How the Polkinghorne case put Pauline Hanna on trial - NZ Herald
How the Polkinghorne case put Pauline Hanna on trial
For Listener editor Kirsty Cameron, the arrest of Philip Polkinghorne, charged with the murder of his wife, jolted memories of childhood encounters with the young "Polk". She was in court for much of the eight-week trial – interested less in the explicit tales of sex, drugs and the private lives of a wealthy couple than in the woman who was figuratively dismembered during the case, Pauline Hanna. The main picture shows Philip Polkinghorne and Pauline Hanna’s wedding at her family home, 1998. Her friend Pheasant Riordan is in the blue dress.
Money, meth, murder. A surgeon, his wife, his lovers, his drugs. Big houses, big incomes, beach homes, sex workers, sexting, private clubs, European cars, European canal boat holidays, ropes, pills – so many pills. The story told in the High Court at Auckland over seven weeks and into an eighth by more than 80 witnesses felt at times like a gruesome blending of CSI and Grey’s Anatomy, minus a Dr McDreamy.
What the court heard and the public followed with live blogs and daily updates was that the crown alleged that retired ophthalmologist Philip Polkinghorne, now 71, in a methamphetamine-fuelled rage, fatally strangled his wife, health executive Pauline Hanna, then 63, in the early hours of Monday, April 5, 2021 in their Remuera home. He then staged her death to make it look like suicide. Three and a half years later, a jury found him not guilty of either murder or manslaughter.
It was a case made for tabloid headlines since the accused unburdened himself to the NZ Herald only days after his wife’s death, claiming he was being treated as a "person of suspect" as police inspected their home for clues. It was a strange verbal mangling from an articulate man and began the narrative later used by his defence: he was deeply grieving his wife, a long-term user of antidepressants who was mourning the recent death of her mother, so desperately overworked and stressed in her senior role in health management mid Covid pandemic that she killed herself.
One of the things I have found hardest about the trial is the letter. It’s appalling, detailing the sadness in her life. That, on top of everything was just shattering.
Pheasant Riordian
The exposed body of Hanna was forensically picked apart, literally and figuratively, over the course of the trial. Indignity after indignity was heaped on her – her insecurities, her pharmaceuticals, her wine intake – batted backwards and forwards between the prosecution and defence as the latter sought to paint Hanna as a hyper-stressed woman running on pinot fumes and Prozac. Nor did the defence often accord her the dignity of her own name. Generally, she was referred to by defence lawyer Ron Mansfield, KC, as "Mrs Polkinghorne", a micro-aggression given she rarely, if ever, used her married name professionally or personally.
The priapic Polkinghorne, a slight man with a penchant for natty socks, meth, daily sex with his wife and extracurriculars he paid for – he transferred close to $300,000 to six women over a five-year period – was easy to dislike during the trial.
It opened with his admission of guilt to possessing 37.7g of the Class A drug the police found at his home. Even Mansfield told the jury at one point they might well think him "a silly old fool". But he was not a murderer, the King’s Counsel said later in his summing up. He was a bereaved widower, finding comfort with a lover when friends shunned him. And the thing about looking up "leg edema after strangulation" on a supposedly private search engine? That, said Mansfield, was just a grief-stricken medico trying to piece together what had happened to his wife.
Polkinghorne had other defenders, of course, including Coromandel neighbours at his Rings Beach holiday house who attested to his good nature and humour, and his practice receptionist who said he was lovely with patients.
Grievous evidence
Among those who definitely did not like Polkinghorne was Hanna’s long-time friend Pheasant Riordan. In the witness box, she testified that she had long found Polkinghorne "controlling". But the most grievous evidence she gave was miming strangulation with her hands, as she recounted the night Hanna shocked Riordan and her husband John, telling them Polkinghorne had "said he could do this to me at any time".
Appearing as a broken man in the days after his wife’s death, Polkinghorne was also planning a Mt Cook luxury lodge sortie with the most famous of his other women, Sydney escort Madison Ashton. He was irate about the police presence at his home, which went on for 11 days. In an email to Pheasant Riordan, he did not mention his travel plans but raged about the ongoing investigation. "Philip contacted me and was going on about how they were going to bring this complaint about the police," she told the Listener. "I just went back and said, ‘Well, you murdered her.’" She never heard from him again.
He was arrested and charged with Hanna’s murder 16 months later, in August 2022. Two years and one month after that – on Monday, September 23 – a jury cleared him and he walked free from the court, out into Auckland’s wan spring sun and the lush wisteria that’s a feature of the High Court’s front entrance. At the beginning of the trial it was a tangle of bare wood, by its conclusion its lilac racemes scented the air, just as they do every spring from the vine Hanna’s mother had planted at the family home.
