Polkinghorne murder trial: Sex worker Madison Ashton breaks her silence, reveals the verdict she was ‘praying for’

Monday, 23 September 2024

Stuff senior investigations journalist Paula Penfold talks to sex worker Madison Ashton.

Auckland eye surgeon Philip Polkinghorne has been found not guilty of murdering his wife Pauline Hanna. But over seven weeks of evidence and over 80 witnesses, there was one key voice that was never heard. Now, escort turned Polkinghorne’s lover, Madison Ashton, talks to Stuff, disclosing the history of their relationship, why she didn’t want to testify — and the verdict she wanted. Paula Penfold and Edward Gay report.

On the day the jury was sent to consider its verdict over whether Philip Polkinghorne murdered his wife Pauline Hanna or whether she’d died by suicide, Madison Ashton told Stuff what the jury never heard.

“I am praying for a unanimous guilty verdict,” she wrote in a message. Four days later, Polkinghorne was acquitted of the murder.

Her position might seem perplexing given she did not appear at the trial as what would have undoubtedly been the Crown’s star witness, her evidence key to the prosecution’s version of events: that Polkinghorne and Hanna’s relationship was deeply troubled and he planned to spend his retirement with the sex worker — not his wife of over 20 years.

Ashton gave the trial a sensational nature, despite her absence.

There were the screeds of personal messages she exchanged with Polkinghorne, the sex tape, and evidence of Hanna referring to a threesome.

There was also the romp down south, Polkinghorne and Ashton’s romantic getaway to an exclusive South Island resort just weeks after Hanna’s death.

But when the Crown closed its case, the jurors wanted to know why Ashton hadn’t been called. After all, she had been on the Crown’s witness list.

Justice Graham Lang told them not to speculate.

The jurors’ curiosity was understandable. They were unable to be told of efforts made to bring her to Court.

Stuff understands a summons had been issued and repeated efforts by New Zealand police and their counterparts in Australia had been made. There was also a request for help to Interpol but Ashton could not be found.

Sex worker Madison Ashton breaks her silence on Polkinghorne case.

If an Instagram post under her professional nom de plume Christine McQueen is to be believed, Ashton was in London during at least part of the trial. She was advertising her services in the exclusive suburb of Mayfair. It also appears she holidayed in Greece.

Despite police’s unsuccessful attempts to find Ashton, she engaged with media outlets, including Stuff, during the trial.

And so we are able to set out the reasons she’s told us for her non-appearance in court. Which requires many steps back, but let’s begin three weeks after Hanna died.

Ashton had arrived in New Zealand to visit Polkinghorne for a romantic getaway. It was April 30, 2021, and the pair were staying at the Mt Cook Lakeside Retreat, when police knocked at the door with a search warrant.

(Ashton sent Stuff a picture of her in a black cat suit. “I was wearing that the night of the police raid.”)

When police went into the room, Ashton directed them to two phones but, in court, Detective Sergeant Lisa Anderson said Ashton refused to give them the codes to access the phones’ data.

The police were able to access the devices anyway.

But in the process, they lost Ashton.

Madison Ashton in the black cat suit she was wearing on the night the police executed a search warrant at her and Philip Polkinghorne’s Mt Cook retreat.

“The police put me in danger … that night at Mount Cook. I was totally unaware that he was married. I had no f…king idea,” she told Stuff, a position reiterated in a statement she made to police. “I thought he was divorced [which] he made out through almost three years of lying.”

It’s testimony which would have been useful to a jury, but Ashton says the way police dealt with her was disrespectful, and did not improve after that first Mt Cook encounter.

“The police bullied me and disregarded my safety. That’s why I ended up deleting the WhatsApp.” Those were the messages between her and Polkinghorne, which he’d instructed her to delete. “Because I thought he was innocent. And I will regret that forever.”

Ashton says she didn’t get a summons from police until 10 days before she was due to fly out on an overseas trip. “And I hadn’t heard from them in nine months”.

“You can’t disrespect someone so badly for so long and then expect them to be helpful, but they never wanted me on the stand anyway because they were so busy stigmatising me, that prevented them from doing their job properly.

