Philip Polkinghorne has been found not guilty of murdering his wife Pauline Hanna in 2021.
Video / NZ Herald
WARNING: DISTRESSING CONTENT
Pauline Hanna had been catching up with two of her oldest friends at a Hawke’s Bay restaurant in January 2020 when the light-hearted nature of the dinner and drinks took an abruptly dark turn. The then-61-year-old - who had about 14 months left to live - was silent as she outstretched her thumbs and put both hands around her neck.
“He tried to strangle me,” John Riordan recalled Hanna explaining as she broke the silence, moments after saying that she “had to be very, very careful” around husband Philip Polkinghorne because she wasn’t ever sure when he “would blow up”.
But it wasn’t the only hair-raising outcry jurors would learn about as they spent eight weeks sifting through whiplash evidence - facts, recollections and innuendo that jerked back and forth into one of two camps, a ceaseless tug-of-war of two starkly different narratives.
The other outcry came some time in the early 1990s, again in Hawke’s Bay, amid some family strife following the death of Hanna’s father. Hanna and her mother had raised their voices at each other and Hanna’s younger sister, Tracey, had entered the fray, trying to intervene.
Another gesture carrying a grim but unsaid meaning: this time Hanna raising her wrists in the air.
“All of the sudden she said that she’d tried to kill herself and [that] I didn’t know her and I didn’t know what was going on in her life,” the younger sister told jurors. “The world stopped. I couldn’t remember what was said after that.”
Tracey Hanna said she’s now ashamed she never had a follow-up conversation with her sister about her mental health, chalking it up to her youth and immaturity at the time and it being a less enlightened era when such discussions were misguidedly considered taboo. She buried the memory for decades, she said, until the shock news that Hanna had committed suicide. She realised that Hanna’s death closely followed their mother’s, just as the previous outcry had been some time in the wake of their father’s death.
Murder or suicide?
For Tracey Hanna, the defence narrative made perfect sense. She travelled all the way from her home in the United Kingdom to give evidence at the request of her widowed brother-in-law. For the Riordans - who spent long weeks in the crowded High Court at Auckland gallery steadfastly seated beside Hanna’s other sibling, Bruce - the Crown’s contention that Polkinghorne fatally strangled his wife before staging the scene to look like a self-inflicted hanging was the only explanation that rang true.
Two outcries by Hanna which, viewed in hindsight, both appeared to be foreboding premonitions of the violent end to her life on the morning of Easter Monday, April 5, 2021.
Philip Polkinghorne talking to media outside court after the jury found him not guilty. Photo / Craig Kapitan
Double lives
Despite being so disparate, the duelling narratives - suicide or murder - often crossed over and offered warped reflections of each other.
In the murder scenario, the focus was on Polkinghorne’s hidden life - a carousel of sex workers, meth pipes and hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of cash withdrawals as his id ran wild. Those advocating the suicide explanation emphasised Hanna’s hidden self-doubt and depression.
An audit that sifted through five years of the couple’s finances found that they had one joint account and several in Polkinghorne’s name only. From the ones operated by Polkinghorne alone, nearly $300,000 had been transferred to six women, three of whom were identified by witnesses as sex workers. Of that, $106,000 went to Sydney-based escort Madison Ashton, who by that time was a tabloid star due to failed bids in 2012 and 2015 for a piece of billionaire cardboard magnate Richard Pratt’s estate.
Another $440,000 in cash withdrawals were noted, almost $200,000 of which had been removed from cash machines in Australia. Travel records showed that neither Polkinghorne nor his wife were in Australia when many of the withdrawals were made - the clear insinuation by the Crown being that Ashton had access.
Emails show that Hanna initially knew about the paid liaisons with Ashton, participating in group sex with her husband, the escort and a male sex worker early on. But the Crown alleged that she had been in the dark about the serious intimate relationship that developed between Ashton and her husband, who vanished for several days in 2019 to secretly spend Christmas in Sydney.
In an undated WhatsApp message which Polkinghorne took a screenshot of in October 2018, Ashton said she had thought over his “idea about the future” but wasn’t yet ready for such an “important life decision”.
“You have been silent and iv [SIC] certainly not wanted to ask about Mrs P,” she wrote. “... I love you and I’ll be true always, that’s all I got right now x.”
Polkinghorne responded: “Darling that is sufficient for me more than sufficient. Let us love each other and leave the future to the future. I will try not to burden you with any of my ideas. Yours Philip.”
A year after the Christmas 2019 tryst, Polkinghorne got into an argument with Ashton as they discussed plans to spend Christmas 2020 together. Screenshots of the WhatsApp exchange were shown to jurors.
“You just love drama and I’m not f**king into it, serious Philip I’m not into it,” Ashton said. That message came after Polkinghorne suggested it might not be worth spending two weeks in a Covid-19 isolation hotel upon his return to New Zealand if Ashton had a booking with someone else while he was in Australia.
