WARNING: DISTRESSING CONTENT
A rope expert has given evidence as Philip Polkinghorne’s trial for the murder of his wife Pauline Hanna enters day four.
The jury at the High Court in Auckland has been hearing from Robert Chisnall, a forensic rope analyst from Canada, regarding the rope Polkinghorne says his wife used to kill herself, but that the Crown claims is the centrepiece of his attempt to stage the scene of her killing as a suicide.
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Yesterday’s evidence centred on the orange rope prosecutors say Polkinghorne used to stage the scene as a suicide. The retired ophthalmologist’s defence says Hanna used the rope to hang herself.
The crux of yesterday’s cross examination was a contentious “tension test” used by a detective to assess whether the rope could support Hanna’s weight to the degree required for suicide by hanging.
Sergeant Christian Iogha said the orange rope came away easily at a light pull, unravelling for 30 seconds. As a result, he and other detectives became suspicious at the explanation offered by Polkinghorne, and began treating the death as suspicious.
Detectives questioned about how a suicide call-out morphed into a murder investigation
Jurors yesterday heard how things in the Remuera home of eye surgeon Polkinghorne and his newly deceased wife weren’t adding up for detectives Christian Iogha and Ilona Walton, who had been assigned to what was initially considered a standard suicide callout.
First the rope, twisted in a “granny knot” around an upstairs bannister, didn’t seem to have enough tension to support the weight of a person.
Then the bedroom where Pauline Hanna, 63, had reportedly slept before hanging herself appeared dishevelled – with a bedspread and pillows scattered across the floor, an ottoman overturned and what appeared to be a faint blood stain on the bed’s fitted sheet.
A damp top sheet, missing from the bed, was found in the washing machine. And in multiple spots throughout the house were small plastic containers of methamphetamine.
The detectives were the only two in the witness box on Wednesday, both answering a lengthy barrage of questions, as jurors in the High Court at Auckland sat through a third day of evidence in Polkinghorne’s six-week murder trial.
Polkinghorne, now 71, was at the time of the Easter Monday 2021 death a respected ophthalmologist who was nearing retirement. But behind the scenes, prosecutors have alleged, he seemed to harbour a significant methamphetamine habit, mounting expenses due to his extramarital affairs and liaisons with prostitutes, and a domineering attitude towards his wife of more than 20 years.
Authorities now believe he fatally strangled Hanna then staged the scene to look like a suicide.
But on that April morning three years ago, police said they were in the embryonic stages of piecing together their theory of what had happened – attending the death, as required by the Coroner’s Act, to obtain evidence that might support a finding of suicide. It would be another 18 months before they would file a murder charge against Polkinghorne.
The first indication that something might not be as it seemed, the detectives both testified, was when they examined the bright orange nylon rope that Polkinghorne said his wife had hanged herself with. They decided to conduct a “tension check” – considered a standard procedure at suicide scenes to make sure the rope can handle the weight of a person.
Iogha delicately held his fingers apart as he demonstrated to jurors how he lightly pulled at the rope to see if it gave. It did. He said he found it odd that the knot, around three balustrades, had not been pulled to the base of the bannister in the course of Hanna’s death.
He recalled lightly pushing up and down on the knot to see if it would slide. It did.
“Our purpose was just to see if the rope would stay where it was if there was pressure on it,” he explained. “At that point, I didn’t believe it would sustain any weight.”
Defence lawyer Ron Mansfield KC has suggested investigators jumped to an erroneous conclusion almost immediately, tainting the investigation from there on out. They didn’t take into account his client’s statement that he had gone “upstairs to undo the knot from the cord” shortly after discovering his wife’s body, he said.
Soon after conducting the tension test, it was decided the scene should be treated as a suspicious death. Polkinghorne, who at that point had been giving a statement to another officer at his dining room table, was discreetly asked to complete the statement outside.
Detectives would spend over a week at the address, which Mansfield described as “practically unprecedented”. It was the longest period Iogha had ever spent searching a personal home, he acknowledged.
Next to the dishevelled bedroom, police found a container of meth in the attached washroom. The toilet had urine in it which was later tested for methamphetamine, Iogha said. While the positive test wasn’t directly attributed to Polkinghorne by prosecutors during their opening address earlier this week, Crown Solicitor Alysha McClintock did point out that Polkinghorne has pleaded guilty to a minor methamphetamine possession charge. Hanna, the prosecutor noted, did not have any traces of the drug in her system and had conducted internet searches indicating she knew little about the drug.
A search of the master bedroom and adjoining bathroom also uncovered methamphetamine stashes, as well as a lighter and a pipe under what appeared to be Polkinghorne’s side of the bed. Polkinghorne has also pleaded guilty to possession of a meth pipe.
After the tension test and Polkinghorne’s initial police statement concluded on the first morning of the investigation, Walton said she approached him outside, offering her condolences and asking if he would accompany her to the police station to provide “just a few more details”.
“He happily obliged,” she said.
The three-hour interview that followed is expected to be played for jurors later in the trial.
En route to the police station, the detective recalled Polkinghorne taking a call in which he told someone he couldn’t go into work that morning because his wife had died.
“It was just very business-like,” she said of his tone while on the call. “There didn’t seem to be any emotion behind it.”
He also noted that he and his wife, a health administrator who was heavily involved in the Covid-19 vaccine rollout, had received their vaccinations the day earlier.
“He briefly questioned whether the Covid vaccine could have something to do with her actions,” the detective recalled.
The questioning of Iogha is expected to continue today when the trial resumes. But first, Justice Graham Lang told jurors, the officer’s trip to the witness box will be paused so that a rope expert from Canada can testify via audio-video feed.
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.
