Philip Polkinghorne trial: Eye surgeon found not guilty of murdering wife Pauline Hanna

Monday, 23 September 2024

After 10 hours of deliberations over two days, a jury has found Dr Philip Polkinghorne not guilty of killing his wife, Pauline Hanna.

Polkinghorne held his head down in the dock after the foreperson read out the verdict. Members of the public gallery could be heard gasping and in tears.

Justice Graham Lang thanked jurors for their service and deliberations. He set a sentencing date for November 1 for Polkinghorne’s methamphetamine charges he pleaded guilty to at the start of trial.

Polkinghorne was charged with murdering his wife Pauline Hanna 16 months after she was found dead on the morning of Easter Monday 2021. The Crown said Polkinghorne fatally assaulted Hanna and then staged their Remuera home to look like suicide.

The defence said it was exactly that - Hanna killed herself.

On Monday, the jury of 11 sided with the defence.

Here’s a recap of the trial:

Week 1- examination of Remuera home, Polkinghorne’s words to police, CCTV of Pauline Hanna

Monday, July 29, a jury of 12 were picked and the Crown and defence laid out the openings of what the jury could expect to hear over the coming weeks.

One of the first witnesses to be called was Constable Alexander Rowland. He was the officer tasked with taking an initial statement from Polkinghorne.

When he arrived at the home in Auckland’s Remuera, Polkinghorne was walking around upset and “audibly wailing”. He calmed down while giving a statement, Rowland said.

Polkinghorne said the night before the couple drank wine, had dinner and watched Netflix before retiring to separate rooms.

Polkinghorne told Rowland he found his wife the following morning in a chair, leaning forward with a belt around her neck. An orange rope was there, too.

“I was very flustered, I knew she was deceased as she was blue and bloated,” Polkinghorne said.

After he’d finished taking Polkinghorne’s statement and handed it to his supervisor, the sergeant scribbled “1C” on his hand - that was police code for “suspicious circumstances”.

Those suspicions arose after Sergeant Christian Iogha and another detective did a tension check on the rope.

Iogha also thought the bedroom where Hanna was said to have slept in the night before seemed “odd”, but agreed with Mansfield under cross examination there was no evidence of a scuffle or altercation in the bedroom.

CCTV footage was also played of Hanna the day before her death.

The footage showed Hanna visiting a rubbish tip in Onehunga with items secured in the back of a red ute using an orange rope.

Week 2- Polkinghorne’s interview, Longlands recording, sex workers and site visit to Remuera home

In the second week, the jury were taken on a site visit to the Remuera home, and watched Polkinghorne’s DVD interview he gave police hours after he said he found his wife dead.

They also heard Hanna’s own words in the form of a recording of her in 2019.

In the last two years before her death, Hanna had spoken openly to her family about the problems she was having with her husband and how he was a sex fiend. But she repeatedly told them she still loved him.

Colleagues of Hanna spoke of how she was “larger than life” and her work ethic.

They also heard from two people who lived at a North Shore apartment complex. Both noted Polkinghorne’s frequent visits in his car, number plate “RETINA”, to visit a neighbour they believed to be a sex worker.

Detective Sergeant Lisa Anderson said she travelled down to Mt Cook Lakeside Retreat on April 30, 2021 to execute a search warrant where Polkinghorne was staying with Sydney escort Madison Ashton. The detective seized Ashton’s phones, with the escort refusing to give police her pin numbers.

Week 3- Pathology, previous strangulation incident, mental health and meth use

In the third week of the trial, the jury heard from pathologists, Hanna’s close friends and Polkinghorne’s colleagues.

It was while at a dinner with friends, a year before her death, that Hanna described how her husband had put his hands around her neck and said “I can do this any time,” Pheasant Riordan, Hanna’s friend, told the court.

“She took that as a real threat that he might do that to her,” Pheasant said.

The court heard from two pathologists, who between them have conducted thousands of autopsies. The cause of Hanna’s death was neck compression.

But, neither Dr Kilak Kesha, who carried out Hanna’s post mortem, nor Dr Martin Sage, who reviewed the findings, could conclude whether Hanna died by hanging or as a result of being strangled - either manually or by the use of a ligature.

Both said they couldn’t say whether a belt was applied to Hanna’s neck after her death, or whether an impression found on her skin was the result of it being removed after she’d been found.

Hanna’s GP of over a decade was extensively quizzed about why there was no record she’d referred her patient to psychiatric or mental health care, despite consistently prescribing Hanna weight-loss medication and anti-depressants.

The GP, said Hanna called her on December 23, 2019 in tears, saying her mother was in hospital and her husband had left her. Hanna said she had suicidal thoughts but had no plans to act on them.

A number of Polkinghorne’s Auckland Eye colleagues gave evidence in week 3. Dr Susan Ormonde, the clinical director at Auckland Eye, told the court she’d known Polkinghorne since about 2001 and had considered him an excellent and supportive colleague.

A day before Hanna’s funeral, Polkinghorne disclosed meth use to her and her husband.

“He asked if we’d ever tried meth, [to] which we said ‘no’, and he said ‘you should’,” Ormonde said.

Week 4- money, meth and sex workers

The fourth week of evidence focused on money, meth, sex workers and communications between the couple, including letters they sent to each other towards the end of 2019 where it appeared their relationship was rocky.

In the years preceding Hanna’s death, Polkinghorne transferred just under $300k to six women, including three sex workers. He also made cash withdrawals totalling $241,000.

Meanwhile, months before her death, Hanna opened a bank account in her own name and took out two $2000 loans. She used the money to spend on groceries, personal shopping and petrol, forensic accountant Margaret Skilton told the court.

The couple had a net worth of $10.5m and Skilton agreed if the pair had separated, they would be entitled to an equal share.

