Week 2, Day 10 of the coronial inquiry into the possibly mysterious death of public health executive Pauline Hanna ended with the cross-examination of her husband Dr Philip Polkinghorne that everyone has been waiting for, to put him on the rack, to hold his feet to the fire, to go to work on him with a blowtorch and a pair of pliers—hold the horses of metaphor for a second, and let’s describe it as, finally, an opportunity to test his word. It was a test he failed. He looked bad. It was exactly the kind of behaviour—raving, shifty, sour, sarcastic, playing dumb, entitled, caught out—that a jury in a murder trial would potentially have responded to with a verdict of guilty.
But a coronial inquiry is not a trial. Polkinghorne already went to trial, in 2024, when he did not give evidence, and was found not guilty of murdering Pauline on Easter Monday, April 5, 2021. Police maintain the belief that he staged her suicide. The coroner is tasked with determining the cause of her death. And so Friday’s hearing saw Polkinghorne cross-examined by Crown solicitor Alysha McClintock, who challenged Polkinghorne on a wide range of inconsistencies in his version of what happened, rounding off her 70-minute roasting by flat-out putting to him that he killed his wife. “Wrong,” he said, and squeaked a series of synonyms. “Absolutely incorrect. False. Patently wrong.” At last, he was consistent.
A coroner’s court maintains the fiction that it is inquisitorial, not adversarial. In fact both McClintock or Polkinghorne’s famous lawyer Ron Mansfield have brought their old adversarial habits with them to court. Friday’s cross-exam was classic McClintock; it’s been a while since I’ve seen her practise that sharp, mean art, and I’d forgotten how good she is, providing a masterclass in the three C’s—commit, credit, and confront—as she leaned into Polkinghorne’s different stories. It was a cross-exam for the ages.
There were, inevitably, a lot of questions about methamphetamine. Police found 37 grams—the technical term is a shitload—at his house, and he pleaded guilty to possession. But the former eye surgeon recanted the admission earlier this week in coroner’s court, suggesting the drugs belonged to Pauline. He also told the court that he had smoked it a couple of times, with Pauline; but in a documentary interview, he claimed he had never inhaled.
McClintock: Did you absolutely deny using methamphetamine?
Polkinghorne: I did.
McClintock: So that was a lie.
Polkinghorne: I didn’t use methamphetamine that night of Pauline’s death.
McClintock: Doctor, you said you had not used methamphetamine at all.
Polkinghorne: Well, I apologise for that. And if I didn’t make myself clear, and I’ll repeat it for the courtroom here, I have used methamphetamine.
McClintock: Okay. But were you telling the documentary makers that the methamphetamine in that house was not yours, that you were not the methamphetamine user?
Polkinghorne: I’ll repeat my answer. I did not use methamphetamine on the night Pauline died. I had previously used methamphetamine.
McClintock: But you didn’t acknowledge that in the documentary.
Polkinghorne: I didn’t distinguish between that in the documentary. Correct.
The Coroner: You’re not answering the question. You need to answer the question. The question is, did you tell the documentary interviewer that you had never used it at all?
Polkinghorne: Well, if I did, that was incorrect. I acknowledge I’ve made an error. My answer was formulated for the fact that I was still working as a doctor and didn’t want my methamphetamine use to be in the public arena. So I lied or misled the audience on that.
McClintock: So we’ve got to the point. You did lie about your methamphetamine use in the documentary.
Polkinghorne: Correct.
McClintock: Now, a methamphetamine bag was found in a room in which you had a shower.
Polkinghorne: Correct.
McClintock: Police tell us it was found there and it hadn’t been there before. Do you maintain that you did not drop that methamphetamine bag?
Polkinghorne: I did not drop that methamphetamine bag when I was having a shower. I’ve never seen it before.
McClintock: So your position, just so we’re clear, is that methamphetamine bag turns up unconnected entirely to you or the shower you have in that room.
Polkinghorne: Yes.
McClintock: That’s a lie, isn’t it?
Polkinghorne: No.
The courtroom was all ears. The front press bench was sardined with hacks, with more at the back of the court. The public gallery was full, including a retired medical couple who trot down the road each morning from their retirement apartment in Parnell. Parnell, Remuera, Ōrākei —a Bermuda triangle of rich Auckland suburbs borders the Newmarket court, forming a tightly confined geography of the Polkinghorne case. The couple lived in Ōrākei. His surgery was in Remuera. They met at a charity dinner for the Blind Foundation in Parnell. She spent some of her last weekend shopping in Newmarket. Until the revelations of his trial, Polkinghorne was just another professional schnook working hard to earn vast wealth in the Tory breeding grounds in the eastern bloc of the Auckland isthmus. He was a private citizen. No one had ever heard of him. Now everyone knows him for his drug use, his hooker use, his suspected involvement in his wife’s death.