“...Thank you so much for f**king ruining Christmas and ruining the whole f**king thing f**k off. I don’t want to hear from you until I’m back in Sydney. I mean it I don’t wanna hear from you I’m really upset. And I’m so disappointed in you.”
Polkinghorne then said he’d ring her in 90 minutes, once he was finished with his surgery. He had something important to say, he told her. She blocked the surgeon, then unblocked him and agreed to talk the next day after he said: “God you have never done that before”.
Dr Philip Polkinghorne and Sydney escort Madison Ashton, also known, as Christine McQueen. Photo / Supplied
Ashton went on to say Polkinghorne had been mistaken about her planning to see a client while he was scheduled to be there.
“... That I would work over our Christmas, it’s such a disgusting suggestion from you, i’m shocked that this would actually come from you,” she said. “And your wording, and the vibe, as if I am a Neanderthal.
“... You have a gutter mentality sometimes when it comes to me and my occupation, in how you communicate and some of your concepts that are in your mind. I accept this is something that is not ideal about you, but you are not perfect but you are very lovable. Kind and patient, sexy and many other attributes ...”
‘Going to last 100 years’
Police seized Polkinghorne’s mobile phone days after his home was taped off and turned into a crime scene, finding that all WhatsApp messages prior to the morning of his wife’s death had been irretrievably deleted aside from the ones for which he had saved screenshots. When they went to seize Ashton’s phone, just over three weeks after Hanna’s death, they found her with Polkinghorne in a posh Mt Cook Village chalet.
Polkinghorne began receiving messages from Ashton again at 4.28pm on April 5, the day of his wife’s death, following a three-hour interview with police. Many of the messages were trivial in nature - marketing blasts that she appeared to send out to all followers. But on April 7 she sent a link to an article about his wife’s death.
On April 10, Ashton sent a link to another article in which Polkinghorne spoke with Herald reporter Carolyne Meng-Yee, telling her he was being treated as a “person of suspect” by police. He added: “Our relationship wasn’t fine, it wasn’t fine at all, it was perfect.” The entire article was printed for jurors, and the Crown quoted from it during their opening address. “Did you give an interview???? Did you use those words !!!!!” Ashton wrote to Polkinghorne, adding: “Person of suspect?!” Polkinghorne replied: “What do you think? Not a chance.”
Three days before his wife’s funeral, Ashton told him: “Honestly I really love you ... Do not wear a f**king bow tie at the funeral. Keep the hat.”
On April 23, she told him, “If you passed away I wouldn’t leave the house ever again,” to which he replied: “Darling you and I aren’t going anywhere. We are going to last 100 years.”
As they planned their meeting at the Mt Cook chalet - 25 days after his wife’s death - preparing to meet for the first time in over a year due to Covid lockdown restrictions, Ashton worried, “Okay sounds like you’re breaking up w th [sic] me what the f***.”
Polkinghorne replied: “F*** no! Christ never, I am not trying to push you in any direction. I haven’t come this far to walk away.”
Ashton had been slated to testify for the Crown and was poised to be the star witness. But as the weeks passed and with only a few witnesses left on their list, prosecutors admitted to Justice Graham Lang while out of earshot of the jury that Ashton was no longer co-operating and could not be found to serve her a summons. All they knew, lawyer Brian Dickey said, was that she wasn’t in New Zealand or Australia.
Jurors sent the judge a note asking where she was after the Crown called their last witness. There was a brief debate about what to tell them before it was agreed with lawyers from both sides to keep it vague.
“I cannot say anything about it,” he said after the group filed back into the courtroom. “Further, you cannot speculate as to why that is the case.”
‘Hurt, hurt, hurt’
In April 2020, one year before her death, Hanna drafted and sent herself a vulnerable email she intended for no one else to see. No one else did notice it - not even police - until a defence-hired IT expert was given access to conduct his own searches of her laptop in July this year.
“I am never good enough despite my efforts - today is the 25th day in a row - but I am not adding any value,” she wrote, noting that she was tired and not herself after working “15/6 hours x4 over Easter”. “I want desperately to tell someone and cry and ask for help but everyone seems to think I’m amazing and does not want to know that I have foibles and failings.
“I have tried to bring up with Philip but he tells me he hasn’t got time to go over the negative tonight = he has enough. I must stand on my own two feet but I don’t know today if I have two feet or what they look like.
“So I have had 3 glasses of wine and a beautiful dinner thanks to PJP [Polkinghorne’s initials] - but I don’t know what to do with myself.. So I will go to bed and not sleep. V. unusual for me - and it builds up - who knows what might follow. Have to tell someone even if no- one but God ever sees this.”
Polkinghorne’s shoulders heaved and he hid his face behind his hands, weeping as his lawyer read the email aloud.
