Philip Polkinghorne’s lawyer called two pathologists who believe the circumstances of Pauline Hanna’s death suggest she committed suicide. Video / Corey Fleming
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 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.
Steve Braunias is an award-winning New Zealand journalist, author, columnist and editor.
OPINION
Time, I think, to take pause in the proceedings of the Dr Philip Polkinghorne murder trial conducted these past seven - seven! - weeks in an upstairs courtroom at the High Court ofAuckland, that fort of justice, that old pile of bricks spooked by the cries of the dead.
The trial is delicately poised. The defence is set to call its final witnesses. Crown, defence, and the judge will all need a whole day each to address the jury, to express their deepest thoughts on what has passed before us in the matter of the death of Pauline Hanna.
Court was delayed until just after midday on Wednesday. And so a pause opened up, and this reporter, this faithful diarist of the Trial of the Century with the caveat this century is only 24 years old, went to the basement Law Society library to ponder and read, and eat a container of raisins and pretzels in peace.
The public foyer outside courtroom 11 has been turned into a brassy kind of joint. A crowd of about 60 with no personal connection to the case gather every day to watch the Polkinghorne trial. On Monday, court staff had enough of their crowding around the front doors, and installed a velvet rope. A guard told them to stand behind it. The herd stood behind it, murmuring and mooing; the guard raised her voice, and said: “This is a lawful direction!”
That shut them up. It killed the vibe, but they rallied and soon regained their humour. Good on them. Open justice is an important principle. They have every right to attend, and that includes the Year 11 schoolboy from Kristin College who showed up on Wednesday morning. “I have started the Law Mooting Club at school,” he explained.
It’s exceedingly rare for trials to attract the peasantry. The last time I saw anything like it was 2019 in the matter of the death of Grace Millane. The public gallery was always packed and it was always quiet, as in hushed, as in the sense of national shame was so great - a visitor to New Zealand was killed and buried in a f**king suitcase - that no one ever said anything, at morning or afternoon recess, at lunch, anytime or anywhere in the vicinity of the High Court.
Polkinghorne’s trial has a different quality: excitement. The deep feeling and sympathy for Pauline Hanna is surrounded by the thrill of so, so many frankly tabloid revelations - group sex!, sex with prostitutes!, sex every day!, and other exclamatious behaviour as displayed by a Remuera surgeon who is accused of killing his wife and disguising it as a suicide.
Polkinghorne himself, small and madly socked, sits as a kind of mute bystander in courtroom 11. He did not elect to give evidence. His defence is that he woke up on the morning of April 5, 2021, to find his wife had hanged herself.
His version of events aroused immediate suspicion and a 16-month police investigation until he was arrested for murder; his private life has been tipped out in public during the trial, shaken the numerous jangling skeletons in his closet, staged the drama of a very active sex life in front of a horrified island nation which clings to its early settler puritan values.
Let’s be honest. You don’t like him. You never did, not since that famous photo was published not long after Pauline Hanna’s death. It captured Polkinghorne at a social event in Parnell when he wore an astonishing pair of red pants with zips in them.
Ageing groover, midlife crisis made flesh, too horny for his own good - the snap was taken by Norrie Montgomery, that great modern chronicler of desperate Aucklanders rushing off to drink fizz and scoff sticky vol-au-vents at the opening of an envelope.
The most devastating line in Daddy, Sylvia Plath’s classic poem full of devastations, is when she declares, “The villagers never liked you.” The villagers of New Zealand have risen up against a red-trousered ophthalmologist, shaken their pitchforks.
His sex worker bill was nearly $300,000 (including the gift of a washing machine)! He had sex with his sex worker of preference, Madison Ashton, in the marital bed (“Let us love each other and leave the future to the future,” he wrote to her)! He searched Google on how to make a glass pipe out of a lightbulb to smoke P (“Take a 60-watt bulb and break off the black stuff on the bottom with a flathead screwdriver”, advised some crackhead)!
Pauline Hanna and Philip Polkinghorne at an event in December 2018. Photo / Norrie Montgomery
But so what and who cares, if all that happened is he woke up one morning to find his wife had hanged herself? What worth is the psychic revenge taken out on Polkinghorne - a gifted surgeon, loved by his patients - by a little uptight puritan colony? Is the Crown case based on this kind of static, on this seething puritan crackle of white noise? What’s the message? What’s the signal? What’s the frequency, Kenneth?
Wednesday was the 29th day of the trial. Its 81st witness was a police forensic IT analyst. His fringe was cut like a Beatle mop-top. He kind of looked like Ringo. He talked a lot about iCloud storage. More static, more white noise... I thought back to my peaceful morning in the Law Society library.
Over raisins and pretzels, I cast my eye over the contents of ancient volumes, and read a history of English law in the 11th and 12th century. One passage dealt with standards of proof. They were not especially intellectually robust standards: “Many of these methods were primitive, oracular, like interrogations of supernatural forces or beings…The Domesday Book shows a number of ordeals of hot iron.”
Bring out the hot iron. Let us interrogate phantoms, deities, ectoplasms. Seven weeks into the Polkinghorne murder trial, with Thursday marking the milestone of Day 30, all possibilities must be explored. The truth is out there.
