As we say goodbye to 2024 and welcome in 2025, it’s a good time to catch up on the very best of some of the Herald columnists we enjoyed reading over the last 12 months. From politics to business, these are some of the voices and views our audience loved
'Polky’ and the sex workers - Steve Braunias on the Philip Polkinghorne 'trial of the century'
Philip Polkinghorne appears at the Auckland High Court during week three of his murder trial. Photo / Jason Oxenham
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Another day in the trial of the century until someone else is accused of murder in even more lurid circumstances, another prostitute. More revelations were heard in the opening day of week three in the trial of Dr Philip Polkinghorne – “Phil,” “the Doc”, “Polky”, as he was known to those who have appeared in the High Court of Auckland this month and talked about the little livewire ophthalmologist, with his big swinging-dick energy, his white Merc, his mad socks, his murder charge.
Now everyone feels as though they know Polky. He is possibly the most famous living New Zealander. He is a national marvel, a legacy news media box-office sensation.
The nation that can produce someone as wholesome as Dame Lisa Carrington can also produce Polky, accused not just of murdering his wife at their Remuera home on Easter Monday, April 5, 2021, but then of acting on the gross idea, the Crown argues, to manoeuvre her body down the stairs into a position to make it look like she died by suicide.
Anyway, hookers. The court has already heard about Polky visiting a sex worker called Alaria most Fridays in Northcote, and a police detective gave evidence of travelling to beautiful Mt Cook 25 days after Pauline’s tragic death and finding him in a hotel room with a sex worker called Madison. The court was also played a tape recording of Pauline telling her brother and his family, “He screws prostitutes when he’s in Sydney.” It made her feel miserable, humiliated. She confessed that she was present on some of these occasions for group sex: “I used to join the prostitutes, and dah-dah-dah and dah-dah-dah.” The dah-dah-dahs drew a veil over these appointments; on Monday in courtroom 11, the veil opened for a glimpse of Polky at it with another sex worker called Lee. Read more >
Polkinghorne and a love story gone bad - August 24, 2024
Polkinghorne fatigue is a thing, an exhaustion that began to set in around about Wednesday during week four of the murder trial of Dr Philip Polkinghorne.
You can only take so many revelations about a wealthy Remuera ophthalmologist who enjoyed the relatively blameless recreations of smoking methamphetamine and having sex with hookers until, police say, he lost control and killed his wife Pauline, then had the nerve and the expertise to stage her death as a suicide.
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We feel the drag of it in courtroom 13, where Dr Polkinghorne - nicknamed affectionately once upon a time as “Polk”, sometimes “Polky” - sits day after day wearing never-repeated, mad socks (Friday: dramatic aqua stripes) and staring straight ahead with his resting face set in a kind of gormless expression, the lower lip sticking out. The drag of it is not contained to court. The nation feels it. The nation is over it. The nation wants it done.
You can have too much Polk. But someone else has intruded on his murder trial. Something else worked its way into week four. More than mere fatigue, there was the sound and texture of heartbreak. The court heard from Pauline. Read more >
Private passions made public - August 27, 2024
Monday was possibly the maddest and most lurid day yet in the long, mad, lurid murder trial of petite Remuera ophthalmologist Dr Philip Polkinghorne, its madness and luridity set in an upstairs courtroom in the High Court at Auckland, and as if to combat it, to take to it on its mad, lurid terms, the accused decided to model his maddest and most lurid pair of socks yet – his feet flew flags of the rising sun in painful yellows and reds, crazy socks, loud socks, porno socks. You don’t wear socks like that. You wouldn’t dare. But Polkinghorne, 71, has dared to wear his wild, wild heart on his feet every single day of his trial, now in its fifth week, and which is still, incredibly, able to present new gaspalicious evidence of a mad and lurid lust.
He is accused of strangling his wife Pauline to death at their home in the medical and legal belt of Remuera on Easter Monday, April 5, 2021. He called it in as a suicide and his defence maintains she hanged herself, framing it as the last, desperate act of a corporate executive who needed Prozac and Pinot to get her through the stress of a high-powered job. Everywhere in this trial, money. They moved in wealth. They both drove Mercs. Their joint assets were about $10 million. “We own two beautiful homes,” Pauline wrote in a note to self. They met at a Blind Foundation fundraising dinner, and their first date was at the French Cafe: “Philip took my hand, my heart flipped, I was sold.”
