WARNING: DISTRESSING CONTENT
Philip Polkinghorne’s trial for the murder of his wife resumes today with more evidence from the couple’s electronic devices.
The Remuera eye surgeon is accused of killing his wife Pauline Hanna and staging the scene to look like a suicide. He maintains she hanged herself.
This morning, constable Madeline Palmer has returned to the witness box. She examined electronic clones of Polkinghorne and Hanna’s laptops in 2021 as part of Operation Kian, the inquiry into Hanna’s death.
Proceedings concluded yesterday with the jury hearing letters the couple exchanged roughly a year before her death. The full letters are embedded in the blog below.
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Jurors were yesterday presented a portrait of a failing marriage as the letters were read aloud in the courtroom.
“I have come to the recognition, belatedly, that you are not going to change,” the Auckland eye surgeon wrote to Pauline Hanna in a 2020 letter that police later extracted from their laptops. “I know by now the cycle of how we relate to each other, the verbal gymnastics, the overstepping of the boundaries, the barbs, and then the declaration of love, only to reboot the same pathway a week or month later. My options it seems are dead simple; either accept my lot or move on, apart.”
But Polkinghorne’s declaration of aggrievement was juxtaposed by prosecutors almost immediately with other items retrieved from his laptop: sexual photos and videos of the defendant and Australian sex worker Madison Ashton, viewed the day before Hanna’s death; details of a $90,000 loan from him to the sex worker; and an email exchange the weekend before Hanna’s death about having furniture delivered to Ashton in Sydney.
Polkinghorne, 71, is accused of having strangled Hanna inside their Remuera home before staging the scene on the morning of April 5, 2021, to look like a suicide. A significant part of the Crown’s circumstantial case in the High Court at Auckland is that he might have been high on methamphetamine when he lashed out at his wife – possibly during an argument over his substantial spending on sex workers or his “double life” with Ashton.
He has pleaded not guilty and his lawyers have endeavoured through cross-examination of Crown witnesses to convince jurors that the case is an example of police overreach based in part on judgmental views on the couple’s lifestyle. Hanna, 63, had suffered depression for decades and was dealing with more stress at work than ever before due to her role in helping manage the rollout of the Covid-19 vaccine, the defence has argued. Her death was exactly as it initially looked, a suicide, they said.
Defence lawyer Ron Mansfield KC described the couple’s marriage at the outset of the trial as “good, supportive and positive”.
In Polkinghorne’s lengthy letter to Hanna, written over a year before her death, he said he had been feeling “increasingly devoid” in their relationship.
“My words seem to me continually either ignored or misinterpreted, to the extent I can no longer tell you of my aspirations, goals for the future, what I want to do, what I want us to consider,” he wrote. “More recently I feel any comment I make is answered with a barb. I am concerned you don’t really listen to me. You don’t want to know what I really think.”
He then went on to criticise her spending, noting that Hanna hadn’t paid any of the couple’s bills in the 25 years they’d been together.
”For many years you have asked what I want for Christmas and my stock answer has been to not to ask me to borrow money from me. But in 2019, not only was that ignored but you went and got an overdraft as well,” he wrote.
“... Again, as I have said numerous times, I don’t want to lend you money, I don’t want to take money out of your account next ‘Wednesday’, I have other demands on my time and as happened at the end of November there wasn’t enough money in your account to reimburse me anyway. Yes, your contempt of money does annoy me, even stating your flights are free beggar’s belief knowing it is the use my ‘airmiles’ that is paying for those flights, dare I say denying me a discounted flight.”
Hanna appeared taken aback by the letter, which she replied to days later.
“Now that it is largely you and me I was of the view that we have a really exciting, vibrant time ahead for the next 30 years, doing many of the things we love together, spending more time at the Beach, being grandparents and really enjoying – together – the fruits of all that the two of us have done,” she explained. “I still have bucket loads of love – I think you do too.
“I have read this email and re-read it so many times and the devastation I feel that I appear to have let you down so badly.”
She said she didn’t realise he had been keeping such close tabs on “he and hers” spending. But it is “truly unfair”, she said, to characterise her as “a totally selfish person who contributes nothing financially”.
“l am so sorry – you are everything to me and you have changed,” she concluded. “I haven’t, but clearly I have not read your signals.
“If you want to make a change (i.e. Divorce) please make it now before 31 JANUARY so that I can make arrangements. I am 62 in February and I do not have a range of options. Right now I feel very scared, confused, sad and incredibly lonely.”
The letters were read aloud yesterday by Constable Madeleine Palmer, who searched the couple’s laptops and produced 1200 pages of documents before narrowing it down to a more concise report.
Hanna’s laptop, which was last used at 10.48pm the night before Polkinghorne’s 111 call reporting her death, revealed a series of searches and downloaded articles in October 2020 about cheating spouses. One search, in all caps, read: HOW DO YOU KEEP SANE WHEN YOUR HUSBAND IS HAVING AN AFFAIR. She also visited the Alcoholics Anonymous newcomers homepage that month.
Jurors were also shown an email exchange between Hanna and a private investigator inquiring about an infidelity investigation.
Polkinghorne’s search history has not yet been disclosed to jurors. But jurors were shown a screenshot first accessed on New Year’s Eve 2019 with instructions on how to make a meth pipe out of a lightbulb. It was last viewed in February 2021.
There was a confidentiality agreement between Ashton and Polkinghorne, created in November 2018, describing an “informal business association”. The following month, there was the $90,688 loan agreement with Ashton.
Prosecutors also produced an email from Polkinghorne to Ashton that contained a PDF copy of the shareholders’ agreement for Auckland Eye, where the defendant worked. It showed that Hanna had been removed as a shareholder – replaced by Polkinghorne’s sister – as of 2020.
A life insurance policy, with a $30,000 payout if either of them were to die, was last accessed in January 2021. Constable Palmer pointed out a footer at the end of the policy: “If any of the life cover attached to this policy replaces existing life cover which has been in force for greater than 23 months, we will waive the 13-month suicide exclusion for the amount of cover being replaced ...”
At 6.33pm on the night before Hanna’s death, Polkinghorne’s laptop data shows he was looking at a bank statement from several years earlier noting his net worth as $7 million.
Crown prosecutor Brian Dickey has not yet finished introducing laptop evidence, and Palmer has not yet been cross-examined by the defence.
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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.
