One News
March 21, 2004

Broken trust in search for justice

Lost police files and connections between investigators and alleged perpetrators are adding fresh controversy to Louise Nicholas' claims of police pack rape.

Nicholas has accused Assistant Commissioner Clint Rickards, Brad Shipton, now a district councillor in Tauranga and Bob Schollum, now a car salesman in Napier, of pack raping her and violating her with a police baton.

"My protests just went straight out the window," Nicholas says.

The accused men strongly deny the allegations but serious questions remain - including the conduct of the chief investigating officer, Detective Inspector John Dewar.

"Hindsight is a marvellous thing and if I knew then what I know now I would never have pursued anything with him," Nicholas says. "I was vulnerable..."

Dewar took charge of the case after a personal request by one of the accused men Brad Shipton.

Dewar and Shipton were friends close enough, a Rotorua woman alleges to have consensual group sex with her. She also says she indulged in group sex with Rickards and Shipton while they were on duty.

Nicholas was unaware of the connection and says that at the time she was convinced Dewar was fairly representing her case.

"As far as I was concerned the man was God and the reason I say that was because my loyalties lay with him simply because he had broken down some of the barrier I had about the police because finally there was a policeman that was helping me and not hurting me."

That was Nicholas' belief until a few months ago when she re-examined the way her case had been handled by Rotorua's then-CIB chief.

Now she says: "He has shafted me big-time. He was protecting his mates just like they did in Murupara."

The Murupara incident relates to a complaint of rape Nicholas made against a policeman when she was 13. The complaint went through three trials in the early 1990s and the accused policeman was acquitted. He has permanent name suppression.

It was during those three trials that the allegations of pack-rape involving Rickards, Shipton and Schollum first emerged.

Suppression orders have finally been lifted for the three trials and those court notes show that Dewar failed to properly pursue the allegations of pack-rape.

One of the presiding judges, Michael Lance, had a stinging rebuke for the inspector, saying: "I am of the view that the failure to record and detail these allegations was not only remarkable, it was utterly incredible".

Dewar had, according to the judge, not only failed to record Nicholas' allegations but had also "deliberately advised" her not to write a formal statement about the alleged pack-rape.

"Such disclosures should have triggered alarm bells that would have permanently silenced Big Ben," said Lance.

One report even cites one of the Murupara policeman involved as threatening to lie on oath if that meant protecting his colleague from Nicholas' rape allegations.

Magaret Caig, Nicholas' sexual assault counsellor in Rotorua, says she never doubted her client's story.

In her 15 years as a health professional, Craig says she's heard many stories - but nothing like this.

"You hear many stories about teachers...members of the clergy... but to have the New Zealand Police Force associated with something as debauched and really disgusting as this was absolutely horrifying," says Craig.

She also had serious concerns about Dewar's working relationship with Nicholas during his investigation of her rape complaints.

"I felt that it was unhealthy, that it breached a lot of the known mores about behaviour between professionals and clients."

Craig says she was concerned Nicholas was being manipulated by Dewar during his investigation of her claims, but the Police Complaints Authority cleared Dewar of any criminal or disciplinary offence.

Nicholas alleges that when she went to the Rotorua police to write a complaint in 1993 she was talked out of it by Dewar. She had earlier repeated her allegations to a police sergeant, she says.

However, the notes from that conversation mysteriously disappeared from the sergeant's desk.

About two years later Inspector Dewar finally took a statement from Nicholas, but contrary to everything she now claims, the statement suggested the sex had been consensual.

The statement is not the only mystery surrounding the case.

A letter dated June 1997 explained that the entire police file relating to the Louise Nicholas case had gone missing. Police have so far failed to reply to questions about whether the files have been recovered.

A police notebook is also missing, along with a diary of Inspector Dewar's that refers to an interview with Brad Shipton.

Reliving trauma in the spotlight

Twenty three years after she alleges she was raped by three police officers, Louise Nicholas and her family have been reliving the trauma - as publicly as it gets.