Pauline Hanna and Philip Polkinghorne at an event in December 2018. Photo / Norrie Montgomery
Every single witness who knew Hanna described her as meticulously put together. Colleagues described the high-ranking health administrator, who had recently taken a lead role in distributing the Covid-19 vaccine, as a “troubleshooter” who had a reputation for enjoying challenges and getting the toughest jobs done. She said that work was her “happy place”, one colleague said.
But Hanna’s hidden side, sometimes revealed to family but more often expressed in notes to herself, was one of self-doubt and anxiety.
Another document found on her computer appeared to be rough notes for a March 2019 letter that was intended for her husband. She drafted it after an argument in which Polkinghorne had said their two and a half decades together had been a waste.
“Throughout my life because I was painfully shy I was continually hurt, cried my self to sleep often,” she wrote, going on to describe her father’s death with one word: “Devastation”.
She went on to describe meeting Philip at a Blind Foundation dinner while in a loveless relationship and realising he was her soul mate.
“HURT HURT HURT -- in fact, wrecked,” she went on to say. “All these years (27) did I get it wrong that he was the only person who truly loved me as his number 1. I was number 1 in someone’s life – as he was in mine – have we got that wrong. ?? God what a prospect – I cannot live if that is the result that I got it wrong.”
One week before her death, she admitted to Polkinghorne’s adult son and daughter-in-law that stress had been building.
“I am so sorry I have been so remote and not even phoned - it is not because I don’t miss and love you,” she wrote to the couple, who lived in the UK. “My life is insane and I do not know what day it is sometimes. I (reluctantly) took this role as Head of Logistics for Vaccine.
“I did not want to.
“But Philip was so proud of me when Outbreak happened, I thought he would be proud of this - which I guess he is - but it is incredibly difficult and lonely.”
In 2019, Polkinghorne drafted a “goal setting to 2040” document for a local physician turned motivational speaker. Near the top of the list - after limiting alcohol, ice cream and red meat - was a goal to “avoid cocaine, marijuana, heroin, LSD, methamphetamine”.
The surgeon’s lawyers repeatedly contended that he has a dry sense of humour in which a sarcastic intent might not always be picked up. But jurors could be sure that at least one thing on the list - methamphetamine - was a realistic guilty pleasure.
Prosecutors took it a step beyond that, suggesting that he harboured a methamphetamine problem severe enough that it altered his behaviour in the final years of Hanna’s life - sufficient to cause increased aggression, even violence.
It became a major theme of the Crown case, along with his philandering and his spending.
Before the trial even started, Polkinghorne pleaded guilty to possession of the 37g of methamphetamine found throughout the house when police arrived and a meth pipe found underneath his side of the bed. His lawyers dismissed it as irrelevant “recreational” use but police noted the stash added up to 370 “points”, or 0.1g single-use doses, with a street value of roughly $13,000. His lawyers countered that when you’re wealthy and you have a taste for a drug, you buy in bulk to avoid the risks of repeat purchases.
Jurors in the High Court at Auckland were shown a photo of a meth pipe that was found in Dr Philip Polkinghorne's bedroom during the lengthy search of his home. He pleaded guilty at the outset of the trial to possession of the pipe but not guilty to murder.
When Hanna died, there was no methamphetamine found in her blood or in a hair sample that dated back roughly six months. Her internet searches suggested she was not familiar with the drug. “what does P look like,” she asked Google on Christmas Eve 2020, following it up with a search for: “what sensation does P give you??”
Medical records showed that over the past two decades she had filled 67 prescriptions for anti-depressant Prozac, which she described as her “happy pills”, and 55 prescriptions for an amphetamine-based weight loss drug intended only for short-term use in part due to its addictive qualities. Hair testing had also shown she had been using for at least six months sleeping pill Zopiclone - a prescription-only medication that was in her husband’s name.
The danger, several experts said, came in mixing the pills with alcohol, especially Zopiclone.
Hanna had at one point been a heavy enough drinker that in 2013 and 2014 she was prescribed a drug intended to reduce - and then another to altogether restrict - alcohol intake. One note on her medical file from about a decade before her death stated she reported drinking at least a bottle of wine on most evenings for the past 10 years or so with frequent blackouts.
Mixing Zopiclone with alcohol was likely to amplify the effects of both. It was also known to worsen depression and increase disinhibition - a potentially lethal combination, experts said, for someone vulnerable to self-harm.
Suicide, meth and academia
Perhaps not surprisingly, the defence organised its witnesses so that the two final people to give evidence - those bound to be freshest on jurors’ minds as they went into deliberations - were two prominent experts on suicide.
Dr David Menkes, a Yale University-trained expert in psychological medicine, suggested that Hanna might have been caught in “a vicious circle” in the weeks before her death in which her disrupted sleep pattern - confirmed by a series of middle-of-the-night work emails - was increasing the risk for suicidal thoughts.
“They keep people awake and they can produce a degree of mood instability,” he said of the weight loss drug.
