WARNING: DISTRESSING CONTENT
“This case is binary: if it’s not suicide, it’s murder.”
After seven weeks of evidence, that’s what Crown solicitor Alysha McClintock told jurors in the High Court at Auckland today as she began what is expected to be a lengthy closing address in the high-profile murder trial of prominent Auckland eye surgeon Philip Polkinghorne.
Allegations of planted evidence, trying to sway witnesses, deleted files and manipulating his wife’s body to stage a suicide - paired with his high standing in society - make for a rare set of circumstances so bizarre it almost beggars belief, the prosecutor acknowledged. But that’s what the defendant is counting on, she said.
“His lawyer says he shouldn’t have been there [suspected of murder] - not Dr Polkinghorne, not the renowned eye surgeon, not the man of wealth, of standing,” McClintock said. “Supposedly police should have just rubber-stamped this [as a suicide]... but they didn’t.
“... Once you understand Dr Polkinghorne’s ability to manipulate things .. it starts to all make sense.”
McClintock’s address is set to continue through the afternoon, after jurors take a lunch break. All of tomorrow has been set aside for the defence closing address, with jury deliberations tentatively set to begin on Wednesday.
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Prosecutors spent five weeks calling witnesses in their circumstantial case against the 71-year-old defendant, who is accused of having fatally strangled wife Pauline Hanna, 63, in the early morning hours of April 5, 2021, before staging the scene to look like a suicide by hanging. The defence, which spent two weeks calling witnesses, has been adamant that Hanna committed suicide after decades of depression and an especially stressful year of work pressure, marriage strife and watching her mother die from dementia.
“A staged suicide is a highly unusual allegation,” McClintock acknowledged at the outset of this morning’s address, quoting a defence pathologist witness who described some of the actions alleged as “mind-boggling”. “Look, the Crown agrees. There’s a lot to get your head around. But when you do, a clear picture emerges - it’s one of murder.”
She urged jurors not to determine the case on “risk factors and statistics and probabilities” regarding suicide and offered a warning: “He is highly intelligent. There is an arrogance in Dr Polkinghorne, I suggest, that you should not underestimate.”
McClintock described Hanna as someone who was “in the way of Dr Polkinghorne’s life with the intoxicating Madison Ashton, no doubt fuelled by the impacts of methamphetamine”. Ashton is the well-known Sydney escort who had initially been scheduled to testify at the trial but was never called. While Hanna had participated in group sex with Ashton and her husband in 2016, messages suggested Polkinghorne and Ashton had developed a level of intimacy well beyond paid services.
“He is an atypical man with high levels of intelligence and self-assurance. He was renowned. He was all of those things, it seems,” McClintock said. “But he was also living another life... a world centred around Madison Ashton... that at least in his mind was his future.
“In this world there was secret financial support for a number of sex workers.”
The two worlds - a marriage with Hanna and another involving Ashton and meth - “were always going to collide at some point and collide they did”.
“Ms Hanna’s death was the result of that,” McClintock said.
The prosecutor outlined how Polkinghorne’s actions in the immediate aftermath of Hanna’s death didn’t portray a devastated widower dealing with the shock of suicide but instead a cold and calculating killer giddy about starting a new life.
He claimed to be devastated, she said, but his first priority was to delete all prior WhatsApp messages with Ashton just hours after his wife’s death was discovered. He appears to have deleted the messages during a break in his three-hour police interview, apparently after realising that police had suspicions, the prosecutor said.
“Dr Polkinghorne is manipulating the evidence and deleting them,” McClintock said. “The clear and obvious inference as to why he did that... is because they contained messages demonstrating that he was not the devastated husband at all.”
He then searched “how to delete iCloud storage” soon after the interview - attempting to delete the search itself - before going to privacy search website DuckDuckGo on April 7 and conducting a search that prosecutors described as “hugely significant” to the Crown case: “leg edema after strangulation”.
“This search unmasks the murderer, I suggest,” McClintock said.
Earlier in the trial, the defence suggested that “strangulation” could have been a clumsy way of referring to a hanging. McClintock disagreed.
