WARNING: DISTRESSING CONTENT
A longtime friend of Pauline Hanna’s who served as matron of honour at her wedding struggled to hold back tears this morning after she put her hands around her own throat and demonstrated a chilling divulgence she recalled Hanna making about her marriage with eye surgeon Philip Polkinghorne a year before her suspicious death.
“She became quite agitated and she described to us that Philip had done this to her,” Victoria Pheasant Riordan told jurors in Polkinghorne’s murder trial, emphasising that Hanna had crossed her hands over her neck with thumbs on either side.
“He’d done it to her and indicated that he could do that at any time. She took that as a threat - a real threat that he could do that to her at any time.”
The testimony marked one of the most emotive moments so far in the high-profile trial, now in its third week in the High Court at Auckland, where it continues to attract near overflow crowds to the court complex’s largest courtroom.
Polkinghorne, 71, is accused of having fatally strangled his wife before calling 111 on the morning of April 5, 2021, to report her suicide by hanging.
Authorities were almost immediately suspicious after noting irregularities in the couple’s Remuera home, including a rope that seemed to be tied too loosely to support a person’s weight, a dishevelled room where Hanna was reported to have slept and several methamphetamine stashes.
The defence, meanwhile, has suggested there were easy explanations for each initial concern from police. They’ve characterised Hanna’s death as a tragic suicide by someone who had a decades-long battle with depression and a job that had reached new levels of stress.
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Riordan told jurors Hanna’s disclosure about the prior strangling incident came in January 2020, as the two sat down for dinner at Malo, a restaurant in Havelock North. Hanna had come down to visit her mother, who was suffering dementia, and Riordan lived about 45 minutes away.
It wasn’t the first time she was left with a bad impression of Polkinghorne, but it was by far the most disturbing, Riordan testified.
“From the get-go [of their marriage], Philip came across as controlling,” she said, explaining that Hanna would make excuses for her husband. However, she said, her friend had never told her about violence in the marriage until that occasion.
At the restaurant, Riordan recalled the mood changing suddenly immediately after the revelation. She, her husband and her adult son all encouraged Hanna to leave her husband.
But Hanna’s response, as the night ended, was that “it would be okay”, the friend recalled.
“She kind of backed away,” Riordan said. “It was almost, I think, that she didn’t want to talk about it. That’s my impression. Things were a bit emotional at that point.”
The next day, Riordan sent a follow-up text to her friend, saying, among other things: “I wish I could take some of your pain away”. Jurors were shown a copy of the text.
The two exchanged texts again a month later. This time Hanna replied: “A good couple of weeks here as PJP [Polkinghorne] in much better frame of mind which makes everyone so much nicer. His old self!”.
Riordan said the message set her mind at ease a little bit in terms of her fears about “physical violence”, but she continued to have concerns about the relationship for some time. She would bring it up again from time to time when Hanna would return for visits with her mum.
“We talked about it and she kept on assuring us that everything was okay,” Riordan recalled. “It didn’t seem right to push it.”
She said her longtime friend was open about her use of antidepressants, which Riordan didn’t see as anything out of the ordinary. She was aware her friend had a stressful job but did not see any indication that the stress was unusual for such a “high-flying” position.
During cross-examination, defence lawyer Ron Mansfield KC noted that the bill for that dinner was more than $500 and suggested that everyone had been drinking.
Riordan responded that Hanna had been drinking, as had her husband and son, but she had not had a drink in 25 years. While her memory about what they did after the revelation might not be clear because she was so upset by it, she was adamant that Hanna’s demonstration of the choking was unforgettable.
As for Polkinghorne’s alleged threat that he could “do that at any time”, Riordan acknowledged that she wasn’t certain if those were the exact words Hanna said or if it was simply the gist of what she was saying.
“The inference was clear,” she said. “This was so dramatic and alarming that I don’t recall everything.”
The witness also disagreed with how the defence was portraying her thoughts on Hanna’s stress level.
“As you’re reading it to me, it sounds like you’re making it more prominent than I would recall as my life experience of it,” she said. “It is one of the things I spoke to police about, but I didn’t put the same weight on it that you do.”
Mansfield then quoted her police statement back to her: “She is often stressed due to work. She was very busy and had a lot going on”.
Riordan’s testimony came directly after Alison Ring, who had been a friend of Hanna and Polkinghorne for about three decades. Ring also described a series of revelations Hanna had made about her marriage troubles in the years before her death.
She recalled a dinner the couples had together at the Northern Club in June 2020 in which Polkinghorne had been “extremely agitated” about issues with Auckland Eye, the company from which he was trying to retire.
At some point, she recalled, she walked off with Hanna for a private conversation.
“She told me she was extremely worried about Polk’s mental health,” Ring recalled.
“She said she was really, really worried. He was difficult to live with, he was verbally aggressive - didn’t say physically, and she couldn’t depend on him.”
Ring said she suggested Polkinghorne see a counsellor and her friend agreed it was a good idea.
About six months later, Hanna again told Ring that she was worried about Polkinghorne and that people at Auckland Eye were also worried.
Although she couldn’t put a date on it, Ring also recounted a conversation in Hanna sometime in 2019 or 2020 in which Hanna said her husband was having an affair. Hanna said she found out by looking at his laptop.
“I don’t care how many prostitutes he f***s in Sydney, but I will not tolerate him having an affair with someone in my space,” she recalled Hanna saying.
Ring said that when she asked Hanna what she was going to do about it, the friend said she had a plan.
“I’m going to see a lawyer and write a will and I’m going to sort out my finances,” she recalled Hanna saying.
Prosecutors speculated in their opening address earlier this month that Polkinghorne and Hanna might have been arguing about finances, a “double life” he had been leading with an Australian sex worker or the exorbitant amount of money he had been spending on sex workers when Hanna died.
Ring said she continued to support Polkinghorne after Hanna’s death, noting that he was “very distraught” when he told her and her husband about what had happened.
“I let her down,” she recalled him saying. “I wish I was dead. I wish I was with her.”
But they drifted apart, she said, after a series of strange interactions in the years since Hanna’s death.
Ring recalled she would often muse how unlikely she found it that Hanna would kill herself without leaving a note, given how frequently Hanna sent out notes to friends and loved ones. Then one day, she recalled, Polkinghorne stopped by their home with a four-inch-by-four inch slip of coloured paper with faded writing and said he had found a suicide note.
“I looked at him and I said, ‘You expect me to believe that? Because I don’t.”
The note, she said, read: “Dear P, I love you forever, from P.”
Polkinghorne told her he had found it in their bedding, she said. She wondered why he had shown her and not police.
“I was very distressed and I had a few sleepless nights over it, because it didn’t sit with me at all,” she said. “It did cause a lot of distress.”
Defence lawyer Mansfield later suggested it had been a misunderstanding and that his client had simply said he found “a note” - not a suicide note.
Ring adamantly disagreed.
“I felt I was being manipulated by him,” she said. “When he came around with that note that was just the last thing. He didn’t have a reason to lie to me because I was supporting him anyway.”
The trial, which is expected to last six weeks, continues this afternoon 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.
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.
