WARNING: DISTRESSING CONTENT
When Philip Polkinghorne called up two of his wife’s closest friends in the days following her reported suicide, the Auckland eye surgeon was already crying as they answered the phone.
“My darling wife, she’s gone,” John Riordan recalled him starting off, explaning that Polkinghorne then continued to cry for several minutes as might be expected in such a situation.
But then the tears appeared to stop suddenly - a transition so jarring that Riordan still remembers it vividly three years later, jurors were told today at Polkinghorne’s ongoing murder trial.
“The police are going to charge me with murder. I didn’t kill my wife,” the witness recalled Polkinghorne saying in a flat tone.
“Then he went back to talking about Pauline and the crying started immediately. It didn’t feel real.”
The recollection came as Riordan spent a second day in the witness box at the high-profile trial, now in the third week of six in the High Court at Auckland trial. It was the last topic prompted by prosecutors before a lengthy cross-examination in which defence lawyer Ron Mansfield KC explicitly suggested he had been “gilding the lilly” and trying to “stick the boot” in a man the witness never cared much for.
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Polkinghorne, now 71, is accused of having fatally strangled wife Pauline Hanna, 63, before staging the death on April 5, 2021, to look like a suicide by hanging inside their Remuera home. Prosecutors acknowledged at the outset of the trial that it would be a circumstantial case, but they’ve emphasised the methamphetamine found in their house, his alleged “double life” with extravagant spending on sex workers and Hanna’s alleged outcry about a previous non-fatal strangling to Riordan and his wife.
The defence, however, has noted repeatedly that Hanna has suffered depression for decades, with thoughts of suicide on at least two occasions. When paired with grief over her mother’s death two months earlier and her highly stressful job organising the Covid-19 vaccine rollout, suicide remains the most credible explanation, Mansfield has repeatedly contended.
Today’s testimony from Riordan followed testimony yesterday in which both he and his wife described a dinner with Hanna and a startling revelation in January 2020, just over a year before her death. Hanna and the couple had been out to dinner and the topic of her marriage had come up, both said.
“She said she had to be very, very careful around him because she wasn’t sure if he would blow up,” John Riordan testified. “What she was telling us was becoming more and more serious. Then she stopped talking and she did this.”
Riordan, like his wife earlier on the stand, wrapped his hands around his neck.
“She said nothing for maybe five seconds,” he said, explaining that she held the position before explaining to the couple: “He tried to strangle me.”
Riordan told prosecutors he was “100%” sure she used the term strangled.
Duriung cross-examination today, Mansfield didn’t so much focus on the word “strangled” as he did Riordan’s statement that Hanna described having to be “very careful” around her husband. That wasn’t included in his statement to police, given after he and his wife flew from Hawke’s Bay to Auckland to speak with them, Mansfield said.
Mansfield suggested Riordan, who previously owned a pig farm, and his client didn’t have much in common. Riordan agreed they probably wouldn’t have been friends without Hanna as the connector but he said they both made an effort.
“You didn’t like his sense of humour, did you?” Mansfield asked, to which he retorted: “I didn’t know he had a sense of humour.”
Actually, the lawyer responded, his client did. It’s an intelligent, dry, sarcastic humour, he said.
Mansfield went on to recount several instances that Riordan used as examples of Polkinghorne being out of sorts with his wife, or demeaning or controlling.
“Over time it got more and more prevalent and the remarks were harder hitting,” Riordan had explained earlier, pointing to one example in which he recalled they were having dinner and Polkinghorne remarked after his wife left the room: “She thinks she’s got a big job at Manukau but really she doesn’t.”
Riordan said he just shook his head.
“I think in most marriages you take the mickey out of each other, but both parties know it’s a joke,” Riordan explained. “But when he said it, it sounded like she was being told off.”
Mansfield noted repeatedly that it was Riordan’s “impression”, suggesting that the witness’ dislike of his client might be tainting his memory. Then the lawyer got more explicit in his suggestions, wondering aloud if the witness had schemed with Hanna’s family or his wife to alter his testimony in a way that might “stick the boot” in his client more than what he had initially told police.
“Do you think you read the reports on this trial and thought you could add a wee bit?” Mansfield asked.
That’s absolutely not the case, the witness said, explaining that if there was anything new in his testimony over the past two days it was because his memory had been jogged by multiple conversations with his wife after answering the questions put to him by police in 2021.
“What I wanted was that Pauline receive justice,” he said of his decision to talk with police.
“You want to provide justice based on your impression,” Mansfield replied.
Riordan again disagreed.
“Not based on my impressions,” he clarified. “I want to see this court provide justice for Pauline. I’m not in any way qualified to do that.”
More witnesses are expected this afternoon as testimony resumes 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 is 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.
