THREE KEY FACTS
Steve Braunias is an award-winning New Zealand journalist, author, columnist and editor.
OPINION
Week one of the most scandalous trial of the century – a Remuera ophthalmologist is accused of stuffing himself with hookers and methamphetamine, and strangling his wife to death but staging it to look like she hanged herself – was played out in front of a packed courtroom upstairs in the High Court at Auckland this week, exhausting in its many repeated claims of Dr Philip Polkinghorne’s alleged wickedness, exhausting in its cross-examination of police officers blundering hither and yon at what they rather quickly determined was a crime scene, and exhausting, too, on account of the High Court elevator breaking down on Monday morning. Justice has to be climbed to be seen.
Long, happy days for the dear old news media. The public vilifies us, but we are there for them in their hours of need for fresh updates from courtroom 11.
We occupy two benches – this is a good time for other accused villains to go to trial; no one will ever read about their sins – and we scarcely suffer a dull moment as we go at it on keyboard and Warwick 3B1 notebook, recording the amazing things said about Dr Polkinghorne in open court: “Sex fiend … sex workers… group sex … he was sexually demanding in unusual ways.”
Quite a lot of sex, quite a lot of drugs (police found 37g of methamphetamine stashed in almost every room of the Polkinghorne home; these are quantities that evoke Al Pacino’s Tony Montoya burying his face in cocaine in Scarface), and quite a lot of wealth.
The Polkinghorne money was the good money earned by the educated professional class of the eastern suburbs. It bought the doctor and his health manager wife a $4m home in Upland Rd. “Warning. Distressing content”, state the more sensitive news sites ahead of their Polkinghorne coverage; it ought to have been placed in front of the police 3D video played in court that roamed through the Polkinghorne home, and showed us a boring, impersonal castle decorated with a few bland landscapes, a bookshelf containing only a few bland reference books, and a massive, savagely designed, very distressing silver-framed mirror in the hallway that looked like it had come from the set of Game of Thrones.
The body of Pauline Hanna was found by St John paramedics who arrived at the big, blah home with white walls and beige carpeting on the morning of Easter Monday, April 5, 2021. “She’s hanged herself,” Polkinghorne said in his 111 call. An operator asked him to cut her down. He said he did as he was told, and laid the body out on the downstairs landing.
He covered it with a duvet. Police photographs showed it pulled up to her eyes. A pillow had been placed under her head. It was, said Polkinghorne’s lawyer, Ron Mansfield KC, the tragic suicide of a woman with mental health problems who was on medication for depression.
It was, said Crown prosecutor Alysha McClintock, “like something out of a crime novel” – her trashy narrative of events asked the jury to picture Polkinghorne strangling her in a methamphetamine rage, then having the awful idea to carry his wife’s body down the stairs, fetch an orange nylon rope, tie it in granny knots to an upstairs railing, secure it to a plaited leather belt, and garrotte her neck with it to leave a pattern.
Can this be the sinister work of the little old man, 71, who sits in court modelling his taste in loud socks (floral, chatty, spotted)?
McClintock’s opening address on Monday was a devastating portrait of a foul beast slouching around the eastern suburbs, driven to murder by his insatiable lusts for more sex, more women, and more variations of sex with women (two was company, a threesome was the crowd he liked), a slave to the P pipe, the white beautiful fumes filling his head with a desire to kill his wife as a way of removing an obstacle to enjoying his “double life”, his “fantasy life”.
Some of the trial has existed as a quaint directory of eastern suburbs life – the Polkinghornes both trained at City Fitness in Newmarket, both got their coffee at that Remuera institution, the Benson Road Deli – but its theme is a lurid story of white mischief, the ruling class gone mad.
The police case against the Auckland eye doctor is based on a variation of the famous joke about football player George Best. Polkinghorne, supposedly, spent much of his money on women and drugs; the rest, he wasted.
Every prosecutor prays they come up with a zinger to stun the jury. McClintock is not a great prose stylist, but routinely works her way towards one nicely composed line that has the simplicity of truth.
Polkinghorne, she said, claimed his marriage was “quite good”, actually “perfect”. It was neither of those things, she said, and then rolled out her zinger: “It wasn’t even plain-old good.”