He agreed with Sydney-based psychiatrist Dr Olav Neilssen, who had testified earlier, that Hanna’s unprescribed sleeping pill use combined with alcohol was “highly significant” and presented “a considerable risk of harm”.
The funeral for Pauline Hanna was held at St Mary's in Holy Trinity on April 15, 2021. Photo / NZME
Neilssen said there seemed to be numerous risk factors for suicide in Hanna’s life even if she presented to others as as vivacious and outgoing.
Dr Sarah Hetrick, a psychologist who serves as the principal clinical adviser to the Ministry of Health’s Suicide Prevention Office, sought to dispel “myths” about suicide including that high achievers who take pride in their appearance are less likely to take their own lives.
“The evidence shows that suicide unfortunately touches every group, type of person,” she said. “Suicide touches all socio-economic groups, it touches all professions.”
Earlier in the trial, the Crown had called a psychiatrist expert of their own: Dr Emma Schwarcz, who had a lot to say about the effects of methamphetamine addiction. While violence is not an “inevitable outcome” of meth use, a wide range of studies have shown a positive association between use of the drug and aggression, she said.
One 2014 study she cited found a three-fold increased risk of violence for users of the drug and a 10-fold risk for heavy users. A New Zealand study looking at 1265 people born in New Zealand found that those who used the drug were 2.4 times more likely than their peers in the study to perpetrate violence even when accounting for background and upbringing. The risk of intimate partner violence was nearly doubled, she said. But in the same New Zealand study, 78% of users “reported no aggression or violence whatsoever”, she added. The drug “can profoundly impact behaviour” and can cause “departing from one’s moral norms and values”, she summarised.
Citing the expert during her closing address, Auckland Crown solicitor Alysha McClintock added: “Being an older, wealthy, privileged man does not make him immune from the effects of methamphetamine.”
Neilssen, the psychiatrist from Sydney who had been called by the defence to discuss suicide risk factors, was briefly seconded during cross-examination by the Crown to instead share his thoughts on homicide risk factors. He agreed that prior violence such as a non-fatal strangulation would be a risk factor, as might be disinhibition due to drug use.
‘Planted’ blood?
The psychiatrists were far from the only professional witnesses to share their expertise.
There were about 25 police officers, paramedics and forensic scientists who entered the witness box, starting with first responders before moving on to detectives who took more prominent roles as it was determined that something about the tragic scene seemed off.
They described a dishevelled guest room where Polkinghorne said his wife had slept alone, with a top sheet missing and pillows tossed to the ground. A toilet attached to the guest bedroom bathroom, where Polkinghorne said he had not been that night, contained urine that later tested positive for methamphetamine.
A photo of the guest bedroom from inside eye surgeon Philip Polkinghorne's Remuera home was entered into evidence during the trial.
A damp top sheet was found in the couple’s dryer and then there were the two orange nylon ropes - one in a tangled bunch on the stairway next to Hanna’s body and another still tied in a series of granny knots to the upstairs balustrade. It was that knot, detectives said, that first raised their suspicion. A “tension test” showed it to slide up and down easily, suggesting the knot wouldn’t withstand the weight of a person without sliding.
All first responders recalled seeing a mildly bloody shallow abrasion on Polkinghorne’s forehead that he had no explanation for. The Crown suggested it might have been the result of a faint struggle by Hanna, who would have been drowsy - perhaps mildly incapacitated - due to her sleeping pills and alcohol.
But the defence suggested the suspicions prompted by the ropes and the head wound were instead signs of shoddy police work. A 111 operator had instructed Polkinghorne to “cut” the rope, so it makes sense he would have loosened it before police arrived, lawyer Ron Mansfield, KC, argued. In his interview with police, Polkinghorne said he had untied the rope completely and threw it down the stairs, suggesting the loose knots found by police were not those used in the hanging.
As for the bloody forehead, Mansfield shared a different theory in which Polkinghorne, who he repeatedly inferred was clumsy, hit his head on the side of the stairs but didn’t realise it in the panic and shock of finding his wife dead. He bolstered the theory with evidence from Timothy Scanlan, a crime scene analysis expert who was flown over from the United States to do a second sweep of Polkinghorne’s home two years after Hanna’s death.
Scanlan took a sample of a red smudge found on the side of the stairway and sent it off for DNA testing, confirming that it was Polkinghorne’s blood.
But the Crown lambasted the entire exercise, equating it to evidence tampering.
“I appreciate this allegation that he planted this blood will sound shocking,” McClintock said. “But that’s what the evidence tells us.”
A stain found on the stairs next to Pauline Hanna's body in April 2021 was photographed (left) but not tested for DNA because forensic scientist Fiona Matheson said the area tested negative for blood. Overseas forensic expert Timothy Scanlan returned to the Remuera home two years later and found a stain in the same location (right), he testified at the Philip Polkinghorne murder trial. The stain tested positive for Polkinghorne's DNA.
