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?”