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.
Opinion by Steve Braunias
Steve Braunias is a senior writer for the New Zealand Herald.
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.
Polkinghorne, priapic and insatiable, slinging it all over town, his sex drive so monstrous that it drove him mad. The murder trial of Dr Philip Polkinghorne at the High Court at Auckland hasmoved on to its core subject – sex, and its plentitude – as the Crown prosecution seeks to blacken the name and character of the man they accuse of strangling his wife Pauline, 63, to death on Easter Monday, April 5, 2021, and then having the audacity and skill to make it look like she hanged herself with an exhibit at the front of courtroom 11: a braided leather belt, coiled like a thin dry snake on a table next to a carafe of water.
There is no onus on the Crown to prove motive. But it doesn’t hurt to hazard a guess, and Polkinghorne, 71, was presented in court on Wednesday and Thursday as a sexual athlete undone by carnal desires. He had to have it. Nothing must stop him. An acceptable and merry version was described by Polkinghorne himself in a three-hour police interview he gave on the Monday afternoon of his wife’s death. It was played to a packed courtroom. Detective Ilona Walton asked: “When was the last time you were intimate with your wife?”
“I think Saturday,” he said. “Actually yesterday. Every day, just about.”
So much sex; he couldn’t be expected to remember. “I think it was Sunday morning,” he mused, sitting with his legs wide apart on the two-seater couch in an interview room at the College Hill police station. Detectives and forensic scientists were at that same time roaming through his Remuera house where Pauline’s body lay on the floor by the front steps. Polkinghorne found her, he said, when he came downstairs that morning in his dressing gown. Police asked him to come with them to College Hill. He got dressed in a pink shirt, jeans, sneakers, and a pair of brightly striped socks. When the interview finished, he put on another item he chose that morning: a jaunty hat.
Most of the remainder of Thursday’s court session was evidence given by Pauline’s brother Bruce Hanna. He did not appear to have a lot of time for his widowed brother-in-law. “We got on okay,” he said, making okay sound like something stuck to the bottom of his shoes. He was close with Pauline; it pained him that her marriage was making her unhappy, due in large part to Polkinghorne’s crazed or at least certainly busy philandering.
Philip Polkinghorne stands in the High Court at Auckland dock. Photo / Michael Craig
He said she told him Polkinghorne “had other women on the side”. He said she told him Polkinghorne “got her involved in group sex”. He said she told him Polkinghorne “wanted to do sex acts that she didn’t want to do, and that’s why he saw prostitutes”. He quoted from more of these kinds of excruciating conversations – and then the courtroom heard from Pauline herself, recorded over dinner with her brother and other family members. She spoke in a posh kind of drawl, someone forthright, direct, bossy, no one’s fool, and not content to live her life as her husband’s “sex doll”.
She said: “He’s a sex fiend.” And: “He wants to have sex with everybody.” Also: “He’s got a sexual appetite that’s extraordinary.” There was maybe a bit of pride in her husband’s virility as she continued to talk about group sex, hookers, and other various manoeuvrings of an open relationship that was plainly making her miserable. But she also said, numerous times: “I love him.” And, numerous times: “He loves me.”
There was something pathetic and sordid about it all. But what did Polkinghorne’s sex marathons have to do with Pauline’s tragic and violent death? The Crown wishes to reveal an unhappy marriage. They have hammered at it these past few days and signalled they will hammer at it again next week. Polkinghorne’s lawyer, Ron Mansfield, KC, wishes to advance the theory that Pauline died by suicide.
Mansfield cross-examined her brother on Thursday afternoon. He asked Bruce Hanna if he knew about an email from Pauline saying that she felt bullied at work, and was stressed by her job leading the Covid-19 vaccine response.
No, said her brother.
He asked him if he knew she had made a suicide attempt in 1992.
No, said her brother.
He asked him if he knew Pauline was on antidepressants and had been referred to a psychiatrist and was diagnosed with alcohol dependency syndrome in 2013.
There was something four-square and bracingly honest about Bruce Hanna. When he left the courtroom, he took no notice of Polkinghorne and walked past his brother-in-law like he didn’t exist.