A forensic scientist had earlier told jurors she tested the area immediately after Hanna’s death and saw no indications of blood. More importantly, prosecutors said, the stains looked noticeably different. The defence gave jurors side-by-side photos to decide for themselves.
Four coroners
Typically during murder trials, the pathologist’s trip to the witness box is one that a defendant is likely to dread. As the medical professional goes into meticulous detail over the injuries of the deceased, it can be an emotional time for everyone in the courtroom, jurors included. While the jury is instructed not to let sympathy play a role in their decision, to what extent that directive is followed no one can know aside from the jurors themselves.
At the Polkinghorne trial, however, the opposite was true. The defence welcomed the pathologist, and even invited more.
In all, four pathologists gave evidence - two from New Zealand, one from Australia and the final one from Canada. Not one of them said there was decisive evidence that Hanna had been strangled.
The two Crown experts both left open the possibility that a fatal strangling or chokehold - although very rare - could have taken place without leaving serious internal or external injuries. The two pathologists called by the defence both said they would have deemed it a non-homicidal hanging i.e. suicide had the case been initially assigned to them.
The Crown underplayed the pathology findings, getting each witness to agree that the narrow scope of their reports were ultimately opinion and it was up to the jurors to determine the facts based on numerous sources of evidence. The defence, unsurprisingly, argued the evidence was among the most critical pieces of information jurors had to consider.
“The Crown knows full well the forensic evidence in this case ... provides the complete answer and always has,” Mansfield said during his closing address. “The answer has always been in the pathology.”
This case is different, the Crown said, because Polkinghorne had a medical degree and had “a greater anatomical knowledge than most”. McClintock urged the jury not to be swayed by statistics when the pathologists agreed each individual case is different.
But those statistics are convincing, the defence countered. The four pathologists combined could only recall two times when fatal strangulation left no injuries. A medical degree wouldn’t defy those odds, Mansfield said, arguing that it was a “phantom” to suggest that his client’s medical degree meant he was a “highly efficient and well-trained killer” who could “leave someone dead without any tell-tale signs”.
The Crown also urged jurors to take a look at the four minor injuries found on Hanna’s body, even though pathologists agreed they were “nonspecific” - meaning there was no indication they were the result of an assault or defensive in nature. They included a grip-like bruise on her arm, a small abrasion to her nose and a bruise to her temple. While perhaps not “meaningful” in the vacuum of a post-mortem exam, they’re telling when viewed in the light of all the other evidence, McClintock said.
“So far she’s been gripped, she’s banged her nose and now she’s banged her head,” McClintock said. “What are the chances that she’s both become suicidal and had this bumpy old time?”
But to charge a man with murder over such flimsy findings is almost a dereliction of duty, Mansfield told jurors when it was his turn.
“It sounds absurd because it is,” he said, describing the Crown case as “one of the most gravest nonsenses our courts have heard for a long time”.
A voice beyond the grave
But it was the voices of Hanna and Polkinghorne themselves that would have left the most lasting impressions.
In only a minuscule number of trials do jurors get to experience the lives of the accused and the victim so viscerally.
There was the trip to the couple’s home, where they got to stand in the guest bedroom and the foyer - one of them, depending on which side was to be believed, being the spot where Hanna took her last breaths. There was also a series of letters between the two as their marriage seemed to teeter.
Most unusual, however, was the haunting moment when jurors listened to Hanna’s voice - a 24-minute recording from 2019 in which she revealed to her brother and her niece that Polkinghorne was “bloody arrogant”, unfaithful, an “angry man” and a “sex fiend” who didn’t react well to stress.
“I love my husband but he is somebody who is very angry with the world when the world doesn’t go his way,” she said. “... He is out of control because he doesn’t understand how to control himself, but he loves me more than anything in the world. I’m his brick. He is mine.”
Her voice somewhat slurred, Hanna described at length their marital strife and at one point added: “To be honest, I’ve considered just chucking myself over the bridge.”
She revealed to her family that she used to join Polkinghorne in threesomes with prostitutes and has “been with so many old men”, but she only joined him “because I wanted to make sure he didn’t go off the rails”. She had stopped about three years ago, she said.
“I had to drink two bottles of wine before I would go with another man,” she said. “It’s just revolting and I hate it.”
But her husband had “a sexual appetite that’s extraordinary” and needed to have sex every day, which meant meeting up with prostitutes, she said. She accepted it but said a girlfriend in Auckland would be a different story. There was no indication from the recording she was aware her husband’s relationship with Ashton had developed beyond that of a client.
“Please don’t think that Philip’s a beast, he’s not. He’s a very complex character,” she added as her family encouraged her to leave him. “I am emotionally bullied at the moment ... but it’s temporary.”
Hanna’s niece, who was accidentally recording the conversation, said she was concerned for her.
