The Crown ended its case by saying Philip Polkinghorne’s final insult was to blame his wife Pauline Hanna for her own death three years ago — but his defence says Polkinghorne is the one who has been insulted.
“The final insult Dr Polkinghorne faces from April 5, 2021 through to today’s date has just been made,” defence lawyer Ron Mansfield told jurors today.
“The first insult he faced was when the police attended his own address… when they walked through that door with an ‘open mind’, they would have us believe.”
This initial insult, Mansfield said, was his client being treated as a suspect.
A hand-written note had been passed among police at the scene alerting everyone to the suspicion except Polkinghorne, Mansfield said.
He spoke of Polkinghorne’s voluntary interview at the police station that day.
“A master manipulator would have been aware of their rights, aware of their remedies and might have lawyered up at that particular point,” he said.
“It was an insult not because he was asked, but because of what lay behind that,” Mansfield told jurors.
He said the Crown has been “weirdly critical” of the police interview which he said showed Polkinghorne being cooperative and answering all questions as best he could.
“And there were occasions when he just didn’t have the answers, that he couldn’t recall what he had done or not done.”
Mansfield said a further insult that day was Polkinghorne not being able to be at home when family were arriving to comfort him and grieve.
The police tension test of the orange rope in the home, Mansfield told jurors, was not recorded and there is no specific record of how the test was done.
He said police lack of experience or education may have made them unfamiliar with the method of suicide that the defence has said Hanna used.
Polkinghorne, who was mostly staring down or typing on his MacBook during the Crown closing address, looked directly at jurors during his defence closing.
The deleted WhatsApp messages
Mansfield addressed evidence of Polkinghorne deleting WhatsApp messages.
Deleting messages that recorded his extra-martial relationship was understandable, he told jurors.
“Given the level of suspicion he is now facing and the police interview, why would he want the police to learn something private?” he said.
Mansfield told the jury it was entirely understandable Polkinghorne might seek to delete messages that were intimate and could harm the couple’s reputations.
He said the Crown’s suggestion Polkinghorne was a “master manipulator” was a theory.
Tongues of Remuera wagging
Mansfield asked why Polkinghorne would have ordered his own autopsy report if he had killed his wife.
He said the report was ordered because police would not give him the results of their one.
“Tongues were wagging around Remuera and soon the press reported there had been a death at the address and it was being treated as a suspicious death.”
Mansfield said people came to know Polkinghorne was being treated as a suspect.
“You might think it was one thing, one insult to face that allegation not knowing the very day of her death,” he said.
Mansfield said there was further indignity and insult that those close to Hanna and Pollkinghorne knew the death was suspicious.
He said everyone “shut down” and treated his client differently, and Pollkinghorne became isolated.
Mansfield questioned why the minds of Crown witnesses had changed since they wrote condolence cards to Polkinghorne.
“Logically, people’s minds and attitudes were permanently changed against him and there was very little he could do about it,” the jury was told.
“He was yet to bury his wife,” Mansfield said.
“This man had not even had the opportunity to say goodbye and bury his wife and he was now dealing with being a suspect.”
Mansfield said Polkinghorne’s life had been turned upside down by the police’s “very public” investigation.
Australian escort Madison Ashton
Mansfield then brought up the Australian escort his client was with at a luxury lakeside lodge just weeks after his wife’s death.
“The only person that was now engaging with him was Madison Ashton, someone he had been in a relationship with for five or six years,” he said.
“One where he had grown close.”
Mansfield said Ashton was also well-known to Polkinghorne’s wife.
He said it was “hardly surprising” their relationship had got closer given Ashton was “the only person reaching out to him” and communicating with him.
On the luxury lodge stay, he told jurors they needed to understand the context of the relationship.
He had to live with people thinking he was a suspect, Mansfield said.
“He had to bury his wife with that suspicion, that loneliness, hanging over his head.”
‘A murder that has not been committed’
Mansfield told jurors they may have thought Polkinghorne being charged was the final insult he would face.
“But no, the final insult came when it was suggested he was to be blamed for blaming his own wife for her own death,” he said.
“If you want to add insult to injury there you have it.”
Mansfield said the forensic material in the case answers what happened.
“It provides the complete answer and it always has,” Mansfield said.
“It has provided the complete answer from the 6th of April, the date that the autopsy was conducted and the report was given.”