A clear sign of the seriousness of the prosecution against Polkinghorne is that McClintock, the Crown solicitor, has called on the services of Brian Dickey, the previous Crown solicitor and her former boss. Dickey has the air of a guv’nor, even though he looks like he’s just come in off a farm or fishing boat, chucked on a suit, and not had time to brush his hair. He wears an old raincoat: “That old coat which never lets you down,” as Rod Stewart once serenaded.
McClintock and Dickey make a formidable pair, but Polkinghorne is defended, inevitably, by Ron Mansfield. Not since the fall of the house of Barry Hart has an Auckland criminal lawyer been so ubiquitous, so present at high-profile cases.
Mansfield was in majestic form this week. Hart could be careless, and tried the patience of judges; Mansfield has seldom had to be interrupted by Justice Graham Lang.
Lang has the long white locks of an ageing wildman – he looked a lot like the bandleader of the Mike Oldfield tribute band I saw at the Bruce Mason Centre in Takapuna on Thursday night, performing the whole of Tubular Bells — but presides over the trial with calm efficiency, the centre of a furiously scribbling media storm (“Sex fiend …Group sex” etc).
Mansfield begins each court day by chomping a royal gala apple. Perhaps it serves as a satisfying metaphor and warm-up for tearing into witnesses. He treated two detectives with considerable scorn on Wednesday, and they both admitted failings.
On Thursday, the Crown produced a forensic rope analyst, Dr Robert Chisnall, of Kingston, in Ontario, Canada. This sounded very exciting. But Mansfield cut him down to size the second he began his cross-examination, and asked him whether he was actually a doctor. He said he wasn’t. “Thank you,” said Mansfield, “Mr Chisnall.”
The rope is vital to the case against Polkinghorne. The very first suspicion that Pauline’s death may not have been a suicide came when Sergeant Christian Iogha performed a “tension test” on the orange rope hanging from the balustrade. He gave it a yank. It felt too loose to support a body. But no photographs or video were made of the yanking, Iogha conceded to Mansfield. “In hindsight, possibly a recording would have been a good option.” In any case, Mansfield pointed out, of course the rope was loose: Polkinghorne had cut it down and untied the knots.
As for Mr Chisnall, the forensic rope analyst who has no formal training or academic position related to ropes, or knots, or forensics, but who said he quite liked rock climbing, Mansfield asked him about tests he performed with ropes tied to balustrades “on your back porch” – perhaps laboratories are scarce in Kingston, Ontario.
The results, Mr Chisnall said, suggested that the rope was too long and too loose to support a body. Mansfield then showed him photos of ESR staff removing the balustrade and rope from the Polkinghorne house, and wrapping them in cardboard for forensic examination. He asked Mr Chisnall if they were sent to his home. He said they were not.
Mansfield then informed him the same kind of rope could be bought from Supercheap Auto, and asked one of the great questions in the history of New Zealand criminal cross-examination: “Have you heard of Supercheap Auto?”
Mr Chisnall said he had not.
Mansfield informed him the same kind of rope could also be bought on eBay. Yes, said Mr Chisnall, he had heard of eBay, but no offer was made to send him the rope on eBay or from the hallowed premises of Supercheap Auto. He made do with whatever ropes he had lying around at his house in Kingston, Ontario. “They would behave in the same way,” explained Mr Chisnall.
It took 18 months for Operation Kian to charge Polkinghorne with his wife’s murder. “They upturned Dr Polkinghorne’s life,” Mansfield told the jury in his opening address.
His client sat behind him on Thursday, pressing his fists into his forehead while witnesses discussed the rope that Polkinghorne claimed his wife used to commit suicide.
A book of police photos was placed on the table where he rested his elbows. They were taken in his house. There were bottles of San Pellegrino on bedside tables, Strepsils in a drawer, and three slices of bread in a red four-slice De’Longhi toaster on a kitchen bench. He said he came downstairs to make tea and toast for Pauline on the morning of April 5, 2021, but saw her body slumped forward on a chair … He pressed his knuckles against his head. His eyes were closed.
The Herald will be covering the case in a daily podcast, Accused: The Polkinghorne Trial. You can follow the podcast at iHeartRadio, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, through The Front Page feed, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Police said the motorcyclist fled the scene immediately after the crash.