This year the Herald’s award-winning newsroom produced a range of first-class journalism, including exploring the NCEA and UE results of every college around NZ, the collapse of the Du Val property empire, revealing claims a former funeral director at Tipene Funerals was swindling grieving clients and charting the 10-year police probe that brought down Wayne Doyle and the Head Hunters.
This summer we’re bringing back some of the best-read Premium articles of 2024. In September after a nine week trial that gripped the nation, Philip Polkinghorne was acquitted of murdering his wife Pauline Hanna. The Herald covered the investigation and trial from the very beginning. Today we take a look back at a selection of the coverage.
Sex, drugs and despair: Inside the Polkinghorne murder trial
Pauline Hanna had been catching up with two of her oldest friends at a Hawke’s Bay restaurant in January 2020 when the light-hearted nature of the dinner and drinks took an abruptly dark turn. The then-61-year-old - who had about 14 months left to live - was silent as she outstretched her thumbs and put both hands around her neck.
“He tried to strangle me,” John Riordan recalled Hanna explaining as she broke the silence, moments after saying that she “had to be very, very careful” around husband Philip Polkinghorne because she wasn’t ever sure when he “would blow up”.
Both Riordan and his wife, Pheasant, shared similar accounts of the chilling moment as they took turns giving evidence in August at the Auckland eye surgeon’s murder trial, one of the nation’s most salacious and closely followed criminal cases in recent memory.
But it wasn’t the only hair-raising outcry jurors would learn about as they spent eight weeks sifting through whiplash evidence - facts, recollections and innuendo that jerked back and forth into one of two camps, a ceaseless tug-of-war of two starkly different narratives.
Murder or suicide?
After 10 hours of deliberations spanning two days, jurors rejected the Crown’s case that it was murder - or even manslaughter.
Craig Kapitan and George Block examine the trial which gripped the nation.
Steve Braunias: When Polkinghorne told me the tide had turned in his favour
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.”
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.”
After nine weeks, Steve Braunias wrapped up his commentary of the trial.
Read the full opinion piece here.
What the jury heard on each day of the nine-week trial
After nine weeks spanning three calendar months, jurors in the strange and salacious – and more often than not riveting – Philip Polkinghorne murder trial returned a not guilty verdict.
It took 10 hours of closed-door discussions for the group to reach its decision regarding the 71-year-old Auckland eye surgeon, who had been accused of fatally strangling wife Pauline Hanna, 63, and staging the scene inside their Remuera home to look like a suicide.
Jurors were tasked with sifting through the evidence of more than 80 Crown and defence witnesses whose individual trips to the witness box in the High Court at Auckland spanned from 10 minutes to four days.
Here’s a look back at how the trial progressed.
How sex worker Madison Ashton reacted to ‘botched’ Polkinghorne case
In the High Court at Auckland the jury was hearing a recording of Pauline Hanna venting about her husband, Philip Polkinghorne: “I know he loves me but he’s just a sex fiend he wants to have sex with everybody,” she had told her family.
That day Madison Ashton – the runaway witness and Polkinghorne’s former lover – was having a cocktail in Sicily celebrating her 50th birthday.
The high-class escort refused to appear as a Crown witness. She would have given explosive evidence about Polkinghorne’s methamphetamine use, how he had planned to leave his wife and marry Ashton – and the messages she had shared with the murder accused.
While “mainlining” on the Polkinghorne trial coverage she took a luxury cruise, walked through the Jardin Majorelle gardens in Morocco, visited London, Lisbon, and climbed the Acropolis in Athens.
Ashton says she fled to Europe to avoid giving evidence because she lost faith in the police investigation into Pauline Hanna’s death.
In an interview with the Herald, the sex worker says she now has some regrets about not appearing as a Crown witness.
She believes police “botched” the murder investigation by not taking her seriously and omitting crucial evidence she provided.
Herald investigative reporter Carolyne Meng-Yee spoke with Ashton after Polkinghorne was acquitted of murder.
Philip Polkinghorne’s only media interview: ‘I just can’t think straight’
The husband of the woman who died under unexplained circumstances at their Remuera home says he is being treated as a “person of suspect” by police.
Philip Polkinghorne, an Auckland eye specialist, told the Weekend Herald he was advised by his lawyer not to talk but he wanted to say his wife Pauline Hanna was the most “remarkable” woman who was adored by her family.
“The loss is insurmountable. I just can’t think straight,” Polkinghorne said.
Pauline Hanna, 63, died at her home in the Auckland suburb of Remuera on Easter Monday. Police are still investigating the circumstances around her death, which authorities are treating as unexplained.
“As you may or may not know I am a person of suspect so I need to talk to my legal counsel whether I should say or shouldn’t say anything,” Polkinghorne said.
Herald investigative reporter Carolyne Meng-Yee interviewed Polkinghorne days after his wife Pauline Hanna’s death. This story was first published in April 2021. It remains his only media interview.
