Proceedings in the closely watched trial resumed at 10am with the Crown calling Rose Hanna to take the stand.
Rose Yvette Hanna, of Tauranga, is Pauline’s niece, the woman who captured the Longlands recording.
The Longlands recording was played to the jury last week and showed Pauline unloading to Rose and her mother and father about her martial problems, saying her “sex fiend” husband Dr Polkinghorne had encouraged her into group sex sessions.
Over the past fortnight the jury has heard from both Polkinghorne, via a video of his interview with a detective the day he reported his wife dead, and Hanna, recorded by a family member discussing their marital problems before her death.
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Retired eye surgeon Philip Polkinghorne has pleaded not guilty to murdering wife Pauline Hanna at Easter 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.
Herald reporter George Block is filing live from the Auckland High Court. Follow our live updates below.
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12 August, 05:03 am
Mansfield said he "hasn't a donkey's show" of finishing his cross-examination of Morris before 5pm, so Justice Lang has decided to take the evening adjournment.
Court will resume 10am tomorrow for Morris' cross-examination.
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12 August, 05:00 am
Morris did not return to clean the home after the death of Pauline Hanna.
Dickey asks if messages were sometimes left for her.
No really, the housekeeper replies, although Hanna had once asked if she could empty the dishwasher.
"One time... there was a note saying Philip was in conference and not to enter," Morris says.
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12 August, 04:59 am
Dickey refers Morris to a police photo of the guest bedroom upstairs, which is in a state of disarray.
Had she ever seen the room in this state? he asks.
"No, never," said Morris. She had never seen the bed stripped like in the photograph, taken after Hanna's death, or the pillows all over the floor.
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12 August, 04:56 am
Morris described her work as "surface management really" and said the home was never very dirty.
Polkinghorne was the only one who came home when Morris was cleaning, arriving on occasion to pick up phones.
She could not remember if anyone was home on her last visit, on April 1.
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12 August, 04:54 am
Morris said her work mostly involved ironing and cleaning floors and occasionally making a bed.
Did you do the laundry? asks Dickey.
No, says Morris, but she ironed and folded shirts – Polkinghorne's mostly.
In her first email, Hanna told Morris she would occasionally have to make the bed in the upstairs guest bedroom, where she said Polkinghorne sometimes slept when he was working late.
Morris told the court she had made the guest bed maybe four times in the months she worked in the house.
Earlier, the jury heard Hanna slept in this room, while Polkinghorne spent the night in the master bedroom.
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12 August, 04:44 am
Next witness: The housekeeper
"We were doing something bigger than ourselves," Alabastro says.
She had heard Hanna's mother died on February 5, 2021, but was not told by Hanna directly. Nor was she told the only time Hanna took off was to travel to Hastings for the day of the funeral and back to work the following day.
Alabastro is now free to go and the Crown calls Sheryl Morris, Pauline Hanna and Philip Polkinghorne's housekeeper.
Morris started working for the couple on December 15, 2020, and finished on April 1, 2021.
She would work Tuesday and Thursday, four hours a day, she told prosecutor Brian Dickey.
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12 August, 04:43 am
"Sorry that this is a wee bit onerous," he comments.
"I feel a bit fatigued myself now."
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12 August, 04:38 am
Mansfield is now, at length, going through email after email sent between the witness and Hanna and others to hammer home his point.
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12 August, 04:31 am
Did Hanna ever tell Alabastro, asks Mansfield, that she was finding the job incredibly difficult and lonely?
No, said Alabastro.
The lawyer is referring again to reams of emails Hanna sent after midnight and into the small hours, sometimes and 2am, 3am and 4am or thereabouts, resuming again at dawn, after full work days.
He aims to show how long her hours were to add to his case she was stressed and overworked.
In another email, Hanna says she had worked eight weeks without a break and was being bullied.
One of the latest set of emails was sent to Alabastro at 1am, telling her about planned vaccine sites.
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12 August, 04:21 am
Sometimes Hanna would say "don't you worry, leave it with me" and then come in the next day and say it was sorted, Mansfield suggested; Alabastro agreed.
In her police statement, Alabastro said she did not think Hanna would tell her if she was feeling stressed. They each had care for each other, she said.
At one point, the jury heard how detectives and forensic scientists found methamphetamine in several areas of the Polkinghorne home. They also heard how detectives found Polkinghorne with a sex worker in the “Matariki room” of a Mt Cook lodge less than a month after his wife’s death.
In a truncated day of evidence, jurors heard from two of Hanna’s friends – both, like her, high-achieving healthcare industry administrators. The two witnesses were called this afternoon, after a rare site visit to the scene of the alleged crime earlier in the morning.
Police, lawyers, multiple media organisations and even Justice Graham Lang lingered on the quiet residential street outside the upmarket home as jurors were led through the interior by a detective, who was not allowed to talk to them. Some brought evidence books with them containing an architectural layout of the home and photos of the rooms as they looked on the day Hanna’s body was found.
They filed back on to a chartered bus, accompanied by courthouse security, after less than 30 minutes.
Justice Graham Lang leaves Philip Polkinghorne's Remuera home after a rare site visit by jurors in the Auckland eye surgeon's murder trial. Polkinghorne is accused of strangling wife Pauline Hanna inside the home. Photo / Jason Dorday
Back in the courtroom, Margaret White explained how Hanna told her: “I just need you to know, if anything happens to me ...”
