WARNING: DISTRESSING CONTENT
Whether Pauline Hanna’s phone was used to draft two early morning messages on the day of her death will continue to be scrutinised at her husband’s murder trial today.
Philip Polkinghorne is accused of having strangled his wife inside their Remuera home before staging the scene on April 5, 2021, to look like a suicide. The Crown’s circumstantial case has relied on evidence about the defendant’s methamphetamine use, his significant spending on sex workers, an alleged “double life” with Sydney escort Madison Ashton and witness accounts of a prior strangulation outcry by Hanna.
The defence, meanwhile, has spent the past two weeks focused largely on Hanna’s mental health, including evidence of her work stress, a 2019 call to her doctor reporting suicidal ideation, an alleged self-harm outcry to her sister in the 1990s and the “cocktail” of drugs she was taking for sleeping, weight loss and depression.
The trial, originally scheduled for six weeks, is now in its seventh week - with an eighth week now inevitable, according to Justice Graham Lang, and the strong possibility of a ninth.
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Police forensic digital analyst Jun Lee will return for yet more cross examination from Ron Mansfield KC this morning.
He made an encore trip to the witness box yesterday, picking up largely where he left off when called as a Crown witness, on what has turned out to be a narrow but lasting point of contention between the Crown and the defence: Did Pauline Hanna open her phone’s messaging app around 4am on the morning she was found dead?
The answer, Lee said with confidence as he spent several more hours giving evidence, was no. The defence, citing their own IT expert who has not finished testifying, adamantly disagreed.
A police examination of Hanna’s phone indicated it was put into sleep mode at 10.47pm on April 4 and not used again before authorities arrived at the couple’s home around 8am the following morning responding to Polkinghorne’s 111 call.
But Mansfield has said Hanna’s phone had logged two “identity lookup” interactions around 4am on the morning of her death. It was an indication, the lawyer suggested, that Hanna’s iPhone had been used at that time to draft two iMessage texts – one to her husband and another to the teen daughter of a friend. If that was the case, the messages were deleted before they were sent and their contents are unknown, jurors were told.
The defence has implied the supposed messages could have been aborted goodbye notes as Hanna contemplated suicide. If jurors decide the evidence is sufficient to conclude that Hanna was on the phone at 4am, it will also significantly reduce the timeframe for when she died.
Lee’s direct examination by prosecutors yesterday was largely an echo of his previous trip to the witness box but with more certainty. He told jurors he had double-checked the data on Hanna’s phone in the time since he last testified and is now more convinced than ever that the defence interpretation was flat wrong.
The phone would have logged separate entries had she picked up the phone and turned it on around that time, Lee said, reiterating that there were no such entries. He said the iMessage “identity lookup” log was something that happened in the background of the phone as a protection against phishing attempts, requiring no user interaction.
During two hours of cross-examination that followed, the defence attempted to set up a mutually exclusive scenario for jurors: either they’ll trust Lee’s assessment or believe the opposite assessment from defence witness Atakan Shahho, a longtime IT business operator from Australia who started giving evidence on Tuesday before returning overseas. He is expected to continue testifying, this time via audio-video feed, today.
“He’s going to tell us ... he doesn’t accept that it’s, as you say, background activity,” Mansfield told the Crown witness.
Lee pointed out that the same background activity was seen to run on the phone on April 8, three days after Hanna’s death - another indication, he said, that logs can be created without direct interaction. Mansfield suggested that would have been because the police were using Hanna’s phone at that time to extract data.
Lee’s evidence is expected to continue today. The judge decided to pause his testimony with an hour left in the day on Wednesday because another witness was waiting to testify via audio-video feed from Europe, where it was early in the morning.
Yesterday’s hearing ended with Justice Graham telling jurors that he was going to allow one of them to be dismissed, reducing the group to eight women and three men. The juror had personal commitments that only came into play as it became evident the trial would extend overschedule into next week.
”The other issues you face in your life are much more important,” the judge said, expressing regret that carrying on without her was the most feasible result after having committed to her civic duty for six-and-a-half weeks.
It is currently expected that closing addresses will be completed and Justice Lang will sum up the case on Tuesday or Wednesday, after which deliberations will begin.
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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.
