WARNING: DISTRESSING CONTENT
The fifth week of the murder trial of Philip Polkinghorne, the Remuera eye surgeon accused of killing his wife Pauline Hanna and staging the scene to look like a suicide, has begun.
The Crown case has resumed with Detective Andrew Reeves giving more evidence as to what police found on Hanna’s phone after her death. Just before the trial ended on Friday afternoon he revealed Hanna had set a calendar reminder for the night of April 5 for dinner with her husband, who reported her dead that morning.
He said she searched for apartments for sale in the Napier suburb of Ahuriri. Earlier, the trial heard some of her friends and family had urged her to leave Polkinghorne and return to the Hawke’s Bay. Her friends the Riordans made that recommendation after she revealed her husband and placed his hands on her neck, they told the court earlier.
Another search was: “Is watching pornographic videos normal make [sic] behaviour”. In December 2020 she searched “P pipe” and “what does P look like” and “what sensation does P give you”.
She also searched that month for the search term “asphyxia” and the day before for “anorgasmia”.
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Polkinghorne claims his wife hanged herself amid the pressure of her role in the Covid vaccine rollout and defence counsel Ron Mansfield KC is set to begin calling witnesses to support that contention this week.
On Friday, following an afternoon of more high-tempo evidence from a Crown witness, Justice Graham Lang addressed the jury.
”We’re getting towards the tail end of the Crown witness list,” the Judge said.
He said we should finish the Crown case early this week. The trial is set down for six weeks and this week will be the fifth.
”As far as I can tell I think we are still on target,” adding we’d know more this week and then giving the jury of nine women and three men a direction.
”There’s a long way to go so keep an open mind. Don’t come to any conclusions at this stage, it’s far too early for that, and again just remember we’re getting to the sharp end of the trial, so it’s just absolutely essential you don’t discuss this case with anyone over the weekend.”
When a detective confiscated Polkinghorne’s mobile phone as part of a search warrant 11 days after his wife’s suspicious death, the Auckland eye surgeon at first volunteered a series of incorrect passcodes before police gave up and went about trying to hack the device themselves.
They were successful and the trove of evidence that resulted – including a seemingly secret internet query one day after Hanna’s death, regarding strangulation – was presented to jurors as the fourth week of Polkinghorne’s high-profile murder trial concluded.
Prosecutors also revealed a long chain of WhatsApp messages between the surgeon and Sydney escort Madison Ashton in the immediate aftermath of Hanna’s death.
“Honestly I really love you,” Ashton told him three days before his wife’s service. “Do not wear a f**king bow tie at the funeral. Keep the hat.”
Polkinghorne, 71, is accused of having fatally strangled Hanna, 63, inside their Remuera home before staging the scene to look like a suicide by hanging and calling 111 around 8am on April 5, 2021. The case against Polkinghorne is circumstantial, but prosecutors suggested he might have lashed out at his wife while high on methamphetamine and during an argument about his exorbitant spending on sex workers or his “double life” with Ashton.
The defendant has pleaded not guilty to the charge, and his lawyers have insisted Hanna’s death was indeed a suicide.
In a police interview hours after emergency responders arrived at the couple’s home, Polkinghorne said that he and his wife had slept in separate rooms that night. He went to bed around 11pm then woke up around 5am, reading in bed before getting up for his daily ritual of presenting his wife breakfast in bed, he told police, explaining that he found her body in the home’s entryway shortly thereafter.
But data extracted from his phone indicates he appeared to be awake and on his phone during at least part of the early morning hours.
After turning his phone off at 11.16pm on April 4, the device was unlocked at 1.10am on April 5 and encrypted messaging app WhatsApp was accessed, police found. Police were unable to find those messages. The phone was then put into airplane mode, which cuts the phone off from the cellular network, at 1.11am. The notes app on the phone was accessed from 1.17 to 1.19am.
The photos and videos folder was accessed numerous times that morning: from 1.19 to 1.20am, from 1.45 to 1.49am, from 2.04 to 2.05am and from 2.23 to 2.42am before the phone display was turned off at 2.44am. The phone was next turned on and unlocked at 6.46am.
Detective Andrew Reeves walked jurors through his examination of Polkinghorne’s phone, along with phones belonging to Hanna and Ashton.
Records show the ophthalmologist made three identical searches in quick succession soon after his interview with police ended: “how to delete icloud storage”.
The next day he went to the website for DuckDuckGo, an app designed to conduct web searches that cannot be traced. But because he searched through the website instead of the app, police were able to trace the search. It read: “leg edema after strangulation”. Edema is a clinical term for swelling.
Jurors were handed a thick booklet of the many WhatsApp messages between Polkinghorne and Ashton starting at 4.28pm on April 5, 2021, less than 12 hours after Hanna’s death was reported. Much of the communications were trivial in nature. But on April 7 Ashton sent a link to a Stuff article titled “Remuera death: More answers expected Tuesday as post-mortem carried out”.
On April 10, Ashton sent a link to an article in which Polkinghorne spoke with Herald reporter Carolyne Meng-Yee, telling her he was being treated as a “person of suspect” by police. He added: “Our relationship wasn’t fine, it wasn’t fine at all, it was perfect.” The entire article was reproduced in the evidence booklet.
“Did you give an interview???? Did you use those words !!!!!” Ashton wrote to Polkinghorne, adding: “Person of suspect?!”
Polkinghorne replied: “What do you think? Not a chance”.
Ashton gave the funeral wear advice on April 12, stating also that she was on a flight, and one day later she sent a photo of a dirty refrigerator and suggested: “Let’s come up with home duties who does what”.
Polkinghorne replied: “I am good at ironing and grocery shopping putting the rubbish out and can cook. I am very good at judging shakes and can freeze bananas. I can water plants wash dogs pick up pooze [sic], point out imperfections. I am a natural at ignoring the obvious, spotting expired milk, reading history.”
The next day Polkinghorne told Ashton he had tried going home “only to be turfed out” – a reference, it would seem, to police still being there.
Ashton then sent multiple messages on April 15 before Polkinghorne replied at 5.08pm: “Will call in about two hours.”
Ashton replied 50 minutes later.
“I just remembered that you’re at the service. I would’ve big day x,” she wrote.
The detective interpreted the message to be a typo meaning it would have been a big day.
Reeves said he found about 150,000 images on Polkinghorne’s phone, thousands of which were adult pornography or sexual in nature. Among them were photos of Ashton and four other women – two of them previously described by witnesses as sex workers – that bank records show Polkinghorne gave nearly $200,000 to over a five-year period.
On a USB drive belonging to the defendant, the detective found multiple saved images of knot-tying techniques. One of the things that first caught investigators’ attention as they responded to the 111 call was the looseness of the rope tied around an upstairs balustrade. It has been repeatedly referred to as a group of “granny knots”. As a surgeon, Polkinghorne was accustomed to tying much more complicated knots, the defence pointed out earlier in the trial.
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.