“The police and the Crown need to be re-educated about how to relate to sex workers as a valid businessperson in the community and not an adversary. That’s just the beginning of why I got literally f…ed over from every angle.

“If they’d done a far better job, i.e. getting me on side from the start, this whole process would’ve been so much better for everybody involved.”

Now, though, Stuff can report some of what Ashton might have said if the prosecution had been on side with her. She has supplied two statements she made to police, explaining, “it’s missing loads of details, but that’s what I got done so far with the police, but it was adversarial at the time of the statements.”

In the first, taken in July 2021, three months after Hanna’s death, Ashton sets out her version of history with the couple.

“I first met Philip and his wife Pauline at the same time, when they both saw me as clients in my capacity as an escort, as a couple. I saw them together maybe three times. From my records I place our first meeting in 2011.”

She’d confirmed the date through a payment of $3600 to her bank account, for a meeting at the bar of Sydney’s Hilton Hotel, between Polkinghorne, Hanna, herself, and another escort.

Her statement details 17 bookings between 2011 and 2017 with Polkinghorne, at least two with Hanna.

“Over time, Philip would book to see me on his own, once or twice a year. In 2017 our contact became more regular and Philip was visiting Sydney more often. Philip made out that Pauline was aware that he continued to see me alone, and that she had no issue with it. He told me they had a completely open relationship but were still devoted to their marriage at the time and I thought that was great.”

Sydney sex worker Madison Ashton has told Stuff the verdict she wanted, and why she didn’t testify at eye surgeon Philip Polkinghorne’s murder trial.

Ashton’s statement records that Polkinghorne had portrayed his wife as having “dozens of partners of her own”.

“Over time, I called him out on this, and he admitted that he had overstated a lot of what he told me … he admitted that he and Pauline had been monogamous for a very long time up until this exploration.”

The statement details how she says the sexual encounters between the three of them went. Stuff has chosen not to report the particulars.

In 2017, Ashton told police, Polkinghorne said one day out of the blue that he had asked his wife for a divorce. “I was blown away. I was more than happy with him being just a good client, in fact it was probably better for me. My first reaction … was along the lines of, ‘don’t even think for a minute that just because you’ve said that, I’m going to hook up with you’.

“I remember saying to him that he had better give Pauline everything she deserved, as I felt he had completely blindsided her, and I thought it was shit. It is really important to me that women don’t get taken advantage of. That included financially.”

The statement details an email exchange in which Polkinghorne outlined settlement negotiations.

In the years leading up to his wife’s death, eye surgeon Philip Polkinghorne transferred nearly $300k to six different woman - three of whom were sex workers, including high-profile Sydney escort Madison Ashton.

“After he told me he divorced Pauline he never mentioned her after that.”

Ashton told police how Polkinghorne had fixed “a bunch of financial problems I was having” over a legal dispute, covering a $110,000 bill, which she accepted as a loan.

She said it was after that financial strife that she and Polkinghorne started dating officially.

“The contact became very regular, pretty much daily, like you do when you are in a relationship.”

By 2020 she felt their relationship was serious and stable, although her statement details having kicked Polkinghorne out of her Sydney apartment over an argument. As part of the reconciliation, she says Polkinghorne offered to forgive Ashton’s financial debt to him, which she accepted.

As it was during the time of Covid travel restrictions, the pair would communicate by Zoom and text, and talk daily.

“There would be times where we would Zoom or Facetime and he would call me from in bed. I wouldn’t see anyone else in the room, I never saw Pauline, I never heard her voice, I never saw things in the background that indicated she was there, I just saw him in his home.”

At the timing of this first statement to police, Ashton said she had been sober from illicit drugs for a year. “However prior to that, Philip and I have consumed drugs together, namely crystal meth and cocaine … and I was aware he continued to use drugs while he was in New Zealand.”

Ashton said when she stopped taking drugs, she was ill and needed to recover. “It was around this time, about July 2020, that Philip told me he was using the ‘stuff’ a lot. This was the meth he was referring to.”

