WARNING: DISTRESSING CONTENT 

When police and a pathologist examined the body of Pauline Hanna inside her Remuera home shortly after husband Philip Polkinghorne called 111 to report a suicide by hanging, they noticed a horizontal braided pattern on one side of her neck that matched the pattern of a belt found rolled up in the couple’s kitchen.

The mark was a significant topic of discussion this morning at the Auckland eye surgeon’s murder trial as the first pathologist to examine Hanna’s body gave a series of answers that seemed to waver depending on who was asking the questions.

“The ligature on the neck was inconsistent with a hanging,” Dr Kilek Kesha initially told jurors, before acknowledging under cross-examination by the defence that it could be consistent.

Kesha is the first of three pathologists - two for the Crown and one for the defence - expected to testify during the 71-year-old defendant’s six-week trial, now in its third week in the High Court at Auckland.

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Prosecutors allege Polkinghorne fatally strangled Hanna, 63, before staging a suicide scene in the entryway to their home on the morning of April 5, 2021. The defence has noted she had battled depression for decades and has insisted there are logical explanations for each of the things that caused police to treat it as a suspicious death almost immediately.

While being questioned by Crown prosecutor Brian Dickey today, Kesha noted two strange things about the braided pattern found on the side of Hanna’s neck at the scene: Its angle and the disappearance of the impression by the time of Hanna’s autopsy the next day, roughly 20 hours later.

The disappearing “criss-cross pattern”, Kesha told jurors, might suggest “that there was an object on the neck after death”.

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Philip Polkinghorne is on trial in the High Court of Auckland, accused of murdering wife Pauline Hanna before staging it to look like a suicide. Photo / Jason Oxenham

“It’s clear there’s something on her neck,” he later explained. “Most likely it’s been removed shortly after death.”

As for the angle of the pattern, Kesha said he would have expected it to be in a diagonal direction across her neck had she died via hanging. A straight line impression, as viewed at the scene, would be more indicative of someone pulling a ligature from behind, he opined.

But in the end, the pathologist told prosecutors, there was a lack of other evidence like defensive injuries to suggest a strangulation in the course of an assault. He found simply that she died due to “neck compression” but left out the mechanism by which it might have happened - hanging, manual strangulation, ligature strangulation or auto-erotic asphyxiation - “because there’s elements of several different mechanisms”.

But if jurors might have been initially left with the impression that a suicide by hanging was the least favoured of the pathologist’s theories due to the belt mark, Kesha left a quite different impression during his cross-examination.

“Is it right to say your findings were entirely consistent with suicide by hanging, namely an incomplete or partial hanging?” defence lawyer Ron Mansfield KC asked at the outset of his questioning.

“No,” Kesha said, before clarifying: “It can be.”

The defence lawyer suggested that the belt mark might be there initially but disappear if it was used in a hanging but then removed between an hour or so after death. The pathologist agreed.

“These possibilities are equal, aren’t they?” Mansfield said of the theories that the belt was either applied after death or there during death and removed within two hours. The pathologist again agreed.

So the jury shouldn’t put “undue weight” on the disappearance of the mark between April 5 and the autopsy the next day, Mansfield suggested and Kesha agreed.

But Kesha wouldn’t go as far as agreeing with the defence that he didn’t find the disappearance of the mark or its alignment on the neck “at all significant”. He might not have mentioned the disappearance in reports but had mentioned it to police who were present during the post-mortem, he said.

“I think it’s relevant,” Kesha said, as he was asked the question several times.

Kesha was also asked by the Crown and the defence about the lack of major injuries on Hanna, which he confirmed “significant” - unusual but not unheard of for someone strangled in an assault. Dickey, for the Crown, pointed out that a person can be made unconscious after less than 10 seconds of consistent pressure. But Kesha noted it hardly ever happens that way in real life.

“Most of the time when someone is strangled, the pressure is not consistent,” he explained. “They’re putting up a fight. This fighting could go on for quite some time.”

Mansfield later suggested that to cause a person to lose consciousness without injury would take a professional - like a police officer or SAS member - experienced in chokeholds. The defence lawyer also noted that Hanna did not suffer a strap muscle haemorrhage, which is common in chokehold or manual strangulations but not often seen in suicides by hanging. The pathologist agreed the finding was “significant”.

Kesha is expected to continue testifying this afternoon as the trial continues before Justice Graham Lang and the jury.

Jurors are also expected to hear testimony from Christchurch pathologist Dr Martin Sage, who gave the Crown a second opinion. Later in the trial, the defence has indicated, it will call to testify an “internationally recognised” pathologist from Australia who has prepared a 100-page report of his own after examining Kesha’s findings.

Kesha said today he reviewed the defence expert’s report and didn’t disagree with the vast majority of it. He just can’t rule out other forms of neck compression, he said.

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.