The Scene of the Crime

by Steve Braunias

  When she finished her story, collapsing into sobs, Justice Tony Randerson adjourned the court for 15 minutes. I went outside for a cigarette. People who didn’t smoke went out for a cigarette. No one talked.

  5

  Back in court, evidence was read from Nicholas’s ex-flatmate. She was 17 when they lived together; Nicholas, 18. She said, ‘Louise was a really happy, fun person, and was really pretty.’

  The woman said Shipton and Schollum (‘Brad and Bob’) would visit, usually in the evenings, and have sex with her and Nicholas. She thought she possibly had sex with Rickards as well, but couldn’t remember. She said, ‘There was always a friendly atmosphere. I don’t ever recall Louise being upset or her demeanour changing.’

  In her statement to police, she said, ‘I recall a time in Louise’s room when she was having sex with one of them. I was in a room with one of the others — she certainly wasn’t saying no.’

  She thought there were three or four visits. She said, ‘I was partly in awe of them, and slightly intimidated . . . I’m not sure why I participated. It was a case of it being easier to go along with it than resist it. I can see now all they came around for was sex. I didn’t see that at the time . . . I wasn’t forced into anything, and neither was Louise.’

  Half of the prosecution’s case — the rape accusations against Rickards and Shipton in the Corlett Street flat — was probably lost then and there. In cross-examination, Haigh asked Nicholas to explain the ‘vast discrepancy’ in the versions of events told by her and her flatmate.

  She said, ‘There’s no discrepancy. That’s her recollection. It’s not mine . . . I’ve always stated she was not there when these men called.’

  Haigh said, ‘Well, I suggest her recollection is correct, and yours is contrived.’

  ‘I do not accept that at all.’

  ‘Have you deliberately set out to destroy Assistant Commissioner Rickards?’

  ‘I’ve come out and told the truth.’

  ‘I suggest you’ve enjoyed the media attention in an extraordinary way.’

  ‘That isn’t right,’ she said. ‘I was given an opportunity to tell my story. I didn’t instigate it. I was approached about the police investigation. It made me definitely think I had been duped something shocking. It’s why I went to the media.’

  Haigh allowed a pause, and then said, ‘Repeatedly.’

  6

  Why would she lie? Who would want to go through the whole ordeal, putting their own name out there when they had the option of suppressing it, and make false accusations? What could possibly motivate someone to do something so wicked and harmful and weird? The accepted notion is that Nicholas came forward because she was telling the truth. She was brave. She had endured appalling treatment, and found the courage to bring ‘evil monsters’ to account. It’s possibly the correct version as well, but in court, at the actual trial, she was held up as a damaged soul who was a stranger to the truth.

  ‘She has told a series of calculated lies,’ Haigh said to the jury. ‘All her evidence is made-up, delusional, utterly false. If it wasn’t so tragically serious, one might almost regard it as laughable.’ He said she was in it for the attention, the intoxicating rush of publicity. He said she was a serial accuser; along with Rickards, Shipton and Schollum, she had accused a policeman in Murupara of raping her when she was 13, and three other officers stationed there as well. Much was made of her alleged comment to a schoolteacher that she had also been raped by a group of Maori horsemen. Nicholas denied she ever said it, that it was rubbish. Haigh dared to have fun with that one, timing his pauses to create black comedy. He said to her, ‘You also made allegations that five Maori on horseback raped you. After they had presumably dismounted.’

  The defence also introduced a witness who said Nicholas had flirted with Schollum years afterwards, at a wedding: ‘She lifted up her skirt and showed him the top of her lacy stocking. Quite a way up the thigh.’ Nicholas denied it ever happened, that it was rubbish. Mabey asked her about a statement she had given to police about having sex with Schollum — long after the alleged abuse with the baton. ‘I must have said it. I signed the statement,’ she said in cross-examination. ‘But I do not recall it.’

  Her credibility was further questioned over claims that she remembered what happened with Rickards, Shipton and Schollum only after counselling sessions led to the phenomenon or gobbledegook of ‘recovered memory’. She denied that was the case. ‘I didn’t have to dredge up what happened,’ Nicholas said. ‘It happened.’

