Retired eye surgeon Philip Polkinghorne has pleaded not guilty to murdering his 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.
The essential subject of any murder trial is death. Death – its mechanisms, its workings – was the only subject all day on Wednesday in the continuing murder trial of Dr Philip Polkinghorne,accused of killing his wife Pauline Hanna at their Remuera home on April 5, 2021.
The Crown argue he strangled her to death. The defence is that she hanged herself. Much of the trial has examined Polkinghorne’s character, his flamboyance, his amusements; but Wednesday was strictly forensic, entirely and exclusively concerned with Hanna’s death.
Defence lawyer Ron Mansfield KC called his 16th witness, Dr Death. Actually, he goes by the name of Professor Stephen Cordner, a retired pathologist who had a long career in the mortuaries of the world – in Australia, Hong Kong, Iraq, Sri Lanka, and the US.
He has an academic position at Monash University; the prospect of listening to an Australian accent all day in courtroom 11 at the High Court at Auckland was horrifying but, in fact, he had a very pleasant voice, without his country’s long, drawn-out vowels, and there was something soothing about his delivery, even though he spoke only about death.
Mansfield was his student. Cordner was his kindly tutor. “The question is,” lectured the prof, “has the deceased been killed, or did she kill herself? If she’s been killed, that means assault. So then there are injuries commonly associated with assault. That would be for me a central concern in this case.”
He was a slender man with unbrushed grey hair who expressed himself with his long, beautiful hands – they were the fingers of death. They have touched so many bodies in death. The lovely hands clutched at his throat to imitate the crushing of the neck, to mime death.
Philip Polkinghorne and Ron Mansfield KC arrive at the High Court at Auckland. Photo / Jason Oxenham
He said: “The veins in the neck are thin walls. Very thin walls. They carry blood from the head to the heart, and the heart pumps it back up and takes oxygen to the head in an amazing circle of life.”
To stop that flow – hanging, strangling, pressure, force, endurance – is to cause death.
Mansfield asked: “How do you decide which is which, hanging or homicidal strangulation?”
He replied, “Yeah. Well. So … The general accepted view is that homicidal strangulation is very often the end-point of a sustained attack. So 70% of these cases is that the person has been the victim of a much more sustained assault, and there would be bruises to the head or scalp, sometimes fractures, a general range of injuries.”
Earlier in the trial, the police pathologist acknowledged there was an absence of injuries consistent with assault; this was during an angry cross-examination, when Mansfield advanced the defence theory that suicide was the likelier cause of Hanna’s death.
To Cordner, Mansfield asked about the ligature marks around Hanna’s neck which had completely disappeared the following day at her autopsy, and furthered the police theory it was a suspicious death.
Professor Cordner said: “To me, the disappearing mark has got no significance.”
Pauline Hanna and Philip Polkinghorne at an event in December 2018. Photo / Norrie Montgomery
He has expressive shoulders as well as hands; he shrugged, and said: “It is as it is. It’s disappeared. It doesn’t impress me one way or another as being worthy of suspicion.”
There were people in the courtroom who knew Hanna; a close friend wept hearing the graphic descriptions of death.
There was someone else who seemed overwhelmed by the Australian pathologist’s account of blocking the arteries which stops the flow of blood – the circle of life is broken – and causes death.
Polkinghorne, 71, widower, former surgeon, sat in court with his hands pressed over his face, his eyes closed, in darkness, listening to the mechanics of Hanna’s death.
Cordner was asked about the likelihood of Polkinghorne staging Hanna’s death, by placing her body on a chair, tying a belt around her neck, and attaching the belt to a rope tied to an upstairs balustrade, as argued by the Crown.
But his answer suggested it was a grotesque nonsense.
“It’s quite mind-boggling to imagine that, because of that looseness and floppiness of the body makes the body very hard to manage,” said Dr Death.
