THREE KEY FACTS
- Philip Polkinghorne has been found not guilty of murdering his wife Pauline Hanna.
- The nine-week trial has come to an end on Monday.
- The Crown alleged he strangled her and staged her death to look like a suicide. The defence said there was no evidence of a homicide.
Steve Braunias is an award-winning New Zealand journalist, author, columnist and editor.
OPINION
And so it was ruled all for nothing, fantastic amounts of entirely insufficient evidence as gathered by a Z-team of detectives who only succeeded in not just blackening the name of an eminent surgeon but completely trashing it amid the avid spectation of a public feasting on the trial of the century.
Dr Philip Polkinghorne has been found not guilty of the murder of his wife Pauline Hanna. The foreperson delivered his verdict in courtroom 11 in the High Court of Auckland at 2.21pm on Monday. It took 16 months to charge him, eight weeks to put him on trial at the High Court of Auckland, and barely seven hours for a jury to declare it was all, just as Polkinghorne’s lawyer had put it, “a grave nonsense”.
Epic trial. Epic fail for the police. Epic vindication for Polkinghorne, who enters immortality as the horny ophthalmologist who spent $296,646.23 on hookers, was busted with 37g of excellent methamphetamine, and he says he woke up on the Easter Monday morning of April 5, 2021 to find his wife Pauline Hanna dead with a belt around her neck. “She’s hung herself,” he told 111, and then, for the first time in the massive ordeal that followed, said out loud the name that everyone in New Zealand came to know: “Philip. Philip Polkinghorne.”
He went by the sobriquet of Polky, that perky nickame which signalled the comedy of his character. He wore mad patterned socks every day to court, and his son wore mad spotted bowties every day in court as a tribute. Polky used to wear bowties every day, too, before Pauline’s death, back when he was just another educated professional medico schnook earning $750,000 in a good year and running around town in his white Merc with the licence plate RETINA to keep his endless appointments with sex workers.
He was an Auckland nobody for 67 years. He was happy. He lived in a big white house in the National Party zone of Remuera. He owned two Hoteres and a McCahon; “I’ve had to sell them for this,” he said to me one day during a break in court.
We chatted a fair bit. I ingratiated myself over the eight weeks and tried to size him up. He was not of great size. Throughout, the Crown presented him as a malignant sex dwarf, an odious sex midget, an evil sex elf; really what they were wanting to impress upon the jury was a portrait of a killer sex gimp. But they were all distractions. To find him guilty, the jury had to go by the forensic evidence. They delivered a note to Justice Graham Lang on Monday morning. It was a message of two halves, of profound contradictions.
The first sentence read: “Most of the people on the jury do not think there is enough evidence to support Pauline committing suicide.”
At which point the rational expectation was that the jury thought she was murdered. But the second, baffling sentence concerned the charge of murder. It read: “Some people on the jury do not think that the Crown has supplied enough evidence.”
So not suicide. But not murder, either. What? I spoke with Pauline’s brother Bruce Hanna after that message was delivered. He was trying to decipher it. We agreed that the crucial word was “some”. That could mean, we reasoned, maybe two jurors thought the Crown had failed to supply enough evidence; perhaps the rest, the other nine, were satisfied the Crown had met the threshold. But we were proven wrong. Maybe it was the other way around. Maybe only two jurors felt there was enough evidence for a conviction.
After we spoke, I went back inside courtroom 11, that hothouse where everyone wilted these past eight weeks, to check on the jury’s document. A word had been crossed out. I wanted to take a closer look to see which word.
The foreperson’s handwriting was very nice and his spelling was immaculate. The word crossed out was “everyone”. It had originally read, “Everyone on the jury do not think that the Crown has supplied enough evidence.”
It was a prophecy of their verdict.
I interviewed Bruce Hanna about an hour after the verdict.
We sat in one of the mean little rooms in the High Court of Auckland where I have interviewed many other families of either the victim or the accused, all of them stunned in some which way by the verdict; Bruce, too, was stunned, had not seen it coming. I asked: “What do you think of Dr Philip Polkinghorne?” He said what he thought. And that was that ”he got away with murder”.
I liked Bruce a lot. He was a straight arrow and had the kind of long, friendly farmer’s face that would make you spot him in a crowd anywhere in the world as a Kiwi. He couldn’t wait to get back to his Hawke’s Bay farm, to the dogs. “To walk the land,” he said. But he admitted he’d come to like Auckland in the two months of the trial. He persisted in coming to court every single day. Every morning he took his seat in the front row of the public gallery. It was tough for him to go through it and there were times when he slunk back to his hotel room on Beach Rd and just lay on the bed, exhausted.