  The most damaging challenge to her story was the statement from her ex-flatmate. Bafflingly, her written evidence — she lived in Australia, and didn’t come to the trial in person — was introduced by the prosecution. In essence, though, she was star witness for the defence. After the trial, Nicholas and journalist Phil Kitchin secretly tape-recorded the flatmate at her home in Australia. The woman told a different story. Her recollection was a lot more vague. Kitchin writes in Louise Nicholas: My Story, ‘She was so flakey, so unreliable that her evidence should have never been allowed in court.’ Nicholas writes in their book, ‘There was something at work deep down in her life that wouldn’t let her tell the truth. What had those bastards done to her?’ The answer might be: nothing.

  In court, the defence seized on the woman’s cheerful, breezy account of early evening threesomes. ‘It puts paid to the dark, forbidding atmosphere that Mrs Nicholas has described,’ Haigh said. ‘People obviously did go in for that sort of thing. People’s sexual preferences are startlingly broad.’ Startlingly, too, a witness later came forward to say that she had willingly engaged in having a police baton used on her during threesomes with Shipton and Schollum. Her evidence was suppressed during the trial. The journalists weren’t allowed to write anything; we sat there and stared at the woman as she shared the intimate details of her enjoyment of a sex toy varnished deep red and measuring 30 centimetres.

  A story in The New Zealand Herald one morning announced that Rickards was about to take the witness stand. It had the impact of an advertisement. There was standing room only in Courtroom 12. Crowded around the door was a visitor from Brisbane who wore a Lycra bicycling outfit, and a man who used the adjournments to consult his racing guide for the field at Avondale.

  Rickards gave his version of events. His face was held together with rage and hate. He said he had sex with Nicholas on two occasions. ‘There was laughing and giggling.’ He told the court five times, ‘It was a happy, jovial occasion.’ He said it without a trace of happiness or joviality. That same tone was heard when he said Nicholas was ‘lying’, was a ‘liar’, told ‘lies’, had ‘lied’; by my count, he said those words 29 times.

  Rickards writes about having sex with Nicholas in his unpublished memoir. Again, he strips it of pleasure. The first time: ‘Apart from the fact that Brad came in and watched us, there was nothing out of the ordinary about the sexual act. If at any time she had indicated that she did not wish to continue, I would have stopped. She didn’t. After we finished, we spoke to Brad, and a short time later Brad and Nicholas had sex, and I watched them.’ The second time: ‘She had phoned Brad again and we drove to her place in the early evening. Brad had met her [flatmate], and she had phoned because the friend liked him, and wanted to get to know him better . . . Brad and the woman soon left the room, and Nicholas . . . gave me oral sex. Afterwards, we chatted away, and a short time later Brad and the flatmate returned. I got on well with her and ended up in a room with her, where we had sex. That’s it.’

  In 1986, two police officers, aged 24 and 27, met up after work with an 18-year-old secretary at the Bank of New Zealand, and had sex with her. Their visit was brief, less than an hour. When Rickards and Shipton walked through the door that day, they never really left.

  7

  The wait for the verdict was long and unbearable. The jury deliberated for 74 hours and 55 minutes, three days and two nights, scoffing filled rolls from Pandoro bakery for lunch, and served two evening meals at
the Hyatt — would it be the roasted whole prime rack of lamb with pistachio crust, or the beef and shiraz pie with confit shallots?

  Co-prosecutor Mark Zarifeh broke out in a terrible red rash. His face looked bad, very bad. John Haigh could be found nursing a whiskey at the Hyatt’s bar. Louise Nicholas could be seen on the balcony of a hotel overlooking the High Court, fagging it up on her Holiday cigarettes, usually alongside journalist Phil Kitchin, who had got her to this point — it was Kitchin who got the whole thing rolling, when he found documents suggesting that a senior officer had covered up Nicholas’s original police complaint about Rickards, Shipton, and Schollum. He showed them to her at her house. She was shocked, and decided to go public with her accusation. Kitchin’s amazing story — unusually, he shared his exclusive with The Dominion-Post and TVNZ — remains one of the greatest and most far-reaching scoops in the history of New Zealand journalism. It led to police inquiry Operation Austin, as well as to the Commission of Inquiry into Police Conduct. It led to the Nicholas trial. It led to the two of them awaiting the verdict. Kitchin had long ago given up on boring codes of detachment and objectivity; he believed in Nicholas, and they’d become close friends. It was at Kitchin’s adobe house in a Hawke’s Bay valley where I’d interviewed Nicholas. That was an uncomfortable, stifling afternoon. Kitchin’s wife was there, and Nicholas brought a friend. The four of them were like some kind of cult — the cult of Nicholas, held together by faith in her story.

