Philip Polkinghorne murder trial live updates: Defense testimony continues, defendant will not testify

WARNING: DISTURBING CONTENT

The murder trial of Philip Polkinghorne continues this morning, marking the start of the sixth week of the case.

The defense began its testimony on Friday and will call additional witnesses today.

As the jury learned, the list of witnesses for the defense will be long and will likely drag the trial beyond the originally scheduled six weeks.

One person the defense will not call is Polkinghorne himself, his lawyer said Friday, saying allowing him to do so would have led to even more distractions related to his sex life and drug use.

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Evidence from Friday: Defense tries to reverse the “silly old idiot” narrative

In January 2021, three months before her death, Pauline Hanna turned to a long-time friend who had also climbed the career ladder and told her about her latest professional predicament.

Hanna had been asked to take a leadership role in the response to the Covid-19 pandemic and, although she did not want to, she had been overlooked for other tasks in the past and therefore did not believe she could afford to say no, Gillian Reid said at the end of the fifth week of testimony in the murder trial of Philip Polkinghorne.

“She felt she wasn't meeting the standards she had set for herself,” Reid, who became an Anglican priest after leaving the corporate world, recalled the “unusual” conversation. “She was working longer and longer and harder and harder.”

“She didn't look good. She was a woman who was very stressed and struggling to cope with what was going on around her.”

That testimony came as the defense first took control of the witness list and attempted to reverse the course of the trial by emphasizing Hanna's struggles with work stress and depression rather than the accused eye surgeon's drug use and extramarital sex life.

Polkinghorne, now 71, is accused of strangling 63-year-old Hanna in her Remuera home before staging the scene to fake a suicide by hanging on the morning of April 5, 2021. Prosecutors have suggested the accused was under the influence of methamphetamine when he attacked his wife of 24 years, possibly during an argument about his exorbitant spending on sex workers or his “double life” with Sydney escort Madison Ashton.

These issues have dominated the first five weeks of the trial in the High Court in Auckland. But this morning prosecutors announced they had closed their case after calling around 60 witnesses. The baton was passed to defence counsel Ron Mansfield, KC, who was to make an opening statement and call to the stand any other witnesses he felt the jury should hear.

As the jury learned, the list of witnesses for the defense will be long and will likely drag the trial beyond the originally scheduled six weeks.

Mansfield stressed during his lengthy address Friday that there was no physical evidence to suggest anything other than a suicide by hanging had occurred. He suggested to jurors that salacious details about his client's drug use and sex life were a distraction – a brazen attempt to feign a motive when the prosecution could not even prove that an attack had taken place.

While he acknowledged that jurors might consider his client a selfish, “silly old idiot” who lived a life of lies, that does not make him a murderer, he said.

“One might think [behaviour] “Perhaps it added to the stress Pauline was living with at the time rather than providing a motive for a murder that never happened,” Mansfield explained.

Reid was asked to comment on an issue that had emerged as a central theme for the defense during cross-examination of the Crown witnesses: the question of whether Hanna might have been so overworked and stressed that she self-harmed.

Reid stressed that she had not seen Hanna since that January conversation, so when other witnesses said she was in high spirits and proud of her work in the weeks before her death, both may be true. She may have caught the friend, whose creek in Coromandel was about half a kilometre from her own, at a low point, she said.

But by this time, Hanna didn't seem to be doing well, and others in the small, close-knit beach community noticed, too, the witness said. She had lost weight and was changing her clothes several times a day, which Reid took as an indication that Hanna was struggling with her self-esteem.

“If it's that bad, just give up and walk away,” she recalled advising her friend about work stress. “She felt like she had to keep working.”

Jurors this afternoon also heard briefly from Polkinghorne's first wife, who applied for and was granted name clearing. Polkinghorne admitted that she had never behaved in a threatening, controlling or violent manner during their marriage. Mansfield suggested the couple separated because she felt isolated and they grew apart during a two-year stay abroad, but she disagreed on that point.

“Philip had an affair,” she explained. “It destroyed the marriage.”

Polkinghorne's three adult children sat in the crowded courtroom gallery for the first time on Friday.

The first witness of the day was Hanna's younger sister, who lives in London. She also addressed the defense's mental health issue, recalling a moment sometime in the early 1990s when, according to her testimony, Pauline revealed to Hanna a previous suicide attempt. That was about a year after her father's death, she explained.

The memory was buried for 30 years, but after her sister's death, which occurred less than two months after her mother's, the memory was reawakened, she said.

Her tone was confrontational as prosecutor Brian Dickey wondered aloud why there was no evidence of a suicide attempt from other witnesses or in the medical records.

“Are you suggesting that I'm lying about this?” she asked Dickey twice. “I find that disgusting.”

The prosecutor replied calmly but unperturbed: “Be as offended as you want, but try to answer the questions.”

The jury also had questions on Friday – four in all. In written notes to the judge, they asked about the approximate time of death, whether the panic buttons in the Polkinghornes' household alluded to in earlier testimony were real, the results of the “rape kit” taken during the autopsy and why Ashton, the oft-mentioned Sydney sex worker, was not called as a witness despite being on the Crown witness list.

The judge said he assumed that by “rape kit” the jury meant the results of a medical examination kit. He said the panel had already heard the analysis of the samples taken from Hanna's body and he could not add anything else. As for the panic buttons and time of death, he said there was no evidence on those topics.

His reaction to Ashton's lack of testimony was equally reserved.

“I can't comment on that,” he said. “And you can't speculate on why that is.”

READ LIVE UPDATES FROM FRIDAY'S HEARING

Craig Captain is an Auckland-based journalist covering courts and justice. He joined the Herald in 2021 and has been covering courts in three newsrooms in the United States and New Zealand since 2002.

The Herald will cover the case in a daily podcast, Defendant: The Polkinghorne TrialYou can follow the podcast at iHeartRadio, Apple Podcasts, Spotifythrough The front page Feed or wherever you get your podcasts from.