WARNING: DISTRESSING CONTENT
After three additional hours of defence closing addresses this morning, both sides have shared their last words and jurors are almost ready to begin deliberating in the murder trial of Dr Philip Polkinghorne.
The last step, Justice Graham Lang’s summing up, will begin after the lunch break.
“It makes no sense because there’s nothing there to support it,” defence lawyer Ron Mansfield KC told jurors of the Crown’s case against his client. “It’s a nonsense, and one of the most gravest nonsenses our courts have heard for a long time, frankly.”
Polkinghorne, 71, has been on trial since July in the High Court at Auckland, accused by prosecutors of having fatally strangled his wife Pauline Hanna, 63, inside their Remuera home before staging the scene on the morning of April 5, 2021, to look like a suicide by hanging.
During the Crown’s day-long closing address earlier this week, Polkinghorne was described as a highly intelligent and arrogant “master manipulator” who also had a concerning methamphetamine habit and a yearning to end his 24-year marriage and start a new life with Sydney escort Madison Ashton. The Crown repeatedly said that suicide “makes no sense” and gave two alternative theories: either Polkinghorne got in an impromptu argument with his wife and lashed out at her or surprised her as she slept in a pre-meditated killing.
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In his final response today, Mansfield accused the Crown of being derelict in their duties by not pinning down when, where, why or how Hanna was killed in their theory.
“Let’s keep our options open,” he said with sarcasm. “It’s only a murder trial, after all.”
Mansfield also emphasised Hanna’s multiple suicide risk factors that mental health experts who gave evidence agreed on. He said she was a perfectionist, worried about professional disgrace, she was mourning the recent death of her mother, she reported prior thoughts of self-harm and she had a dangerous combination of alcohol and sleeping pills. He blamed Hanna’s work for not proactively reducing her hours when they saw she was sending work emails at all hours of the night.
He noted that taking a meal to friends and taking items to the tip the day before she died might be seen as signs of suicidal thinking, but more likely killing herself was a spur-of-the-moment decision in the middle of the night.
“There is no more lonely place when you’re already feeling low than the early hours of the morning,” he said. “At that time, when you’re that low, it is the darkest place to be. It is dark, it is bleak, it is desperate and that is where Pauline was likely to be woken to.”
He also went through some of the darkest moments found in her emails. In March 2019: “I cannot live if that is the result that I got it wrong,” she said of the prospect her husband didn’t love her. “I am lost.”
Mansfield said: “That sadly tells us a lot.”
In November 2019, during an accidentally recorded 24-minute conversation with her brother and niece, she called her husband a “sex fiend” and said he is angry at the world but also said at one point “I’ve considered just chucking myself off a bridge”. The Crown said it was an offhand comment, but Mansfield said it had to be interpreted in the context of all her other self-harm comments.
In early January 2020, in the early draft of a letter she wrote Polkinghorne after he disappeared for several days over Christmas, she said: “Right now I feel very scared, confused, sad and incredibly lonely.” She wrote an email to herself in April 2020 in which she said she was tired and not herself.
“I am never good enough despite my efforts,” she wrote. “I want desperately to tell someone and cry and ask for help but everyone seems to think I’m amazing and does not want to know that I have foibles and failings.
“... So I will go to bed and not sleep. V unusual for me – and it builds up – who knows what might follow. Have to tell someone even if no one but God ever sees this.”
In May 2020, she told family it was her first full day off in eight weeks and that she had “mixed emotions” about her new job helping to manage the Covid-19 response and that she had been “criticised and bullied and it has been incredibly brutal”.
Mansfield recounted a conversation in January 2021, recounted by a former corporate climber turned Anglican priest Gillian Reid, in which Hanna said she was struggling to do her job well.
“She was working longer and longer and harder and harder,” Reid testified. “She did not look well. This was a woman who was very stressed and struggling to handle what was going on around her.”
Then on March 28, 2021, exactly one week before her death, she wrote to her son-in-law and his wife: “My life is insane and I do not know what day it is sometimes. I (reluctantly) took this role as Head of Logistics for Vaccine. I did not want to. But Philip was so proud of me when Outbreak happened, I thought he would be proud of this – which I guess he is – but it is incredibly difficult and lonely.”
In the seven days before her death, Hanna was sending work emails at all hours of the day, including times when most people would be sleeping.
“Are you seriously about to believe that she wasn’t a suicide risk?” the lawyer asked as he began to wrap up his argument. “Is what I’m suggesting to you a stretch?”
Hanna was a beautiful and competent woman, “but she didn’t always see it that way”, he said.
“She had vulnerabilities – it’s a reality ... There were friends who would have dropped anything had they known how poor a state she was in – including Philip. But no one saw through that veneer because she didn’t want anyone to know.”
It’s fine, he said, if some jurors “are not able to shake the image of a dirty old man who didn’t realise how good he had it with Pauline”. They might even think his treatment of her contributed to her suicide risk factors, he said.
But jurors would be “emotional vigilantes” to find Polkinghorne guilty of anger towards him and sympathy towards Hanna when he didn’t do it, Mansfield added.
“There is no justice for Pauline if you ignore her vulnerabilities and ignore the decision she took,” he said. “The decision you make must be made on the evidence.
“If you believe the need for evidence for a case before you convict a man ... you already know the correct verdict in this case and it’s not necessary for me to tell you.”
Justice Lang has not given an estimate as to how long his summing up will take this afternoon.
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.