It began with a quick exchange of texts – a typical form of communication as the two mixed work and friendship – around 9pm on January 23, 2020.
“Hi sorry can t den [sic] anything tonight. Philip has decided to be beastly,” Hanna wrote her friend, signing off with “P”. She followed up a short time later with: “I need to talk”.
“She was very upset,” White recalled of the phone call that followed. “He’d become enraged. I wish I could remember more. I absolutely recall her saying, ‘I just need you to know, if anything happens to me ... ’”
There was no indication during the call, or ever during the 17 years they had known each other, that Polkinghorne was being physical with Hanna, the witness said. But she was worried enough about the ominous statement that White said she discussed with her husband the possibility of Hanna coming to stay with them.
White acknowledged under cross-examination from defence lawyer Ron Mansfield KC that her “sense” during the call was that Hanna had been drinking that night. Hanna was someone who enjoyed a glass of wine and would sometimes “have a couple extra” when upset about her relationship, but White said she never considered it to be problem drinking.
Mansfield hinted during his questioning that the incomplete “if anything happens” statement might have been an oblique reference to suicidal ideation. He asked White if Hanna had elaborated on what “beastly” meant.
Listen in full: Covert recording of wife Pauline Hanna describing surgeon husband as 'sex fiend'
The recording made of Hanna by a relative when she visited their Hawkes Bay property, in which Hanna describes Polkinghorne as a 'sex fiend', was played to the jury in court.
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Privileges Committee chairwoman Judith Collins responds to Te Pāti Māori no-show
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NOW PLAYING • Listen in full: Covert recording of wife Pauline Hanna describing surgeon husband as 'sex fiend'
The recording made of Hanna by a relative when she visited their Hawkes Bay property, in which Hanna describes Polkinghorne as a 'sex fiend', was played to the jury in court.
“No, she didn’t,” White responded. “She was very upset. She was crying and she couldn’t say a lot because he [Polkinghorne] was there.
“She assured me: ‘It’s fine. It will pass’.”
That was a common refrain from Hanna, White said, as the friends discussed her turbulent marriage over years of walks, phone calls and coffee dates.
“Mostly, the whole time I’ve known Pauline ... she had always talked about his infidelities,” she said of Polkinghorne. “That was something she was always unhappy about but seemed to accept it, bizarrely.”
White said she often questioned Hanna about why she chose to stay with Polkinghorne, including after an incident in December 2020 – one month before the “beastly” text – in which Polkinghorne had vanished for days and Hanna had to lie to his family about why he wasn’t there for Christmas.
“I thought she deserved better,” she testified. “When they were good, Pauline was so happy and would understandably want that to last, but it didn’t last.”
Philip Polkinghorne describes finding wife dead and final night together
The eye surgeon was interviewed by Detective Ilona Walton on the morning he reported Pauline Hanna dead, April 5, 2021. Video/Pool
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NOW PLAYING • Philip Polkinghorne describes finding wife dead and final night together
The eye surgeon was interviewed by Detective Ilona Walton on the morning he reported Pauline Hanna dead, April 5, 2021. Video/Pool
But on the last time she saw Hanna, at a birthday dinner in February 2021, she seemed to be in a good place, White recalled.
“She was good,” she told jurors. “It had been a tricky time the year before, but she was in quite good spirits. Things with family were on a much better footing. She felt they [her and Polkinghorne] were actually in a much better place.”
The defence responded with what has become a standard line of questioning for witnesses who knew Hanna. Did they know she attempted suicide in 1992? Did they know she had been prescribed depression and anxiety medication for over a decade? Did they know she was referred to a crisis team in December 2019 after reporting suicidal thoughts? Every witness so far has said no, they did not know.
Mansfield also delved more today into Hanna’s work stress, noting she was sending work emails at all hours of the night in the final weeks of her life. He pointed to emails from earlier in the Covid-19 pandemic in which she said she was being bullied at work and that she never wanted to take on the role of overseeing the rollout of the vaccine.
White and HeathSource chief executive Clare Thompson, the other witness to testify today, both said Hanna was a high achiever who showed an immense amount of pride in her work. Everyone in the healthcare industry was under the pump during lockdown, they said, but Hanna had a reputation as a “troubleshooter”.
“She had all this going on in her private life, and professionally she always delivered,” White explained.
“ ... Work at times was extremely difficult. Pauline was the type that would get the difficult challenges that other people weren’t able to see through. She thrived on it.”
White later added, after more questioning from Mansfield: “We had a similar work ethic, which is not healthy, admittedly.”
Thompson’s testimony was in a lot of ways similar to White’s. The two weren’t as close as Hanna was to White, but they had been friends for about a decade and would spend time together outside the office.
“Pauline was a very sociable person,” she said. “She was larger-than-life. She was a happy person.”
She was also open about her home life, Thompson said, including challenges in her relationship with Polkinghorne. At one point, she recalled Hanna telling her she had “broken into” her husband’s laptop after fearing infidelity and found photos of him with another woman. They discussed the possibility of hiring a private investigator – something, jurors learned earlier in the week, Hanna had inquired about but didn’t follow through on.
The relationship wasn’t great but Hanna couldn’t see herself as a single woman in her 60s, Thompson recalled her saying. And there were also concerns about finances.
“She said that Philip had asked her to sign forms that she didn’t understand,” Thompson testified. “When she asked what they were for, he became evasive. She was worried he was doing something underhanded – that she wouldn’t be able to access the money.”
The trial is scheduled to last four more weeks.
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.