She tried to encourage him to address his drug use. “He told me he had stopped using.”

She believed him, until she saw him after Covid travel restrictions eased. It was the first time she’d seen him in person for about 14 months.

“I was amazed at how much weight and muscle loss since I had last seen him. I just knew then and there he’s obviously been hitting the pipe bigtime. By this I mean smoking meth. His skin was limp on his backside and he was just so depleted.”

Polkinghorne pleaded guilty to possession of methamphetamine and a pipe at the start of his murder trial.

Ashton’s statement then sets out how she heard about Pauline Hanna’s death, on the day it happened: Easter Monday 2021.

Pauline Hanna died in her Remuera, Auckland mansion in 2021. A jury at the High Court at Auckland has found her husband, Philip Polkinghorne, not guilty of her murder.

She did not get a reply to her usual good morning message, but then Polkinghorne called.

“He was quite distressed, crying, and took him a little while to actually tell me what had happened to Pauline. He said, ‘Pauline has hung herself at home and I found the body’.”

Since Ashton thought they were no longer living together, her statement records that Polkinghorne supposedly explained Hanna had “let herself into the house somehow, without triggering the alarm”.

“He said she had come back to the house and committed suicide in order to punish him.”

The statement records Ashton’s shock. “I was taking his word for everything he told me.”

Before Ashton flew to New Zealand, she received a phone call from Polkinghorne asking her to delete their WhatsApp conversations. “He said he was looking out for me and wanted to protect me from getting involved and also the mention of drugs. Because of this I fully agreed and deleted them from my phone right there and then.”

Once Hanna’s death began to be reported in the media, Ashton started to question their relationship, asking to see the divorce papers. “I want tangible proof.”

None was given.

“This person to me now has become a dickhead, someone I do not respect.”

It was another two years before Ashton made a supplementary statement to police, in September 2023.

In it, she described an email she had sent to police in which she referenced doing her best to get Polkinghorne talking.

Ashton’s statement says the first two occasions were on a video call in mid 2021. “I had hoped you, the police, would have been listening and it would have been recorded.”

Ashton told police she thought she might have recorded the conversation herself but had not been able to find it, and would keep looking.

Her statement also detailed the last time she was with Polkinghorne physically, in Melbourne in mid-2022.

“I was screaming at him. This was a regular occurrence. It was like water off a duck’s back. He would then talk about himself and how hard it was for him, how the police were picking on him.

“I was also constantly worried about what he could do to me.”

The statement then records a further occasion Ashton raised Hanna’s death, and sets out the reasons she had disengaged with police following her first statement.

“I did not trust NZ Police. I was annoyed. I had been stopped by the Australian Border Force and searched. I asked if the NZ Police had put them up to it and they said no.”

Later freedom of information requests confirmed the New Zealand police had asked them, she said.

She re-engaged with police in July 2023. “I really think … that a jury should hear what I have to say.”

As we now know, the jury never did.

A further glimpse of what Ashton may have told the jurors can also be seen in pre-trial judgments from the High Court and Court of Appeal in the lead up to trial.

Text messages between Madison Ashton and Philip Polkinghorne.

They contain the claim that Polkinghorne told the Sydney sex worker that he was separating from Hanna.

In one pre-trial judgment, Justice Graham Lang said Ashton’s evidence would support the Crown theory that Polkinghorne’s marriage to Hanna had “deteriorated significantly” in the lead up to Hanna’s death.

A Court of Appeal decision that was suppressed until now, shows Polkinghorne told Ashton in 2017 that he was divorcing Hanna. “She believed the couple had done so. They had not,” the decision says.

The pre-trial decisions detail the Crown position that Polkinghorne was financially supporting Ashton, taking on the responsibility for paying for her Sydney apartment, and including evidence from a forensic accountant over his paying her legal bill.

Messages exchanged between the pair were read out during the trial and confirmed the financial support.

A police examination of Polkinghorne’s laptop found a loan agreement between the pair for $90,000.