But while Nicholas is embarrassed about having to tell people exactly what happened she is not ashamed.

Nicholas says all she wants is for it to be proven that she is telling the truth. She says she does not regret going public, even though she has faced a blaze of publicity.

Nicholas is now aged 36 and a mother of three, but the events that have caused this scandal began when she was 13 years old and living in the small logging town of Murupara.

She says she was an average teenager, certainly not rebellious or wordly.

One day she was walking past the Murupara police station when someone opened the window and called her in.

"No problem really. I went and he closed the door behind me [and] locked it, which I thought was a bit strange at the time."

She says that's how it all started and was her first introduction to sex.

"He raped me on the kitchen table in the meal room of the police station and that happened on several occasions."

Nicholas alleges this happened about half a dozen times and says she suspects word got around the station.

"There was one other officer at Murupara at the time. An incident I recall at his house, babysitting. He came home earlier than his wife and got me into his bedroom and did exactly the same thing in there."

Nicholas kept it to herself, fearing her parents' reaction.

"It's not because I didn't think they would believe me because I'm sure they would have. But I was worried sick that Dad would go nuts and do something stupid and probably [I would] be visiting him in jail today. That was what really worried me."

Nicholas' father, Jim, helped set up the Murupara search and rescue unit and got to know the local police. They would often come around to the family home for a barbeque. They were his mates.

"I just cannot believe that the people that have done this to Louise were actually friends of ours policemen. People that people trust," Jim says.

Nicholas alleges that the abuse continued for some years, first in Murupara and later in Rotorua.

By 1986 Nicholas was 18 years old and working in Rotorua as a receptionist. Early one evening Bob Schollum, an old family friend and one of the Murupara police she accuses of indecent assault, offered her a lift home.

It was a decision she finds hard to explain.

"I can't quite get my head around [it]. He wasn't as bad as these other guys and so I felt probably safe with him."

But Schollum didn't take her home, instead she says she was taken to a police house in suburban Rotorua.

"We pulled up into this house and I looked up and here they were all sitting on the balcony and I knew straight away."

At the house, she says, were Rickards, Shipton and Schollum. There was another man there too, she says, but he has never been identified.

"He said: 'Come in. It'll be right. Come in, Lou.. she'll be right.' So I did and got inside. I was offered a drink and I declined and the next thing I was being led to a bedroom."

Nicholas says she was not forcibly taken into the bedroom, but did object to being led there.

The 'incident' she alleges involved three of the men raping her and one of them violating her with a police baton. They all strenuously deny this, but have admitted having consensual sex with her.

Nicholas also alleges earlier rapes by Rickards and Shipton sometimes on their own, sometimes together. Also claims the two men deny.

She says: "Every time it happened I would ask them not to do it, tell them not to do it, swear at them, get angry. Didn't matter. So it got to the stage where the sooner they get it over and done with and get the hell out."

Nicholas says there is not way they could have mistakenly thought she was a willing participant.

"I don't think so. What part of 'no' did they not understand?"

The abuse stopped, Nicholas says, only after she met her future husband Ross.

Nicholas says that to this day she can't really explain why she tolerated the alleged abuse, but her counsellor says she can.

"She was a hostage. Things were done to her that were beyond anything that she would have ever imagined or experienced in her life because she was so young. She was silenced which is what happens when people are taken hostage- they're silenced out of fear."

"I think that there was no way that Louise could have got out of the situation she was in because she was entrapped."

Craig says what Nicholas described was "a pack of male predators taking advantage of someone really very young".

Nicholas says she is aware of the pressure she is putting on the men she accuses, but carries on because she knows she is telling the truth.

"I know these people have families and they've got children. I have [too]. It hasn't been easy for my children, so it can't be any easier for theirs'. That's as hard for me because I'm upsetting a lot of people's lives. But at the end of the day I didn't ask for this to happen."