WARNING: DISTRESSING CONTENT
The Philip Polkinghorne murder trial will resume this morning, as the defence team continues calling witnesses to give evidence.
Proceedings will resume about 10am with a new defence witness. The jury has not heard who. But in his opening address, defence lawyer Ron Mansfield KC signalled the defence would be calling its own pathologists, as well as a psychiatrist and suicide expert to put to bed what he said were suicide myths promulgated by the Crown.
He has yet to call the pathologist or psychiatrist or suicide expert.
STORY CONTINUES AFTER THE LIVE BLOG
STORY CONTINUES
We’ve heard from Tracey Hanna, Pauline Hanna’s younger sister who said outright she believes the successful DHB manager took her own life. She said Hanna had in the early 1990s disclosed to her and their late mother a previous attempt to take her own life shortly after their father’s death. Tracey referenced the fact their mother had died in February 2021, two months before Hanna’s death, and said the similarity had brought back that memory of the suicide attempt disclosure from three decades prior. Prosecutor Brian Dickey took aim at the fact none of Hanna’s other close friends or relatives had heard anything of this alleged suicide attempt, and said the fact Tracey could not remember the date of the attempt made it impossible to verify via hospital records.
Among the other defence witnesses - 18 have been called so far - was electricity industry veteran Ronald Beatty. He analysed the power usage at Polkinghorne’s home in Remuera over the two years leading up to Hanna’s death, a longer period than the Crown electricity expert, whose analysis Beatty suggested was over too short a period to establish trends and relied on some flawed assumptions. Beatty found the data supported Polkinghorne’s version of events, that he rose around 6am to switch the lights on and read for a while before coming downstairs and switching on the toaster and kettle before finding his wife dead in the entranceway. He also concluded, contrary to the prosecution expert, that the washing machine and dryer could not have run on the morning of April 5, when Hanna was reported dead. Police found a top sheet missing from the bed Hanna was said to have slept in, and a slightly damp top sheet was found in the dryer.
Many of the others called by the defence have been lay witnesses speaking about what they observed of Polkinghorne and Hanna. Several of his former colleagues said he was an excellent ophthalmologist who they enjoyed working with and who was so committed to his patients he would sometimes waive his surgeon’s fee if they could not afford a procedure. Others described Hanna as stressed and overworked in her Covid role in the leadup to her death.
The first witness yesterday was Anne Theresa Millar, who cut and dyed Hanna’s hair at her Remuera salon Headquarters for more than 20 years. She said Hanna was always immaculately turned out, kind and generous. At her last appointment, about two weeks before her death, she was late, which was unusual, the witness said. She also had to rush out because of another work commitment. At earlier appointments that year, she was so busy she had to undertake zoom meetings while waiting with her foils in during the hair dyeing process, the jury heard.
Then, the jury heard from Robert John Willis, Polkinghorne’s former accountant, who gave lengthy and at times dense evidence of the series of trusts and companies used by the defendant and his wife. He said it was a standard sort of arrangement used by people to protect their assets and insulate their properties from the risks inherent in a trading company. Polkinghorne was not employed directly by Auckland Eye, instead consulting via a company that was paid by the practice. Willis said he had identified errors in some of the account statements relied on by police forensic accountant Magaret Skilton. He had not sought to correct the errors as police never contacted him or asked for a statement, he said. Willis said he met with Polkinghorne sometime in 2023 to discuss the Skilton report.
The defence then called Andrew McGregor, a mechanical engineer who runs Prosolve Ltd, a firm specialising in forensic investigative engineering services including air crash investigation. McGregor was asked by the defence to simulate the arrangement Polkinghorne said his wife used to hang herself.
Justice Graham Lang suppressed the bulk of his evidence on the grounds that publication of a detailed description of the purported suicide method could endanger public safety. But the Judge did allow the fact of the simulation to be reported, along with his findings. He said all of the four simulations he conducted using the method Polkinghorne described could have created enough force to cause death.
Auckland Crown Solicitor Alysha McClintock suggested the number of variables at play rendered the simulation meaningless. “Do you understand ... the theoretical possibility of this is not an issue?” she asked. He also confirmed the arrangement he used relied entirely on the description of the setup provided by Polkinghorne to police on April 5.
The final witness, Regina Gay Haysom, of Orere Point, used to run a business called Body Shots Photography. Haysom confirmed Hanna contracted her to provide a number of photos of herself for a birthday present for her husband in 2010. There were two wall portraits with dimensions of over a metre vertically and horizontally, the jury heard.
Tuesday’s evidence: Hanna’s hair stylist, couple’s accountant testify
A Remuera hair salon owner who had Hanna as a client for about 25 years told jurors today that Hanna appeared “fine” during her final three appointments but was quite obviously being kept busy with work.
Anne Millar’s testimony came as the march of defence witnesses continued for a third day in the murder trial of Hanna’s widower, eye surgeon Philip Polkinghorne, in the High Court at Auckland.
