WARNING: DISTRESSING CONTENT
An addiction expert who specialises in substance use disorders is giving evidence at the Philip Polkinghorne murder trial.
Auckland Crown Solicitor Alysha McClintock has called Emma Schwarcz to the witness box. She’s currently the clinical director of CADS (Community Alcohol and Drug Service). Police enlisted her to give expert advice about the effects and manifestations of meth use.
Polkinghorne is on trial at the Auckland High Court accused of killing his wife Pauline Hanna at their Remuera home and staging the scene to look like a suicide.
His defence maintains his wife hanged herself amid mounting work and financial pressures.
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Polkinghorne, now 71, is accused of having fatally strangled Hanna, 63, inside their Remuera home before staging the scene on April 5, 2021, to look like a suicide by hanging. Prosecutors have suggested he lashed out at his wife while high on methamphetamine, possibly during an argument over the exorbitant amount he was spending on sex workers or a secret “double life” with high–profile Sydney escort Madison Ashton.
Earlier today, police forensic accountant Margaret Skilton finished giving evidence. She first entered the witness box on Tuesday and spent all of yesterday giving evidence on the five years of Hanna and Polkinghorne’s financial affairs from 2016 to her death in Easter 2021.
The crux of her evidence was that Polkinghorne gave six women - including three already described to the jury as sex workers - nearly $300,000 in the five years leading up to Hanna’s death.
Skilton said he controlled the couple’s financial affairs but defence lawyer Ron Mansfield KC, in cross-examination, said it was normal for one person to pay the bills and handle the admin around investments.
The defence argued the defendant’s wife would have been far from financially helpless – having spent over $110,000 from 2016 to 2018 on personal items and services such as clothes, hair, skincare and dry cleaning.
About $106,000 in bank transfers went to Ashton, who was found staying at an expensive Mt Cook chalet with Polkinghorne three weeks after Hanna’s death. The last payment had been for $5580 on January 5, 2021, exactly three months before Easter Monday, when Polkinghorne called 111 to report his wife’s death.
The defence has contended Polkinghorne and Hanna, jointly worth over $10 million, had a happy “open” relationship and that Hanna’s history of depression was responsible for her death rather than foul play.
Skilton, who works in the police financial crime unit, tallied $296,645 that Polkinghorne had transferred to the six women between January 2016 and March 2021. The payments came from accounts that only he had access to.
In addition to the money that went to Ashton, the payouts included:
- $35,905 from 2016 to 2019 to a woman named Lee, who was identified by Polkinghorne’s barber earlier in the trial as a mutual acquaintance sex worker
- $72,100 between 2019 and 2021 to a woman named Jody
- $61,800 between 2016 and 2021 to a Northcote Point resident named Alaria who was identified by her neighbours to jurors as a sex worker who would receive frequent visits from the surgeon – his car’s personalised RETINA plates having made an impression
- $13,550 between 2017 and 2018 to a woman named Kimberley, and
- $7160 in 2019 to Ashton’s daughter.
Polkinghorne’s bank accounts also saw cash withdrawals of $439,450 during the same period, almost half of which had been taken from cash machines in Australia. The accountant pointed out that neither Polkinghorne nor his wife were in Australia when many of the withdrawals were made, suggesting that an unknown third party had been given access to the account.
Mansfield suggested during cross-examination that the cash could have been used on simple day-to-day spending, but the witness was sceptical.
“A lot of companies don’t even take cash anymore,” she said.
Mansfield did not touch on the bank transfers to the women, but he’ll get another opportunity to traverse the subject when Skilton returns to the witness box today. The defence lawyer instead directed the witness to focus on other areas of the couple’s finances, including their substantial assets.
Multiple witnesses have testified that Hanna had been contemplating leaving her husband due in part to suspicions of infidelity but she worried that she couldn’t do so without first getting her financial affairs in order. Hanna’s niece testified that Hanna had been distraught at one point, fearful that Polkinghorne had swindled her out of access to their joint assets by having her sign financial documents without telling her what they were for.
But she would have had no legitimate reason to worry, the defence suggested yesterday.
“You would know that in New Zealand, assets [upon divorce] ... would be divided ordinarily 50/50,” Mansfield pointed out in one of his first questions to the accountant, adding that it wouldn’t matter whose name the bank accounts were in. “It wouldn’t matter whether a person had seen the bank statements at all.”
Given that standard aspect of New Zealand divorce law, Hanna could have expected to receive over $5 million if they were to separate and could have easily kept herself afloat in the meantime with her salary of over $200,000 per year, Mansfield said.
“It’s not unusual, is it, in a relationship for one member in the relationship ... to look after the finances?” he asked, to which Skilton agreed.
But Skilton had seemed to indicate earlier, during questioning by the Crown, that it went beyond that.
“Mr Polkinghorne had control of Ms Hanna’s financial position,” she concluded, explaining that the defendant had siphoned significant amounts of money from the couple’s joint account to ones in which Hanna had no access.
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.
