The court has heard from Pauline Hanna, in her own words — in her own voice.
Warning: This article contains content that could be disturbing to some people.
The jury has been played an audio recording of her speaking with extended family at her brother Bruce Hanna’s Hawke’s Bay home in November 2019.
She was allegedly murdered by her husband Philip Polkinghorne in April 2021. Polkinghorne, 71, is accused of strangling his wife and making it look like a suicide. His defence said she took her own life and he found her in their Remuera home after waking up.
“He screws women, and he hurts me, but I know he loves me,” Pauline Hanna said, in the recording played to the court. “I just know he’s such a sex fiend and wants to have sex with everyone.”
Hanna goes on to say Polkinghorne had really hurt her.
“He is an angry, angry man,” she said, forcefully, in the recording. “He is somebody who does not handle stress, he is somebody who gets very, very, very wound up.”
“I love my husband but he is somebody who is very angry with the world when the world doesn’t go his way,” Hanna said.
She was then heard saying that she was Polkinghorne’s “brick”, and he was hers.
“He does love me,” she pondered, before asking family whether they thought Polkinghorne was using her.
Hanna said in the recording, several times, she loved Polkinghorne.
But she also said: “I’m not a doorman, I’m not a doormat.
“There will be a point, if it continues next year, I will say no,” she was also heard saying.
In the recording were Pauline Hanna and her brother and trial witness Bruce Hanna and his wife and daughter.
The recording was more than 20 minutes long.
Pauline also told the family how much she loved her DHB health administrator job.
“I’ve got $200-million to spend, I’m not going to let him destroy me,” she said. “He hates the fact that I’ve got power.”
Additionally, she detailed her husband’s relationship with a woman in Sydney.
“She loves me more than she loves Philip,”Hanna said.
“I used to join the prostitutes and be part of the whole f***king thing, I did that because I wanted to make sure he didn’t go off the rails but now I can’t do it anymore.”
Pauline Hanna told her family she was emotionally bullied by Polkinghorne. But she also told them, “he is a good man”.
In court, Polkinghorne appeared to show no reaction the sound of his dead wife’s voice.
Hanna unhappy with accused’s ‘foibles’ — brother
Pauline Hanna’s younger brother Bruce Hanna was also today giving evidence in the trial.
Bruce Hanna told the court she called him while driving home the Thursday before the weekend she died.
“We had a good conversation, she was in high spirits.”
He outlined how his sister, a health administrator, was very proud of herself and her team ahead of a Covid-19 vaccine clinic opening.
Bruce Hanna said she called to catch up ahead of a 10-day holiday she was to take with friends.
When asked how he first came to meet or know Polkinghorne, Bruce Hanna said he first met him in the mid 1990s and “got on okay” with him.
They had fished together and he had gone to their Coromandel bach.
But he said he didn’t think his sister was relaxed or happy when with Polkinghorne.
“I think she was just on edge really. Philip seemed quite detached, had other things on his mind,” he told Crown prosecutor Brian Dickey.
“I did notice when they were together, she wasn’t as happy.”
He then said what he’d been told about why.
“She wasn’t happy with the way the relationship was going. Philip had other women on the side she told us about. Yeah, she wasn’t happy with it at all,” he said.
“He had a woman in Sydney and he had other women, he visited prostitutes in Auckland,” Bruce Hanna said.
He said Polkinghorne wanted her to carry out sexual acts she “wasn’t happy with”.
“And that’s why he went other places, and they were the words she used,” he said.
“I think there used to be group sex, yeah, Philip used to get her involved. I don’t think she was very happy with it, I think for the sake of the relationship she was trying to go along with it … I think Philip was pushing her into it really.”
He said “foibles” was the word his sister used to describe her husband’s actions.
But she would say that Polkinghorne loved her.
Bruce Hanna also detailed how his sister would describe Polkinghorne’s mood.
“Sometimes she would speak and say he was on the roof and that he was an angry man, those were her words … she’d say ‘I can’t talk at the moment because he’s on the roof and he’s in a complete wild, mad at something, I don’t know what, so I’ve just had to walk away and leave him’.”
Dickey asked Bruce Hanna how he found out about his sister’s death.
He said it was Polkinghorne, who seldom called, who called him.
“I saw it was Philip and I pulled over and he told me, ‘oh I’ve got some terrible news, it’s Pauline, she’s dead, she’s hanged herself’,” he told the court.
Bruce Hanna said he was aware Polkinghorne was having business difficulties.
He did not appear to look at Polkinghorne in court during his evidence.
Defence asks Bruce Hanna about his sister’s earlier suicide attempt
The defence case is that Polkinghorne found Pauline Hanna dead after she took her own life.
Cross-examining Bruce Hanna, defence lawyer Ron Mansfield asked whether he knew his sister had attempted suicide in 1992; previous anti-depressant prescriptions; a specialist referral for severe depression; a psychiatrist referral; and a diagnosis of alcohol dependence syndrome among other things.
Bruce Hanna replied he was unaware of all these matters.
He confirmed to Mansfield that his sister had talked with him about long hours she was working.
Mansfield produced an email sent by Pauline Hanna to family members in May 2020 in which she said she was having a first full day off in eight weeks.
