Polkinghorne: Inside the Trial of the Century
by Steve Braunias

The last time a book by Steve Braunias was reviewed at this website, a mere 10 months ago, Guy Somerset wondered if Braunias could escape the clutches of crime. Somerset sounded doubtful, and he had good reason to doubt. At the time, Braunias was deep into his long, gripping and idiosyncratic dispatches from the Philip Polkinghorne trial, published daily in the NZ Herald. He was clearly absorbed, just as his many readers were. Could he really call time on his true-crime series, as he had promised? Of course not. A trilogy – The Scene of the Crime, Missing Persons and The Survivors – has now become an unofficial quartet, albeit with a different publisher. 

The trial of Polkinghorne for the murder of his wife, Pauline Hanna, is considered sensational enough and unusual enough to warrant a book of its own, rather than a chapter in a collection, even if some will question whether it really is the trial of our still-young century. Was the second David Bain trial a bigger deal? Had the Christchurch terrorist not changed his plea to guilty, his trial would have overshadowed all others. But let’s agree that the Polkinghorne case was indeed lurid, fascinating and, as Braunias shows, mysterious enough to at least be nominated for that title. The case keeps on giving: after two documentary series and a book, we could call it the Polkinghorne of plenty.

Here is a quick summary of the facts in the unlikely event anyone could have forgotten. Polkinghorne, a successful Auckland eye surgeon, discovered his wife dead one morning in their large Remuera home. It looked like suicide. The Crown tried to prove, unsuccessfully, that Polkinghorne had killed her. Put like that, it may not sound so unusual. Much of the coverage of the case was really about two things, sex and drugs. Again, nothing unusual there. A lot of crime is about one, the other or both. But it was the milieu that was different. It is in those words ‘successful’ and ‘large’.

The sense of getting a rare glimpse into the sordid private lives of the rich across a vast gulf seems to have attracted many to the trial. But oddly for Braunias, ‘after years of reporting on murder trials of damaged colonised peoples, or of low-lifes and the financially illiterate’, Polkinghorne was a familiar, even empathetic figure. Sure, he was wealthier, but he was only seven years older and from the same white middle-class background as Braunias (both men grew up in the Bay of Plenty). They became friendly during the trial. They said hello and goodbye; they joked and made small talk.

The trial revealed Polkinghorne’s insatiable, compulsive consumption of methamphetamine and use of sex workers. Who could not be simultaneously amused and repulsed by this older man’s relentless, pornographic pursuit of sex? Who would not be horrified at the sums he spent on sex workers (nearly $300,000 over five years) and the hefty stash of methamphetamine discovered in his home, which he smoked on his trusty meth pipe, comically named ‘Sweet Puff’?

But are we here to be prurient or to judge the prurience of others? There is a view that most of us watched like curtain-twitching, tut-tutting puritans as we learned about this carnival of excess that seemed so frivolous, so Auckland, so entertaining and so idiotic. Even as Braunias refuses to join in that moral chorus, he has fun with the sordid details. After the Crown described Polkinghorne as a ‘sex fiend’, Braunias riffs on funnier variations on that quaint term, such as sex dwarf, malignant sex dwarf, foul sex elf and even deranged sex goblin. This is good comedy. Polkinghorne was a shameless ‘sex machine in miniature’. He was ‘the Remuera burgher gone rogue and rutting’ and his emails and texts were ‘a testament to turpitude and tumescence’. For Braunias, the trial ripped up ‘the puritanical contract’ and liberated uptight New Zealanders from shame. It revealed Auckland to be ‘big, loud, crowded, happy, anxious, nosy, drugged, violent, adorable, shimmering, extremely rich, extremely poor and extremely horny’ and made it sound like the place to be.

Maybe. But you don’t have to be a wowser to see the sadness and waste here. Polkinghorne’s life was a moral disaster, a collection of soul-destroying addictions that ruined him and others. Better than sex fiend or sex dwarf is Braunias’ description of Polkinghorne as ‘a prisoner of sex’, or a slave to his compulsions. There were times during the trial when the story seemed reminiscent of Charlotte Grimshaw’s novels and short stories about Auckland society, especially for the ways in which wealth and power can so easily rub up against crime and poverty.

In her piece on the Polkinghorne trial, published by 1 News, Grimshaw hit on a dimension others seemed to miss, which is the effect of heavy drug use. She wrote that Polkinghorne ‘collapsed not just into seediness and squalor, but into sheer inanity. This has always seemed to me the hellish essence of substance abuse: its blending of melodrama and inanity. His life as described in the trial seems like the collapse of Polkinghorne’s intellectual self. Along with the loss of his faculty of self-preservation – both sure outcomes of meth use.’

The Crown case presented a man who was out of his right mind, pursuing a Pretty Woman delusion about settling down with a sex worker. That sex worker, who uses the name Madison Ashton, put it even better when she talked about the ‘never-ending sexual wonderland that exists in his psychopathy’. She added that she ‘was never a human being’ in Polkinghorne’s fantasy life. ‘It was just him getting his rocks off in his very fertile mind.’

