Day 4 of a two-week inquiry into the 2021 death of a beautiful and successful Auckland woman was a kind of cliffhanger. The woman’s husband sometimes seemed on the verge of tears. Would the dam break? He had broken down, howling, earlier in the week; his lawyer told the courtroom, “Grief can strike at any moment.” But there were very few people at court—I estimate three, tops—who were likely to give anything more than a flying fuck at the prospect of the piteous tears of Dr Philip Polkinghorne.
Intimate forensic exhibits were the focus of Thursday’s hearing at the coronial inquest to establish the cause of death of Pauline Hanna. The matter has been referred to the Coroner after a High Court jury found Polkinghorne not guilty of his wife’s murder. That epic nine-week trial in the winter of 2024 might reasonably be regarded as something that blew the nation’s mind.
Its heavy whiff of scandal—the puritan New Zealand nose always twitches and trembles at the mention of sex, and the trial had a lot of sex in it—was fanned by Crown prosecution. The defence preferred prim and proper forensic evidence. The pathology, especially, failed to meet the burden of proof of Polkinghorne’s guilt. He walked free on September 23, 2024, but has walked back to face a similar kind of shocking, piano-heavy music at the coroners court in a discreet corner of Newmarket some 3kms down the isthmus from his Ōrākei home.
He is not on trial. There are no criminal charges. “There is no prosecution. There is no defence,” Coroner Tania Tetiha told the hearing on Day 1. This idea of the coronial inquiry as a kind of utopia is, of course, a fiction. Polkinghorne is defended by Ron Mansfield, with assistance from a Polkinghorne duplicate or mini-me, Michael Timmins, balder and tinier. Crown solicitor Alysha McClintock has resumed her role when she led the High Court prosecution. The object of the court is to determine whether Pauline’s death was self-inflicted or inflicted by “another”; Polkinghorne, held up at his trial as a dark perverted Other, is that suspected “another”.
ESR scientist Fiona Matheson put it nicely in the witness box on Thursday, when she was questioned about her forensic role at the Ōrākei scene examination, and said, “There were two different scenarios to consider of how Ms Hanna died.” She gave evidence all day. She often provided commentary on a series of photos of police exhibits shown on a video screen positioned on a wall in the freezing courtroom. Some of the exhibits cannot be named, in accordance with media prohibitions set down by the Chief Coroner. Other exhibits can be considered neutral but were confronting or distressing for Pauline’s friends (Pheasant and John Riordan have left Hereford cattle at their Hawkes Bay farm to attend the inquiry), Pauline’s family (her brother Bruce is an epitome of the decent Kiwi joker except smarter), and, most obviously, Pauline’s husband.
And so to the cliffhanger of whether Polkinghorne would crumple just as he did on Day 2, and howl like a dog. He was most at risk on Thursday when the video screen was imprinted with images of Pauline’s dressing gown. She was wearing it when emergency services responded to Polkinghorne’s 111 call on the morning of Easter Monday, April 5, 2021. Seeing it again put Polkinghorne on the brink. Grief heated his face and his eyes boiled with tears. His sister Ruth sat with him for support, but seemed unaware of her brother’s struggle. Timmins sat on his other side, but the little lawyer did not look up at his client.
Matheson talked about “a noticeable unidentifiable aroma” on the bathrobe, and about yellow staining. Surprisingly, she said the ESR lacked the technology to test for urine, which you’d think was a piece of piss. Meanwhile the photos kept coming of the bathrobe, front and back, close-up and from different angles … It was the clothing of death. Polkinghorne sucked in his breath, wiped his face, fought back the tears.
The moment passed. He held it in. Matheson moved on, too, commenting on other photos taken throughout the house. “I was looking to track the movement of blood.” The court was shown photos of a bathroom sink. There were photos of sheets. There were photos of the dressing gown that Polkinghorne wore when police and ambulance staff arrived at his house. Unsurprisingly, for that snappy wearer of bowties and comedy socks, the gown was a technicolour dreamcoat. Relevantly, Matheson said, “No blood was detected on the dressing gown.” What about the bedroom? The police theory is that it was the setting for a struggle to the death. It was reasonable, then, to expect signs of a struggle. Matheson: “All of the door handles and light switches were tested and no blood was located.” In short there was no actual “movement of blood”.
Pauline’s friends and Pauline’s family do not believe Pauline’s death was self-inflicted. Pauline’s husband says he saw with his own eyes that it was self-inflicted, and has suffered five years of the trauma and anguish of losing his wife as well as the extreme stress of being charged with murder. It is an appalling position to imagine: a widower, knocked sideways by the sudden death of their spouse, then stuck on the end of a pitchfork and held up in the most heavily reported trial of the century as a diabolical killer. The injustice of it would be monstrous. An additional, enduring problem, evident in the public gallery in that cold courtroom in Newmarket, is that very few people bother to imagine it.
