It’s got all the fantastical elements of a true crime Netflix series, and our news media is saturated with it. But is it all a bit much?
The Philip Polkinghorne trial has it all: the backdrop of an affluent Auckland suburb, sex obsession, methamphetamine use, a Canadian rope expert, an unhappy marriage, a dead woman and her husband in the defence. The New Zealand Herald has likened the trial to OJ Simpson’s, while it and media rival Stuff have both launched podcasts dedicated to breathless Polkinghorne coverage alongside daily live blogs. No moment, no piece of information, has been missed.
Polkinghorne, and the public, are now nearly halfway through the trial brought by the Crown, which alleges the 71-year-old murdered his wife, Pauline Hanna, by strangulation while possibly under the influence of methamphetamine, or prompted by an argument concerning Polkinghorne’s sexcapades. The prosecution alleges Polkinghorne staged her death to look like a suicide. Hanna was found dead in the couple’s Remuera home on Easter Monday 2021, and the defence maintains she took her own life before being found by her husband. At his first court hearing in August 2022, Polkinghorne pleaded not guilty.
The Crown alleges Polkinghorne lived a double-life, and evidence heard so far paints a picture of a man whose wealth was disappearing on a methamphetamine habit and sex workers in Auckland and Sydney, and an unhappy woman pressured by a controlling husband and her role as a DHB boss, helping to roll out the Covid-19 vaccine.
There are many ways to engage with the Polkinghorne trial – in the 24 hours after the hearing began on July 29, the New Zealand Herald launched its podcast Accused: The Polkinghorne Trial, a live blog, recap of the hearing’s events and commentary from former court reporter Steve Braunias, who described the trial as “a case from the golden age of tabloid journalism” and later, “the most scandalous trial of the century”. Driving the streets of Auckland, headlines from NZ Herald about the trial shine out from digital billboards. Some of the quotes played out in recordings are such fodder for headlines you can almost hear the furious typing of the court reporters. This from Hanna, for example: “He screws women, and he hurts me, but I know he loves me … I just know he’s such a sex fiend and wants to have sex with everyone.”
It’s not just the Herald though. Stuff launched a second season of its own true crime podcast The Trial to follow the Polkinghorne case, alongside a daily live blog. For lighter reading, 1News and RNZ are offering multiple written stories rather than rolling blogs.
An ‘ad nauseam’ access to the courts
It may seem par for the course now, but court reports weren’t always so instantly accessible, or padded out in immense detail. Award-winning journalist Donna Chisholm first began her career in court reporting for the Auckland Star in the 70s, when stories were written in the press bench by hand on paper with carbon copies, which were later run back to the office, or retold over the phone so an editor could copy it out for printing, line by line. If there was no available phone, you kept two cents in your pocket to find a phone box.
Now, journalists enter courts armed with laptops that can instantly update stories with the push of a button, so that as soon as a verdict is called, the public will know about it too. Throw a live blog into the mix, and the reporter can publish every statement they hear without having to worry about editing to fit a word count.
It’s an ability which shocked some members of the public in the reporting of the Lauren Dickason trial, also live blogged by the media. However, Chisholm says she doesn’t have any ethical concerns with today’s coverage of the courts. For one, it removes some of the inherent bias in reporting. “I think that it’s probably safer in many ways than cherry picking,” she says. “Obviously, there’s angles to stories, but a blow by blow of every single witness and everything they said, ad nauseam, is in there, and if you’re interested enough, you can go and find it. You’re not relying on another person’s filter.”
Back when Chisholm was in the press bench, reporters spent all day in the High Court sitting through every case in the courtroom, waiting to hear something that might be newsworthy. “There wasn’t any better example of what was happening in the community,” Chisholm says. Witnessing the courts on a daily basis “gives a far better reflection of what’s happening out there than the one-off spectacularly newsworthy cases like [Polkinghorne].” The truest example of this she recalls is a case from 1978, concerning a 17-year-old Niuean boy Iki Toloa, brought before the magistrate accused of stealing a comb from his workplace.