But this was not the love story examined on Monday at courtroom 13. The love story of Mr and Mrs Polkinghorne was peripheral, actually just not in the picture, something in the past. The love story played out in front of the jury was between Polkinghorne and his long-time consort, Australian escort Madison Ashton – their first appointment was in 2015 (fee: $800), and they maintained close contact over the next six years, but the Crown prosecution was more interested in their correspondence in the days following Pauline’s death. It was very interesting correspondence. It was not exactly the textbook on how to grieve. It was Polkinghorne in heat, mad for it, the prolific author of lurid wants and needs. Read more >
Doctor’s songs of innocence - August 31, 2024
And so now the defence – the songs of innocence, the alibis, the denials – is under way in the murder trial of Dr Philip Polkinghorne at the High Court in Auckland, that faux old pile of bricks festooned with Anton Teutenberg’s gargoyles which have witnessed so much since they were sculpted in the 1860s but never saw anything quite like this vulgar and wildly gossipacious case of the ophthalmologist accused of killing his wife.
Week six begins on Monday. The last time I reported on a murder trial as long was way back in 2005 when Samurai swordsman Antonie Dixon set about achieving a rare paradox – he was an insane sonofabitch who attempted to impersonate an insane sonofabitch. But that was simple compared with Polkinghorne. Dixon was poor white trash, tied to a clothesline and beaten as a kid. He did worse unto others. Polkinghorne was high society, a skilled eye surgeon who made life immeasurably better for patients afraid of going blind, just another anonymous and blameless Merc-driving capitalist schnook – until April 5, 2021, when he dialled 111 and said: “My wife’s dead. She hanged herself.”
A trial is a debate, for and against; in courtroom 11, the moot is Polkinghorne. The Crown closed its case on Friday morning. Since that moment, it’s now the turn of the defence to patiently lay out its evidence, and for Mansfield to ask witnesses questions that he already knows the answers to; and it’s now the turn of McClintock and Dickey to dance, to think on their feet, perchance to yell. They are quite good at yelling. Over the years I have seen them yell their heads off in court, seemingly repulsed by the sight and sound of whatever poor wretch is in the witness box; of course it’s for effect but only a simpleton would think of court as some kind of rousing little drama, as some kind of game. All murder trials are the admin of something terrible. Read more >
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When Polkinghorne told me the tide had turned in his favour - September 24, 2024
And so it was ruled all for nothing, fantastic amounts of entirely insufficient evidence as gathered by a Z-team of detectives who only succeeded in not just blackening the name of an eminent surgeon but completely trashing it amid the avid spectation of a public feasting on the trial of the century.
Dr Philip Polkinghorne has been found not guilty of the murder of his wife Pauline Hanna. The foreperson delivered his verdict in courtroom 11 in the High Court of Auckland at 2.21pm on Monday. It took 16 months to charge him, eight weeks to put him on trial at the High Court of Auckland, and barely seven hours for a jury to declare it was all, just as Polkinghorne’s lawyer had put it, “a grave nonsense”.
Epic trial. Epic fail for the police. Epic vindication for Polkinghorne, who enters immortality as the horny ophthalmologist who spent $296,646.23 on hookers, was busted with 37g of excellent methamphetamine, and he says he woke up on the Easter Monday morning of April 5, 2021 to find his wife Pauline Hanna dead with a belt around her neck. “She’s hung herself,” he told 111, and then, for the first time in the massive ordeal that followed, said out loud the name that everyone in New Zealand came to know: “Philip. Philip Polkinghorne.”
Two pathologists, called as expert witnesses for the defence, agreed with each other that there were no injuries you would expect to find in a case of homicidal strangling. They were crucial to the defence case and Polkinghorne spent the first four weeks of the trial, when the prosecution threw everything at him, waiting for them to appear. He said to me one day that the science would clear him. After the first pathologist appeared, I asked him one day, “Do you think the tide is turning?”' He replied quickly, “Oh, it’s turned. It’s already turned.” Read more >
