WARNING: DISTRESSING CONTENT
Retired eye surgeon Philip Polkinghorne, whose appetites for methamphetamine and sex workers were the cornerstones of an ultimately unsuccessful murder prosecution, was today sentenced for his meth charges – just over a month after his high-profile acquittal.
The disgraced eye surgeon has today been sentenced to 150 hours of community work for meth possession.
His defence team sought a conviction and a fine but Justice Graham Lang stated that, given his “healthy” financial position, a fine would not be sufficient.
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Polkinghorne, 71, began his eight-week trial in July by pleading not guilty to murder, but admitted possession of the 37g of methamphetamine that police found in his Remuera home and possession of a meth pipe that was stashed under his side of the bed.
Polkinghorne’s trial, which on most days garnered a near-overflow crowd to the court complex’s largest courtroom, captivated the nation as prosecutors delved into salacious details of his alleged “double life” with high-profile Sydney escort Madison Ashton.
Police began harbouring suspicions about the ophthalmologist within hours of his call to 111 on March 5, 2021, reporting that Pauline Hanna, 63, had fatally hanged herself in the foyer of the couple’s $5 million Remuera home.
Crown case
The bright-orange nylon rope tied to an upstairs railing seemed too loose to support the weight of a person, detectives quickly surmised. Upstairs, in the guest room where Polkinghorne said his wife had slept alone, an ottoman was overturned and the bed was dishevelled – missing a top sheet and with the duvet and pillows thrown on the floor.
Crown solicitor Alysha McClintock suggested during her closing address in September that Polkinghorne was caught off guard by police suspicions – expecting authorities to “rubber stamp” the death as a suicide based on his stature in the community. But as they continued to look into the death, more suspicious behaviour was revealed.
Financial records showed he had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on sex workers in recent years. Over $100,000 was given to Madison, with whom he had shared hundreds of intimate WhatsApp messages and had secretly flown to visit during Christmas 2019. Ashton, who had been scheduled to testify as a Crown witness but could not be found, told the Herald in an interview that the two had been in a serious relationship since 2017, but broke up in 2021 some time after Hanna’s death. She described Polkinghorne as a “liar” who told her he and his wife had divorced and Hanna was living with another man.
Prosecutors speculated Polkinghorne might have been high on methamphetamine when he killed Hanna in the guest room – either attacking her during an argument over his secrets or stealthily climbing on top of her as she slept and putting her into a fatal chokehold. He then took her body downstairs and staged the suicide scene, they alleged.
Phone records showed he had, for the first time in 12 months, put his phone to airplane mode in the hours before calling police. The day after her death, following a lengthy police interview, he searched on the internet: “leg edema after strangulation”. Two long-time friends of Hanna testified she made an outcry a year before her death in which she said her husband had strangled her and threatened he could do it again.
Defence case
But lawyer Ron Mansfield KC dismissed the salacious details as attempts by authorities to circumvent the justice system when they didn’t have any proof a homicide had occurred.
He pointed to Hanna’s decades-long battle with depression, which he said had been exacerbated by her mother’s recent death and her high-stress job helping manage the rollout of the Covid-19 vaccine. Hanna’s younger sister flew from the United Kingdom to testify for the defence, telling jurors Hanna made a suicide outcry some time in the early 1990s after their father had died.
There was also a call to her physician in December 2019, during Polkinghorne’s secret rendezvous with Ashton, in which Hanna said she had considered driving her car into an oncoming truck as she travelled to the couple’s Coromandel bach. She was feeling low because her mother was sick and her husband had left her, she said, but did not follow through with the suicidal thoughts because of her family and fear of getting hurt.
Letters recovered from her laptop showed other moments of self-doubt and references to self-harm.
“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 in an email to herself one year before her death, noting 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 wept as the letter was read aloud during his trial.
The defence also pointed to a dangerous cocktail of depression, weight loss and sleeping pills in Hanna’s system that several psychiatrists said could have put her at a higher risk of suicide.
But the centrepiece of the defence case was the pathology evidence.
Four pathologists were called to the witness box – two by the Crown and two by the defence. All of them acknowledged it was rare for a person to be fatally strangled without discernible internal injuries or defensive wounds. Only two of the four could recall a single previous homicidal strangulation that left no signs.
In the end, jurors seemed sceptical of both sides. In a note sent to the judge at the start of their second day of deliberations, the group said most of them did not believe there was enough evidence to support the defence contention that Hanna had committed suicide. But some in the group also didn’t believe the Crown had proved that Polkinghorne caused the death of his wife.
Justice Lang pointed out only the Crown has the burden of proof. Several hours later, they found Polkinghorne not guilty.
The drugs
Although Polkinghorne’s guilty pleas to the two drugs charges at the outset of the trial blurred the focus on them in the weeks that followed, drug use remained a major theme of the murder trial.
The Crown suggested the surgeon had developed a major habit, to the point where it was causing him to act more erratically in the months leading up to Hanna’s death. The 37g found in his home would have equated to about 370 doses with a street value of over $10,000, they noted.
Days were spent trying to convince jurors that a Sweet Puff meth pipe found abandoned at Polkinghorne’s eye clinic in 2020 was his. But he insisted it wasn’t and the issue was never definitively resolved.
The defence, meanwhile, downplayed the drug usage.
Mansfield suggested during cross-examination of witnesses that his client was a recreational user who just happened to buy the drug in bulk because that’s what you do when you’re wealthy – make one big purchase rather than multiple small ones because that reduces the risk.
It was also insinuated by the defence throughout the trial that Hanna, too, was a recreational user of methamphetamine. Post-mortem tests showed no signs of methamphetamine in her body. A hair sample dating back six months also showed no indications of meth use, but the defence pointed out she dyed her hair twice a month, which can cause false negatives.
Internet searches extracted from Hanna’s phone and laptop showed naivety about the drug.
On Christmas Eve 2020, less than three months before her death, she conducted three back-to-back searches: “p pipe”, “what does p look like” and “what sensation does p give you??”. There were pictures, taken with her phone on Christmas Day, of two used meth pipes that appear to have been found in the couple’s home.
Polkinghorne’s devices, meanwhile, included a screenshot of instructions showing how to make a meth pipe from a lightbulb. It was first accessed on New Year’s Eve 2019 and last viewed in February 2021.
Prosecutors showed jurors a photo of Ashton topless and lying on her stomach in a bed, her pet chihuahuas beside her. The photo, one of thousands of Ashton found on Polkinghorne’s devices, also showed a Sweet Puff meth pipe on the bed stand next to a pair of colourful socks similar to ones the defendant had worn every day to his trial.
In a recent interview with the Herald, Ashton confirmed she would smoke methamphetamine with Polkinghorne and became so concerned about his usage that she texted a warning to his son in 2021. She said she believed he developed a serious drug habit some time in 2018.
Jurors also heard during the trial from Auckland Eye clinical director Susan Ormonde, a fellow ophthalmologist who recounted Polkinghorne admitting to methamphetamine use as he visited her lifestyle property a day before his wife’s funeral.
She said she was shocked by the disclosure. He made it sound as if both he and Hanna took the drug, she recalled.
“He asked if we’d ever tried meth,” Ormonde said, explaining that she told him she and her husband hadn’t.
“You should,” she recalled him responding.
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.
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