“I’m safe, darling. Please think I’m safe,” Hanna responded. “... I’m not physically battered but emotionally battered.”
A year later, in August 2020, the same niece recounted how Hanna made another revelation - this time through tears - as they dined together in Tauranga. She asked for help finding a divorce lawyer but said she was concerned she might have trouble paying because she suspected her husband had already swindled her out of her share of their money, Rose Hanna recalled.
Pauline Hanna went on to say she’d been in touch with a private investigator “to find out once and for all if there was infidelity” but decided the cost for the service was too high. There was no recording of that conversation, but jurors were shown a text from the niece the following Monday with information for a divorce lawyer and his initial consultation charge.
‘Not going to change’
Also somewhat rare was the jurors’ ability to put themselves in some of the darkest moments of the couple’s marriage as they spelt it out in a series of blunt letters to each other.
Their propensity for putting their thoughts to paper - or at least email - as their marriage teetered was unfortunate for a man accused of having killed his wife, defence lawyer Mansfield appeared to obliquely concede. While questioning one of the detectives tasked with extracting all relevant material from the couple’s laptops, he asked her about her own experience as a beat cop.
She agreed that most domestic disputes she had been called out to in the past did not involve the drafting of lengthy essays and retorts.
“I have come to the recognition, belatedly that you are not going to change,” Polkinghorne wrote his wife on December 23, 2019. “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.”
Polkinghorne said he had been feeling increasingly devoid in their relationship. 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 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.
“... Yes, your contempt of money does annoy me, even stating your flights are free beggar’s belief knowing it is the use of my ‘airmiles’ that is paying for those flights, dare I say denying me a discounted flight.”
The letter ended with him stating he was leaving immediately for a three-day “Moving on or Up” retreat. “I don’t know what the outcome of this retreat will be but to be frank without some sort of insight I am sure I will not be able to continue,” he wrote. “If there is a pill to make it easier, don’t worry I would take the bottle !!!”
He warned he would not be contactable until he returned to their Coromandel bach in four days, after Christmas. The organisers of the retreat were allowing him to take patient texts “but other stuff is out of bounds”, he explained.
Jurors would later learn that instead of a retreat he was in Sydney, spending Christmas with Ashton.
Police found multiple versions of the letter Hanna drafted in reply.
“Right now I feel very incredibly scared, confused, sad and lonely therefore I apologise if this is not as coherent as you may wish,” she wrote.
In an earlier draft, she wrote: “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.”
The final draft said simply that she loved him “without reserve, foibles and all” before concluding with an apology: “I am sorry you have felt so low - you are everything to me and it hurts me that you are suffering.”
It’s unclear if Polkinghorne knew that while he was secretly overseas, Hanna had called her GP and then a crisis team to report suicidal ideation - the result, she told her doctor, of her mother’s long-term illness and her husband leaving her. She had thought about driving into an oncoming truck on her way to her bach, she said, but then thought about her family and decided not to.
Three months later, Hanna wrote her husband a typo-ridden message while he was again overseas: “I have had the most horrible last two weeks. But the only response from me was to respond to you. We have a discussion to [trails off]. Do you want me I. Your life. ? I have gone through major upheaval and change with no regogniton [SIC] from you. So do you want us to go forward it leave me. ? Up to you. You are calling the shots. I don t want us to oart [SIC]. Pxxxx.”
The next morning she followed up: “Hi darling sorry about my rant. I had too much to drink and was sad and lonely. I miss you and need ya. P [four love heart emojis].”
Polkinghorne speaks
As they had for Hanna, jurors got to hear Polkinghorne’s voice but it was again a recording. There was no use in him giving evidence, Mansfield said fleetingly in his opening statement before quickly changing the subject, because they’d already listened to his reaction just hours after his wife died, when his memory was most fresh.
In the four-hour interview, edited down to three hours for jurors, his thoughts were scattered and his words were fast-paced. Without having any other settings to compare it to, there was no way for jurors to know if that was his natural peculiar personality, or if the strange and erratic demeanour was spurred by meth, or if it was perhaps all due to shock.
Although delivered in a friendly, conversational tone, he ticked off an extensive list of mundane marriage grievances against his wife: breaking his concentration during television shows by asking questions, over-use of pillows on their beds and couches, drinking too much and getting argumentative to the point he often opted to tune her out, leaving the windows open in winter but using an electric blanket that he disliked, bragging too much about her academic achievements decades back, paranoia about mosquito bites and ignoring his advice not to use her work phone for personal use.
The detective interviewing him kept steering the conversation back to the discovery of Pauline Hanna’s body, and eventually to another topic: How he received the horizontal scrape on his forehead.
“Well, I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve got no idea. I can’t even feel it.”
A selfie Dr Philip Polkinghorne sent to escort Madison Ashton on April 11, 2021 - six days after the death of wife Pauline Hanna - shows a small horizontal abrasion on his forehead.
As time went on, his cadence somewhat slowed and he became more speculative.