The mess
Talking to the Listener before the verdict was delivered, Riordan was clear in her thoughts. She and Hanna were close – even though their lives had diverged, they remained tight, picking up their conversations as if they’d spoken only the day before.
She does not want to believe Hanna killed herself but is firm that if she had, it would not have been like that: using a rope, nude beneath a bathrobe.
"You can never know someone’s true mental health. But Pauline would not have left a mess for other people to clean up. That just wasn’t her."
The mess. The room Hanna last slept in was a mess in an otherwise tidy house. The jury saw photos of the unmade, dishevelled bed and an upturned ottoman – explained away by the defence as perhaps knocked over trying to get down toys from a high cupboard ahead of a visit from their grandchild.
No, she’d never seen the room look like that, testified their twice-weekly cleaner. In the ensuite, urine in the unflushed toilet tested positive for methamphetamine, which the crown said placed Polkinghorne in her room on the night she died. There was none found in Hanna’s system: there was a dose of Zopiclone, a sleeping pill she was not prescribed.
As long-time friends testified, Hanna was calm, composed, terrifically professional in her work and always so beautifully presented in her appearance. Even the athleisure kit she wore for her walks was carefully co-ordinated. Never a hair out of place.
It was a careful construct. As the court heard, Hanna was a longtime user of antidepressants: they worked for her, her GP told Mansfield crisply. She had contacted a mental health crisis line in late 2019 when she confessed to thoughts of driving her car into a truck. She thought her husband was leaving her: it was Christmas, and he had told her – lied – that, instead of spending Christmas together, he was going to a three-day retreat called "moving on, or up". In truth, he flew to Sydney and Madison Ashton. The storm passed, he returned.
Her medications also included an appetite suppressant. Philip liked her slim, she told friends. The friends who spoke for her in court also stressed how driven she was, what an amazing colleague and friend: thoughtful, kind, the sender of cute emails at Easter. Always professional, and someone who thrived on a challenge – the early-hours work emails she sent were a pointer to her stress, the defence argued, but they were not a surprise to colleagues.
Her job was demanding, she only did things well and it was the strange times of Covid-19. At the time of her death, she was looking forward to the opening of the dedicated Māori and Pasifika vaccination centres in South Auckland, which she had championed. There was a sense, one friend and workmate said, that "we were doing something bigger than ourselves".
We know that the economic abuse is a pattern used, usually by men, to keep women in the relationship.
Lady Deborah Chambers, KC
Financially controlled
Controlled, controlling Hanna. She rigorously controlled what she ate; the ladies-lite breakfast of a cup of tea and a single piece of toast with Olivani and smear of marmalade. Lunch would be sushi or an apple; at dinner she avoided carbohydrates. This with a regimen of diet pills and workouts, so she looked slender in her preferred Adrienne Winkelmann suits. Just as her husband liked her. Polkinghorne exercised control over their joint finances. She did not have a credit card in her name and, at the time of her death, her sole bank account was overdrawn by a small amount.
The Riordans fervently hoped Hanna would leave her marriage. They had never warmed particularly to Polkinghorne; they found him controlling and they remain devastated they could not convince her to leave him after she told them of the strangulation threat over dinner one night in January 2020 in Havelock North, near where the Riordans live and where Hanna grew up.
John Riordan was incensed, offering to drive to Auckland and put "your stuff in the car", he told Hanna. To the court, he recalled saying to her "that if he’s done it once, he’ll do it again" and like his wife, demonstrated what Hanna had shown them with her hands around her neck. The couple begged her to leave. But she shut down the conversation.
"She was a grown woman, and she was very good at deflecting," says Pheasant Riordan, over a cup of tea in the lobby of the Pullman Auckland. It’s a few doors from the High Court, where the case was still leaching its sordid detail, then into its sixth week.
The Riordans were part of the Hanna whānau in court. All wore the white ribbon pins denoting violence against women. Hanna’s brother Bruce attended every day after his evidence was given, usually with his wife, Shelley, daughter Rose – another persuasive witness – and son Jacob. Shelley Hanna brought Pauline to court every day: in her handbag was a pink photo album of chronologically ordered shots of her sister-in-law from childhood to a recent Christmas: smiling, happy, graduating, cuddling her new grand-niece. There was no wedding photo among them.
The Riordans also joined them after their evidence was given. Pheasant took a break mid-trial, unable to sit through more of the eviscerating of her friend as a needy, clingy drunk so ground down by work she could not go on living.
