Kim Baker Wilson attended eight weeks of the Polkinghorne trial in which Polkinghorne and Hanna’s lives, histories and families were trawled for evidence. Some moments will stay with him forever.
Her voice cut through an otherwise mundane courtroom. It was a shock, surprise piece of evidence that played with little warning. It was Pauline Hanna’s voice.
Her cheerful tone. Her angry tone. Her exasperated tone. We heard her way with words in her own words, and so did the jurors.
They were told it was recorded by chance while Pauline and her family were discussing other things. Hanna called her husband a sex fiend. She spoke about how Polkinghorne had really hurt her. She said she wasn’t going to let him destroy her. She apologised to her niece Rose for what she was saying and the way she was saying it.
But she said she was his brick, and he was hers. She loved him.
Reporters get an indication of most witnesses the Crown will call; who they are and why they’re there, but not of the evidence coming with them. No one was expecting Hanna’s voice to ring so hauntingly across the court room.
It was just one piece of evidence. In death, her life was being thoroughly picked over. The sex. The workload. The pills. The drinking. Her demeanour.
Just as her intimate details were waded through, so were her husband’s. The sex. The infidelity. The methamphetamine. His demeanour.
Both of their laptops and phones. Their emails, their messages, their web searches and bank statements. Their private lives were laid bare for the court and the country.
After eight weeks of trial Philip Polkinghorne was found not guilty. He said outside the court that it was now time to grieve.
Family presence in court
Pauline Hanna’s friends and family had an air of constant and ongoing and painful grief.
Her brother Bruce and her niece Rose were Crown witnesses. It meant they weren’t allowed in court ahead of their time in a lonely looking witness box. Off to the right-hand side of the courtroom, but the centre of attention and a barrage of questions.
Every day after that they, and the rest of their immediate family, were there. Bruce told me they had to be, “for Pauline”.
Day in and day out they arrived wearing white ribbon badges. When the verdict came Bruce’s daughter Rose clasped the hand of his wife, her mother. His son Jacob had his head in his hands. Bruce stared straight ahead.
Now, he said, it was time for a break.
Philip Polkinghorne’s family was there too, not at first, but as his defence got underway. His sons Taine and Ben. His sister Ruth.
During the latter parts of the trial the two families sat largely next to each other. Ruth looked to be in shock as the verdicts came. Her brother, standing in the dock, was about to walk out of court.
Loud socks and a quiet voice
Philip Polkinghorne seemed polite, shy, quiet. He said thank you as I held the court door for his lawyer with him following behind.
In court he became known for his vast array of loud colourful socks – I don’t remember him wearing the same pair twice. His love of accessories is decades old. We know because softly spoken Dr Philip Polkinghorne was on TVNZ’s Holmes programme twice in 1993, wearing bold bowties both times.
The eye surgeon had been accused and later cleared of patient poaching. An apology eventually came his way. He spoke in a methodical, almost muted and shy way back then, too.
In court we heard from him too in the frenzied 111 call and the long police interview soon after. That interview showed a different Dr Polkinghorne, his big body language took up the small room. The tempo of his speaking moving at pace.
Of Pauline, too, we heard contradictions. For every witness who said she was struggling and stressed in the final weeks of her life, another said she was vivacious and fine.
Checkmate
The court was a who’s who of top counsel – Alysha McClintock, Brian Dickey, Ron Mansfield. Three lawyers for the Crown and three for the defence.
The trial was remarkable in that two completely opposite versions of events were laid out. The only real agreements were that Pauline Hanna had died, and she died from neck compression.
Jurors had to pore over evidence from about 80 witnesses that amounted to about 3000 typed pages.
“The questions are quite simple,” Justice Lang advised jurors before they headed out. “That doesn’t mean the answers are going to be simple.”
For all the warnings media gave at their start of their stories, the jury had had to hear much more. Both sides of the case talked through with precision what they made of that neck compression. How it got there. What happened. What didn’t happen. At least, their versions of it.
The Crown said openly at the start and again after the verdict that this was a circumstantial case. There was no security camera vision that night. No witnesses. No recording of police with the rope.
Circumstantial cases, the jury was told, aren’t unusual. But for lawyers on either side they can be difficult. In that kind of case dots are being drawn and connected in front of jurors. Lawyers have to hope the jury can see, and agree, with the lines and the threads being drawn.
The trial debated whether home appliances (the toaster, the washing machine) had been used or not used. Lawyers duelled at length over technology – whether Pauline had started typing messages or not in the hours before she died. The pathology results meant different things to different pathologists.
This was a drawn-out high stakes chess game. Witnesses were pieces on the board and some of them could make bigger moves than others. The Crown made its chess pieces work together to slowly advance to the other side. The defence, with its own pieces, pushed back.
Checkmate came after a day and a half of deliberations.
‘An amazing person’
There aren’t many photos of the late Pauline Hanna. Her family emerged from court tightly clinging to a framed picture of one of them.
Her good friend Pheasant, a Crown witness, later emerged in tears. She called it a crap decision. “She was an amazing person, and she didn’t deserve this end,” she told reporters.
We know Hanna was loved from her friends and family who kept showing up at court. We know she loved her husband from hearing her say she did. We know too, how much he made her feel hurt.
We know she strove to look and be her best. We know that big smile from the few photos there are. We were told she was proud of her work and loved helping her community.
She was dead at 63.
During the trial it sometimes felt like every New Zealander had views on how she died. But it was the views of eleven people sitting behind two rows of desks in the trial that mattered.