“Maybe I put so many expectations on her - I don’t know,” he said of her vaccine rollout role. “I never should have let her do it. A lot of my partners’ wives don’t work... She didn’t need to work, you know? I don’t know if it was too much. I don’t know.”
The interview ended somewhat abruptly, after a barrister friend of the surgeon called him to say his house was still being searched and the death was being reported in the media. The friend advised him to only give police 30 more minutes, he told the detective.
Mansfield would later characterise the interview as a nasty trick by police at a time when his client was most vulnerable, giving unguarded answers not knowing that it would later be broadcast to a courtroom - and, in fact, to all of New Zealand. His answers to the detective’s questions weren’t always perfect, but the lack of easy explanations goes to show he wasn’t a cold-blooded murderer who had planned an elaborate deception, his lawyer said.
Prosecutors, meanwhile, warned jurors not to be fooled. He’s an “atypical man” with high levels of intelligence and a “master manipulator”, McClintock said. What jurors saw in the video, she speculated, was him momentarily stumbling as he realised he might not get away with it as easily as he anticipated.
Dr Phillip Polkinghorne (centre) is surrounded by his defence team as he arrives at the High Court on July 29, the first day of his murder trial. Photo / Michael Craig
“His lawyer says he shouldn’t have been there - not Dr Polkinghorne, not the renowned eye surgeon, not the man of wealth, of standing,” McClintock said of the interview. “Supposedly police should have just rubber-stamped this [as a suicide].”
During a fresh air break in the interview, Polkinghorne took the opportunity to delete all previous WhatsApp messages with Ashton from his phone. Prosecutors characterised it as “manipulating evidence”. His own lawyer called it common sense - a premonition, as the intent of the interview became obvious, that his name and lifestyle were about to be dragged through the mud.
‘Unmasks the murderer’
There were other intriguing findings scattered throughout the seven weeks of evidence - some of which were likely to be considered significant, others rabbit holes in which entire days were swallowed.
There was the data from his phone, and from hers.
Polkinghorne’s phone was put into sleep mode at 11.16pm on April 4. He told police he slept through the night then read the next morning before discovering his wife’s body as he went downstairs intending to make her breakfast in bed. But his device was unlocked at 1.10am on April 5 and WhatsApp was accessed, police found. Neither the contents of the messages nor the recipient are known.
The phone was switched to “airplane” mode, cutting access to the cellular network, at 1.11am. In the 12 months prior, he had never before done that, a detective noted. He continued to use various apps until the display was again turned off at 2.44am, staying off this time until 6.46am. He continued to use photo and video apps through to 8.05am, two minutes before he called 111.
The data showed not only had he been lying about sleeping but he “had plenty of time to kill her”, McClintock said. It’s also unbelievable that Hanna could have killed herself without him knowing if he was awake the whole time, she said. But the defence painted a simpler picture: a man watching Netflix in bed, suffering his own stress-induced insomnia and unaware that his wife was also awake, battling more serious demons.
The photo of the rope from inside eye surgeon Philip Polkinghorne's Remuera home was entered into evidence at his murder trial in the High Court at Auckland.
Everyone agreed it was put into sleep mode at 10.47pm on April 4, but two IT experts debated for days about whether it was ever accessed again. The defence insisted she opened her messaging app around 4am and appeared to contemplate texts to two people - Polkinghorne and the daughter of a friend - but then must have had second thoughts and exited the app. If accepted to be true, it would be a strong argument for the suicide narrative.
But a police expert was equally as adamant that Hanna never used the phone again after 10.47pm. The “iMessage identity lookup” log that the defence was relying on is something that can run automatically in the background, he said, noting that there were no logs for the phone’s screen becoming unlocked or the phone moving. The defence expert insisted the opposite - that “iMessage identity lookup” could only run if a person was actively using the app.
The stalemate was never resolved but, at any rate, the Crown noted, Polkinghorne had already been on record saying that he knew his wife’s passcode.
Another day or so was spent eliciting from numerous witnesses meticulous detail about a “sweet puff” meth pipe that was found at Polkinghorne’s workplace in late 2020. He was never charged with possession of that pipe, but prosecutors wanted to show a pattern of the surgeon’s life spiralling out of control with the drug to the point it was entering his workplace. Polkinghorne’s lawyers insisted it wasn’t his and, although there was CCTV of him entering the office with two patients on the weekend before the Monday morning when the pipe was found, there were other people who had also been in the office. He let the patients out around 9pm and stayed behind an hour longer.
It was another unresolved issue left to the interpretation of jurors.
Records show the ophthalmologist asked the web soon after his interview with police ended: “how to delete iCloud storage”. The next day he went to the website for DuckDuckGo, an app which allows web searches that cannot be traced. But because he searched through the website instead of the app, police were able to trace the search. It read: “leg edema after strangulation”. Edema is a clinical term for swelling.
