WARNING: DISTRESSING CONTENT
The Crown is due to finish calling witnesses today in the murder trial of Philip Polkinghorne after a revelation yesterday that draft messages were discovered on Pauline Hanna’s phone on the morning of her death.
At 4.04 and 4.05am on the same morning that Hanna was found dead in her Remuera home, her phone appears to have been used to draft two messages - one to her surgeon husband Polkinghorne and another to the teen daughter of a friend.
The iMessage texts were never sent and anything that might have been typed before being deleted is unknown, but their presentation to the court - in week five of Polkinghorne’s ongoing murder trial - could have major implications for the Crown case depending on how jurors interpret them.
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Four hours after the phone recorded the aborted drafts, Polkinghorne would call 111 to report Hanna’s suicide by hanging.
Defence lawyer Ron Mansfield KC revealed the existence of the drafts this afternoon after hours of at times tense cross-examination of Detective Andrew Reeves, who spent three days in the witness box describing the contents of the defendant’s and his late wife’s seized mobile phones. His testimony finally came to a close shortly after the revelation.
Paramedics found Hanna, 63, dead in the entryway of the couple’s home on April 5, 2021, and although immediately suspicious that the scene didn’t seem right authorities wouldn’t file a murder charge against Polkinghorne until nearly a year-and-a-half later.
The eye surgeon, 71, is accused of having fatally strangled Hanna before staging the scene to look like a suicide. The Crown has suggested as part of its circumstantial case that the surgeon was high on methamphetamine when he lashed out at his wife, possibly as she confronted him over the hundreds of thousands of dollars he had squandered on sex workers or the “double life” he was alleged to be setting up with Sydney escort Madison Ashton.
In support of the “double life” contention, the Crown has had Detective Reeves read aloud a series of sometimes sexually explicit messages between Polkinghorne and Ashton in the months before Hanna’s death and the weeks after.
“Darling you and I aren’t going anywhere. We are going to last 100 years,” Polkinghorne had written to Ashton 18 days after Hanna was found dead as the two planned a tryst at a Mt Cook chalet. In other communications, Ashton joked that the surgeon shouldn’t wear a bowtie to Hanna’s funeral and they discussed how they might split chores in the future.
But Polkinghorne’s defence team has insisted the “police narrative” that Polkinghorne killed his wife was formed almost immediately – and erroneously – based on suspicions over the couple’s unorthodox but stable “open” marriage. She was a healthcare executive with a long history of depression and recently amplified work stress as she helped organise the rollout of the Covid-19 vaccine, Mansfield has argued.
Other witnesses have said they didn’t think Hanna would kill herself, especially without leaving a note.
Today’s abrupt revelation about the 4am iMessage drafts could be argued by the defence as evidence of an aborted note. The high school student to whom the second message was drafted had developed a connection with Hanna in recent months after the teen sent a message of condolence following the death of Hanna’s mother in February 2021, the defence noted.
Mansfield asked the detective if he was aware that iPhones make an entry of a message being started when drafting an iMessage even if nothing is ultimately sent.
”That is quite a technical question and no, I was not aware of that,” Reeves replied, suggesting the question might better be put to an IT expert.
But the detective disagreed when the defence suggested the phone record was proof that Hanna had been using her phone at 4am. He didn’t know if it was something the phone could have done automatically in the background, he said. The Crown later pointed to messaging from Polkinghorne showing that he knew his wife’s phone passcode.
But if jurors decide the evidence is sufficient to conclude that Hanna was on the phone at 4am, it will significantly reduce the timeframe for when she died.
Reeves was also asked by the defence this afternoon about Polkinghorne’s mobile phone usage that morning. Polkinghorne, who said he was sleeping in the master bedroom while his wife took the guest room, had his phone on “airplane mode” - disconnecting from the cellular network - for seven hours starting at 1.11am.
“It just seems odd that it happened on that night,” Reeves said. “I only saw it [airplane mode] come on once before - for a 25-minute period over a one-year period - so it did stand out to me.”
Mansfield suggested it might have been so that his client wouldn’t be disturbed by calls or notifications while sleeping, but the detective said Polkinghorne would have still likely received notifications if the phone remained connected to the home’s wi-fi. Data showed Polkinghorne’s phone had been used several times during the early morning hours, but his lawyer suggested it was the result of him perhaps logging into YouTube or Netflix in the middle of the night - unable to sleep soundly due to his own work-related stress.
Mansfield also attempted to offer explanations for his client using, unsuccessfully, a privacy browser to search “leg edema after strangulation” on the day after his wife’s death and for why Hanna had searched the term “asphyxia” on her own phone in 2019.
Search engine DuckDuckGo is commonly used to avoid giving personal data to web companies, the defence lawyer said, suggesting there was nothing inherently nefarious about using it. The term “strangulation” might have been a clumsy way of referring to a death by hanging, the lawyer said.
Hanna’s search for “asphyxia”, meaning a loss of oxygen to the brain causing death, was sandwiched between two searches for “Emmanuel Zola” and searches for several 19th-century French authors. Emile Zola, it was noted, was a French author who died from asphyxia in 1902 due to gases emitted from a stove.
Asphyxia can also be caused by a hanging, the defence lawyer noted, pointing out that within a week of the online search Hanna had been in contact with a crisis hotline after telling her GP she was having suicidal ideation - albeit not a method involving hanging.
The daylong cross-examination at times just barely crawled along - including a lengthy sampling of the many mundane texts between the couple that, the defence emphasised, showed no signs of animosity - but also at times was punctuated by verbal jabs from Mansfield as he accused the police of omitting key facts to mislead the jury.
Mansfield at one point referred back to Reeve’s analysis of Hanna’s movement data from her phone. Looking at the 35 days before her death, the detective had surmised that she would wake up, on average, between 5.52am and after 7am.
But the defence lawyer responded with an extensive list of emails that had been sent overnight, indicating she had been up all hours in the week before her death. On April 4, the day before her death, there were work emails sent at 12.35am, 1.31am, 1.35am, 1.37am, 1.39am, two emails at 6.08am and another at 6.12am.
“You can see that she is doing the night shift on a number of these days,” Mansfield told the witness. “Do you not think it leaves a misleading impression [about wake-up times] ... when you know damn well she was sending emails?”
The detective said the wake-up time was based on her mobile phone movement data alone.
“I realise now I should have cross-referenced them,” the detective responded calmly before the subject changed to a new topic.
There are only a few uncalled names left on the Crown witness list that was read aloud to jurors at the start of the trial. However, the trial does not appear to be ending soon. Polkinghorne’s lawyers have indicated they will also call witnesses.
Prosecutors are expected to continue calling evidence tomorrow when the trial resumes before Justice Graham Lang and the jury.
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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.
