WARNING: DISTRESSING CONTENT

After four-and-a-half straight weeks of testimony, Crown prosecutors have called their likely last witnesses in the high-profile and still far-from-finished murder trial of Auckland eye surgeon Philip Polkinghorne.

Jurors in the High Court at Auckland will have by now noted one glaring absence from the roster of 62 potential witnesses read aloud at the start of trial: Sydney-based escort Madison Ashton, with whom the 71-year-old surgeon is accused of having formed a “double life” prior to wife Pauline Hanna’s suspicious death.

The wider jury pool is commonly read aloud a list of potential witnesses at the start of a trial so that anyone who has a conflict of interest can be dismissed before the final group of 12 is selected. Neither lawyers nor Justice Graham Lang have directly addressed Ashton’s absence to the jury.

Discussions outside the jury’s presence cannot be reported while the trial is ongoing.

Polkinghorne is accused of having fatally strangled Hanna, 63, inside their Remuera home – possibly while high on methamphetamine – before staging the scene to look like a suicide on the morning of April 5, 2021 (Easter Monday that year).

Regardless of Ashton’s presence in court, she has become a major theme of the prosecution’s circumstantial case against the doctor.

Current Crown solicitor Alysha McClintock, reunited with her Crown solicitor predecessor Brian Dickey, has suggested Polkinghorne might have violently lashed out at Hanna as they argued over the hundreds of thousands of dollars he had spent on sex workers in recent years. Financial records show over $100,000 went to Ashton – with some of that money, it is expected to be argued, derived from the $1 million sale of the South Auckland home Hanna owned before their marriage.

McClintock also suggested during her opening address last month that Hanna might have been confronting her husband over a “double life” he was alleged to have been setting up with Ashton. That contention was bolstered by numerous intimate and sometimes sexually explicit WhatsApp communications between Polkinghorne and Ashton in the months leading up to Hanna’s death and in the immediate aftermath.

But through cross-examination of each of the witnesses so far, the defence has emphasised a starkly different narrative. Polkinghorne, they contended, loved his wife but she was an overworked healthcare executive with a history of depression and suicidal thoughts who was pushed over the edge by the most stressful work assignment of her life, helping to oversee the rollout of the Covid-19 vaccine.

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The apparent suicide scene was exactly that – a suicide – lawyer Ron Mansfield KC has repeatedly insisted.

He will get to explore that perspective further over the coming week or so as the defence controls who enters the witness box next. Jurors have not been read a list of defence witnesses but Mansfield has suggested there will be many, ranging from experts to people who knew the defendant and his wife.

Mansfield briefly addressed the jury with an opening statement at the start of the trial but he will have an opportunity tomorrow to give a more fulsome outline of the defence case before the first of Polkinghorne’s witnesses are called.

The Crown’s final witness for their case-in-chief was the opposite of Ashton – a surprise appearance from someone excluded from the original witness list read to jurors.

Jun Lee, a digital forensic analyst and civilian police employee, was called at the last minute to rebut a revelation by the defence late yesterday afternoon that Hanna’s phone had logged two interactions around 4am on the morning of her death. Polkinghorne’s 111 call reporting her death was about four hours later.

Jurors were left with the impression at the end of yesterday that the 4.04 and 4.05am logs were indications that Hanna’s iPhone had been used at that time to draft two messages – one to her husband and another to the teen daughter of a friend. If that was the case, the iMessage texts were deleted before they were sent and their contents are unknown, Mansfield suggested yesterday as Detective Andrew Reeves sat in the witness box for a third day.

The defence implied the messages could have been aborted goodbye notes as she contemplated suicide. If jurors decide the evidence is sufficient to conclude that Hanna was on the phone at 4am, it will significantly reduce the timeframe for when she died.

When asked about the logs yesterday, Reeves suggested there might be alternative explanations. Polkinghorne knew his wife’s pincode, he pointed out. But Reeves said most questions about the log entries would be best directed at an IT expert.

Lee, the expert, was adamant the defence was flat wrong in its interpretation of the data.

“It just runs in the background,” he said. “I have checked. There was no user interaction of the phone at all.”

Lee explained that iPhones frequently run checks of other iPhone users on a person’s contact list – verifying their authenticity in an effort to protect against phishing scams. Doing so will create a log. But if someone was to use iMessaging, even if to draft a note that was deleted before it was sent, there would be “heaps of logs” to make it evident.

Hanna’s phone, he said, had no logs indicating that it had been turned on or even picked up around that time.

Mansfield asked if such logs are sometimes omitted when extracting data from a phone for analysis. Lee insisted that wasn’t the case.

“It’s fairly straightforward,” the witness said. “We deal with this every single day.”

The trial ended early today so that Mansfield could consult with his own tech expert in Australia before finishing Lee’s cross-examination tomorrow morning.

Prior to their final witness, prosecutors called upon Detective Senior Sergeant Chris Allan, one of the officers in charge of the investigation, which was dubbed Operation Kian. Among the varied topics he was asked to address was the going rate for methamphetamine around the time of Hanna’s death – about $350 per gram, with “a little bit of a wholesale aspect if you buy in bulk”, he responded.

Police reported finding just over 37g in the Polkinghorne home, which would put the value at roughly $13,000. Polkinghorne pleaded guilty at the outset of the trial to possession of methamphetamine and possession of a meth pipe.

Prosecutors also delved one last time into a December 2019 incident, alluded to by previous witnesses, in which Hanna was distraught after Polkinghorne vanished over Christmas – leaving her to lie about his whereabouts to family as they gathered at the couple’s Rings Beach bach in Coromandel. It was around that time that Hanna called her physician, and then a crisis hotline, to report that she was having suicidal thoughts but no plan to enact them.

Jurors last week were shown a letter from Polkinghorne to his wife just prior to the disappearance in which he said he had been feeling “increasingly devoid in the last few months from our relationship” before listing her perceived flaws – including extensive spending in travel and using his “air miles”. He ended the letter by indicating he was leaving immediately for a “three-day course” in Auckland called “Moving on or Up”, where he planned to contemplate the future of their marriage.

“I don’t know what the outcome of this retreat will be but to be frank without some sort of insight I am sure I will not be able to continue,” he wrote. “If there is a pill to make it easier, don’t worry I would take the bottle!!

“My intention is to return to Rings on the 27th. I will not be contactable until then. The organizers’ [sic] of the retreat have agreed I can answer patient’s texts, but other stuff is out of bounds.

“I don’t know where the bucketload of love went, but there you have it.”

But travel records, Detective Allan pointed out, showed Polkinghorne wasn’t at an Auckland retreat during that time. He left New Zealand on a four-day roundtrip flight to Sydney – the city where Ashton lives – before returning on December 27.

Craig Kapitan is an Auckland-based journalist covering courts and justice. He joined the Herald in 2021 and has reported on courts since 2002 in three newsrooms in the US and New Zealand.

The Herald will be covering the case in a daily podcast, Accused: The Polkinghorne Trial. You can follow the podcast at iHeartRadio, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, through The Front Page feed, or wherever you get your podcasts.