Investigators also found an email in which Polkinghorne told Ashton that Hanna had been removed as a shareholder of Auckland Eye, the private medical practice which he co-founded and where he worked as a surgeon.

He also spoke of separating with Hanna. “If it doesn’t work out we will depart amicably, sell the house and split the assets roughly 65:35 in my favour. That way I would end up with about 6-7 million.”

The Upland Rd property owned by surgeon Philip Polkinghorne, who was found not guilty of the murder of his wife, Pauline Hanna.

In February 2021, Ashton sent him a copy of a home loan application with initial approval and the acronym “FYI”.

Police also found 12 videos of Ashton in various stages of undress. One showed the pair having sex.

But the jurors never heard Ashton’s evidence about Polkinghorne’s plans to live with her.

Included in the pretrial decisions, is a claim from Ashton that in early 2021, just three months before Hanna’s death, Polkinghorne is said to have told her he wanted to retire from medicine and spend his retirement with her.

Ashton could have also told the jurors that Polkinghorne spoke of wanting to meet her family.

On April 2 there was an email from Ashton to Polkinghorne telling him that some furniture had been delivered to her Sydney apartment.

Three days later, on the morning of April 5, Hanna was found dead in the Remuera home she shared with Polkinghorne.

Polkinghorne was interviewed by Detective Ilona Walton in the hours following. But during a break he deleted his messages exchanged with Ashton. He also searched “How to delete iCloud storage”.

Philip Polkinghorne arrives at the Auckland High Court on day two of his murder trial, with his lawyer Ron Mansfield KC, left. After a trial lasting seven weeks, a jury found Polkinghorne not guilty.

It was later that day that Polkinghorne messaged Ashton, asking her to delete their WhatsApp message history. She followed his instructions.

Ashton could have faced questions about these messages, had she appeared in the witness box.

It was recognised as such in a pre-trial judgment from Justice Lang.

“It also obviously calls into question statements Dr Polkinghorne made to the police (and to the news media) that his marriage had been ‘perfect’. Further, the Crown can rely on the evidence as providing part of the motive for Dr Polkinghorne to deliberately strangle his wife on 5 April 2021.”

Justice Simon Moore, who also heard pre-trial arguments, said the Crown’s case relied on Ashton’s evidence of the pair being in a relationship.

“[It] further goes to the Crown case that there was a physical altercation between Dr Polkinghorne and Ms Hanna as his ‘double life’ explains or provides a motive for the assault which the Crown says caused Ms Hanna’s death.”

While the lines of questioning from Crown prosecutors and her answers can only be guessed at, the nature of her relationship with Polkinghorne - contrasted with the state of his marriage with Hanna - was central to the Crown’s case.

Polkinghorne’s lawyer Ron Mansfield KC had attempted to have Ashton’s evidence excluded from the trial, on the grounds that it was too prejudicial.

“The Ashton evidence will bring a salacious tone to the trial and that brings prejudice,” Mansfield told the Court of Appeal at a hearing in June.

Eye surgeon Philip Polkinghorne on trial for the murder of his wife in the Auckland High Court.

He described Ashton as “unpredictable” and said she had been critical of the police and the Crown.

The Court of Appeal allowed Ashton’s evidence to form part of the Crown’s case.

“[T]he relationship between Dr Polkinghorne and Ms Ashton allegedly changed from a commercial one to a close, personal relationship of significance, and one that endured at the time of Ms Hanna’s death.”

There was also extensive evidence of how Polkinghorne and Ashton’s relationship continued after Hanna’s death.

The jurors heard how Ashton was one of the only people outside of his family to support him.

There were playful messages between the pair - Ashton sending messages about buying “anti-barking” collars for her Chihuahua dogs, whom she referred to as her “children”.

Polkinghorne asked if she had bought him a collar too.

On April 13, Ashton suggested they “come up with house duties who does what”.

The Mt Cook lakeside retreat on the shores of Lake Pukaki.

Polkinghorne listed his skills as ironing, grocery shopping, putting the rubbish out and that he could cook.

“I can water plants, wash dogs, pick up pooze, point out imperfections. I am a natural at ignoring the obvious, spotting expired milk, reading history.”

