WARNING: DISTRESSING CONTENT 

Fifty-one days after the murder trial of Remuera eye surgeon Philip Polkinghorne began, the jury is today set to retire to consider whether his wife Pauline Hanna died by his hands or her own. 

The Crown says he strangled her and staged the scene in an attempt to make it look like she hanged herself. His lawyer Ron Mansfield says she killed herself. He is set to finish his closing address this morning before Justice Graham Lang sums up the case. 

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The crux of Mansfield’s closing address yesterday was that the pathology was on his side and all the salacious evidence of sex and drugs in the leafy suburbs proves nothing. 

He said all pathologists found the cause of her death was neck compression and none could exclude that the cause of that compression was suicide by hanging. 

“The pathology and the forensic evidence in this case provides the answer, and it always has, and it continues to do so,” Mansfield said. 

The defence lawyer said his client and his wife had a longstanding understanding that he could use sex workers, an activity she had participated in before pulling back from it in recent years. That showed he did not control her and she was her own woman, he argued. 

As for the search for “leg edema after strangulation” that Auckland Crown Solicitor Alysha McClintock said unmasked the murderer, Mansfield said Polkinghorne made this search a few hours after his wife’s autopsy to try and work out why he was still being treated as a suspect, and whether it was due to marks he saw on her legs. 

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He deleted his messages with Sydney escort Madison Ashton after his police interview because he did not want his personal liaisons unmasked by police, Mansfield said. 

The injuries on her body, said Mansfield, were few and non-specific. For example, the bruise on her temple could have been caused by her hanging her head when arranging her hanging mechanism, the KC said. 

Polkinghorne, now 71, is accused of having fatally strangled Hanna, 63, inside their Remuera home before staging the scene on the morning of April 5, 2021, to look like a suicide by hanging. Prosecutors have suggested the defendant was high on methamphetamine when he lashed out at his wife of 24 years, possibly during an argument over his exorbitant spending on sex workers or his “double life” with Sydney escort Madison Ashton. 

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.