He was stopped by police on Auckland’s Karangahape Road while walking home from his work at Consolidated Plastics factory in Ellerslie. Toloa was arrested, charged and convicted of theft from his employer. “I was sitting there and thinking, ‘why?’ What that said was, this is racism in action,” Chisholm says. “I actually went running back to the office with the story, that’s how outrageous this was. And [then-acting editor Pat Booth] put it all over the front page.”
The follow-up became an even bigger story – University of Auckland law lecturer, David Williams, handed himself and a UOA-branded pen over to police for arrest. This became a front page story, too, after police chose not to charge him. “[Toloa’s] only real crime was that he was poor and walked home at night,” Williams told Chisholm at the time. Following Chisholm’s front-page reporting, Toloa’s case was referred back to the courts where police failed to present any evidence and his conviction was vacated. Chisholm says watching Toloa’s case unfold was a class in “racism 101”.
Polkinghorne sits at the opposite end of the spectrum to Toloa. As a wealthy white man, his trial is unlikely to offer a lesson on institutional issues, instead it taps into our curiosity of how the other half lives. And the life of Polkinghorne is particularly fantastical for a court case. As Chisholm points out, you don’t typically expect your eye doctor to go around and “thump” somebody. “This trial obviously has everything: with most murders, you don’t get status, you don’t get wealth, sex, drugs, all in one pot,” she says. “That’s pretty unusual in court, and that’s not really what court coverage is all about.”
Our fascination with true crime
Anyone with a Netflix subscription and internet access will recognise the true crime genre has grown exponentially since the 2010s, though its history is much longer, back to the gallows of 17th century London. The Polkinghorne trial has coincided, for this reporter, with a first time reading of In Cold Blood. The 1969 Truman Capote novel, which follows the quadruple-murders of the Clutter family in Kansas, is often touted as the pioneer of the true crime genre, though considering it arrived following centuries of crime reporting, it might be more suitable to think of it as a grandfather of the genre.
In 2024, where reading is meant to be a break from our constantly updating social media timelines, In Cold Blood offers no respite from the horrors of the real world. In immense detail, Capote retraces the family’s last day on Earth, the anxiety-inducing hunt for the killers, and their subsequent downfall. The book has sold millions of copies worldwide, though it began as a four-part series for The New Yorker.
It’s not hard to imagine, like the Clutter family’s small town community, Remuera locals gathering in cafes and recounting the trial of their former neighbour over coffee. Maybe they’re the same people packing out the public benches in Polkinghorne’s courtroom – on Wednesday, the Herald noted that “to get into Courtroom 11 this afternoon, media and lawyers have had to push past at least a dozen mostly older people who are coming to watch every moment, and who have massed in the corridor outside to ensure they get a seat.” On a separate day, Stuff described a group of older women loyally sitting in to see the trial.
Drew University criminology professor Scott Bonn has chalked interest in true crime up to the adrenaline our brains produce when we “witness terrible deeds”, and the fact the genre can be consumed in a controlled environment where fear can be manageable, and we can act as armchair detectives.
Crime author and DeSales University criminal justice professor Katherine Ramsland also argues true crime gives us viewers a puzzle to solve, and that “people gawk at terrible things to reassure themselves that they are safe”. Former lieutenant commander of the New York City Police Department, Vernon Geberth, has said that true crime piques our curiosity, and that a viewer can insulate themselves from the “reality of the horror by viewing the events through the prism of entertainment. This tends to make the reality less threatening, because the event happened to someone else.”
Whether or not he is found guilty of murder, Polkinghorne and all his flaws have already been immortalised in the public mind and media. And so has Hanna – the victim at the centre of this trial, whose death has inadvertently produced hundreds of headlines. She has no idea that the nation has been breathlessly following the last years, months, days and minutes of her life, trying to piece together her story like a game of Cluedo. What remains is her family, loved ones and friends (such as The Housewives of Middlemore), and while the Polkinghorne trial may serve as entertainment for some, for others it acts as a constant and jarring reminder of the loss of the woman they loved, the struggles she faced in her marriage and ways in which her husband may have failed her.