Sydney-based escort Madison Ashton also featured heavily in the fourth week of evidence through communications between her and Polkinghorne after Hanna’s death.

A sex video of Polkinghorne and Ashton was found on his laptop, as well as numerous other sexual photos and videos of her.

Week 5- Crown closes case, defence begins

The fifth week of the trial had the Crown close its case and the defence begin.

Mansfield opened by arguing the police “became intoxicated by the thought of establishing murder” after they found evidence of methamphetamine use and extra-marital affairs. Both were just distractions, he said.

He said if the police had taken a step back, and looked objectively, there was “no evidence at all of a culpable homicide”.

Hanna’s younger sister by 11 years, Tracey Hanna, was the first witness to be called for the defence.

Tracey, who had lived in London since 1992, told the court that Pauline told her that she attempted suicide sometime after their father’s death in 1990.

“Pauline was having a very emotional crisis. She was shouting and crying. My mother was crying, which was unusual.

“I was really angry and then she turned her anger on to me and I can remember toing and froing anger and all of a sudden she paused and said she’d tried to kill herself.”

Under cross-examination by prosecutor Brian Dickey, Tracey was asked why she hadn’t told anyone about Pauline’s suicide attempt in the 1990s.

“Are you suggesting I’m lying… I take offence,” Tracey replied.

Week 6- Pathologist, psychiatrist and other experts called for defence

The lack of injuries to Pauline Hanna were consistent with a partial hanging, a veteran pathologist told the court during the sixth week of evidence. He also said it would be quite “mind boggling” to imagine Hanna’s body had been manipulated after her death to simulate a suicide.

“There is no evidence of a forensic pathology kind to positively support a conclusion that this deceased has been homicidally manually or ligaturally killed,” Professor Stephen Cordner said.Cordner would have concluded Hanna’s death as suicide by hanging.

Nearly two years after Pauline Hanna’s death, forensic expert Dr Timothy Scanlan flew from Louisiana in the United States to the Remuera home to conduct an analysis of a possible blood stain on an area near where her body was found.

The mark looked different to the picture police had taken after Hanna’s death, but showed up with a possible match for Polkinghorne’s blood. Something prosecutor Brian Dickey suggested could have been interference or contamination of the scene two years after Hanna’s death. Scanlan accepted and said in his report there had been possibility of interference and contamination given the passage of time.

Week 7 - The final week of evidence

Suicide and its risk factors were much of the focus in the seventh and last week of evidence. The mystery 4am phone logs was also long debated by an expert for the defence and the digital forensic analyst for the police.

The jury also lost a juror on Wednesday due to personal commitments.The debate over two logs on Pauline Hanna’s phone all boiled down to whether or not Hanna had accessed her phone at 4am and gone to send a message to her husband and her daughter’s friend.

Jun Lee, a digital forensic analyst for the police, maintained the logs were simply the phone running background checks on contacts. But Atakan Shahho, an IT expert called for the defence, said they had to be user-generated.

Two psychiatrists called to give evidence on behalf of the defence team both took the jury through a number of suicide risk factors and concluded Hanna would have been at higher risk.

Dr David Menkes held the view that a cocktail of medications and other factors would have left Hanna at a higher risk of suicide.

McClintock asked the psychiatrist that he was not saying the combination of risk factors were operative on the night of April 4 for Hanna. He agreed.

The final witness called for the defence in week eight was associate professor Dr Sarah Hetrick. She said between 2/3 and 3/4 of people who have gone on to die by suicide have previous denied feeling suicidal.

“Human beings can compartmentalise, can present well, many people are very good at putting a front on professionally even to those friends and family and hiding and concealing what’s going on.”

Week 8 - Crown and defence close

In finishing her closing address, prosecutor Alysha McClintock said the evidence to find Polkinghorne guilty of murder was there.

“His conduct after his wife’s death is telling against him not being the devastated husband, telling against him as the master manipulator too.”

McClintock accepted Hanna lived with her challenges but suggested she was not suicidal on April 4.

“And even if she were, it is incredibly hard to fathom she did what is said she did - committing suicide by hanging with that rope, in that doorway, undressed in a robe and nothing else.”

McClintock told the jury Polkinghorne had changed and his two worlds were “fast colliding”.

“He either decided to end his wife’s life or they argued and he ended it in the course of that.”

McClintock said he then went about staging the scene, manipulated evidence and witnesses and lied to the police.

“He blamed Pauline in life for a lot… it is the final insult to her to blame her for her own death.”

But the defence said it was the eye surgeon who had been repeatedly insulted in his treatment by the detectives, and compared the Crown’s case to a fantastical murder mystery with “a script written by the police”.

“Dr Polkinghorne has had to prosecute this case to show his wife died by hanging,” defence lawyer Ron Mansfield KC told the jury.

“It’s nonsense - one of the most gravest nonsenses our courts have heard in a long time,” Mansfield told the jury about the Crown’s case.

Mansfield said Hanna was a beautiful woman, intelligent and capable. But she had vulnerabilities.

He said Polkinghorne and Hanna’s relationship was not for everyone and maybe in the end it wasn’t for Hanna.

“She had a high paying job and plenty of support, whether she fully appreciated it or not. Friends who would have dropped everything if they’d known how poor of state she was in.”

Polkinghorne would have too.

“No one saw inside that veneer as she didn’t want people to know.”

Mansfield said the pathology and forensic evidence clearly established Hanna died by suicide.

Mansfield said Hanna likely got up, got the rope and the belt and used it.

“There’s no justice for Pauline if you ignore her vulnerabilities and disrespect the decision she took… that is not respect… it is being emotional vigilantes.”

He told the jury to make their decision on the evidence, not on emotions.

“You cannot convict a man of murder when they did not do it.”