Dr Philip Polkinghorne’s murder trial revealed the dark secrets of privileged, unhappy lives and inspired a book by journalist Steve Braunias. He describes five haunting memories from the trial.
Every day of the eight-week murder trial last winter of Dr Philip Polkinghorne was awful, as in it was a kind of glut of highly memorable awfulness. Polkinghorne’s wife, Pauline Hanna, died in their Remuera home. He said he woke up and saw her slumped forward on a chair with a belt around her neck. She hanged herself, he said, but police very quickly suspected he had murdered her. And so for eight long weeks the High Court of Auckland heard masses of gossip, presented as circumstantial evidence, about Polkinghorne’s avid enjoyment of hookers and methamphetamine. All murder trials are hearts of darkness but much of the Polkinghorne affair was a wildly scandalographic hot mess.
He was found not guilty. The day of the verdict was among the least memorable of the entire trial. It was received in silence, just a few sighs and groans, and then everyone went home. Nothing happened other than a quite unusual little surgeon had been found not guilty and set free. It was an end without an ending, an unresolved death of a 63-year-old woman whose own secrets were tipped over and exposed as much as Polkinghorne’s private life was made blazingly public.
It had been an incredible thing to sit through and watch, listen, and notate in a series of 3B1 notebooks. I was a close witness to the investigation of a tragedy. When I think back to what I most remember about it, it’s like trying to make sense of things glimpsed in a dream. Not a pleasant dream. More like a nightmare, really.
1. The first time I met Polkinghorne. Reporters seldom actually meet defendants during their murder trial. The accused sit behind glass or some other kind of partition, like exhibits—now and then it’s permissible during the prosecution case to think of them as whack-a-moles, each accusation aimed at clobbering their claims of innocence. But Polkinghorne was allowed the freedom of the general courtroom population, and he introduced himself on Day 1 of the trial. “Hello,” he said. “Philip Polkinghorne.” He was very formal about it. He got to his feet, although it was hard to tell; he was so tiny, such a small pink-faced specimen at the centre of the most outrageous murder trial this century.
2. The first time the Crown blew everyone’s mind with evidence pointing to what they alleged was Polkinghorne’s guilt. It was also the last time. They called pathologist Dr Kilak Kesha to give evidence, as they customarily do with just about every murder trial at the High Court of Auckland. He was going about his usual business, telling of his observations at Pauline’s autopsy, when he was asked why there was no impression of a belt mark around Pauline’s neck when he examined her body. He replied, devastatingly, that it meant the belt had been tied around her neck after she had died. It was the ultimate gotcha moment. All eyes turned to Polkinghorne, and the thought travelled around the courtroom: you killed your wife and tried to manipulate it as suicide. But under cross-examination, Dr Kesha admitted there were other, equally plausible reasons; and his testimony was never raised again. The big reveal was a total flop.
3. Polkinghorne’s socks. The key to understanding Polkinghorne was on his feet. He wore lurid, crazily patterned, look-at-me socks every day of the trial; they were statements of guiltlessness, that it was his business to live as he chose and anyone who didn’t like it could go to hell. The socks said he had done nothing wrong. The socks said he had not harmed a hair on Pauline’s head. The socks said he was the last of the Remuera playboys — and where was the crime in that? The socks were made for walking; and they walked him right out of court, free to do what he wanted, any old time.
4. The woman who wasn’t there but later on was kind of everywhere. There was so much expectation and a real sense of tension as we waited for the Crown to call its star witness, Madison Ashton, the Sydney-based sex worker who formed a de facto relationship with Polkinghorne and was positioned by the Crown as his motive to kill Pauline. Everyone thought her testimony would be explosive. But she did a runner, and refused to appear; her silence was kind of deafening, a riddle, a mystery, and I will remember her absence a lot longer than I will remember the presence of witnesses who did appear. Later on she talked her head off to media. I had lunch with her after the trial and was dazzled by her wit and intelligence. She would have made an amazing witness.
5. The belt. Alleged murder weapons are exhibited at the front of the courtroom, in the care of the registrar. In my years as a courtroom writer I have ambled over and casually inspected shotguns, knives, bats, and Antonie Dixon’s Samurai sword which was still streaked with blood. I didn’t look too closely at the belt in the Polkinghorne trial. The prosecution alleged that he had fastened it around her neck after he killed her, to stage an elaborate and appalling hoax; the jury accepted his defence that she had placed it there herself and died by suicide. It was a sad, wretched sight. It lay curled up like a snake.
Polkinghorne: Inside the trial of the century, by Steve Braunias, (Allen & Unwin Aotearoa New Zealand) is out on Tuesday, July 15.