"One of the things I have found hardest about the trial is the letter," she says, referring to a 2019 letter by Hanna to her husband in which she spoke of her loneliness. "It’s appalling, detailing the sadness in her life. That, on top of everything, was just shattering."
Apologetic email
Another email, sent by Hanna in January 2020, was read to the court by a police officer. It appeared to be a heartbreaking response to an email from him to her, full of criticisms of her behaviour, from the petty – she picks up glasses by the rims – to complaints that she doesn’t "really listen" to him, and digs about how she doesn’t pay the rates at either of their properties.
In it, she expressed her love for her husband and their family and writes of the future she thought they were both looking forward to. She apologises for her perceived failings: "I keep my car full … I have my text messages chime so I cannot miss your text … I accumulate the washing so I am not using the washing machine overly". She acknowledges he carries the financial load [Polkinghorne earned more than three times her salary] but pushes back as "truly unfair" the implication she is a "totally selfish person who contributes nothing financially". She ends the email by asking him that if he does want a divorce, to state so sooner rather than later. "Right now," she finishes, "I feel very scared, confused, sad and incredibly lonely."
Hanna would take friends like Riordan into her confidence and she was frank with her niece and brother about her sex life and her husband’s use of sex workers, again relayed in court.
She would share – to a point. "She would deflect," says Riordan. "My goodness me, she did. Like at the dinner that we had that was so upsetting. She tried to change [the subject]. She’d just say no, I’m fine, it’s sorted. Please don’t worry, I’m fine."
Of course, your friends worry when you’ve just told them your husband has demonstrated how he could put his hands around your neck and strangle you – non-fatal strangulation is a recognised key marker in the escalation of domestic violence. Riordan replays that night in her head but she can’t see how it could have been any different. Her husband was outraged; she was shocked. "But you can’t tell a mature woman who knows her own mind … She’s a big girl. And she didn’t want us to pursue it.
"Bruce and Shelley and Rose found exactly the same thing. She’d find a way out of what you’d been talking about. ‘Oh, how’s Connor getting on? What’s he up to?’"
Riordan, her voice breaking at times, had told the court of their long friendship, which began when the two Hawke’s Bay girls bobbed up against each other on the Wellington Polytech secretarial course in 1978. Hanna was 20, Riordan 17. "We were never going to be secretaries," Riordan says at the Pullman. "But we needed something on paper, right?"
They became flatmates in Khandallah, subsisting on leek and potato soup and shots of whisky. Hanna would be Riordan’s bridesmaid, Riordan would be her matron of honour. Hanna became godmother to Riordan’s son, Connor. Later, Hanna lived with the Riordans in Auckland while studying for her commerce degree.
You can never know someone’s true mental health. But Pauline would not have left a mess for other people to clean up. That just wasn’t her.
Pheasant Riordan
That achieved, Hanna went to Dunedin and completed an MBA. Riordan’s voice is full of pride as she recounts how Hanna was part of the team that topped that course, winning a trip to a Montreal university as their prize. She also returned from Otago with a new boyfriend, whom the Riordans did not warm to.
Riordan can’t recall exactly when she met Polkinghorne but first impressions were less than favourable. "He wasn’t what I expected." But he seemed nicer to Hanna than her previous partner had been; she was happy and that’s what mattered.
The couple had first encountered each other at a charity dinner. Polkinghorne had already separated from his first wife, who told the court their marriage ended due to his having an affair. (She has name suppression). There were three young children from that marriage: John, Ben and Taine.
Polkinghorne wooed Hanna with charm and money: there were flowers and dinners at The French Café; he didn’t let the fact she was in a relationship deter him. "There was a lot of discussion about what she should do," Riordan recalls of phone calls about this new love interest. "We said, ‘Well obviously, anything’s going to be better than [her then-boyfriend].’"
Their 1998 wedding was spectacular: a marquee, the chairs dressed with linen and bows, on the lawn of the Hanna family home on a 10-acre boysenberry orchard at Longlands, near Hastings. "It was really elegant, so beautiful. She was stunning, the dress was very fitting," Riordan remembers. She discovered later that Hanna had had full-body liposuction before the wedding.
"I don’t know at what point Pauline started to get smaller. At some point, she just shrank. She always liked to look her best, but she was …" Riordan searches for the word. Bigger? "Oh yes, curvy." When they flatted together, Hanna’s voluptuous bosom was the subject of laughs between the girls. "We’d joke that she should share some of hers with me, as I didn’t have much."