“This search unmasks the murderer, I suggest,” McClintock said.
The defence argued the search engine was not as nefarious as the Crown made it out to be, as it is often used by professionals who don’t want their data to be mined. “Strangulation”, Mansfield argued, could be a clumsy way of referring to a death by hanging.
Hanna’s searches included the Christmas Eve queries about meth and a visit to the Alcoholics Anonymous webpage. Significantly, a detective said, there were no internet searches in her history for suicide or self-harm. But it’s quite common for people to kill themselves without planning or research, a defence expert would later counter.
Cracked facades
On the surface, Philip and Pauline seemed to have the perfect life - top-performing professionals, expensive wardrobe, frequent overseas travel, a grand house in one of New Zealand’s most affluent suburbs, a Mercedes with personalised plates, a bach in an exclusive Coromandel beach community, 24 years of marriage and $10 million net worth.
But with hindsight, there had been cracks in both of their facades.
Polkinghorne the “sex fiend” who bought his methamphetamine in bulk. But was he a killer?
Hanna who secretly struggled with self-doubt and sometimes used a dangerous mix of alcohol and sleeping pills. But was she suicidal?
The defence warned jurors not to fall for such an absurd fantasy as the Crown proposed: a TV villain mastermind willing to brutally - but also delicately, with surgeon finesse - strangle the woman he loved and then pose her body in a grotesque final insult.
“This has been a trial prosecuted by emotion and where the victim is logic,” Mansfield said, suggesting that a guilty verdict would mean the Crown had succeeded in turning them into “emotional vigilantes”.
“A trial prosecuted by emotion allows our murder-mystery fantasies to run wild. It was like a binge of every Murder She Wrote all in one session by our own Angela Lansbury presenting...
“His entire lifestyle has been laid bare – I would say unnecessarily – seeking to create him as the villain that the Crown says he is.”
It’s fine, he said, if some jurors “are not able to shake the image of a dirty old man who didn’t realise how good he had it with Pauline”. They might even think his treatment of her contributed to her suicide risk factors, he said.
Pauline Hanna. Photo / Supplied
But “it’s a reality”, he said, that Hanna had vulnerabilities and that cannot be overlooked.
“There is no justice for Pauline if you ignore her vulnerabilities and ignore the decision she took,” he said.
But if anything, the Crown countered, Hanna’s vulnerability was continuing to love and defend the “very angry man” who had strangled her at least once before. McClintock acknowledged the oddity of the case, but the gruesome scenario was unfortunately no fantasy, she said.
“She was not a woman who had given up. She was a woman whose husband was giving up on her.”
In the justice system, jury decisions are sacred - the Crown cannot appeal an acquittal - and secret. Even judges are left in the dark, sometimes musing as much during sentencing hearings as they try to read the tea leaves of what a jury communication meant they were thinking about a certain facet of the case when they reached a verdict.
But like so many other unusual aspects of the Polkinghorne trial, that secrecy was shattered. Six hours into their deliberations, as they returned from a three-day weekend late Monday morning, jurors sent out a note giving a clear, detailed account of their then-deadlock.
“Most of the people on the jury do not think there is enough evidence to support Pauline having committed suicide,” the note began - an indication that would have given prosecutors a surge of adrenaline-laced hope before going on to read the next sentence, which would have had the opposite effect.
“However, some people on the jury do not think that the Crown has supplied enough evidence that we can answer yes to the question, ‘Has the Crown made you sure that Dr Polkinghorne caused the death of his wife, Ms Pauline Hanna, by intentionally strangling her?’ Please can we have some direction?”
Justice Lang responded to the note by pointing out that the defence doesn’t have the onus of proof. That includes not having to prove beyond a reasonable doubt whether Hanna’s death was a suicide. Instead, he reminded them, the onus is always on the Crown.
“At the end of the day, it’s not sufficient for you to say that Dr Polkinghorne is probably guilty or even very likely guilty,” he said, a repeat from his summing-up the day earlier.
For the seven weeks of evidence and an additional week of closing addresses, jurors had been told they had a binary choice. If it wasn’t suicide, the only logical conclusion was then murder, they were told over and over.
In the end, they rejected the binary option.
It wasn’t suicide, they seemed to think. But finding Polkinghorne guilty of murder was a step too far.
Outside the courthouse after the decision was announced, the Crown solicitor looked weary as she explained to a horde of roughly 20 reporters that prosecutors knew all along a circumstantial case would be difficult - for everybody, including the jury - by its very nature.
“The evidence is there, was available to be pieced together, but at the end of the day the jury has to be convinced...” she said.
“The jury has to be sure, and they weren’t sure. I’ve got nothing but respect for that.”
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.
George Block is an Auckland-based reporter with a focus on police, the courts, prisons and defence. He joined the Herald in 2022 and has previously worked at Stuff in Auckland and the Otago Daily Times in Dunedin.
