WARNING: DISTRESSING CONTENT
For a week straight, forensic scientist Fiona Matheson returned to eye surgeon Philip Polkinghorne’s Remuera home every day - spending at one point over 12 hours at the property as she collected samples and scoured for potential evidence.
New Zealand police were billed for over 53 hours of work at the home by Matheson and her colleagues, defence lawyer Ron Mansfield KC pointed out this morning as he questioned the veteran scene examiner at Polkinghorne’s ongoing murder trial. Despite that time and effort, Mansfield added, nothing of significance was found by the forensic scientists to suggest Polkinghorne’s wife died due to foul play rather than suicide.
Matheson has been on the witness stand since Friday afternoon, bridging the first and second weeks of the high-profile trial that has continued to draw crowds to the gallery of the High Court at Auckland’s largest courtroom.
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The trial began last Monday with each side putting to jurors two diametrically opposed theories of what occurred prior to emergency responders arriving at the home on the morning of April 5, 2021. Pauline Hanna, 63, was found dead near the home’s entrance - her body covered by a duvet and her head placed on a pillow at the foot of the stairs, while a bright orange nylon rope dangled from an upstairs banister.
The defence has contended it was exactly what it looked like: a suicide by hanging by someone who had a documented history of depression.
But Crown Solicitor Alysha McClintock contended that Polkinghorne had from the outset been dishonest with investigators about the state of his marriage. He’d been leading a secret double life, using methamphetamine and spending so much money on prostitutes that Hanna had taken out a bank loan, and their marriage had been marred by violence on at least one other occasion, McClintock alleged.
The Crown suggested that Polkinghorne strangled Hanna - possibly while high on meth and during a confrontation about that double life - then staged her death to look like a suicide.
Matheson’s testimony did not vary too much today under cross-examination from what jurors learned during her questioning by prosecutors on Friday.
The Crown has said from the first day of the six-week trial that not much is likely to hinge on forensic testing at the scene.
“Scientists from the Institute of Environmental Science and Research, they’ll come along and give evidence about the thing that they carried out in the house - samples they took and things,” McClintock told jurors during her opening address. “They tested... for blood and things like that within the house, and look, much of that evidence didn’t necessarily reveal anything that Crown relies on.
“But it is important for you to know what testing was done, and you need to know what wasn’t found just as much as you need to know what was found. It’s part of the assessment.”
The defence, however, has nudged jurors towards a slightly different take-away from the evidence.
Mansfield suggested during his opening statement that police were quick to jump to a mistaken conclusion when they arrived at the house and they let that false premise - that the death was suspicious - influence the 18 months of investigation that followed before Polkinghorne was arrested.
He noted while questioning Matheson that she was called to the Polkinghorne home within just a couple hours of Hanna’s body being discovered. Matheson disagreed that her early arrival meant she was there just to look for signs of murder. She was also tasked with looking for forensic evidence to suggest a suicide, she said. But she acknowledged it was being treated like a crime scene.
“You’re pulling some hours at the address, it seems,” Mansfield noted.
“Yes, it was a full-on week,” the witness replied.
Mansfield noted that his client wasn’t allowed to return to the home until Apil 16, 11 days after his wife’s death. Matheson noted that her work had been finished by the 11th, six days after the death, but she did return to the house on April 15 to attend a meeting with police and Crown prosecutors.
Matheson acknowledged, at Mansfield’s prompting, that the time she spent in the home collecting evidence was not usual.
“That, based on my experience, is at the upper end of the scale of the amount of time I would spend at a scene,” she said.
Much of Matheson’s testimony, as had been the case on Friday, involved going through a list of items and rooms that were tested before explaining how nothing of significance was found as a result. For example, in the guest bedroom where Polkinghorne said his wife had spent the night without him, police had earlier noted a blood stain on the fitted sheet of the bed. It was later determined to have been Polkinghorne’s blood, Matheson confirmed.
The forensic scientist also recounted taking DNA samples from two water bottles and a cup of tea found in the guest bedroom. One reason for that, she acknowledged, was to see if there was any evidence Hanna had been drugged. But the testing was abandoned after a post-mortem blood test found Hanna to have no such drugs in her system, the defence lawyer pointed out.
Matheson’s cross-examination is expected to continue this afternoon as the trial continues 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.