Similar backgrounds
In 2002, Polkinghorne and Hanna bought the expansive house at 121 Upland Rd in Remuera, a short walk from the bush-ringed, volcanic Ōrākei Basin in one direction and a cluster of neighbourhood restaurants, cafes and a bougie bakery in the other. With four bedrooms and multiple living spaces over its 376 sq m, it’s all house and little garden, the inverse of the Tauranga home Polkinghorne grew up in.
Their backgrounds were not dissimilar: Hanna and her siblings, Bruce, two years her junior, and Tracey, 11 years younger, grew up on the outskirts of Hastings, where they went to local schools and their parents grew boysenberries commercially on the property where Bruce now lives. Tracey has spent her adult life in the UK, returning for holidays and to testify for the defence at the trial that Hanna had claimed to have wanted to kill herself years previously.
The Polkinghornes lived in a small white stucco house in a quiet street in Tauranga’s "The Avenues" area. At the time of matriarch Mary Polkinghorne’s death at 97, a few days before her son was arrested and charged, the house had changed little since the family moved in when Philip was a child.
Mary stayed at home while her cheerful husband John went off to work. John Polkinghorne, who died in 2009, was an accountant who became the secretary of the local power board. They were regular parishioners at the city’s St Mary Immaculate Catholic Church. Philip was the middle child, the adored only son whom childhood friends recall as being wilful, prone to literally stamping his foot if he didn’t get his way. "I think they were all a bit scared of him," recalls one. "He was spoilt from the day he was born."
Elizabeth, the eldest, became a teacher. Ruth, the youngest, became a nurse and has remained close to her brother, arriving with him at court each day when the defence began its case and escorting him home at the end of the trial. The house sat in a large garden of lawn with pockets of shrubs and fruit trees. There was a rotary clothesline and, across the back of the section, a cream corrugated-iron fence that separated the Polks, as they were known, from the backyard of their neighbours and good friends, Phyl and Dave Cambie – my grandparents.
There was a neat rectangle cut in the fence, allowing "popping in" between the two houses. I spent many school holidays popping in to the Polks. My younger sister and I would often stay with our grandparents and part of the attraction was getting to hang out with cool big sister-substitute Ruth, who’d paint our nails, let us play with her guinea pig and kindly pretend she wasn’t bored witless by her gormless tag-alongs.
I have no memory of Elizabeth in those holidays; she was probably away at training college or her new married life. Nor of Philip. You had to pass by his bedroom to leave via the back door, but I never went in. College boy, no nail polish or a guinea pig, so not interesting.
Once, we did give him a ride back to Tauranga from Auckland when he was at med school. My parents were interested in his studies but, as he was no Donny Osmond, I couldn’t have cared less. My only memory of that trip was that he had long hair and that we had to stop as usual so I could throw up in the Karangahake Gorge.
One memory remains seared in my mother’s mind. When I was born, there was the usual fuss that heralds the first grandchild. Philip had presumably overheard the chatter about a present for the new baby. He arrived with his parents to meet me at Phyl and Dave’s, leaned over my pram and presented his gift – an introduction to his pet rat.
Right now, I feel very scared, confused, sad and incredibly lonely.
Pauline Hanna
His needs first
The rat-bearer grew up to be affable and sociable. The Polks were funny, witty people. At the Rings Beach holiday house, he enjoyed fishing, though his seamanship was less precise than his surgical skills: a witness recalled he’d sunk so many of his boats he had taken to giving them names like the Bismarck and the Lermontov.
"Polky" was a good guy, the court heard. He was social, great with the kids, and never seen angry or sozzled, though he did get ribbed for "him and Pauline carrying around these ridiculously large glasses of wine," the witness said.
Again, Pheasant Riordan has a different experience. When Polkinghorne and Hanna came to Hawke’s Bay together, they always stayed in a motel rather than with the Hannas or Riordans and their social interactions were structured around what Polkinghorne wanted.
In her evidence, Riordan told of the night of her husband’s surprise 60th, held in a restaurant in Havelock North. Early in the evening, Polkinghorne decided he needed to leave the party as a contact lens was giving him grief. So that was the end of Pauline’s night, too, despite the room being filled with her old friends and family. Riordan recalls Polkinghorne standing outside the restaurant, waiting for her to accompany him back to their nearby motel.
"She had to go with him because he wasn’t having any fun."
Hanna would continually explain away Polkinghorne’s behaviour – he was tired, in one of his moods, "on the roof", the court heard. He had his "little patterns", she would say. "It’s just Philip."