He said in the little High Court room, “I knew the day he called me at 11.30 in the morning on the 5th of April 2021 that my sister never took her own life. And then the day after that, he phoned me and asked me if I had a copy of Pauline’s will, in a quite a normal voice. And I said, ‘Why the f**k would I have a copy of Pauline’s will?’
“He said, ‘Oh, it’s okay. I just wondered.’ And then hung up. That was like the second conversation I had with him. His wife had supposedly taken her own life, and I thought, ‘No way. That’s just bullshit.’
He will think that for the rest of his days. Weirdly, and fortunately, I doubt it will be with any damaging or permanent bitterness. He has a pragmatism about him. But this is to simplify him as some kind of rustic; he was more complex than that, more sensitive. I asked him about Pauline. They were close. “We laughed a lot,” he said, “and I still laugh with her now. I still talk to her. Yeah. Still.”
Pauline was 63. Her cause of death was compression of the neck. “I’m safe, darling,” she told her niece, Bruce’s daughter Rose, at a dinner party that was recorded and played in court. “Please think I’m safe.”
Bruce remembered that night. He cooked his speciality, chana masala. Pauline had shocked everyone by telling them about having group sex with her husband and prostitutes, about how unhappy she was, about how he would get so angry (“on the roof”, as she put it) that he was out of control, but she loved him, she loved him, she loved him, and he loved her, he loved her, he loved her – yeah, hell of a dinner party. “Here’s the real oil,” Pauline warned them.
Her family never liked Polkinghorne. They loathed him. Except for her younger sister, Tracey, who was a witness for the defence, and claimed Pauline had once tried to die by suicide. Bruce said, “For her to fly all the way over here, give her evidence of court, not even say hello to us, and walk out and get on a plane and fly back to England – that’s his doing.”
Bruce’s wife Shelley was in the interview room, too, with Rose, and Rose’s brother Jacob. She said, “Everything that’s come about in the trial about Philip – to have got all that detail over eight weeks, it’s a huge gift. Because everybody’s been sitting there thinking, ‘What a terrible man.’ You know, no matter what the verdict is, everyone’s saying, ‘Wow. He’s a terrible man.’”
He was a strange guy. He had beautiful blue eyes and a mischievous smile. He looked a bit like – okay all bald men look alike, and all short bald men are replicants – Dave Dobbyn. He talked a lot, rabbited on, was quick with a joke; he was also a good listener, and had a warmth to him. He was made for company. Throughout the trial, witnesses talked about how great he was with patients. He put his patients first. His patients loved him. If his patients were hard-up, he would volunteer to forego his surgeon’s fee. I found all of this easy to believe. I liked Polky.
I shook his hand on Monday morning and wished him good luck. He started talking rapidly about how unbelievable it was to have had to sit in court and have to listen to the police evidence against him, such as it was; he mentioned the so-called “tension test”, that first, crucial step that set the whole police investigation down its path of suspicion.
It was on the morning of Pauline’s death. Her body lay beneath bedding at the bottom of the stairs. Polkinghorne had described how he had found her slumped forward on a chair, her neck inside a belt that was tied to a rope from an upstairs balustrade. Sergeant Christian Iogha tugged on the rope. It instantly came loose and he deducted that it could not have supported any weight. He mentioned it to a colleague, who inked a message on the palm of his hand: IC. It was police code for suspicious circumstances. He held up his palm to other police at the scene. Things were already in motion.
Later that day, Polkinghorne was interviewed at great length by a detective at the College Hill police station. It was played in court. Polkinghorne raved and rambled and blathered and prattled on endlessly, about all sorts of crap – French Earl Grey tea (“Isn’t it fantastic!”), about doing the housework (“I’m not a saint, don’t get me wrong. I’m not going around polishing the floors”), about the large size of Pauline’s wardrobe (“Some would say excessive”). I have watched countless police interviews and this was the worst. Polkinghorne came across as shifty, rattled, seized with the desire to make small talk – mere hours after his wife of 24 years had died, her face blue and her skin cold.
One day last week I stopped for a yarn with Polky. It was during a long adjournment. He always stood up to talk – he had good manners, never swore, accepted the fact I was there as part of a massive press contingent monetising his trial – and launched into a speech about conservation. “Every time I see a pine tree, I lose the will to live,” he said. He went on, and on, with asides, jokes, fragments, and segued into other subjects, most of it incoherently, just a babble of words. Kendall Roy, from Succession: “Words are just, what? Nothing. Complicated air flow.”
Anyway the point I’m trying to make here is that the Polkinghorne monologue in the courtroom that day was exactly the kind of rubbish he was spouting in the police interview. What seemed so revealing of suspicious behaviour in that little room at the College Hill copshop – Polkinghorne in jeans and a pink shirt, with a white hat beside him on the two-seater couch – now struck me as just the way a slightly crazy old or at least definitely eccentric guy liked to talk, in random patterns, enthusiastically, a bit deranged but in no way suggestive that he was some kind of psycho.