When, just three weeks after Hanna’s death, Ashton was planning to fly to New Zealand to meet up with Polkinghorne for the first time in months, they discussed in messages the future of their relationship and the likely stress of meeting up after more than a year being physically apart.

Madison Ashton had been ‘praying’ for a guilty verdict for Philip Polkinghorne, but did not give evidence because she felt disrespected by police. A jury found him not guilty.

At one point Ashton asked Polkinghorne if he was breaking up with her.

“Christ never, I am not trying to push you in any direction. I haven’t come this far to walk away,” Polkinghorne replied.

When police accessed Ashton’s phone after the Mt Cook raid, among the messages they were able to recover was Ashton recommending her Sydney lawyer to Polkinghorne.

“Hire Zali”, she wrote. Polkinghorne took her advice.

Like Ashton, Zali Burrows was expected to be at Polkinghorne’s trial, not in the witness box but at counsel benches as part of his legal team.

But just like Ashton, she never appeared.

Burrows is a high-flying Sydney lawyer who swooped into Auckland to join Philip Polkinghorne’s legal team in the lead-up to trial.

This composite image shows the mark on the stairs shortly after Pauline Hanna’s death in April 2021 (top right) and the mark on the stairs that tested positive for Polkinghorne’s blood in 2023 (bottom right).

Burrows represented Ashton as recently as February 2021 when she opposed a provision in the Australian Online Safety Bill that would allow a Commissioner to issue takedown orders of sexual content on social media.

Burrows has spoken publicly about Ashton, describing her as “the epitome of what every woman wants to be” to the Daily Telegraph podcast, Lady Justice.

“She is gorgeous, perfect figure, perfect face, she’s got the most fun personality and she is a true feminist because she charges men for what they want. She gets something out of it.”

The podcast was released in June 2021, two months after Pauline Hanna’s death and 14 months before Polkinghorne was charged.

Burrows also appeared to refer to the case, describing in detail what she heard happened at the South Island lakeside resort.

She told the podcast Ashton had been in New Zealand recently seeing a boyfriend whose “wife died unexpectedly and in suspicious circumstances”, though did not name Polkinghorne.

“She’s in a near-naked state with her sex toys and everything to give her boyfriend the best time,” she said through laughter, “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t be laughing, I’m just visualising it.”

Burrows explained the police burst into the hotel room with a search warrant - not for Polkinghorne’s phone, but for Ashton’s.

“They all wanted a piece of Madison.”

She said Ashton was again questioned over Hanna’s death as she went through Customs in Melbourne.

Burrows attended pre-trial hearings at the High Court in Auckland as part of Polkinghorne’s legal team.

She was also at Polkinghorne’s mansion when forensic expert Timothy Scanlan from Louisiana in the US flew in to conduct an investigation for the defence team.

The Crown alleged a blood stain, pointed out by Burrows, was due to contamination or interference.

Scanlan confirmed that was one explanation for the blood that had been missed in the days following Hanna’s death in April 2021 but found by him nearly two years later.

Despite being part of the legal team during the preparation phase, Burrows was not sitting at counsel benches on day one of the trial on July 29.

The only explanation of Burrows’ absence from Polkinghorne’s trial is contained in a judge’s minute that can only now be reported.

Less than two weeks before the trial was due to begin, Justice Simon Moore issued the minute explaining Polkinghorne’s lawyer Ron Mansfield KC was having difficulty filing briefs of evidence from defence witnesses.

Justice Moore said Polkinghorne had recently “disengaged” his instructing solicitor.

“Mr Mansfield reported that since then he has discovered that certain potential defence witnesses have not been briefed nor has Dr Polkinghorne’s instructions been confirmed.”

Justice Moore said work that was expected to be done had not been finished.

Stuff contacted Burrows for comment.

She responded by text message: “One thing to say is all will be revealed later and any bullshit said about me I will vigorously defend and sue for defamation.”

It took the jury 10 hours to return its not guilty verdict, bringing to a close one of the most keenly observed trials in recent New Zealand history.