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.
A friend told the court yesterday that Pauline Hanna planned to see a lawyer and write a will before her death.
Steve Braunias is an award-winning New Zealand journalist, author, columnist and editor.
Something quite feral is taking shape in the crowds that continue to swarm into the lovely old stone castle of the High Court at Auckland in expectation of yet more erotic tales in themurder trial of 71-year-old Remuera ophthalmologist Dr Philip Polkinghorne.
Wednesday’s attendance was at a record high. They filled the upstairs courtroom 11 to capacity. The circus had attracted about 70 onlookers. Another 20 milled outside the door, too late to get a seat; there is fierce competition to gain attendance, with the keenest ghouls pressed up against the door.
The ladies and gentlemen of the fourth estate have to fight our way through the mob and go about our noble calling as professional ghouls.
There was even a school visit. A teacher performed miracles in corralling a herd of Year 11 criminology students from Edgewater College. Year 11! They had excellent manners and were very respectful. But generally speaking there is no such thing as a silent teenager and during morning recess, the Year 11s chatted and hooted and laughed, filling the usually subdued and deeply boring High Court with loud good spirits.
So, too, did the adults. Unlike the kids, though, they had the bad grace to continue yapping and gossiping and happily chuntering on and on and on as they filed into the courtroom. No one heard the registrar’s command to stand for His Honour the King’s judge. Justice Graham Lang sat down and patiently waited for them to shut the hell up. The wild animals, kept behind a velvet rope, eventually ceased their howlings.
But good on them for taking an interest. The trial is fascinating, mysterious, tragic. Polkinghorne’s wife Pauline Hanna died at their home above Ōrākei Basin on Easter Monday, April 5, 2021. She was 63. She hanged herself, her husband said; a monstrous lie, police suspected, and charged him with murder 16 months later.
It took a long time to gather very many pieces of circumstantial evidence and to examine Polkinghorne’s private life. That is, his formerly private life; his secrets are now public property. In essence, the Crown has attempted to present the tiny doctor these past three weeks in court as an odious sex midget.
Philip Polkinghorne in the High Court at Auckland as his trial continues. Photo / Michael Craig
The ferals feasted on fresh revelations on Wednesday. A witness with the musical name Pheasant (the “h” is silent) Riordan, beautifully dressed in a two-piece cream suit with antique cameo broaches, talked of her long, close friendship with Hanna, and the stories she shared about Polkinghorne’s “seemingly insatiable desire to have sex”.
There doesn’t seem to have been anything seemingly about it. To add to stories already heard in courtroom 11 of sex workers and group sex, the witness said Hanna told her about having sex with Polkinghorne when the phone rang. He picked up, but remained otherwise occupied. “She found that disturbing.”
Riordan also said Hanna “broke into his computer and found obscene pornography”; told her that Polkinghorne once pressed his hands around her neck, and hissed at her something along the lines of, “I can do this anytime I want”; that her own observation of Polkinghorne was that he was “controlling” in his relationship with Hanna; and that she felt Hanna was in danger, and needed to get away from her husband.
She said a lot. Plenty, then, for defence lawyer Ron Mansfield KC to seek to demolish, and practise his expertise in the dark arts of cross-examination.
He had the same challenge with an earlier witness on Wednesday morning after she gave evidence in chief to prosecutor Brian Dickey. Alison Ring and her ophthalmologist husband were friends with Hanna and her ophthalmologist husband. She said such startling things in the witness box that my colleagues on the press benches had no other choice than to describe them as “bombshells”.
Chief among her detonations was that Polkinghorne waved a piece of paper at her that he claimed was Hanna’s suicide note. It was the first anyone had heard about such a document and the Crown made it clear that in their view it was another monstrous lie. As for Ring, she made it clear she didn’t believe it, either.
Mansfield stood to face these two women who had the slightly imperious manner and definitely good taste (the antique cameos, the trench coat) of the comfortably-off upper classes, and he … ended up with jack. They were women who had the air of not ever taking any kind of shit. Mansfield can chase veteran cops around a courtroom in a cross-exam but good old Alison and Pheasant (with that silent, enigmatic “h”) chased Mansfield around courtroom 11, and sent him away empty-handed. No concessions were made.
And then Justice Lang dropped, you know, a bombshell. He announced the Supreme Court had staged a coup, and would move into courtroom 11 next week. The trial will have to squeeze inside the considerably smaller courtroom 13 – and provide even less room for the public to come along and spectate. His news was met with worried mutterings from the mob.
Seating will surely be reserved for Hanna’s family. Her brother Bruce gave evidence this week and has remained in court to keep an eye on proceedings. At first, he sat with other family members at the far end of the public gallery nearest to the jury. There was a change of plan, maybe an executive decision, on Wednesday. He sat directly behind Polkinghorne, breathing down his ex-brother-in-law’s neck.
