A long-time friend of accused murderer Philip Polkinghorne says he noticed changes in him that he couldn’t reconcile, and that he had become “manic” and “irrational”.
The Auckland High Court trial is continuing for Polkinghorne, who the Crown said killed his wife Pauline Hanna at Easter 2021 and staged it to make it look like a suicide.
Polkinghorne’s defence is that nothing sinister happened and that he found Hanna after she took her own life in their Remuera home.
Stephen MacIntyre, a friend of the couple, has been giving evidence this morning.
They knew each other because they had baches at the same Coromandel beach.
MacIntyre said, however, that they did not spend time together outside of there.
He said he was friends with Polkinghorne for about 25 years.
“I would describe us as close friends but not outside that community, we didn’t spend time in other cities or towns,” he told the court.
He described Hanna as “vivacious” and “a very proud woman” who was professional and always keen to put her best foot forward.
MacIntyre said he began to notice changes in Polkinghorne in the year or so leading up to Hanna’s death, and that they didn’t see each other as much as they used to.
“I felt he was quite changed… I doubted the truth from him, his nature changed… he became a bit more manic and a little irrational at times,” he said by video link from Wellington. “I didn’t think he was behaving normally or truthfully to me at all times.”
He said he felt Polkinghorne was using drugs and that he thought something “wasn’t right” with him.
MacIntyre recounted a “very unusual” time when Polkinghorne said he crashed a ute into a paddock while avoiding a dog and said nobody had seen the accident and the police were not involved.
He said Polkinghorne asked specifically for him to not tell his wife about it. But MacIntyre said Polkinghorne brought up the incident a couple of weeks later and the story then did not match what he had originally said.
“He told me that he actually fell asleep,” he said. “I couldn’t quite reconcile how he’d changed, but he’d changed.
“He told me some strange things which I didn’t believe and didn’t really understand why he was telling me those things,” he told jurors.
“He became jumpy, slightly irrational, he would talk pretty fast at times, he would change the subject, and I thought this is a guy for one reason or another [who] is under a lot of stress.”
Polkinghorne’s lawyer Ron Mansfield KC proceeded to give additional information about the vehicle crash and Polkinghorne’s weight loss. When asked if stories he thought were unusual now appeared to be less unusual, MacIntyre said “it’s a little more plausible”.
Mansfield asked MacIntyre if he and Polkinghorne had ever talked about him using drugs, or if he had seen him using drugs, and he said no. Still under cross examination, MacIntyre told Mansfield he was aware Polkinghorne was under stress “for a variety of reasons”.
Polkinghorne pleaded guilty to methamphetamine charges just ahead of the trial.
Part of the Crown’s case is that his and Pauline Hanna’s marriage was in a steep decline and he was caught in a cycle of infidelity, financial pressure and drugs. Polkinghorne was charged with her murder 16 months after she died.
Much of the evidence until now has focused on what the police did at the scene after Polkinghorne called 111, and the forensic testing that took place.
