The eye surgeon was interviewed by Detective Ilona Walton on the morning he reported Pauline Hanna dead, April 5, 2021. Video/Pool
WARNING: DISTRESSING CONTENT
After quietly showing up at eye surgeon Philip Polkinghorne’s former workplace in an unmarked car, a methamphetamine contamination testing company found a concerning level of the drug in what had been the doctor’s favourite consultation room.
That was what jurors were told today as Polkinghorne returned to the High Court at Auckland for week four of testimony in his ongoing, high-profile trial. Although charged with murder, today’s testimony focused on an alleged crime that Polkinghorne has never been charged with: whether he smoked methamphetamine at Auckland Eye in the months leading up to his wife’s suspicious death.
Prosecutors allege Polkinghorne was high on the drug when he killed her. An expert witness is expected to testify later in the trial that the drug is known to cause erratic and sometimes aggressive behaviour.
The defence has vigorously insisted her death was exactly as it initially looked: a suicide. And although Polkinghorne began the trial by pleading guilty to possession of methamphetamine and a meth pipe found in his home as police investigated the suspicious death, his lawyer has suggested through cross-examination a pipe found at his workplace in October 2020 – five months before Hanna’s death – was not his.
In the witness box this afternoon, Jeremy Hill described going to Auckland Eye on July 9, 2021, to test several rooms at the business on behalf of his employer, The Drug Detection Agency. It was eight months after a meth pipe had been found inside the business and two months after Hanna’s death and Polkinghorne’s alleged confession to a co-worker days later that he had a history of using the drug.
“They wanted a confidential test,” Hill said of his decision to show up at the clinic after hours in an unmarked car before donning a hazmat suit.
He recalled taking 14 samples altogether from the office complex. All of them showed trace levels of methamphetamine, but only one sample – taken from the heat pump in Polkinghorne’s favourite consulting room – was concerning, he said. The test showed a level of 3.1 micrograms of methamphetamine per 100sq cm, above the 1.5 micrograms cutoff point for amounts deemed safe, he said.
He was called back to do a second round of testing in September 2021, after another company had been hired to do a deep clean. This time the heat pump was found to have an acceptable level of contamination, but a printer was found to have 100 micrograms, Hill said.
“That is quite a high result,” he said, explaining that he had not tested the printer during his first visit. “Anything over 1.5 is considered contaminated, so that is quite contaminated.”
Defence lawyer Ron Mansfield KC suggested the heat pump contamination could have been caused by someone smoking methamphetamine near the outside unit of the device before the air was sucked inside. He noted that the printer was on a filing cabinet with wheels, suggesting that it might have been wheeled around to various parts of the office before it landed in the consultation room that his client formerly used.
Hill’s testimony followed a lineup of Auckland Eye co-workers earlier in the day.
Philip Polkinghorne appears at the Auckland High Court this morning, August 20, 2024. Photo / Jason Oxenham
Registered nurse Janet Wigmore said she was “showing the ropes” to two staff members on a Monday morning when she walked into the office complex’s retinal laser room and found a methamphetamine pipe and lighter on a table immediately to the right of the entrance.
“I backtracked and closed the door,” the registered nurse told jurors
She alerted operations manager Tracey Malloy, who followed Wigmore in the witness box. Malloy explained that they moved the pipe into her office and called police, who asked if there had been a break-in.
“Return it to the person it belongs to,” Malloy recalled police advising her, to which she responded that she didn’t know who the drug paraphernalia belonged to. They responded: “Well, throw it out.”
Malloy did toss the pipe, with the words “sweet puff” etched on the side, in the non-recycling bin. It was later retrieved after Auckland Eye hired an employment law firm to conduct an independent investigation. The owner of the pipe was never determined.
A "Sweet Puff" meth pipe and lighter found in an Auckland Eye clinic consultation room used by Philip Polkinghorne.
CCTV footage showed Polkinghorne entering the clinic with a man and a woman on the Saturday and again on the Sunday before the pipe was found, but others had also entered the clinic over the weekend. The defence suggested it could have been left by a 17-year-old who had been seen in the office the prior Thursday, although witnesses expressed doubt it would have remained undetected for so long if that was the case.
Mansfield asked Malloy if she was aware that “sweet puff” pipes were readily available for purchase on the internet.
“I’m sorry, I’ve never googled looking for a ‘sweet puff’ pipe,” the operations manager replied, evoking laughter in the courtroom gallery.
Today’s evidence follows recollections from other Auckland Eye colleagues last week about the discovery of the meth pipe and incidents of strange behaviour by Polkinghorne.
Ophthalmologist Susan Ormonde said Polkinghorne admitted meth use to her the day before Hanna’s funeral, even going as far as to recommend Ormonde give it a try. Others described Polkinghorne appearing to have fallen asleep at meetings and one finance committee meeting weeks before Hanna’s death in which his behaviour was recalled to have stood out as especially erratic.
“He was just extremely agitated,” former Auckland Eye chief executive Deborah Boyd told the court today about that same meeting, in which he appeared via Zoom.
She described the surgeon as “often up on his feet” and displaying “quite hyperactive behaviour” that at times seemed “aggressive” to the point that several other directors commented on it.
“It was very odd,” Boyd said.
Mansfield suggested his client had been rightfully angry about receiving the materials for the meeting so late. He was connecting to the meeting via his home, so it might not be so strange that he was standing from time to time, he said.
Boyd and other witnesses all agreed Polkinghorne was dedicated to his job and his patients, and that coming in on weekends was not unusual.
“He’s highly regarded in his field – world-renowned, really,” Boyd said.
Auckland Eye eventually hired the meth testing company, it was over half a year after the discovery of the pipe – after Polkinghorne’s alleged admission about using methamphetamine was brought to the board’s attention.
The worrying traces were found in consulting room four. While consulting rooms are not officially assigned to each doctor, “custom and practice” had been for Polkinghorne to use the room most of the time because it was closest to the equipment that he would frequently use, Boyd said.
Only the final 20 minutes of testimony today covered a different subject than meth in the workplace.
Forensic accountant Margaret Skilton, who works in the police financial crime unit, scoured over five years of financial documents for Polkinghorne and Hanna. But court ended for the day before the results of her search could be explained to the jury.
Skilton’s testimony is set to continue when the trial resumes tomorrow morning before Justice Graham Lang and the jury.
Craig Kapitan is an Auckland-based journalist covering courts and justice. He joined the Herald in 2021 and has reported on courts since 2002 in three newsrooms in the US and New Zealand.