He said police found nothing in the home that indicated a killing.
“The pathology and the forensic evidence in this case provides an answer and it always has, and it continues to do so.”
Mansfield said jurors and lawyers have endured weeks in court but Polkinghorne endured 16 months before being charged.
“The answer has always been in the pathology, the answer is still in the pathology,” he said.
“A murder that has not been committed.”
Mansfield ‘riled up’
Mansfield told jurors they may notice that he was “riled up” in his remarks to them after the earlier Crown closing.
“Effectively Dr Polkinghorne has been required to prosecute this case to show you that how his wife died was by way of suicide by hanging,” he said.
“It has been incumbent on him to deal with wide and generalised evidence slung at him during the course of this trial.”
Mansfield told jurors the evidence needed to be put in context, and had been shown to be unreliable or to fall far short.
He detailed the witnesses the defence team had called including global forensic pathologists.
He spoke of the psychiatrists who talked about the “cocktail of lollies” Hanna was given by her doctor.
“As if they should be freely prescribed without caution or without follow up,” he said.
Mansfield said Polkinghorne has effectively needed to take over and prosecute the case to establish a suicide.
“Even though he has no onus or burden to prove anything,” he said.
‘Murder the police wrote’
Mansfield said logic — which is reliable and sound — is what jurors must look at and not, he said, anything by way of emotion or sympathy.
“A trial run by emotion allows our murder mystery fantasies to run wild,” Mansfield said.
“And what a blockbuster my learned friend’s closing address was to you, our very own modern day murder mystery,” he continued.
“It was like a binge of every Murder She Wrote all in one session, by our very own Angela Lansbury presenting.
“Or I suppose more correctly put, she was presenting the script written by police, the murder the police wrote” he said.
“The murder they started writing immediately after the tension check.”
‘He would have to be The Phantom’
Mansfield told jurors Polkinghorne would have to be “a highly efficient and trained killer” to leave someone dead without any telltale signs.
“We have unmasked a phantom, folks, and apparently it’s Dr Polkinghorne.
“He would have to be The Phantom… that is the way in which the Crown prosecute this case,” Mansfield said.
He said it was a phantom murder that no pathologist has been able to confirm.
“Without any training in martial arts, without being a big or strong man…” Mansfield said. “Fit? Yes. Bragger regarding his own fitness? Yes.
“But neither big or strong enough for someone who might easily overpower someone much smaller or more diminutive than he,” he said.
“It sounds absurd because it is. It sounds unachievable because it is,” he continued.
“Folks this case is not The Phantom, the unachievable.”
Defence raises lack of injuries
Mansfield moved on to talk about the injuries seen on Hanna’s body.
“So, no internal or external injuries that you might expect for a homicide strangulation,” he said.
“The injuries that were seen are entirely consistent with the classic incomplete or partial hanging.”
Mansfield told the jury there were no other injuries showing Hanna fought for her life or grabbed at her neck to release a hold.
“None of the scratches or bruises that can occur by her own motion trying to release that pressure,” he said.
Mansfield then turned to address a small head injury on Polkinghorne raised by police and St John staff at the start of the trial.
He said there were a number of explanations.
“It simply means his head has come into contact with a surface and split,” he said.
Mansfield suggested that if he had been injured in an altercation, Polkinghorne would have known about it and attended to it.
“It’s an injury that he didn’t even know that he had,” Mansfield said.
He reminded the jury that all of Hanna’s acrylic nails were still on her hands, despite how easily they could have come off.
Returning to Hanna, he said her injuries are “small and minor”.
He suggested they could have happened when she set up the rope or got the rope from the garage, or “stumbling around the house and falling over the footstool”.
Mansfield warns jurors
Mansfield told jurors there are obvious and reasonable explanations for Hanna’s “very minor” group of injuries.
“Despite that, despite the logic of that informed advice from professionals in that area who are there to assess injuries of this kind, the Crown says you should use your logic and consider them as consistent with an assault,” he said.
“Because the Crown has to, doesn’t it, point to some form of injuries of an assault even though on the evidence it’s not there, because the Crown wants you to accept its emotional plea that this was a homicide or strangulation which by its very nature must have incurred some struggle at some time for some length,” he said.
Mansfield said it was entirely illogical for jurors to follow the Crown and consider the injuries as consistent with an assault.
