WARNING: DISTRESSING CONTENT
The wife of Auckland eye surgeon Philip Polkinghorne was using weight loss and sleep drugs that could have deepened her depression and prompted erratic behaviour, the defence suggested at his murder trial today as some of the final police and forensic analysts slated to testify took turns in the witness box.
But it was Polkinghorne - not wife Pauline Hanna - who was showing a troubling shift in demeanour, a longtime friend of the couple told jurors.
“I felt something wasn’t right with him,” said Stephen MacIntyre, who recalled the shift in the defendant to have evolved in the year or so before Hanna was found dead in their Remuera home.
MacIntyre, who said he had grown close to the couple over the roughly 25 years they owned nearby baches in a small Coromandel Peninsula beach community, is the only friend of the couple to have testified so far in the high-profile trial, which began last week in the High Court at Auckland.
Polkinghorne, 71, is accused of having strangled Pauline Hanna, 63, in April 2021 before staging her death to look like a suicide. Part of the Crown’s circumstantial case is that his behaviour had been influenced in part by a growing methamphetamine problem.
The defendant has pleaded not guilty to murder but has admitted to possession of 37g of methamphetamine - described by prosecutors as up to 370 “points”, or doses - found throughout his house during the scene examination that followed his wife’s death. He also pleaded guilty to possession of a meth pipe found underneath his bed.
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MacIntyre, testifying via audio-video feed from the High Court at Wellington, told jurors he had strong suspicions about drug use as his interactions with Polkinghorne evolved in the final year or so of Hanna’s life.
“I felt that Dr Polkinghorne was changing or changed,” he said. “Some things I saw and felt I didn’t particularly like, and I probably backed off the relationship a little bit...
“He became a lot more manic, a little bit irrational at times. I didn’t feel he was behaving truthfully to me at all times. I felt he was using drugs.”
The witness was asked by prosecutors to elaborate on some of the examples of uncharacteristic behaviour.
“He told me some strange things which I didn’t believe and I didn’t know why he was telling me,” MacIntyre explained. “He became jumpy, slightly irrational. I thought, ‘This is a guy, for one thing or another, under a lot of stress.’”
The witness recalled how on one occasion Polkinghorne told a story of swerving to miss a dog on a country road before crashing through a paddock gate and rolling his ute. But the vehicle landed upright and he was able to drive it back to Auckland before trading it in, the witness recalled him saying. Nobody saw the crash and he just left, with no involvement from police, Polkinghorne allegedly told the friend.
“A couple of weeks later, he voluntarily changed the story to me,” MacIntyre recalled. “He told me he fell asleep. ... He also asked me specifically not to tell Pauline.”
MacIntyre said Polkinghorne was known within the small Rings Beach community of mostly bach owners by the nickname “Polkie”, or sometimes “Doc”. Up until the change, he said, they would often spend early mornings together when both at their properties - often during long weekends. They would golf, fish and dive together, and both the couples would sometimes have a barbecue at night.
“He was a very intelligent, funny, witty, generous man,” he said, describing Polkinghorne as “a close friend” but not outside the community. “We always had a lot of laughs together.”
MacIntyre and his wife were also close with Hanna, he said, adding that he didn’t see any changes in her in the months prior to her death other than a drop in weight.
“She was a very vivacious woman. She was a very proud woman,” he recalled. “[She was] keen to put her best foot forward. She was always meticulously turned out. She didn’t like you seeing her in the morning until she was made out. She was a well-presented woman.”
In cross-examination, defence lawyer Ron Mansfield KC suggested that his client had gone to the bach less frequently in the 12 to 18 months before Hanna’s death, so the witness’ recollections would be based on a limited sample size.
He also zeroed in on the specific examples of how the witness said Polkinghorne had acted strangely. Mansfield noted that his client was known for having a dry sense of humour, suggesting that might account for some of the discrepancies in the telling of the story about the crash. It is true that no one saw the crash, Mansfield suggested, noting that Polkinghore paid $2000 for roughly $400 worth of damage to make the matter go away after he was contacted by the landowners, who had security camera footage.
