WARNING: DISTRESSING CONTENT
Seven months before Pauline Hanna died in what was quickly deemed suspicious circumstances, she had told her niece that she wanted help finding a divorce lawyer but was concerned she might have trouble paying because she suspected husband Philip Polkinghorne had already swindled her out of her share of their money.
Rose Hanna would share that recollection with police within a day of learning of her aunt’s death, she testified today from the High Court at Auckland as week three commenced in the Remuera eye surgeon’s high-profile murder trial.
“What Dad had told me [about her death being a suicide] wasn’t sitting - just wasn’t making sense,” Rose Hanna said of her decision to call police and give a statement so early in the process.
Polkinghorne, now 71, wouldn’t be charged until nearly a year-and-a-half after that call. Prosecutors allege he fatally strangled his 63-year-old wife - possibly while high on methamphetamine and during a confrontation about his infidelity or finances - before staging the scene to look like a suicide by hanging on the morning of April 5, 2021. He has pleaded not guilty, with his lawyers insisting Hanna succumbed to a history of depression combined with an extraordinarily stressful workload helping to roll out the Covid-19 vaccine.
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Rose Hanna is responsible for the secret recording of her aunt played for jurors last week in which her aunt referred to Polkinghorne as a philandering “sex fiend” and “angry man” who emotionally bullied her but whom she very much still loved. The younger Hanna explained today that the recording, from November 2019, came about because the family had been dividing items belonging to her grandmother that evening and she decided to record rather than type because she didn’t have her laptop. The phone kept recording as the topic of conversation changed, she explained.
Nine months later, in August 2020, is when Pauline Hanna met her niece at a restaurant in Tauranga to celebrate Rose Hanna’s birthday, the witness recalled today.
“That’s when she was the most open and honest,” she told jurors today.
Rose Hanna said while dining her aunt took a call from the defendant and was overheard asking her husband: “Is Sharon there with you?”
After the call ended, the niece said she asked who Sharon was.
“Exactly,” she recalled her aunt responding. “I’m trying to find out if she’s staying [at the Remuera house] ... and if that’s why I’ve been sent away.”
Pauline Hanna went on to explain how she’d been in touch with a private investigator “to find out once and for all if there was infidelity”. But for the price she’d been quoted to stake out the home and watch her husband, she decided she’d rather do it herself, the niece recalled her saying.
“She was crying, saying she’s been incredibly naive and trusting and was worried she had no more money in her name anymore,” Rose Hanna said.
She was told by her aunt, she said, that during lockdown Polkinghorne had told her to sign a bunch of financial documents - suggesting it would be easier to invest their money if the assets were under one name. But now she doubted her husband’s motives, Rose Hanna recalled her aunt explaining.
“She was terrified that she had no assets,” Rose Hanna said, explaining that it was very unusual for her aunt to be crying in a restaurant when she was usually so composed.
Pauline Hanna then asked her niece for help looking up divorce lawyers, Rose Hanna recalled.
There had been discussion about not selling a family property in Hawke’s Bay because Pauline Hanna might want to move there if needed, but her niece said she wasn’t left with the impression she would leave Auckland anytime soon given the job she loved.
“She wasn’t just going to pick up sticks and leave him,” she said.
The following Monday after the conversation, Rose Hanna sent her aunt a text with information for a divorce lawyer and his initial consultation charge. The communication was shown to jurors.
“Thank you. !!!” Pauline Hanna texted back. “I am sure it won t [sic] get to that. What I am first going to do is get a copy of everything when the year end accounts come through and if we have to engage someone then I will.”
In the months between that August conversation and her death the following April, her aunt never quite opened up like that again, Rose Hanna said.
“Whenever I’d bring it up, she would tell me everything is fine and there’s really nothing to talk about,” she explained. “She would always reassure me. I think she was embarrassed I knew as much as I did.”
Rose Hanna said her final text from her aunt came just after 8pm on the night before emergency responders were called to the Polkinghorne home. It was a typical text from her aunt, wishing her a happy Easter. Like clockwork, her aunt would text on long holiday weekends - be it Easter or Anzac - to check in, she explained.
Prosecutors also called to the witness stand this morning a fellow Remuera resident who used to cut Polkinghorne’s hair. The barber revealed a relationship between Polkinghorne and a mutual friend who was a prostitute. It’s the third alleged relationship with a prostitute that jurors have been told about.
During the brief testimony, Paul Adriaanse said he didn’t know that his client had been married until he read about the death in the media.
“He was visibly distraught,” he recalled of discussing the matter with Polkinghorne on one occasion after the death, explaining that Polkinghorne didn’t share too many details. “I think he had just been advised to say nothing and [said] I should say nothing too.”
He recalled responding: “I don’t have anything to hide so I’m not going to be lying.”
Under cross-examination, defence lawyer Ron Mansfield KC suggested that his client was simply talking about common legal advice not to talk about a case with any potential witnesses. That also explains why Polkinghorne never returned for a haircut after that conversation, Mansfield said.
“It’s not because of your haircuts, you can rest assured,” the lawyer said during a brief moment of levity in the courtroom.
Testimony continues 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.
