Day 1 of the coronial inquiry of the century, the sequel to the criminal trial of the century, was held on Monday morning in an obscure corner of Newmarket where interested parties gathered to examine the matter of the death of Pauline Hanna. The most interesting party was Dr Philip Polkinghorne. He entered the courtroom in disguise, with a thick scarf covering his face; it only emphasised the theatrical strangeness of the man accused of murdering his wife and found not guilty. He looked like a kind of phantom of the opera.
The latest production in the Polkinghorne affair is set in a calming Ministry of Justice courtroom on the second floor above an abandoned Irish pub and beneath Go Cars Finance. It’s on a side-street off the lower end of Khyber Pass Rd, in an Asian restaurant district; there are always cigarette butts on the pavement outside noodle joint Nan Xin. The panelling motif behind the coroner resembles teardrops or udders. It was hard to know whether to cry or moo.
Pauline died on April 5, 2020. She was 63. Her brother Bruce Hanna brought in a framed photograph of Pauline and positioned it in front of the court. She looked radiant.
Polkinghorne sat next to his lawyers Ron Mansfield and Michael Timmins. All bald men look alike and from behind their three shining skulls made them look like sad old triplets. As though to mock them, Polkinghorne’s sister Ruth modelled a fabulous head of wild hair. Alysha McClintock appeared for the Crown, as she did at the High Court trial that everyone remembers she lost, and she introduced two police officers who gave evidence at the High Court; the three losers all looked very determined.
A sense of a reunion was further established by the line-up of the ladies and gentlemen of the press, all veterans from the High Court epic. Craig Kapitan from NZME and Cat Owen from Stuff were there. If a criminal trial occurs, and neither Craig or Cat report it, it does not make a sound. I was there. Mark McNeill, who made a light-hearted documentary about the trial, was there. Herald legend Carolyne Meng-Yee was there but only in spirit, with everyone laughing at her typically brilliant report about the inquest in Monday’s paper; she had interviewed Polkinghorne’s ex-lover and hooker of choice, Madison Ashton, who talked about attending a masked ball in the Palace of Versailles where guests included Kanye West “dressed like a gimp”. Bring out the gimp! Classic Meng-Yee, and classic Polkinghorne-adjacent copy.
It was a short hearing. It lasted 91 minutes. “No person is on trial,” the Coroner told the courtroom. “There is no prosecution. There is no defence. There is no burden of proof.” As such there is a beautiful purity about a coronial inquest; it takes out the heat and noise, resists narratives and story-telling. The first phase of the inquest will focus exclusively on Pauline’s cause of death.
Just like the trial, though, the central question remains the same: whether the death was self-inflicted, or, as McClintock put it really rather delicately in her opening address, “was it an act done to her by another?” Her question was rhetorical. “The police position points toward death at the hands of another.” McClintock had read the memo. The court’s beautiful purity prevented her from accusing or even naming this mysterious “another” by name.
And yet Mansfield, in his opening address, came out roaring, as though still in courtroom 11 at the High Court of Auckland. He’s a creature of habit—as ever, he tore through a Gala apple in court, reducing it to a shrivelled core—and always takes the same weather with him, shouting in a tempest. He yelled, “What we’ve seen from my learned friend’s elongated opening address to you is the continued obsession by the New Zealand Police based on their subjective view of Dr Polkinghorne and his lifestyle!” And: “We need to be very careful in this hearing that a fascination with someone’s lifestyle does not drive and inflict this hearing!” Also, variously, “Moral judgment … fixation … prejudice!” He was dancing a furious little foxtrot, but the music was all in his head. McClintock had made zero mention of Polkinghorne’s “lifestyle”. Nothing about hookers. Nothing about sex. Nothing about threesomes, foursomes or moresomes.
Pauline’s brother Bruce Hanna provided the most stunning moment of Monday’s hearing when he said, very loudly, “The elephant is in the room!” He had pinned a white ribbon made of metal on his shirt, just as he wore it every day of the trial as an eloquent statement about men’s violence toward women. He held a sheet of A4 in his hand. It shook. The Coroner invited him to move from the public gallery to a desk in front of courtroom so he could spread out his documents. “I just have one document, ma’am,” he said. His statement was not merely from the heart but ripped from the heart. “That terrible day she died was the worst day of my life … I believe Philip John Polkinghorne was on drugs that night … The truth is there. It’s always been there … Please expose the elephant!”
All eyes turned to Polkinghorne, that tiny elephant, that not very mysterious “another”.