Millar, testifying via audio-visual feed from her holiday hotel room in Europe, recalled seeing Hanna every four weeks to retouch her hair tint and condition her hair.
There was usually no time for chatting during the appointments, she said, explaining that Hanna would sometimes be on Zoom meetings during the appointments.
Defence lawyer Ron Mansfield has pointed out repeatedly throughout the trial that Hanna had an at times thankless job helping to manage the rollout of the Covid-19 vaccine.
Multiple witnesses called by the Crown have said Hanna felt immensely proud of the work she was doing, thrived in high-pressure environments and preferred to work long hours. But over the past two-and-a-half days of defence evidence, witnesses have described someone who seemed to be struggling with an assignment she never actually wanted but felt she had to accept.
During her third-to-last appointment on February 6, 2021, Millar said she could tell her client was busier than usual with Covid-19 response demands. During her second-to-last appointment on February 27, Hanna had her laptop out and was working, the witness said. And during her final appointment, on March 20, Hanna showed up uncharacteristically late and remained busy and distracted with her work throughout the appointment, before finishing early to leave for another meeting, Millar said.
The business owner agreed under cross-examination by the Crown that Hanna presented as a busy professional woman but was also remembered as positive in outlook and attitude. During her last visits, she had been looking forward to a South Island 4WD holiday and was enjoying being a grandmother, the witness agreed.
Millar was also asked by the defence to identify the products that were used to dye Hanna’s hair. Such products can sometimes strip hair follicles, causing false negatives for drug tests involving hair clippings, the defence had noted earlier in the trial. Police had tested Hanna’s hair dating back six months and found no traces of methamphetamine use.
The defence has previously suggested that the 37g of methamphetamine found in the couple’s home was for recreational use by both of them. But the Crown has suggested it was for Polkinghorne alone, and the amount found – the equivalent of about 370 doses – showed the surgeon had a serious issue with the drug.
Chartered accountant Robert Willis, a patient of the defendant’s who went on to help handle the couple’s finances, was also in the witness box giving evidence yesterday.
Willis was called by the defence in part to rebut earlier evidence from police forensic accountant Margaret Skilton, who outlined how the proceeds from the sale of a $1 million Papatoetoe property were put into a trust designed to benefit Hanna, before the funds were dispersed by Polkinghorne over the course of a year. The outbound payments, Skilton testified, included a $500,000 investment and money to Hanna’s stepson to help him buy a house. But the accountant also traced some of the money back to private accounts that Polkinghorne allegedly used to pay sex workers.
Willis said he was initially told the trust was set up to “give Pauline a separate accumulation of wealth” but he didn’t know if the intent of the account had changed.
There had been an error somewhere along the way – which he emphasised was of no fault of the defendant – in which the money was paid to Polkinghorne’s account. He suggested the police forensic accounting report was based on erroneous information.
Under cross-examination, prosecutor Brian Dickey asked the witness why he didn’t tell police that, if he believed they were looking at the wrong set of accounts.
“That wasn’t my role to do that,” Willis replied, adding that he would have set the record straight had the police accountant ever contacted him.
Dickey noted that the witness and the defendant met sometime last year, while Polkinghorne’s murder charge was pending, and discussed the “Skilton report”. The witness, however, disagreed with the characterisation by the prosecutor that the two “put their heads together” to analyse the report at that time. Willis was later emailed a copy of the report, either by the defendant or one of his lawyers, he said.
The witness indicated there didn’t seem to be anything unusual about the account that would suggest money was being hidden from Hanna. Had Polkinghorne and Hanna separated, he noted while being questioned by the defence, their property would have been split down the middle, regardless of what accounts the money was in.
Polkinghorne, now 71, is accused of having fatally strangled Hanna, 63, inside their Remuera home before staging the scene on the morning of April 5, 2021, to look like a suicide by hanging. Prosecutors have suggested the defendant was high on methamphetamine when he lashed out at his wife of 24 years, possibly during an argument over his exorbitant spending on sex workers or his “double life” with Sydney escort Madison Ashton.
Much of the first five weeks of the High Court at Auckland trial have focused on those themes. But prosecutors announced this morning that they had finished their case in chief after having called roughly 60 witnesses, passing the baton to defence lawyer Ron Mansfield, KC, to give an opening address and call anyone else to the witness box who he felt jurors should hear from.
The list of defence witnesses, jurors learned, will be long – likely stretching the trial past the six weeks that had initially been allotted.
Mansfield emphasised during his lengthy address on Friday that there was no physical evidence indicating anything other than a suicide by hanging had taken place. He suggested to jurors that salacious details about his client’s drug use and sex life was a distraction – an audacious attempt to pitch a motive when the Crown couldn’t even prove an assault had occurred.
He acknowledged jurors might think his client a selfish, “silly old fool” who was living a lie, but that doesn’t make him a murderer, he said.
“You might think that [behaviour] 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,” Mansfield explained.
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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.