Riordan remembers exactly where she was when she learnt Hanna had died. It was her daughter Madeleine’s birthday and the family had been out to dinner. Back home, she looked at her phone – there were three missed calls from Rose Hanna. "I remember standing in the bedroom and just wailing. It didn’t seem real. And when you get up in the morning, it’s still not real."
Learning of how Hanna had died was devastating, and it also just did not seem true. "The next day, John and I talked about it, how it could not have happened that way."
"You never know what’s going on but … it would have been dignified. It was not her – she would have reduced stress for anybody else as much as possible."
Never would she have imagined ropes and mess and a nude body in a towelling robe in full view of a glass door. Never Hanna, who smelled of Chanel No 5, loved to play Céline Dion singing in French, laughed easily, had buckets of empathy and always thought of other people first.
Insufficient evidence
Early into their 10 hours of deliberations, the jury of 11 – eight women, three men – asked Justice Graham Lang via a note for clarification. The note read: "Most of the people on the jury do not think there is enough evidence to support Pauline having committed suicide. However, some people on the jury do not think that the crown has supplied enough evidence that we can answer yes to the question, ‘Has the crown made you sure that Dr Polkinghorne caused the death of his wife, Ms Pauline Hanna, by intentionally strangling her?’ Please can we have some direction."
Justice Lang responded, repeating from his summing-up: "At the end of the day, it’s not sufficient for you to say that Dr Polkinghorne is probably guilty or even very likely guilty."
Ultimately, the jury perhaps leaned towards Mansfield’s summation that the crown case – which suggested Polkinghorne was planning a future with Madison Ashton to which Hanna was a stumbling block – was some of the "most gravest nonsense" to be heard in a long time. (In an interview published in the Herald after the verdict, Ashton, who refused to testify as a crown witness, said she had believed Polkinghorne to be divorced since 2018 and only became aware he was still with Hanna when she died. She says she is no longer in contact with him.)
Polkinghorne was free to leave the court on September 23 but will return on November 1 for sentencing on his guilty plea to possession of methamphetamine and a meth pipe.
Days after Hanna’s death, he gave that extraordinary interview to the Herald’s Carolyne Meng-Yee. While he may have delivered a garbled "person of suspect" to describe his own situation, he was very clear on how he regarded his wife.
"Our relationship wasn’t fine, it wasn’t fine at all, it was perfect," he gushed.
Perhaps there is more truth in this quote from the same article: "Pauline was a beautiful lovely, lovely, lovely lady. I failed her. I failed her."
Opinion: Money and control
Pauline Hanna was displaying the classic symptoms of someone suffering economic abuse.
Pauline Hanna earned a shade over $200,000 in her role as an executive project director for the Counties Manukau District Health Board. She was bright, educated and high achieving, and blindly loyal to her husband. It’s a scenario Lady Deborah Chambers, KC, is not unfamiliar with in her legal practice.
In the couple’s relationship, Chambers sees the vexed signs of economic abuse: Philip Polkinghorne controlled the money and was the one who met the accountants over their two trusts (despite his wife being a trustee), and had full visibility over her spending: one argument presented in court between the couple was his niggling over her spending at Adrienne Winkelmann’s Auckland boutique at a time when he was stressed by the amount he would receive at his imminent retirement from Auckland Eye, the practice he had co-founded in 1993.
Financial stress is always relative: he was mightily pissed off about receiving only a $450,000 pay-out, even with two mortgage-free homes, an investment portfolio and total net assets about $10.5 million. He was also spending freely, burning through the cash from the sale of an investment property, slinging funds to Madison Ashton and to whoever was supplying his methamphetamine: the amount found in the house by police had a value of about $13,000.
Chambers is just one of the legal sorority who followed the Polkinghorne case with interest. In Pauline Hanna, whom she did not know personally, she sees a textbook case of being "bang smack on the power and control wheel".
The power and control wheel is a matrix used internationally to describe the types of abuse seen in family violence. Its eight sectors include intimidation, isolation and using economic abuse. Under the "economic abuse" heading, the text includes "taking her money" and "not letting her know about or have access to family income".
"It’s way too common," says Chambers. "We know that the economic abuse is a pattern used, usually by men, to keep women in the relationship."
From the evidence presented, she believes Hanna "appears to be under a misapprehension she was better in the relationship than out".
"She had no choices or say in how the family income was spent. She has no money to go and see a lawyer. Her income goes into a joint account, of which he is a signatory.
"He has control over her money. She has no control or say over the money.
"There she is, she’s like a mushroom. She’s being fed shit and she’s sitting in a little dark room going, ‘Where’s the way out of here?’"