At his trial, the Crown highlighted his decision the day after Pauline’s death to use the Duck Duck Go search engine to look up a very specific medical issue, and then trying, unsuccessfully, to delete it. Media are prohibited from reporting aspects of the death, in accordance with s71 of the Coroner’s Act; I have amended the transcript to abide by that order. At the inquiry on Friday morning, McClintock asked him why he looked it up.
Polkinghorne: It was an educative search.
McClintock: Okay, but if it’s an educative search, doctor, why did you delete the search?
Polkinghorne: I always delete my searches. I delete searches to this day.
Right. Of course. Totally normal. Another subject from the trial resurfaced at the inquiry on Friday, when McClintock asked him about his phone activity in the small hours of the night Pauline died. He was on WhatsApp, Notes, photos and videos from 1:10am until 2:44am. There is no record of that activity.
McClintock: You activated airplane mode that night.
Polkinghorne: I found that out subsequently, yes.
McClintock: You say you did so by accident.
Polkinghorne: Yes.
McClintock: But there are a number of steps involved in activating airplane mode of an iPhone. Are you aware of that?
Polkinghorne: No.
McClintock: Okay, well, the simple point is it takes a series of steps to do it. So my suggestion to you is it’s not something easily done accidentally.
Polkinghorne: No comment.
“No comment”! What was this, a press conference? Throughout the cross-exam, Polkinghorne alternated between terse replies and long, stuttering, sometimes incomprehensible monologues, grabbing at random asides that no one wants to know (“I often get cold sores”) and wandering away from the question until the Coroner led him back to it. One such rave came during a line of questioning about his use of the phone on the night Pauline died.
McClintock: You were active on your devices that night.
Polkinghorne: Yes. The record shows it.
McClintock: Yes, it does. And on Tuesday you told us that activity included you looking at ophthalmic images. So you’re now quite clear, are you, that’s what you were doing?
Polkinghorne: Yes.
McClintock: It’s not something you mentioned to police in your interview the next day.
Polkinghorne: I don’t believe I was asked.
McClintock: In your brief of evidence dated 14 April you said, “I have no recollection of what I did that night.” That’s what you said.
Polkinghorne: There’s an inconsistency there.
McClintock: You signed it as the truth.
Polkinghorne: Four months ago.
McClintock: And now what we see in the documentary is that you said you did not use any devices at all.
Polkinghorne: Yes, I should have been more prescriptive in my answers, but at the time, when I make some statements, certainly I’m trying to convey what I believe at the time and obviously my memory is faulty on occasions and when I’m prompted by certain things, issues come up. Like the bread in the toaster that morning. I see photos of it and it reminds me what the bread was. So I’m trying to give the best description as I can to this inquiry, this inquest, but it’s based on data that comes to light at a later date. For example, I didn’t recall that I’d used my telephone overnight on that occasion. And that’s what I said at the time. Then I found some data that shows that I did use it…
The above transcript of his answer is actually abbreviated. I just didn’t have the strength to include all of it.
The wave of the cross-exam built, and built, and built, and then it came crashing down upon the small figure half-submerged in the witness box.
McClintock: Dr Polkinghorne, you have told many lies. Do you accept that?
Polkinghorne: Yes.
McClintock: And the reason is to try to keep your story straight. But if Pauline killed herself, there’s no need to try.
Polkinghorne: Could you repeat the question?
McClintock: Pauline killed herself and all you had to do was explain how you found her. We shouldn’t have all these lies.
Polkinghorne: No.
McClintock: What explains it is the lying. You’re lying to talk to your way out on reality.
Polkinghorne: Wrong.
McClintock: Some form of argument took place that night.
Polkinghorne: No.
McClintock: In that bedroom where she slept.
Polkinghorne: No.
McClintock: It was you who took Pauline’s life.
Polkinghorne: No. No. That’s not true.
It was the cross-exam that finally had its day, denied a place at the High Court in 2024; if it had taken place back then, in front of a jury, it’s entirely possible it would have cooked his goose. His goose might right now be in jail. And yet, and yet. Maybe all the inconsistencies and scarcely credible denials don’t add up to a hill of beans. They were just stories, bits and pieces of a memoir told by a unreliable narrator. It doesn’t matter what you think of him; the only thing that matters is what can and cannot be proved. Two forensic pathologists were called by the defence to give evidence at the trial. They both favoured suicide over homicide as the cause of Pauline’s death.
A third forensic pathologist is due to give evidence at the coronial inquiry next week, and so is a neuropharmacologist regarded as the leading opioid expert in Australia. Back to the science. Back to the forensic evidence. Back to the balance of probabilities of what caused the death of the woman in two framed photographs at the front of the Newmarket courtroom.
Her family brought in a picture of Pauline by herself, and placed it to next to a bouquet of proteas. The next day, it was joined by a portrait of Pauline with Polkinghorne, happily posing for the camera, a picture of married bliss. It was placed next to a vase of lilies. The flowers were closed for the remainder of that first week of the inquiry but they opened, spectacularly, on Monday, and remained in bloom all this second week. They have looked very beautiful, a small, good thing.
