WARNING: DISTRESSING CONTENT
Auckland eye surgeon Dr Philip Polkinghorne was a man who suffered many insults – at the hands of police, prosecutors, the media and a community that rushed to judgment.
That was the theme that defence lawyer Ron Mansfield KC conveyed this morning as jurors in the High Court at Auckland prepared to devote a second full day to listening to closing addresses in the eye surgeon’s unusual and closely watched murder trial.
“This has been a trial prosecuted by emotion and where the victim is logic,” Mansfield said. “A trial prosecuted by emotion allows our murder-mystery fantasies to run wild. It was like a binge of every Murder She Wrote all in one session by our own Angela Lansbury presenting.”
Polkinghorne, 71, has been on trial since late July, accused of having fatally strangled wife Pauline Hanna before staging the scene inside their Remuera home to look like a suicide by hanging. Standing before jurors and a packed courtroom gallery for the entirety of yesterday, Crown solicitor Alysha McClintock said the surgeon wanted his wife of 24 years out of his life for a variety of reasons – chief among them his fantasy of starting a new life with Sydney escort Madison Ashton.
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McClintock painted a scenario in which Polkinghorne took “toots” from his Sweet Puff meth pipe before either getting into an argument with Hanna and attacking her or surprising her with a pre-meditated attack as she slept in the couple’s guest bedroom. Almost everything about the case is strange, including his wealth and high standing in society and the allegation he manipulated his wife’s body after death to simulate a suicide, McClintock acknowledged.
But it’s a binary case where jurors must pick either suicide or murder and the evidence for suicide doesn’t add up, she said.
Mansfield strongly disagreed. He spent the morning pointing to evidence that it was in fact a suicide.
“The Crown knows full well the forensic evidence in this case ... provides the complete answer and always has,” Mansfield said, noting that none of the four pathologists who testified could find conclusive evidence of anything other than a hanging. “The answer has always been in the pathology.”
He suggested that police and the Crown pushed on anyway because they needed to “justify the way Dr Polkinghorne was treated”.
“The pathology provides more than a reasonable doubt – it provides proof that she died by incomplete or partial hanging” Mansfield continued. “The pathology provides the only logical explanation for Pauline’s death.”
Of the four pathologists who gave evidence, the two hired by the defence said they would have determined Hanna’s death to be non-homicidal hanging had the case been theirs. The two pathologists call by the Crown agreed with much of what the defence witnesses said but left open the possibility Hanna could have been strangled without leaving any internal or external neck injuries.
Mansfield repeatedly rubbished that suggesting as a “phantom”, noting that the four witnesses combined could only recall two times when fatal strangulation left no injuries. So the Crown now claims that not only was Polkinghorne a “master manipulator but a highly efficient and well-trained killer to leave someone dead without any tell-tale signs”.
“It sounds absurd because it is,” he continued. “It sounds unachievable because it is.”
Three injuries on Hanna – a bruise on her temple, a small abrasion on her nose and a grip-like bruise pattern on the back of her arm – were pointed to by the Crown as possible evidence of an assault. But Mansfield noted that none of the pathologists reached the same conclusion, referring to them instead as “non-specific” and far fewer than would be expected in most strangulation cases.
“That’s not logic,” Mansfield said of treating the injuries as evidence of an assault. “That’s the Crown and you going rogue, if you agree with that kind of approach ... It’s not honouring the oath which you took.”
The defence lawyer also dismissed the accounts from two witnesses who described an outcry from Hanna in 2020 in which she described being previously strangled by her husband. They amounted, Mansfield said, to “drunken banter that they [the witnesses] didn’t place a great deal of weight on at the time”. Their positions seemed to change, Mansfield said, after it was reported in the media that Hanna’s death was being treated by police as suspicious.
“People’s views of him drastically changed like the flick of a switch,” the lawyer said. “There is the very real risk of exaggeration and there is the very real risk of people wanting to help with a police investigation.”
But the lawyer saved most of his outrage for the “indignity and insult” that he said was inflicted on his client by police and the Crown. He said Polkinghorne was “lured under false pretences” into a police interview just hours after his wife’s death, not allowing him to mourn at home with family, and secretly treated him like a suspect. He was restricted from using his own home to plan her funeral, and even after an autopsy bolstered his account of his wife’s suicide by hanging, detectives continued to scour for any damaging information for 16 months before eventually charging him, Mansfield said.