  When the clouds of smoke parted, Kitchin and Nicholas looked anxious on the hotel balcony. In their book, Kitchin wrote that he doubted they’d get a guilty verdict for the Corlett Street charges, but was hopeful the jury would convict the three men for ‘the Rutland Street incident’.

  Rickards, Shipton and Schollum waited it out downstairs in the cells. Shipton read the seventeenth-century poem by Richard Lovelace that famously and foolishly begins, ‘Stone walls do not a prison make, / Nor iron bars a cage.’ But that’s exactly what the walls and bars make. That’s the point of that particular architecture. Rickards swung between fear and loathing. His blackest rage was for the cop who alerted Kitchin to the story in the first place. Kitchin writes in the introduction of his book: ‘I’d like to pay tribute to my anonymous police sources.’ In his manuscript Rickards writes of ‘Kitchin’s spies, including a couple of jaundiced officers who had it in for me . . . [and were] willing to lie just to take me down’. He blames one particular officer. Rickards was his boss. He gave the cop a poor performance rating, and marked him with a score of two, meaning average. The officer insisted that Rickards give him a score of three, which would have qualified him for a pay rise. Rickards refused. His working title for his manuscript is ‘But For Three’.

  The wives of the three defendants formed a tight bond of silence as they waited outside Courtroom 12. Tania Rickards walked with her head held high. Karen Schollum was small and contained. Sharon Shipton wore hooped ear-rings, and walked with her bouffant hair held high; you could imagine her, before the agony of the charges, as someone expressive and funny and big-hearted, the life of the party. The problem was that you also imagined her husband rooting someone at the party. Shipton was the numbers man. Shipton, always Shipton, at every threesome; Shipton, saying he watched while Rickards had sex with Nicholas in Corlett Street, saying he and Schollum had sex with her at another address, saying he never had sex with her ‘on a one-to-one basis’; Shipton, who gave Nicholas’s flatmate ‘the creeps’, but was ‘persistent’.

  Shipton, always rooting or talking about rooting. From his police interview, read out in court: ‘I put it to Louise a threesome would be good for her . . . My sexual encounters with Louise have always been group sex. Me and Bob, or me and Clint . . . She openly expressed her sexuality . . . I believe she had sex with other officers. She frequented the police canteen, and Cobb & Co, where police drank. She was one of those girls . . .’ He talked and talked and talked; he couldn’t shut up; the interview lasted three hours. Asked why he thought Nicholas ‘thoroughly enjoyed’ their sexual encounters, he said: ‘It’s the same as when you have sex with your wife. The vibes, the reaction you’re getting.’ God almighty. Shipton, the priapic blowhard; Shipton, raving about ‘vibes’ as he equated his conquest of a teenage secretary with sex in the marital bed.

  No one other than family was particularly concerned about the lecherous fatty’s fate. In any case, Shipton and Schollum were already in jail for their part in the sickening pack-rape of a girl in Mt Maunganui. But Rickards still had his freedom at stake. Haigh had tried to get Rickards a separate trial, to distance his client from the two co-accused jailbirds. He’d also applied to have it heard in Rotorua. He was happy with Auckland as the choice; the city he wanted to avoid was disapproving Wellington.

  I joined Haigh now and then for a lunchtime drink during the long wait. He was always warm, lively company, and his death in 2012 at the age of 65 was felt with enormous sadness throughout Auckland’s legal profession. A thousand people packed Holy Trinity Cathedral for his funeral. Rickards was among the mourners; he knew he owed Haigh his liberty. When the charges were laid, he called Crown prosecutor Simon Moore to ask who he recommended he should engage. Moore suggested Paul Davison, John Billington, and Haigh. Part of the reason Rickards chose Haigh was because of his speciality as an employment lawyer: at that stage, Rickards wanted to fight for his job. By the time of the trial, he just wanted to stay out of jail.

