorne “spent about $300,000 on sex workers”, some of it with money derived from the sale of a property that was intended to benefit Hanna.
“That’s not an investment, not for Hanna it’s not,” McClintock said. “She was worried about where the money was going, and she was right to be worried.”
Several witnesses said Hanna was mulling the idea of leaving her husband but didn’t think she could afford to. She was “scared he had big shot lawyers on his side and she went up with nothing”.
A lot of the tension in the relationship, McClintock speculated, had to do with Polkinghorne’s secret use of meth - perhaps initially only with Ashton but then at home and work as his dependency on the drug grew. She showed jurors a photo of Ashton topless and lying on her stomach in a bed, her pet chihuahuas beside her. The photo, one of thousands of photos of Ashton found on Polkinghorne’s devices, also showed a “sweet puff” meth pipe on the bed stand next to a pair of colourful socks similar to ones the defendant has worn every day to his trial.
By the time of his wife’s death, he was keeping $13,000 worth of meth in their home, a fact he pleaded guilty to at the outset of the trial.
He was becoming “increasingly angry” and “increasingly controlling of and abusive of his wife” - characteristics, the prosecutor said, that go “hand-in-hand with the usage of methamphetamine”.
“Being an older, wealthy, privileged man does not make him immune from the effects of methamphetamine,” she said.
Then there was his secret life with Ashton, to whom he transferred over $100,000, shared work documents with, talked explicitly about leaving his wife for and even bought a washing machine for.
A photo found on murder defendant Dr Philip Polkinghorne’s USB showed Sydney escort Madison Ashton on a bed with a “sweet puff” meth pipe and coulourful dress socks on the bed stand. It shows, prosecutors said, that methamphetamine was part of his world with Ashton, not wife Pauline Hanna.
“He is emotionally and financially fully invested in Madison Ashton at the time of Pauline Hanna’s death,” McClintock said. “It doesn’t matter what Madison Ashton’s true intentions were and whether she was genuine or not genuine.
“He thinks he’s setting up a life with her.”
McClintock also spent a fair bit of time this afternoon arguing that a defence-hired pathologist was wrong to advocate for a suicide finding based on the small number of injuries found on Hanna’s body in the post-mortem examination.
Four injuries - which included a grip-like bruise on her arm, a small abrasion to her nose and a bruise to her temple - might not be “meaningful” to the expert while viewed in the vacuum of a post-mortem exam, but they’re significant when viewed in light of everything else jurors know, she argued.
“So far she’s been gripped, she’s banged her nose and now she’s banged her head,” McClintock said. “What are the chances that she’s both become suicidal and had this bumpy old time?”
While all four pathologists who gave evidence agreed it was very rare to leave no injuries after a fatal strangulation, they also agreed it was not entirely unheard of. McClintock said it would be dangerous to rule out the possibility based on statistics.
“We’re dealing with a medical professional,” the prosecutor said repeatedly. “He has a greater anatomical knowledge than most.”
McClintock described two possible scenarios, both of which might have included Hanna being dazed by the “decent” knock to her temple or by the sleeping pills in her system.
“Either she’s been surprised and in the ensuing struggle she’s been struck and punched and gripped and strangled, or there’s been an argument during which she’s been struck and punched and gripped and strangled,” she said. “We don’t need to prove which.”
While pathology is important, the case doesn’t live or die by the imprecise science, she said.
“It doesn’t have to be reconstructed blow-by-blow,” McClintock explained. “That fact that there are things we don’t know doesn’t make this suicide.”
