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.
And so to the second closing performance in the grand Auckland opera of the Dr Philip Polkinghorne murder trial. It was actually a bit muted. It wasn’t especially operatic. For eight solid weeks,the trial has enchanted the nation with its consistently shocking and graphic portrait of sex enjoyed by small men in high places; on Tuesday, though, the floor belonged to defence lawyer Ron Mansfield KC, a demon at cross-exam, sometimes frightening witnesses into incoherence, but his closing address (more to come, on Wednesday) felt… kind of fussy, distracted.
Polkinghorne is accused of killing his wife. The public gallery, yet again, was full in courtroom 11 at the High Court at Auckland on Tuesday, day 33 of an epic trial. Proceedings began at the unfamiliar early time of 9.30am. The herd mooed and murmured behind a security rope outside the court. “Steve!” cried out one of the regulars, and gave a thumbs-up as I ran inside.
The opening hour belonged to Crown prosecutor Alysha McClintock. She gave a day-long closing address on Monday and returned to say more, which is to say she said the same thing more and more. She repeatedly appealed for common sense, and its absence thereof in Polkinghorne’s defence that his wife died by suicide. “It makes no sense,” she said. “It doesn’t make any sense… Does this make sense?…It makes no sense.” In case there was any doubt, she held the sides of her lectern, leaned forward, and said: “It. Doesn’t. Make. Any. Sense.”
The remainder of Tuesday belonged to Mansfield. His closing address was set to heart-wrenching melodies. His voice shook with grief at the “insults and indignities” suffered by Polkinghorne, accused of murdering his wife Pauline Hanna at their Remuera home on April 5, 2021. “This is a trial run by emotion,” he told the jury, emotionally, “and the victim is logic.” He spoke at immense volume. He stood with his hands in his pockets. Jurors now and then met his eye.
This reporter, this imperturbable diarist of a murder trial like no other with its strong Victorian whiff of scandal and its central figure of tiny 71-year-old ophthalmologist, is grateful to author CK Stead for his emailed remarks that the trial can be seen as classic opera – grand passions, the eternal war of the sexes, a rich man womanising and a wronged woman dying. He is right. The wealth and pageantry (or what passes for pageantry in boring Remuera, the trial’s setting), the ballet of sex workers (Polkinghorne seemed to have a roster, including his special amour Madison Ashton) and the swelling orchestras of death… There is a timelessness to Polkinghorne, the opera. It has nowt to do with public policy or race relations. It is the secret diary of respectable New Zealand having too much sex.
If the prosecution turned it into a version of La traviata (plot summary in courtroom 11: eminent surgeon Polkinghorne killed his wife to be with Ashton, courtesan for hire), defence preferred Madama Butterfly, ie the heroine dies by suicide. Hanna was 63. She hanged herself, said Mansfield.
His closing address on Tuesday formed a libretto in three acts.
Philip Polkinghorne and Ron Mansfield KC arrive at Auckland High Court. Photo / Jason Oxenham
ACT 1
An opening act of a tragic opera presents a problem, suggests conflict, foreshadows the dread finger of fate up to no good. But Mansfield said there was no problem in the marriage of Mr and Mrs Polkinghorne. Certainly, he saw other women. Definitely, his sexual appetite was ravenous. Well, said Mansfield, Hanna knew all about it. They had an open marriage.
And so not a lot happened in Act 1. Just a married couple having a lot of sex with each other, and sometimes in groups. As for Polkinghorne’s alleged methamphetamine use, Mansfield said the 37g of the crystal delirium found at his house proved nothing substantial. Maybe, he suggested, Polkinghorne bought it in bulk, and it was “just sitting around the house”. No problem. “No relevance.” No bony finger of fate pointing to a violent death on April 5, 2021.
But there was something else, something insidious, that would lead to tragedy. “Pauline,” said Mansfield, “was vulnerable and had vulnerabilities.” There is likely more to follow on Wednesday, when Mansfield resumes his closing address and sings an aria of anxious, depressed, self-loathing Hanna, who died, he says, by suicide.
For the second day in a row, Polkinghorne’s son Taine sported a bowtie, Tuesday’s model in bold polka dot. His socks, too, were a probable tribute to his dad: madly patterned, just like Polkinghorne favours, every day for 33 days in court.
ACT 2
Another quiet act. There was much activity, but Mansfield’s closing address was soundtrack by a single small violin, sawing at strings of sympathy – all of Act 2 was set after Hanna’s death, and Mansfield attempted to restore Polkinghorne as a grieving widower who ought to be seen as a deeply sympathetic figure.
The police investigation, he said, was an “insult”. So was the arrest. So, too, is the trial. Mansfield invited the jury to regard Polkinghorne as an outcast, hounded by police and the media, isolated, a suspect in his wife’s death, when in reality all that happened is what he told police happened when they attended his 111 call: he got up in the morning and found her lifeless body slumped forward on a chair, a belt around her neck.
In this state of exile and grief, continued Mansfield, Polkinghorne reached out to Ashton, and the two developed “a growing friendship”.
It was a day of hard rain and a cold, cold wind outside the High Court, but it was just as windy inside.
Pauline Hanna and Philip Polkinghorne at an event in December 2018. Photo / Norrie Montgomery
ACT 3
And so to the death of Hanna. Mansfield said, “The pathology provides the complete answer to this case. The pathology provides more than a reasonable doubt, it provides proof that she died by way of an incomplete or partial hanging.”
There was an absence of a struggle. There was an absence of internal or external injuries to the neck. There was an absence of blood, skin or DNA beneath Hanna’s acrylic nails. “Her injuries don’t support a homicide…There is no evidence for homicide.” How, then, could her death be a homicide? “It sounds absurd because it is. It sounds unachievable because it is.”
It was around then that Mansfield taunted McClintock: “The prosecution case is like a binge of every Murder She Wrote all in one session by our own Angela Lansbury presenting.” This is wildly unflattering to McClintock. She bears no resemblance to the matronly Lansbury. In her snug little two-piece woollen suits, she has a kind of Jackie Onassian sense of style. As for Mansfield, the buttons on his suit jacket are feeling the strain.
He will close his closing on Wednesday morning. Justice Graham Lang will then sum up. He told the jury he expected they might be sent out to deliberate as early as 3pm. Polkinghorne, the opera, is in the hands of the critics.