Polkinghorne’s lawyer, Ron Mansfield KC, had a more tangible reading of the three-hour police interview. He quite correctly pointed out that everything Polkinghorne said – about Pauline’s death, not about French Earl Grey tea or whatever – checked out. Every single detail, corroborated. None of it exposed as an outright lie or a complete falsehood. It had been a long and intense interview. He hadn’t eaten all day – a muffin bought for him by police lay half-eaten on the table. And throughout, for all his ravings, he said things about coming down the stairs from bed that morning to boil the jug, to pop in three slices of bread into the toaster, to then find Pauline and to talk about the rope, the belt, her position on the chair – all of it, backed up.
Two pathologists, called as expert witnesses for the defence, agreed with each other that there were no injuries you would expect to find in a case of homicidal strangling. They were crucial to the defence case and Polkinghorne spent the first four weeks of the trial, when the prosecution threw everything at him, waiting for them to appear. He said to me one day that the science would clear him. After the first pathologist appeared, I asked him one day, “Do you think the tide is turning?”' He replied quickly, “Oh, it’s turned. It’s already turned.”
He spent a lot of time typing with two fingers – we have so much in common – on a laptop. Long paragraphs would come and go; the screen kept moving down as he made terrific progress. He asked me one day for the name of my book publisher. The next day I said to him, “You asked me that because you’re writing a book, aren’t you?” He said that a good title would be Guilty Until Proven Innocent.
Two hours after the verdict, I received an email from the mysterious Madison Ashton.
Mysterious, because she failed to appear in court as a prosecution witness, potentially its star and most devastating witness - the Crown case was that Polkinghorne killed his wife to be with her. They had first met when Polkinghorne hired her in her role as a sex worker in Sydney. They continued to see each other, for years, and met up three weeks after Pauline’s death at the Mount Cook Lakeside Villa. They were planning to shack up together, most likely in Sydney – intercepted messages revealed they were looking at real estate listings in Millers Point (“A historic enclave with 19th-century terraced houses and Harbour Bridge views”).
The public gallery who packed our courtroom 11, and the entire watching nation who were entranced by the Polkinghorne trial, eagerly awaited Ashton to appear. But she went missing. The cops went looking for her. Kind of predictably, the detectives on this case did not exactly cover themselves in glory. They failed. She sent me the first of numerous emails around that time. I asked her where she was and she said, “Morocco.” Not really in walking distance to the High Court of Auckland.
Her very first email to me expanded on her dim view of the police investigation. She wrote, “Hi Steve, You keep referring to me as sex worker, which is my occupation but I was in a de facto relationship with Philip and you’ve never once just said de facto partner Madison Ashton, also we were engaged so I could be referred to as ex fiancé Madison.
”The crown prosecution have maintained their one-dimensional stance on me, Same goes for the incompetent New Zealand police. The prosecution and the New Zealand police refuse to see me as a loving girlfriend. I am literally Pauline 2.0…Police and the prosecution have made so many serious mistakes with my evidence and they literally refused to use the bulk of my really damming evidence. I honestly put my life on the line to go get some of that stuff.
“I doubt he will be convicted. And the police want to do everything to distract from the mistakes they made initially and have done everything to smoke screen and protect themselves. I feel so sad about the whole situation with Pauline and me. We were both victims... Regards, ex defacto partner Madison Ashton.”
There were more emails over the next few weeks: “Philip had it all, hot wife, he had a hot de facto girlfriend, he could have bookings for days with sex workers to blow some steam. And yet he still f***ed it up which says a whole lot more about men than it ever will about women.”
Both the Crown and defence pointed to Pauline’s use of Zopiclone, a sleeping pill. To the Crown, it was circumstantial evidence that Polkinghorne was able to easily overpower her, and kill her; to the defence, it was circumstantial evidence that her fragile mental state was further damaged by mixing alcohol with Zopiclone, and led to her decision to die by suicide.
Ashton: “That stuff works just like Xanax yeah you build up a resistance but it’s still works brilliantly especially when it’s with one glass of wine. You are out cold. I remember many times getting up to go to the bathroom on 1/3 of a tablet and I would be staggering, sliding against the wall to make it to the toilet. And then lurch back to bed.”
She loathes him, detests him. All of her messages expressed that in very certain and betrayed terms – with one exception. She reached out one day after I wrote about Polkinghorne’s apparent fondness for methamphetamine. She wrote, “Your latest instalment brought back memories of Philip being high on crystal meth and how much fun he was. He would dance around in my Camilla pink gown, exactly like a fabulous elderly gay man.”