Ashton became notorious as the witness who ran away and popped up again after the verdict to tell journalists her side of the story. Should it be a surprise for readers to learn she is an intelligent, complex, defensive, vulnerable and fully human character and not simply the sexual cartoon she believes Polkinghorne saw? If it is, that might also speak to a prejudice and judgmentalism about sex. She too is a prisoner of sex. People seem unable to see her as a regular human being.

To say that the trial seemed entertaining and idiotic in much of the coverage means it never felt fully tragic. Only an encounter with Hanna’s brother Bruce and his family after the verdict strikes a truly sad note in a story we kept forgetting was supposed to be about the death of a hard-working, well-liked woman rather than the sordid antics of Polkinghorne.

If Braunias does see this book as the true end of his crime writing career, then ‘the trial of the century’ is a good place to stop. He has been consistently writing at the top of his game for more than two decades now. No one can approach him for style or skill. Even worse for his critics and haters, he’s prolific. While most journalists struggle to master one form, he has mastered at least three, and the three strands of his career run in parallel. There is the fearless satirist of the weekly Secret Diary. There is the erudite books editor at Newsroom, and the Listener before that. And over the past decade, there was Braunias the literary court reporter, building on his skills as a profile writer. He has invented his own genre.

One of the things Braunias did in the trilogy was to write as though he was reviewing defence lawyers and prosecutors, in the mode of a theatre critic covering actors. They sometimes became more three-dimensional to the reader than the person on trial, or the person who was murdered. He became familiar with the lawyers. He knew their flaws and strengths. He had seen them in other productions. So it is with this case and Ron Mansfield KC, ‘the most famous defence lawyer in town, the big hitter, the gun for hire’. And the real star of the show.

That idea of a trial as a performance with a strong leading man, a supporting cast, heroes and villains, finally becomes literal in Polkinghorne when Braunias actually does review the closing addresses as though he was watching an opera. There are three acts, a narrative arc. Few court reporters could make that conceit work. Braunias’ readers also know he is a great comic writer, and the comedy often depends on incongruity, such as an unlikely reference to ‘the hallowed premises of Supercheap Auto’ during a tense cross-examination about ropes and hanging, or this John Clarke-like exchange between a prosecutor and a witness over a carpet stain:

‘They are different lines, aren’t they?’

‘They are different in appearance, yes.’

There is a highly amusing bit when a witness appearing by Zoom from Canada looks to Braunias ‘like novelist William Burroughs, thin-lipped and severe, a prophet of doom’. You can picture that. This is a highly literary book, not just in its style but in its references. Braunias reads the LRB on lunch breaks and besides Burroughs, we hear from Wittgenstein, Sylvia Plath, Emily Dickinson, Kendrick Smithyman, Camille Paglia and WH Auden, among others. There is also Janet Malcolm, who has long been a model for Braunias’ examinations of motives and internal contradictions, although Braunias is never quite as ruthless.

To state the obvious, this is not a book for people who dislike journalists writing themselves into the story. The Polkinghorne story begins and ends with Braunias’ observation of him, but he is more than an observer. He is essentially another character in the courtroom opera.

But in the end, what kind of person is Polkinghorne? And what kind of person was Hanna? These are harder questions to answer. We settle for Polkinghorne being multifaceted and contradictory, both friendly and narcissistic, both generous and controlling, both a fool for love and a devious manipulator. However, Hanna never fully comes out of the shadows and remains less vivid than Madison Ashton. A Listener cover story by Kirsty Cameron, ‘A body laid bare’, was very good on the overlooked Hanna.

The case ended in a no man’s land: not murder but not entirely convincing as suicide, either. This is one way in which it genuinely was unusual. There was never a murder to solve, based on the science at least. If it was not Polkinghorne, it was no one. Or if it was not Polkinghorne, it was not a murder. So it remains a real mystery.

And what does Polkinghorne’s future hold, besides possibly adding to the Polkinghorne of plenty with his own rumoured account of the case? He is a free man who does not seem free. The book ends with an eerie encounter with a lonely man (oddly like Robert Durst at the end of The Jinx). Polkinghorne will never become one of the folk heroes of the New Zealand justice system, like Arthur Allan Thomas or Peter Ellis or Teina Pora. He will not join the list of those who were wrongfully arrested and badly treated by the system, even though he too went through an ordeal and spent more than $2 million defending his freedom and his reputation against a case that was probably never more than circumstantial.

There is no groundswell of support out there for Polkinghorne. People simply dislike him. Some of that may be prejudice about flamboyant displays of wealth and some of it is directly about his behaviour. Or as Hanna’s brother Bruce, a ‘straight arrow’ from a Hawke’s Bay farm, said to Braunias, ‘Everybody’s been sitting there thinking, “What a terrible man.” You know, no matter what the verdict is, everyone’s saying, “Wow. He’s a terrible man.”’