http://www.investigatemagazine.com/Australia/pawns.htm
Investigate Australia
December 2004
(An extract from) Pawns in a game
by Ian Wishart
Rotorua
is a great little town. A friendly tourist trap with its mud
pools and geysers. But it has its secrets as well. Deep,
dark secrets. As anyone who was close to a television set earlier this
year will recall, the biggest police scandal in New Zealand’s history blew up
in sleepy Rotorua of all places, involving allegations of sexual orgies, gang
rape, cover-ups and corruption. Allegations so serious that
the Government has called a Commission of Inquiry into the claims of several
Rotorua women, including Louise Nicholas.
Investigate can throw another similar case into the ring – that of senior
Rotorua police officer Evan Jordan (now deceased), whose previous claim to fame
came from cheating death in a Zimbabwean air crash in 1990 and selling his
video footage of the crash-landing to TV3 and the Readers Digest. What neither
media organization realised at the time was that Jordan was a corrupt cop who
had a habit of arresting attractive young women on various misdemeanor
charges in Rotorua then arranging to drop the prosecutions in exchange for
sexual favours. Although eventually prosecuted for rape in Rotorua in the mid
nineties, he got off.
Indeed, the allegations that have surfaced this year about Rotorua raise
questions about just how far back and how deep the corruption in that city’s
law enforcement and justice systems goes. Might it, for example, go all the way
back to Christmas, 1976, and the disappearance of Wellington mother of two
Heidi Charles, holidaying in Rotorua with her family? Dropped off for a spot of
Christmas shopping in the morning, the attractive young blonde never returned
to her two boys or her husband. No trace of her was ever discovered. Rotorua
police never upgraded her disappearance to homicide, nor did police searches
find anything. The question after all this time might better be phrased, “How
hard did they really look?”