There’s a tenderness to that email. It reads like they shared some kind of love.
All over, the end, no more of the trial that began in the dead of winter on Monday, July 29, and lasted eight weeks and one day, 36 days in total. It was an incredible thing to experience and I never really knew which way to think – that is, there were days when I was convinced he was the killer sex gimp of legend, others when I thought the cops conducted a botched and bungling investigation based on nothing substantial, and that he would and should walk.
It was a trial like no other before it, and nothing else can surely ever match it. Polkinghorne was not Rich List rich but he was a superb representative of eastern suburbs wealth, perched above the lovely placid waters of Ōrākei Basin in his $4m pad. Many murder trials are about lowlifes, losers, the financially illiterate; one defence witness was Polkinghorne’s investment advisor from JB Were. And so it was a saga of how the other half live, with their shopping at Karen Walker and Trelise Cooper, their holidays at the five-bedroom summer house with a glass pavilion in Coromandel, their long hours and executive status and happy white privilege.
It was sex, a lot of it; “Philip has a sexual appetite which is extraordinary,” Pauline said that night over chana masala with her family. We heard about Polkinghorne’s regular Friday appointments with a sex worker in Northcote courtesy of her amazingly nosey neighbours who appeared as witnesses for the prosecution. We heard about his many messages to Madison Ashton, eg the one where she sent him a photo of her surgically enlarged ass, and he wrote, “That pretty special butt will create a new dimension for your business, and will drive a tsunami of lust and will monetise your body further. For me, I get to f**k you endlessly.”
It was the defence performance of a lifetime, a masterpiece, as conducted by Ron Mansfield KC. No one else could have danced his way through that long Crown case as skilfully or as aggressively. Mansfield is the most famous defence lawyer of the age for very good reasons. Before him, there was Barry Hart; in cross-examination, police hate Mansfield with the same rage that cops from a previous generation used to hate Hart. The difference is that none of them were ever scared of Hart. He wasn’t exactly a genius at dismantling a witness. Mansfield, though, was a frightening opponent in the Polkinghorne trial. It was not a collegial trial. There was real animosity between Crown and defence. The stakes were high. Crown prosecutors Alysha McClintock and Brian Dickey seemed to have joined the queue of people who loathed Polkinghorne; they will be shattered by the verdict.
But it was always going to be hard verging on impossible to get a guilty verdict across the line. The most obvious clue was in the 16 months it took for police to arrest Polkinghorne. They just never had enough to go on. The case was entirely circumstantial. One of Polkinghorne’s passions is collecting dictionaries (another is Winston Churchill); there are a number of them in bookshelves seen in police photos of his house. I looked up a range of online dictionaries one day in court to parse the definition of “circumstantial”. It was interesting reading.
Merriam Webster defined it as, “Everything from which a jury may infer the existence of a fact but which does not probe the existence of the fact directly.”
Britannica: “Everything not drawn from direct observation of a fact.”
I liked these but the one I thought got its nature best was Cambridge. Its definition: “Murky, blurry, slippery, you never know.”
Yeah. Murky, like the small injuries to Pauline’s body, which defence pathologists said were meaningless. Blurry, like the CCTV footage of Polkinghorne with two companions at his Auckland Eye offices late one night, which the Crown suggested might have been a methamphetamine session but had nothing to back up that claim. Slippery, like the IT evidence that Polkinghorne deleted his WhatsApp history of messages with Madison Ashton, during a break in his police interview. None of it proving anything; all of it leading towards reasonable doubt. You never know.
The jury asked to hear the 111 call in court last Thursday. Polkinghorne broke down listening to it. He really howled. He could not stop. It was awful to witness and of course, it occurred to think that it was a sham, an act, a phoney performance to work on the sympathy of the jury; it also occurred to think he meant it.
“My wife’s dead, she’s hung herself,” he told the operator.
“Why do you believe she’s dead?”
“Because I can’t feel a pulse, she’s blue.”
“Do you think she’s beyond any help?”
“Yeah yeah.”
That’s where it started and that’s where, the jury has ruled, it should have ended. “She had so much to look forward to in life,” Bruce Hanna said in the little downstairs room in the High Court on Monday afternoon. It was sad saying goodbye to him. It was sad saying goodbye to Pauline’s best friend Pheasant Riordan, too; she was crying when she left the court, and we gave each other a hug. Polkinghorne gave a brief statement to the media on his way out: “We can grieve and let Pauline rest in peace and that is the best gift we can possibly give her.”
Poor Pauline. She was 63. She had always wanted a bulldog, Bruce said. I asked Polkinghorne one Monday what he had got up to in the weekend. He said he had walked the bulldog that Pauline always wanted.
