Witness Susan Ormonde speaks about Philip Polkinghorne visiting her house the day before Pauline Hanna's funeral.
THREE KEY FACTS
Retired eye surgeon Philip Polkinghorne has pleaded not guilty to murdering wife Pauline Hanna in 2021.
The Crown alleges Polkinghorne, 71, strangled his wife and staged her death to look like a suicide at their Remuera home but the defence says there is no evidence of a homicide.
And so the full awesome machinery of the state grinds on in the murder trial of Dr Philip Polkinghorne, which resumed at the High Court of Auckland on Tuesday after a three-day break, withthe Crown calling six more witnesses in its fourth and likely final week of bringing evidence against the 71-year-old Remuera ophthalmologist accused of strangling his wife Pauline to death and then going to incredible lengths to make it look like suicide.
His defence is that it looked like she hanged herself because she hanged herself. The one indisputable fact is that it was a violent and tragic death. Emergency services were called to the couple’s house overlooking the oval-shaped lagoon of Ōrākei Basin on April 5, 2021. Pauline was 63.
Everyone is talking about the trial - the sleaze, the wealth, the touch of evil - but the verdict is the sole responsibility of a jury of nine women and three men. They are led by a very engaged foreman. They very often examine court documents with keen interest. But it would be wildly inaccurate to claim there has never been a dull moment in this generally shockorific trial.
All trials are necessarily an accumulation of dull moments, and perhaps the very dullest moments in The King vs Philip Polkinghorne were endured on Tuesday morning, when a juror untied her hair, vigorously rubbed her eyes, pulled her jersey up over her nose, hung her head down low, and then tied her hair back up again in a supreme effort to stay awake during a long cross-examination about the mysterious workings of air conditioning units.
There was a serious purpose to this prolonged boringness. The prosecution called Deborah Boyd to the witness box. The former CEO of Auckland Eye, the private practice co-founded by Polkinghorne, spoke in a small, uncertain voice, and her curtains of long brown hair fell on either side of a small, pointed face. The only thing upfront about her were a large pair of black-rimmed glasses. She gave evidence that Polkinghorne appeared to fall asleep at a shareholders meeting. “His eyes,” her voice quavered, “were shut.”
There has been much said and raised throughout the trial (eg Dr Polkinghorne’s relentless sex life) which has not seemed at first blush to be particularly apropos of the alleged act of brutal murder. Falling asleep at a shareholders meeting is not a criminal offence.
Defence lawyer Ron Mansfield KC established in his very long cross-exam that the shareholders meeting was held in the offices of an accountancy firm on a Friday, that the weather that day was unseasonally warm, and much on the agenda that day was of little importance… The long, stiflingly hot day cooped up in an accountancy firm was so realistically evoked in Mansfield’s cross-exam that it felt like the shareholders meeting was still taking place - in courtroom 13, at the High Court of Auckland.
Crown prosecution raised the matter in the first place to present Dr Polkinghorne as someone who began to behave erratically in the months leading up to Hanna’s death. Deborah Boyd also gave evidence that a methamphetamine pipe was found at Auckland Eye. Someone had quite carelessly left it on a table. One side of it had a slogan: SWEET PUFF. As well, traces of methamphetamine were located in an air con unit of a consultation room used by Polkinghorne. Auckland Eye engaged law firm Wynn Williams (situated way up high on the 25th floor of the Vero Centre skyscraper on Shortland St) to investigate. Its report noted that CCTV showed Polkinghorne heading in the vicinity of where the pipe was found. Mansfield, predictably, argued the hell out of it.
A "Sweet Puff" meth pipe and lighter found in an Auckland Eye clinic consultation room used by Philip Polkinghorne.
Such are the ways a trial tells its stories. Prosecution storytelling is loud, crass, frantic, terrible things going on behind our backs, someone up to no good and losing their senses and ultimately, fatally, lashing out; defence storytelling is all anti-climax, subtle and lower-case, personal history told as one random thing after another without any pattern, without any danger, without any narrative. No offence, but your life is probably just as formless.
“Life, friends, is boring,” wrote the great American poet John Berryman. “We must not say so.” But Ron Mansfield must say so. He went to such lengths to bore everyone in courtroom 13 about air con units and what-not in his mission to present his client, too, as a total bore, as someone just going about his business, closing his eyes at shareholders meetings not because something was wrong with him or that he was erratic in any way, but merely because he was, you know, bored.
Yes, a methamphetamine pipe was found at the medical practice where Polkinghorne worked; but that, droned Mansfield, does not make him the owner of SWEET PUFF. There’s no proof. There’s no connection. There’s no story.
And so the day in court was, in short, a real grind. Crown prosecution introduced SWEET PUFF as an exciting line in their plot about an ophthalmologist driven to murder; defence approached it like an unimaginative subeditor, and crossed it out. Such are the competing interests of this grim trial. The core of it is that violent and tragic death. A woman slumped forward on a chair with an orange rope hanging from an upstairs balustrade… Polkinghorne said he found her body in the morning. His story is that it happened while he was asleep.
