WARNING: DISTRESSING CONTENT
The defence has begun its closing address in the murder trial of Philip Polkinghorne, the Remuera eye surgeon accused of killing his wife Pauline Hanna and staging the scene to look like a suicide.
Ron Mansfield KC told the jury, “this has been a trial prosecuted by emotion, and where the victim was logic.”
Auckland Crown Solicitor Alysha McClintock spent all day closing the Crown’s case yesterday and jurors heard more from her this morning.
STORY CONTINUES AFTER THE LIVE BLOG
STORY CONTINUES
Proceedings will resume at the slightly earlier time of 9.30am at the Auckland High Court today before Justice Graham Lang and a jury of eight women and three men.
Yesterday, McClintock said all the various pieces of hard and circumstantial evidence, woven together and followed to their conclusion, led to the conclusion Hanna did not hang herself, as Polkinghorne claimed.
“The Crown says once you fit everything together here you can be sure that suicide can be excluded here,” McClintock said.
“This was murder.”
McClintock, in her opening address to the jury 49 days ago, said the staged suicide was the crescendo of a double life Polkinghorne had been leading where he used meth heavily and spent thousands upon thousands on sex workers.
She said the killing was presaged by domestic violence, as recounted by family friends of Hanna’s who said she had told them her husband had placed his hands on her neck and told her he could do it again, any time.
Crown lays out case for Polkinghorne’s guilt
The two worlds of Dr Philip Polkinghorne – in one the renowned eye surgeon and loving husband of Pauline Hanna, and in the other a shadow life involving meth, aggression and fantasies of a new start with his well-compensated escort mistress – were about to collide.
The result, prosecutors said as they devoted an entire day to delivering a closing address in his murder trial, was both violent and tragic.
“Here we have a man spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on sex workers and drugs in secret and trying to keep his second life away from Pauline Hanna,” Crown solicitor Alysha McClintock told jurors. “Dr Polkinghore has become aggressively more and more shambolic ...
“He’s obsessed with [Sydney escort] Madison Ashton. He’s thinking he’s setting up a life with her ... He’s haemorrhaging money, and money’s something he’s preoccupied with.”
And all the while, it was alleged, his methamphetamine dependency was increasing, resulting in friends and coworkers sometimes noticing a change in his behaviour, and Hanna was starting to have suspicions.
“There’s a tinder box ready to go up,” McClintock said this afternoon, theorising that it culminated overnight on April 5, 2021, with either a surprise attack on his wife as she slept or an argument that turned fatally violent.
Polkinghorne, 71, is now in the eighth week of his high-profile trial in the High Court at Auckland, where the Crown has accused him of fatally strangling his wife before staging the scene at their Remuera home in an attempt to make it look like a suicide. His lawyers, who are expected to give their own lengthy closing address either tomorrow or on Wednesday, have said it’s a clear case of suicide warped by police overreach and the Crown’s fascination with his sex life.
McClintock was unable to cram the entire Crown closing address into one day. She’s expected to finish this morning, at which point it will be decided if jurors are sent home for the day or if defence lawyer Ron Mansfield KC goes immediately into his closing address.
The Crown solicitor acknowledged to jurors today that the allegations against the eye surgeon were both bizarre and unusual. But with the only two viable explanations being suicide or murder, the circumstantial evidence points strongly at the former, she said. Most of the afternoon was spent weaving together the circumstantial threads that led her to believe so.
“The single most significant piece of evidence in this trial is that Dr Polkinghorne had tried to strangle Pauline Hanna before,” McClintock said, referring to an outcry in 2020 that two of her longtime friends recalled being present for. “There was no challenge – none – to the fact that she said that he’d done it and that she demonstrated he’d done it.”
She read aloud transcripts of John and Pheasant Riordan’s evidence about the incident, in which they recalled Hanna putting her own hands around her neck to demonstrate.
“Sadly, John Riordan was right [when he told her], ‘If he’s done it once, he’ll do it again’,” the prosecutor said.
The defence insinuated during cross-examination of the witnesses that Hanna was drunk and might have been lying. Whether she was intoxicated or not has no real relevance, but it would make no sense at all for her to have lied to her friends, McClintock argued.
“She did nothing ... but defend him, paper over his bad behaviour over and over again,” she explained. “She defends him constantly. Why would she lie about that?”
Polkinghorne, she said, “wants to make this all about her state of mind”.
“Don’t look at me, he says, look at her. I ask you to look at him. Look at his behaviour.”
You can read the full recap of the first day of the Crown’s closing address here.
Seven weeks, more than 80 witnesses
After seven straight weeks of testimony involving more than 80 witnesses, both sides have finished presenting evidence in the high-profile murder trial of eye surgeon Philip Polkinghorne.
Justice Lang instructed jurors early on Friday, after the final witness had left the courtroom, to return to the High Court at Auckland on Monday for the Crown’s lengthy closing address. The defence will give a closing address on Tuesday, with deliberations expected to start Wednesday.
Jurors are probably distrustful regarding timing predictions by now, Justice Lang joked of the unusually lengthy trial, which was initially scheduled to be finished in six weeks but now has the potential – depending on how long the jury deliberates – of stretching into a ninth week. However, the plans from this point on are relatively firm, he said.
Polkinghorne, now 71, was charged with murder in August 2022 – 16 months after wife Pauline Hanna, 63, was found dead in their Remuera home. The defence has been adamant that her death was exactly as it initially seemed – a suicide by partial hanging in the entryway of their home that had taken place sometime overnight while Polkinghorne was sleeping. The Crown, however, has presented a much more nefarious picture in which the surgeon strangled his wife of 24 years and then staged the scene to look like a suicide.
Prosecutors spent more than four weeks calling evidence that focused on, among other things, Polkinghorne’s methamphetamine usage, the hundreds of thousands of dollars he spent on sex workers, his alleged “double life” with Sydney escort Madison Ashton and an alleged prior outcry by Hanna in which two witnesses said she reported her husband had strangled her non-fatally.
Ashton did not testify and neither did Polkinghorne. His sister, who arrived at the scene before paramedics and police, was also not called by either side to the witness box.
The defence has sought to dismiss much of the sex and drugs evidence as irrelevant. The past two-and-a-half weeks have focused largely on Hanna’s mental health, which included a decades-long prescription for Prozac, revelations in her own emails noting at-times-intense work stress, a call to her GP in December 2019 reporting thoughts of suicide and an alleged outcry to her sister in the early 1990s about a previous attempt at self-harm.
The final witnesses did not stray from that theme.
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.