“That’s not logic, that’s the Crown and you going rogue if you agree with that kind of approach,” he said.
He told jurors ignoring expert advice “is just going rogue and being irresponsible, and worse, it’s not honouring the oath that you took”.
As with the Crown closing, regular breaks are being placed throughout the defence closing.
Polkinghorne, on each return, has remained looking directly at jurors as his lawyer continues his closing address.
‘Private and personal understanding’
“A lot of time in this trial has been invested in creating the villain that every murder mystery requires,” Mansfield said, arguing there was no evidence of Polkinghorne’s alleged “arrogance”.
“It’s convenient for the Crown to paint him as the villain.”
He criticised the Crown’s focus on the defendant’s use of meth and sex workers.
“His entire lifestyle has been laid bare, I would say unnecessarily,” Mansfield continued.
“Can I suggest to you that it’s abundantly clear on the evidence you have before you that there is nothing secret about the relationship with Madison Ashton?”
He said that court was not about “imposing our values on other people”.
“There was a very private and personal understanding between Pauline and Dr Polkinghorne regarding sex outside of their marriage.”
Mansfield stressed that Hanna was involved “on a number of occasions” with Ashton and other sex workers.
“That is very much a decision that they made… and it’s not for us to judge,” he said.
“She was intelligent, she was independent, and she was making her own decisions.
“If it wasn’t a problem for her, what right do we have to make it a problem for us?”
‘[Meth] doesn’t go off’
Mansfield said there were “inconsistencies” in evidence of the allegation Polkinghorne had put his hands on Hanna’s neck before.
And there was no evidence of violence in their relationship, Mansfield continued.
Focusing on the Longlands recording, he said “she makes it perfectly clear in that conversation that she is safe” and that Polkinghorne’s anger at the time was to do with his resignation from Auckland Eye, not Hanna.
“[The payout he was offered] was an emotional kick in the guts to a man who was wanting to retire with dignity at the end of a long and distinguished career.
“He was angry but not with her.”
Mansfield said that meth “is everywhere” and Polkinghorne’s meth use “has been deliberately overstated”, adding that there was “sense in” buying bulk “if you can afford it” to reduce the risk of arrest and to get a better deal.
“It doesn’t go off.”
The quantity found in the house therefore doesn’t reflect the amount he was using, Mansfield argued.
‘No relevance at all’
Mansfield said that “methamphetamine can remain in urine for up to four to five days after its use”, dismissing the meth found in urine in the bedroom where Hanna was sleeping at the time of her death.
Polkinghorne’s meth use “has no relevance at all”, the defence lawyer continued, adding that experienced ambulance staff and police saw no signs that Polkinghorne was high or coming down on the day they were first called to the scene.
On sex workers, Mansfield said that Ashton was “one of three, not one on her own” and that he was “developing an interest in their lives” but that did not mean he had formed relationships with them – and he said Hanna’s concerns over Polkinghorne’s use of sex workers, if she had any, could have contributed to suicidal thoughts.
“That was their lot, that was their relationship, not ours.”
He continued: “You have to be careful not to place excessive weight on something that tells you nothing.”
He said that Polkinghorne’s DuckDuckGo “leg edema” search was consistent with the behaviour of a man who learnt he was suspected of murder but didn’t know why.
“There is nothing indicative of this search unmasking the murderer as promoted.
“Don’t jump to the conclusion urged on you without actually applying some thought to it.”
Mansfield also pushed back on the Crown’s suggestion Polkinghorne is a “master manipulator”, suggesting Polkinghorne’s conversations with witnesses in the wake of Hanna’s death were “logical occurrences, natural discussions which are likely to take place between he and those individuals”.
‘As predictable as Christmas coming every year’
Mansfield also hit back at the Crown’s questioning of the “blood” found on the stairs at the couple’s home.
By the time it was tested, “everyone knew at this point that Dr Polkinghorne had been charged”, and therefore he would want to prove his innocence, Mansfield said.
The complaint from the Crown about the possibility of Polkinghorne interfering with that evidence “was as predictable as Christmas coming every year”, he continued, given the amount of time that had passed since Hanna’s death – but despite knowing that complaint would come, Polkinghorne asked an expert to come and take a sample, Mansfield said.
“Why would you go to that cost and face that obvious criticism unless you were driven to prove as best you could that you didn’t have an altercation with your wife?”
Additional reporting by Jordan Lane