WARNING: DISTRESSING CONTENT
In the final year or two of her life, Pauline Hanna was upfront with her brother about difficulties she was having in her relationship with husband Philip Polkinghorne, who is now on trial for murder.
The Auckland eye surgeon had pressured her into threesomes and saw prostitutes on his own, she told him. And then, she said, there was his anger.
“She’d say, ‘I can’t speak to him at the moment, he’s on the roof,’” Hawke’s Bay resident Bruce Hanna told jurors in the High Court at Auckland today as he sat in the witness box - explaining that “on the roof” was his sister’s way explaining Polkinghorne’s anger level.
“Does he get violent?” the brother recalled asking his sister.
“[She replied], ‘I go to the gym or I leave the house.’ She seemed to have a bit of a solution for it.”
Prosecutors contend Polkinghorne, now 71, strangled his wife inside their Remuera home then staged the scene on April 5, 2021, to look like a suicide. He had a methamphetamine habit and a “double life” that included exorbitant amounts spent on sex workers, Crown Solicitor Alysha McClintock said during her opening address last week. The defence has insisted that the scene wasn’t staged and that it actually was a suicide by a person who was over-worked and had a history of depression.
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During his testimony, which is ongoing, Bruce Hanna recalled how he would have long conversations with his sister in 2019 and 2020 while driving his sister from the airport to the family farm near Hastings. She would visit about once a month to help take care of their mother, who suffered dementia and was dying.
“I didn’t think she was very relaxed when she was with Philip,” he said of the final years of her life. “She was a lot happier ... when she was by herself.
“..She was just on edge, really. Philip seemed quite detached. ... In the end, I was please to see her come down by herself because I knew I’d get my sister.”
There were several candid conversations, he said, in which she gave some explanation for the change in behaviour.
“She wasn’t very happy with the way the relationship was going,” Bruce Hanna said. “Philip had other women on the side. She wasn’t happy with it really, at all.”
Asked by prosecutors to elaborate, the brother said she was told that Polkinghorne “had a woman in Sydney” and would visit prositutes in Auckland.
“I think there used to be group sex,” he added. “Philip used to get her involved. I didn’t think she was very happy about it, but for the sake of their relationship she’d go along with it.”
It wasn’t the sister he knew, he added.
“I think Philip was pushing her into it really,” he speculated to the jury. “I think Philip wanted her to do sexual acts which she wasn’t happy with and that’s why he went other places, and she wasn’t happy about that. He had other prostitutes that he visited.
“Again, she was wasn’t happy about it. But she kind of said it was his ‘foibles’ - that’s the word she used.”
Pauline told her brother her husband would “get over this”.
“Or she hoped [he would], anyway,” Bruce Hanna quickly added.
Pauline Hanna had told her brother years ago that she was on “happy pills” - a reference, it seemed, anti-depression medication - but he said he didn’t inquire about it further. But when his called him four days before her body was found, her mood gave no indication that she was struggling with depression, he insisted.
“She was very happy that day,” he said. “She was finishing the contract [involving the Counties Manukau Health Board’s rollout of the Covid-19 vaccine] ... and then she was going on a holiday.
“In fact, I hadn’t heard her that happy in a long time. It was good to hear.”
By the time the jury broke for lunch today, defence lawyer Ron Mansfield had not yet had an opportunity to cross-examine the witness.
Court began today with jurors listening to the final hour of a lengthy interview that Polkinghorne had given police just hours after calling 111 to report his wife’s suicide.
The list of mundane marriage grievances - although delivered in a friendly, conversational tone as he spoke with Detective Sgt Ilona Walton - was extensive.
His wife’s foibles included but was not limited to 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 list accumulated over the course of a nearly four-hour interview - edited down to three-hours to account for breaks - in which the defendant spoke in a fast cadence and often went on long tangents unrelated to what the detective had asked.
But his voice seemed to slow a bit in the final portion of the interview played for police today, and though often digressing still, he appeared more circumspect.
“Maybe I put so many expectations on her - I don’t know,” he said, referring to her high-ranking job with the DHB. “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.”
He suggested her drinking was a natural reaction to the high-stress environment of her job, adding that he should have paid more attention to her day-to-day stress.
“I just didn’t listen,” he said, explaining that she often spoke in acronyms and jargon. “Some were so complex. I didn’t understand it. ...I may have glossed over and not shown the interest I should have, and maybe she didn’t support at home.”
A short time later, he told the detective, her interview of him was similar to what he would call “taking a history” with a patient.
“I don’t tend to listen much to the history, because it’s usually unreliable,” he said. “Sometimes it doesn’t really matter.”
The detective interjected: “This is quite important.”
“Oh yes, yes,” Polkinghorne responded. “I understand.”
The interview ended somewhat abruptly, after a barrister friend of the surgeon, Tony Bouchier, 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.
What police never told him, the defence said while cross-examining Detective Walton, was that he was a suspect.
“He was treated as a witness and he was not given his rights,” she acknowledged. “In my mind, there were plausible explanations at that time that he could have provided.”
Testimony continues this afternoon before Justice Graham Lang and the jury.
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.