Given all that, Mansfield told jurors, it’s no wonder his client turned to comfort from the only person who hadn’t ostracised him – Ashton, the escort with whom he’d developed a “friendship” over the five years he was her client.
Polkinghorne said his client was being unfairly maligned for what he said during the interview, in which he was speaking “open and honestly” and not thinking it would be viewed by anybody other than the coroner. He had no idea it would one day be viewed by the outside world, his very word analysed to see if he was insulting his wife, the lawyer said.
During a break in the interview, the Crown emphasised yesterday, Polkinghorne deleted all prior WhatsApp messages with Ashton. But that’s hardly surprising, Mansfield suggested.
“Why would he want police to learn of something that’s private ... between him and his wife ... in relation to what they or he got up to by way of sexual relations outside the union?” he asked, noting that the messages were “intimate, potentially embarrassing and something that would certainly damage both of their reputations”. “It’s entirely understandable.”
Mansfield promised to give jurors a more in-depth defence analysis of the interview later this afternoon.
Before Mansfield could begin his closing address this morning, McClintock had an hour more of the Crown closing address to finish. She saved her analysis of the scene for last on purpose, she said, describing Polkinghorne as a “master manipulator” who thought he could deceive police.
“He did have time to try and stage this as a full-suspension hanging,” she said, rubbishing defence claims that the investigation was marred from the start by not understanding that it was a partial-suspension hanging in which she was seated. “It seems to be what he was trying to make it look like. Maybe he found it too difficult - we can’t say.”
But it was evident he was working on a time limit, she said, because Hanna had a 9am appointment with their personal trainer and if she didn’t show “alarm bells are going to be ringing”. It’s apparent that was on his mind because he called the trainer at 8.30 that morning, roughly 20 minutes after his 111 call, she said.
He made a mistake by not cleaning the room his wife slept in and not flushing the toilet, which contained traces of meth showing that he had been in it even though he claimed not to, she said.
“He did not expect police to be trawling through that house in the way they did,” McClintock alleged. “He expected the rubber stamp.
There’s good reason police were suspicious, she said, directing jurors to the 111 call. In it, she noted, the operator told Polkinghorne to cut down his wife and background sounds can be heard for about 10 seconds before the surgeon responds, “Oh yeah, yeah.”
Had he actually found his wife in the way he claimed to, McClintock said, that 10 seconds would have needed to include him unbuckling the belt and unwrapping it from her neck, undoing a series of knots from the rope, moving the chair and putting her to the ground. The prosecutor noted that car keys were found on the chair when police arrived, suggesting that it hadn’t been used that morning.
“He couldn’t possibly have done all that in that timeframe,” she said. “He is revealed in that 111 call.”
Even after police arrived at the scene he was manipulating the evidence, McClintock said, noting that Polkinghorne picked up the belt and wrapped it around his hand before moving it to the kitchen.
And he failed to give a coherent explanation for why the two ropes found at the scene were so long and why the one found tied to the upstairs balustrade was so loosely knotted. When police confronted him with the inconsistency, showing him a photo of the rope, he ended the interview, she noted.
“Dr Polkinghorne is confused, police are confused, you’re probably confused and you shouldn’t be,” McClintock said. “The explanation for that is this is a fake rope.
“...You can’t treat this scene as having any sort of validity. Police spent 11 days there because it had no integrity. They’re doing their job. They’re being thorough.”
Polkinghorne had the “intelligence” and the “meth-fuelled courage” to fake his wife’s suicide, McClintock concluded.
“He blamed Pauline Hanna in life for a lot,” she said. “It is the final insult to her to blame her for her own death.”
Mansfield, however, seized on the comment, making it a theme of his own address that followed 15 minutes later.
“The final insult came when it was suggested he was to be blamed for blaming his own wife for her death,” he said. “If you want to add insult to injury, there you have it.”
Mansfield’s address before Justice Graham Lang and the jury is expected to continue after the lunch break.
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.
