WARNING: DISTRESSING CONTENT
A detective who has spent the past two days at the Philip Polkinghorne murder trial reading aloud intimate messages between the eye surgeon and an Australian sex worker misled jurors on several points, the defence counter-attacked this morning as the officer began a third day in the witness box with tense cross-examination.
Ron Mansfield KC took the offensive from the get-go as he referred back to Detective Andrew Reeve’s analysis of Pauline 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 Mansfield 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 Polkinghorne called 111 to report 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,” he acknowledged.
Polkinghorne, now 71, is accused of having fatally strangled Hanna, 63, inside their Remuera home before staging the scene to look like a suicide by hanging on Easter Monday three years ago. The Crown has suggested 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.
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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 the sex worker 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 Pauline 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 “open” marriage. She was a stressed-out 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.
The many overnight work emails offered proof of that, he has suggested throughout the trial and again today.
Mansfield also gave jurors two new thick evidence booklets containing communications between the defendant and his late wife years prior to her death.
On March 28, 2020, Hanna wrote her husband a typo-ridden message while he was overseas: “I have had the most horrible last two weeks. But the only response from me was to respond to you. We have a discussion to [trails off]. Do you want me I. Your life. ? I have gone through major upheaval and change with no regogniton [sic] from you. So do you want us to go forward it leave me. ? Up to you. You are calling the shots. I don t want us to oart. Pxxxx.”
The next morning she followed up: “Hi darling sorry about my rant. I had too much to drink and was sad and lonely. I miss you and need ya. P [four love heart emojis].”
An hour later, she added “Can you talk to me” followed 18 minutes later by: “I am sorry darling. Please talk to me. I have been through such an emotional upheaval over that 2 weeks. Please forgive me, Just as I do you when you are over wraught and in an emotional state. You don’t mean what you say. Neither do I.”
Polkinghorne responded a couple hours later that he could talk – his message accented with love-heart emojis and two goofy-eyed smiley faces.
“You don’t think that was relevant?” Mansfield asked the detective, noting that Reeves had gone as far back as 2015 to scour messages between Polkinghorne and the escort.
“Yes, it is relevant,” Reeves replied, adding that there was a lot of data to sift through. “I appear to have missed this message.”
Most messages between Polkinghorne and Hanna showed nothing amiss in their marriage and ended with heart or kiss emojis, Mansfield noted. But there were other indications of Hanna’s stress, the defence lawyer noted.
“I’m having a disastrous day,” Hanna wrote to her husband in June 2020, referring to a work situation jurors learned about earlier in which tens of millions of dollars in defective facemasks appeared to have been ordered from a Chinese factory.
“Good lord. Thank goodness 24 hours in the day!! NOT!” she wrote from a work meeting four days later.
Mansfield has also over the past two days clarified two other impressions the jury was left with following Reeve’s direct examination: Polkinghorne not giving police the correct passcode for his phone and a photo found on his hard drive showing how to tie a knot.
Knots have become a subject of contention during the trial. Other detectives said they first started to suspect that something might be amiss after seeing a series of “granny knots” that very loosely held a rope to the couple’s upstairs balustrade above where Hanna’s body at that point lay.
The knot was suspicious because it didn’t seem it could support a person’s weight, multiple witnesses have said. The defence, meanwhile, has noted there were two ropes at the scene. The rope Hanna used was untied and thrown downstairs before paramedics arrived, Polkinghorne said in a police interview. His lawyer noted that, as a surgeon, Polkinghorne knew complicated knots and suggested that a “granny knot” would not have come naturally to him.
Reeves told jurors earlier while being questioned by Crown prosecutor Brian Dickey that the “how to” knot photo was found on a hard drive of his. But Mansfield later pointed out to him that the photo was downloaded in January 2012 and appeared to be in reference to soft bait fishing. Why not tell that to jurors initially, the lawyer asked.
Reeves said he didn’t knowingly mislead anyone, adding that it “would have been beneficial to know that” when he was questioned by the Crown.
And while a search of Hanna’s phone showed no evidence she did any web searches for how to tie knots in the months prior to her death, Mansfield pointed out that she had gone to a tip the day before her death and had tied items to her ute.
During his first day in the witness box, on Friday, Reeves had described seizing Polkinghorne’s phone during a search warrant the day after his wife’s funeral. Polkinghorne was asked four times for his phones passcode but entered the wrong code four times, he said, explaining that he left the phone locked in the on position as he took the phone back to the police station and asked the digital forensics team to try downloading the data. The date was successfully retrieved, he said, even though the digital team was initially sceptical they would be able to do so.
Mansfield said his client used face ID to open his iPhone and suggested it wouldn’t be at all unusual for him to not remember the passcode. He noted that his client did willingly open the phone for police using face ID.
Reeves is expected to continue testifying under cross-examination when the trial resumes this afternoon 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 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.