“You get some information and you realise, ‘Oh, it’s not as odd as I thought,’” the lawyer suggested.
But the witness remained adamant that it wasn’t any one specific incident as much as an overall change in demeanour gradually over time. He wondered at one point if it was methamphetamine to blame but didn’t have any solid evidence, he acknowledged.
“The problem was I couldn’t understand where the change was coming from,” he said in a police statement that was read aloud as his testimony finished. “I was trying to find an explanation for why my friend was acting like a weirdo.
“It was not like he was having a bad day. It was a behavioural change.”
The longtime friend was followed on the witness stand by two experts - one on energy usage and another on toxicology tests.
Scientist Helen Poulsen tested samples of Hanna’s blood, urine, hair and vitreous humour - a substance found in the eye - for a variety of drugs. At the time of death she had alcohol in her system, although not at a level that would have resulted in a driving violation, as well as normal dosage amounts of an anti-depression medication and a weight-loss drug.
However, she had a higher-than-normal amount of Zopiclone, a sedative often used to help people sleep, Poulsen said.
“The amount found in her blood was about twice what you’d expect from normal use,” she explained, adding that the drug can “be quite dangerous” when paired with alcohol.
An analysis of a 6cm strand of Hanna’s hair, which would have accounted for roughly six months of growth, found no indication of methamphetamine use. However, a urine sample pulled from the toilet next to a guest bedroom where Polkinghorne said his wife had slept the night before her death suggested someone had been using methamphetamine. The Crown contends it was Polkinghorne.
But the defence noted during cross-examination that Hanna was known to dye her hair every three weeks, a process that the expert acknowledged can throw a hair test out of whack. Methamphetamine might not show up for a casual user, Paulsen agreed.
Mansfield also suggested that Hanna had received over 40 prescriptions for the weight loss drug over the course of 10 years, even though the drug is supposed to be prescribed for short periods only. That’s in part because the drug has been associated with unpredictable effects on mood or disinhibition and suicide, Mansfield prompted. The expert said she didn’t know - it would be a question best directed at a pharmacologist.
Chronic use of the sleep drug, Mansfield suggested, is known to sometimes worsen depression. The witness again said it wasn’t her area of expertise and couldn’t answer.
The other witness - Paul Smith, who has a PhD in engineering and until recently was Consumer New Zealand’s product test manager - gave jurors a primer on energy use during his time in the witness box this morning. He was asked to analyse power usage data from the Polkinghorne household in the hours leading up to the defendant’s call to 111 reporting his wife’s death.
Polkinghorne had told police he found Hanna’s body in the entryway of their home after going downstairs to make her toast and tea for breakfast. During the hours between 4am and 7.30am, the power usage data suggests the kettle and the toaster could not have been used at the same time, although it’s possible one of them could have been used, he surmised.
Mansfield noted that the toaster was on the lightest setting, which might have accounted for less energy use, or that the toaster might not have been turned on at all. Police found three slices of bread in the device, but in the photos the food appears untoasted. At any rate, the defence, noted, they have their own expert energy analyst who will report different findings than the Crown witness.
The final witness of the day was Sgt Jonathan Hurn, who helped with the scene examination of the Polkinghorne home. The defendant put his head in his hands and appeared to be briefly overcome by emotion as the officer held up the belt that the defendant said his wife had used to hang herself. Mansfield quietly checked if he was okay but the testimony continued.
Jurors at the start of the trial last week were read aloud a list of 62 planned Crown witnesses, roughly a third of which comprised of police, paramedics and crime scene or evidence analysts. Those professionals have provided most of the testimony over the past week and a half, but most of them have now finished. The bulk of remaining witnesses are people who knew or worked with the couple.
The trial is set to continue tomorrow 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.
