WARNING: DISTRESSING CONTENT
Police investigating the death of Pauline Hanna were too “intoxicated” by salacious details of sex and drugs to step back and take a realistic look at what was so obviously a suicide, lawyer Ron Mansfield KC told jurors today as the focus of the Philip Polkinghorne murder trial turned to the defence.
“That would have to be the perfect murder,” Mansfield said during his opening address this morning, emphasising that there was no physical or pathologist evidence to support the Crown’s claim that the eye surgeon’s wife was strangled on Easter Monday 2021.
“Can I suggest it’s not [the perfect murder]. It’s a phantom.”
Mansfield also announced today that his high-profile client would not be testifying, explaining that doing so – after already giving an “unguarded” police interview that was later “broadcast to the nation” as part of the trial – would only encourage the Crown to distract again with questions about sex and drugs.
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Polkinghorne, now 71, is accused by the Crown of having fatally strangled Pauline Hanna, 63, before staging the scene inside their Remuera home to look like a suicide by hanging. During Crown solicitor Alysha McClintock’s own opening address last month, she suggested that Polkinghorne might have been high on methamphetamine when he lashed out at his wife – perhaps during an argument about the hundreds of thousands of dollars he had spent on sex workers or the “double life” he was allegedly establishing with Sydney escort Madison Ashton.
But all that focus on motive is simply a distraction, Mansfield told jurors today.
“You don’t need a motive if the crime hasn’t been committed,” he said, explaining that jurors’ first goal should be to determine if there was any evidence of a culpable homicide and not take the matter any further if there isn’t. “That’s really murder 101.
“We’ve spent much time ... on evidence that really doesn’t focus on that fundamental issue for you.”
Mansfield’s address officially marked the end of the Crown’s case in chief, which had been ongoing since the start of the trial five weeks ago in the High Court at Auckland.
The defence was expected to continue cross-examination today of the Crown’s final witness but, instead, Justice Graham Lang said he would allow Mansfield to recall the witness later in the trial if needed. Mansfield instead went directly into his opening address, followed by the first of what is expected to be many defence witnesses.
Mansfield told jurors they were going to be “inundated a wee bit with what we would call expert witnesses”, including two more pathologists, an engineer and mental health professionals. A number of witnesses, he said, would assist the jury with understanding the mechanisms of suicide.
He said it is a common myth, fanned by the Crown, that people who are successful, well-liked and well-presented don’t kill themselves.
“It is common for people to be shocked when they learn that someone had died by way of suicide,” Mansfield said. “It is easy for people to be angry. It is easy for people to feel hurt and bewildered.
“... It is entirely unpredictable.”
Mansfield told jurors it is easy to get distracted by “evidence of drug use by a professional in one of the most affluent suburbs in Auckland” or by an “unconventional relationship”. But he insisted his client’s drug use was “social or recreational” only, not to the extent that it altered his mood as suggested by the Crown.
“Dr Polkinghiorne may have lived a lie that many of you will think was selfish, that many of you will not like ...” Mansfield said of his client’s dalliances with other women, adding that jurors may think Polkinghorne a “silly old fool”.
But those details, he suggested, have taken precedence by authorities “to make you think less of him”. It’s important, he said, to also consider Polkinghorne was married 24 years, a doctor for 42 years and an ophthalmologist for 35 years.
“You need to look at all of his life,” Mansfield said. “... He was known for his quirky sense of humour. He was intelligent and his patients like him and he worked very hard for his patients.”
Even if jurors do turn their focus on drug use and extra-marital relationships, that doesn’t mean it fits the Crown narrative, the defence lawyer added.
“You might think that might have added to the burden that Pauline was living with at the time, rather than providing a motive for a murder that never took place,” he said.
Mansfield characterised the investigation against his client as something that started with a mistaken assumption by a junior detective following a “tension test” of the rope found dangling from the upstairs balustrade in the couple’s home. The seemed too loose to support the weight of a body and immediately raised suspicions that something about the scene didn’t seem right, the detective testified earlier in the trial.
But Polkinghorne gave a credible explanation – noting that there were two ropes but he untied one and threw it downstairs – in an interview with police that same day, Mansfield continued.
“Now the police believe they are investigating ... a homicide,” the defence lawyer said. “Eveything moves in that direction without stopping or thinking. And it doesn’t stop. It’s just like a junket that just gets longer and longer. And the more that’s spent on it, the more pressure there is to get a result ...
“They became intoxicated by the thought of establishing a murder even though ... objectively there was no evidence at all of a culpable homicide.”
The rest of the morning was focused on testimony from the first defence witness: Hanna’s sibling, Tracey Hanna, who travelled from her home in the United Kingdom, where she has lived for more than 30 years.
The younger sister recalled an incident sometime after their father died in the early 1990s in which she overheard an argument between Pauline Hanna and their mother in the kitchen of the family’s Hawke’s Bay farmstead.
“It escalated,” the witness recalled. “Pauline was having an emotional kind of crisis. She was shouting and crying.”
Tracey recalled telling her sister to stop making their mother cry, at which point, she said, Pauline Hanna “turned her anger on me”.
“And then all of the sudden she said that she’d tried to kill herself and I didn’t know her and I didn’t know what was going on in her life,” the witness said, explaining that her sister “flashed her arms” as if to show a previous attempt at self-harm. “Just the world stopped. I couldn’t remember what was said after that.”
Tracey Hanna said she never brought up the issue with her sister again, something she will always “deeply regret”. She explained that she was an “unworldly 21-year-old” at the time and mental health wasn’t openly discussed in New Zealand back then.
The sister’s testimony took on a different tone when cross-examined by prosecutor Brian Dickey, who pointed out that no other medical record exists and no other witness has come forward to suggest a suicide attempt prior to her death.
“Are you suggesting that I’m lying about this?” she twice asked Dickey. “I take offence to that.”
The prosecutor replied: “Take all the offence you like but try to answer the questions.”
Dickey took on an incredulous tone when suggesting that Pauline Hanna, having been so open with others about her marriage and her anti-depression medication, would only confide a suicide attempt to her much younger sister.
“In anger – she was having a meltdown,” Tracey Hanna said, explaining that her sister said it “to punctuate the pain she was in”.
Under further cross-examination, the witness said she had forgotten about the incident until her sister’s death “triggered a memory”. The conversation took place sometime within a two-year period after her father’ death and her sister’s death came about two months after their mother died, she said of what prompted the memory.
“It had been buried in the recesses of your mind for the past 30 years?” Dickey asked, and she agreed.
Dickey pointed out that Tracey Hanna had been in touch with Polkinghorne, offering support, after his wife’s death. Police had at that time secretly obtained permission to monitor the surgeon’s phone conversations.
The prosecutor noted that Tracey Hanna appeared to be in Polkinghorne’s corner from the very beginning, telling him she was gathering information for a formal complaint against police and suggesting they were waiting for him to “stuff a brown envelope full of cash before they let you off”.
“Is New Zealand Police that corrupt yet or have I been living in the United Kingdom too long?” she continued.
The witness said she had no recollection of the conversation but would have been joking.
“It’s obviously not true,” she said, adding a short time later “thank God!” as the judge told her that her testimony was finished and she could leave the witness box.
The defence’s second witness is expected to be called this afternoon, after a lunchbreak.
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.