  As soon as the jury retired, the extended Rickards family moved into the courthouse, and it became a Maori thing. There was a sad, mournful prayer in te reo on the first night. But radio broadcaster Willie Jackson turned up the next day in support, and introduced a boisterousness, dispensing wisecracks and good humour. At midday on the Friday, two hours before the verdict, a boil-up in a pot was brought in, along with loaves of Tip-Top bread, paper plates, and a bag of apples. I may be indulging in racist misremembering, but I’m pretty sure someone strummed on a guitar.

  All day the tension had swelled, raised itself to boiling point; something had to break. It broke at quarter to three on Friday afternoon when word finally came through that the jury had reached its verdict. Lawyers, defendants, press, court staff and the public were herded into the courtroom. It was filled to capacity. Five minutes passed in complete silence. A silence that long picks up everything around it — hope, fear, anguish, dread. And then the jury came in. The foreperson was a young woman. She read out their 20 unanimous verdicts.

  Nicholas fled the court. The three defendants wept for joy. They probably thought it was the last they would ever see of her.

  8

  To the victor, the spoils. Five days after the verdict, John Haigh could be found loping along the quiet waterfront streets of Picton, and was a picture of health and happiness. He was on holiday with his wife, Sue. ‘Let’s drive to Mapua this afternoon, Johnny,’ she said.

  I sat down with him on the shore and we talked about his life and career for a while. I was particularly interested that he was the son of ‘Fighting Frank’ Haigh, a legendary lawyer of high principle and socialist conviction, who represented the watersiders’ union in the 1951 waterfront strike: ‘My mother remembers other lawyers refusing to have anything to do with him, or her.’

  He remembered that his father took him on a protest march in Queen Street in 1960, in the ‘No Maoris, No Tour’ Springbok protest. He said: ‘I don’t have the courage he had.’

  His father was 48 when Haigh was born. Were they close? ‘He wasn’t a great family man. He was focused on the bigger issues. He worked virtually every night, and about 48, 50 weekends every year. He didn’t want me to go into law at all. Dead against it. Because he knew what it took out of him, I think.’

  But he did go into law; was part of that wanting his father’s approval and respect? John replied, ‘There’s always a desire to please . . . I wish he’d been alive when I was made a silk.’

  And it had come to this: the son defending a policeman charged with raping a young, v
ulnerable woman. It seemed more likely that his father — champion of the underdog, who waged war on social injustice — would have wanted to represent Nicholas. I asked Haigh the old chestnut about whether he thought his client was innocent.

  He said, ‘First of all, I don’t allow myself the indulgence of determining whether clients are innocent or guilty. Some lawyers do. I don’t. I think it removes the necessary detachment. But after we received the majority of police disclosure, I formed the view that he had not committed the offences as charged at all.’

  The jury hadn’t been told that the co-accused were already in prison or that the three of them would face another rape trial. A group of women who supported Nicholas threatened to make it public. Haigh said, ‘They were acting out of ignorance, because they’re saying that somehow the truth eluded the jury. That’s a fallacy. The jury knew everything that was relative to this trial.’

  The police gave it their best shot, he said, but they simply came up short. The accusations didn’t stack up. ‘The size of the investigation, the resources they put into it . . . I can’t think of anything that might have equalled it. Well, maybe that tragedy here in the Marlborough Sounds,’ he said. We looked out to the deep, green water, where Ben Smart and Olivia Hope had been murdered.

  9

  The standard happy male fantasy of a threesome is one man, two women. Rickards, Shipton and Schollum acted out another fantasy, travelling in pairs, in pursuit of the mathematic of one woman, two of them. To see them a year after the Nicholas trial, once again sitting in the dock at the Auckland High Court, once again defending charges of sexual offending, was to realise that they were the threesome that endured, that stuck together.

  The second trial was a kind of reunion. The three defendants were accused of kidnapping and indecently assaulting a woman, once again in Rotorua, in the 1980s. The same themes of power and sex and abuse, the same denials.