Veteran journalist Steve Braunias has covered many murder trials but none contained the privilege and depravity that captivated New Zealand during the eight-week Polkinghorne trial. Below is an exclusive extract from his new book, Polkinghorne, released today.
His name was Polkinghorne. Polkinghorne, first introduced to the nation as ‘a person of suspect’, as he put it in his typically anxious and mangled English; Polkinghorne, whom the police quickly suspected of murder and then slowly, not altogether competently, went about investigating the amazing, very distracting, and apparently criminal extent of his sex life, finally arresting him for the murder of his wife Pauline sixteen months after he made a 111 call on the frantic morning of 5 April 2021, saying she had hanged herself in their strangely impersonal white complex above a beautiful shining lagoon on the mansioned eastern slopes of the Auckland isthmus; Polkinghorne, acquitted and let free to wander the Earth by a jury at the close of an epic, shockalicious eight-week murder trial like none before it in our island history — and surely none after it, unless some other surgeon or likewise high-earning urban professional, whose hobbies include hookers and methamphetamine, is accused of something so diabolical that it’s of an even lower moral order than murder; Polkinghorne, that long, drawn-out, perky, improbable name, became a kind of household brand in the winter and spring of 2024, something everyone recognised and regarded with a mixture of rage, awe, wonder, fascination, scorn, distaste, zero sympathy and close to 100 per cent actual downright hatred; Polkinghorne, those three syllables thrown together almost at random, forming a name that will remain fixed as a garish icon in the psychic territories of the New Zealand mind, will achieve a sordid immortality but an immortality nonetheless, supernatural and haunting. Say his name three times into a mirror and you might see him suddenly appear behind you, small and enthusiastic, a blue-eyed voodoo doll, a demon of wealth and white privilege hopping up and down on his madly socked feet — Polkinghorne, Polkinghorne, Polkinghorne.
I got to quite like Dr Philip Polkinghorne. We chatted constantly in an upstairs courtroom at the High Court of Auckland during his murder trial that began in July and ended in September of 2024. I have interviewed people accused of murder quite a few times — including a Chinese guy who killed two men with a knife he had last used to divide a pizza — but had never just casually chatted with them in a courtroom, never during their trial. ‘Morning, Phil,’ I’d say when I came into courtroom 11 to take my seat at the press bench directly behind this tiny figure dressed in a limited range of tiny dark suits and an unlimited range of crazily patterned socks; he’d respond with a wink and a cheerful word. Friends knew him as Polk or Polky. It was an appealing diminutive but I refrained from using it. ‘See you tomorrow, Phil,’ I’d say when I left, and he’d affectionately place his hand on my arm. In between times we gossiped, joked, laughed, made small talk, sometimes made big talk; he always stood up when I came over for a yarn, made that kind of gentleman’s polite gesture. It was all very collegial, although many times I thought I ought to feel I was in the presence of evil.
Most murder-accused are marooned throughout their trial in the dock. It must feel like one of the loneliest places in the world, and yet one of the most public. It’s a glass box, with a little waist-high door that leads to the downstairs cells. It’s a room of accusation, a purgatory, a bad place to find yourself ordered to sit inside for everyone to stare at and judge.
Polkinghorne was not confined to this chamber of prejudice. He was landed gentry, owner of a block of real estate in the form of a row he had all to himself, behind his legal team in courtroom 11; the only times he appeared in the dock were at the beginning of the trial, to enter his plea, and at the very end, to hear the verdict. They were cameo appearances. Otherwise, he was part of the general courtroom population.
Steve Braunias has written a book about the trial, in which Philip Polkinghorne was found not guilty of murdering his wife Pauline Hanna. (Source: Breakfast)
But it was more than just the geography that made him so accessible and allowed our tête-à-têtes. It was a class thing. Finally, after years of reporting on murder trials of damaged colonised peoples, or of low-lifes and the financially illiterate, I was able to relate to someone accused of depriving someone else of their life. ‘Oh yes, I know who you are,’ he said when I first introduced myself. He could read. He stood up, we shook hands, he said, ‘Philip Polkinghorne.’ It was all very formal, like men meeting at a function or a conference, and it was easy to assume a connection. We were men of a pension demographic — I was 64, he was 71 years old — and we shared the same cultural references as everyone in the white New Zealand middle class.
The point of my conversational ingratiations was to size him up. He was not of great size. One day when we were talking, I was trying to describe one of the witnesses: someone from his former eye clinic’s executive team. I couldn’t remember his name.
‘Bit taller than you,’ I said.
‘Everyone’s taller than me,’ he said, and put on a hapless expression; he presented himself as Charlie Chaplin, little comical tramp. The terrible thing about the trial was that it was so wildly entertaining. It ripped up the deep puritanical contract that New Zealanders signed up to when white settlers went about establishing the new colony. It liberated the country from shame. Polkinghorne was shameless. He was a sex machine in miniature. He maintained a furiously busy roster of sex workers, but it wasn’t as though he wasn’t getting it at home; in his only police interview, he casually revealed that he and his wife of 24 years had sex every day. The trial heard about group sex and professional orgies. A detective at the trial recited the synopses of the videos he watched on Polkinghorne’s phone. ‘She performed a sex act on him’, etc. There was a balance sheet of Polkinghorne’s sex spend, when a forensic accountant totted up the sums he gave to prostitutes. It echoed the self-service robot voice at supermarkets:
Do you wish to print a receipt? The figure was wonderfully exact and certainly very generous: $296,646.23.
Extracted from Polkinghorne: Inside the trial of the century, by Steve Braunias (Allen & Unwin Aotearoa New Zealand, RRP $37.99). Available today, July 15.