“’Strangulation’ is an entirely different word to ‘hanging’,” she said, noting that the search was made on the same day as Hanna’s post-mortem examination. “That search in no way fits with a man whose wife has committed suicide. It simply doesn’t fit...
“He’s trying to check if he’s left behind a clue.”
McClintock noted that the DuckDuckGo search appeared to be the only time he had attempted to use the app rather than a more common search website.
“There is not an explanation for that search that is an innocent explanation,” she said.
It’s also telling, the prosecutors said, that he was found at a secluded South Island chalet with Ashton just three weeks after his wife’s death.
“This is the life he wanted,” McClintock said, noting that there were aborted plans being made on April 12 - exactly one week after his wife’s death - for him to fly to Australia. “He’s talking about setting up house with Madison Ashton one week after he says his wife killed herself. Let’s get real. It is relevant... because Pauline Hanna didn’t know about the relationship that developed in this way with Madison Ashton.”
McClintock suggested Polkinghorne tried to manipulate witnesses by telling his barber, who knew one of the other sex workers he was seeing, not to talk to police. Then there was longtime friend Allison Ring, who said she felt she was being manipulated after Polkinghorne went to her one day with what he said was a suicide note he had found in the bedding.
“When she was in pain, that’s what she would do. She got it out. She wrote her feelings down all the time, or contacted people and talked it out,” McClintock explained. “For her, that [not leaving a note] doesn’t gel. He knows that’s significant. That’s why he’s playing these games with Allison Ring.”
The prosecutor suggested he also boldly manipulated evidence, smearing his own blood on the stairwell next to where the body was found then paying for an overseas scene examination expert to visit his home two years after her death. That area was extensively searched for blood during the initial scene examination and none was found. Jurors were shown side-by-side photos of the 2021 and the 2023 markings, which were noticeably different.
“There just isn’t anyway to be police about it - Dr Polkinghorne put that there,” McClintock said, explaining that it was necessary to explain away the bloody mark on his forehead first responders noticed when they arrived at the home. “He’s gone from fake rope to fake toast to fake blood, all trying to create a fake suicide.”
The Crown then turned focus to Hanna and why, they argued, a suicide would have been out of character for her. Sure, she had expressed low points and work stress earlier, but nothing suggested there was anything about the night of April 4 to trigger such an event, McClintock said.
There were no searches on her phone for self-harm, she noted, pointing out that even an expert who recreated the partial hanging scenario had to do research first.
“How did she know?” McClintock said before repeating the question: “How did she know without searching aspects of how to do it? I suggest that is very significant given the type of person she was and the type of things that she would research.”
There were plenty of drugs in the house that she could much more easily overdose on if that was her aim, McClintock said, suggesting it was weird that she would have used such a long rope in front of the glass front door where she could be seen, nearly naked and no hair or makeup.
Had she committed suicide, it would be a strange set of circumstances, McClintock said.
“She’s got up despite the high levels of Zopiclone [sleeping pills] in her system but she didn’t touch her phone. She didn’t touch her laptop. She hasn’t gone to the toilet,” the prosecutor said, noting that Hanna had a full bladder at the time of death. “Instead of going to the toilet, she’s made a mess in the room for some reason.”
Police found the guest room where Polkinghorne said his wife spent the night to be dishevelled, with the top sheet to the bed missing and pillow cases missing.
“A suicidal woman, one of her last acts alive, she’s concerned about sheets but only one sheet,” McClintock said. “It makes no sense.”
Hanna then would have had to cut the rope and put away the knife, McClintock theorised - all while not disturbing her husband, whose phone showed that he had been awake.
“He’s almost certainly having a toot on the Sweet Puff meth pipe,” she said. “He’s awake for most of the night, which he lied about.”
The Crown closing address continues this afternoon before the jury and Justice Graham Lang.
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.
The Herald will be covering the case in a daily podcast, Accused: The Polkinghorne Trial. You can follow the podcast at iHeartRadio, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, through The Front Page feed, or wherever you get your podcasts.
