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Allegations
of Sexual Abuse |
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Steve Braunias heard -
and watched - all the evidence at an extraordinary three-week rape trial
which ended on Friday with the acquittal of three police officers. Justice
was served, he reports, but was the trial really about rape charges? The past three weeks in
courtroom 12 at the High Court of Auckland took hold like a plague. There was
definitely some kind of sickness, an obvious suffering. The least of it is
that one of the lawyers broke out in a rash on the final day. His face looked
bad, very bad. A great many other people - family and friends of the
defendants - looked worse. They were the walking wounded, but there was
nothing surprising about that. The trial was riddled with lies, inside and
out. It was presented as the
allegations made by Louise Nicholas against three men - Clint Rickards, Brad
Shipton, and Bob Schollum -who were serving police officers 20 years ago, in
Rotorua. She claimed they raped her and once sexually violated her with a
standard police-issue baton, varnished a deep red, 30cm long, designed to
cause harm. Very shocking, utterly obscene, but the real point of the trial -
of why it was so notorious, of what it meant -was elsewhere. The jury took three
days to deliver their verdict. It had been an unbearable wait; the air
swelled, raised itself to boiling point; something had to break. It broke at
quarter to three on Friday afternoon. Or not quite, because that was when
word went around that a verdict was due, and the courtroom filled to
capacity. Five minutes passed in complete silence. Silence that long picks up
everything around it - hope, fear, anguish, hysteria. And then the jury came
in, and delivered verdicts of not guilty on every charge. Nicholas fled the
court: she was a ghost leaving the room. The three defendants wept for joy:
they may have seen the last of her. And that's where it ended, in an upstairs
courtroom that seemed to shrink and contract, until it posed as a kind of
cell, with its worn blue carpet, its mauve doors, its stale oxygen. Release,
at last. All trials take on a life of their own; a slow life, usually, the
evidence measured out in endless small doses, and there had been 10 days of
that in courtroom 12. But there was always more to it than the fact of the
trial. Justice Tony Randerson put the matter extremely well when he addressed
the court after the verdicts. "This trial was relatively
straightforward," he said, "but complicated by outside events
swirling around in the world." You could very easily
describe the trial as a nonsense, monstrous and grotesque, given shape, form
and direction by the media. Time to roll out a cliche: media interest was
intense. Why, when it was a "relatively straightforward rape"
trial? Because it involved three cops, including Rickards, the assistant
commissioner of police, groomed and ambitious for the top job in the country.
Because it really was scandalous - a reporter had looked into the 1995 police
inquiry of Nicholas's allegations, showed her the documents, and she went
public, saying she "felt duped something shocking". Because it led
to the arrest of Rickards, Schollum and Shipton, and a prosecution case which
you could at least describe as thorough - so thorough (the time, the
resources, the expense) that it led to a popular notion that in some deep
sense this was a blood-letting, politically motivated, of an abusive police
culture. Because, likewise, there was a feeling that the crown justice system
had to live up to media and public expectations, and make sure the bastards
were held to account. Because there was such immediate and understandable
sympathy for Nicholas, who cast herself in a role that has such currency in
modern New Zealand: a victim. Because it was hyped - and lived up to its
billing - as the trial of the decade. Because it was all so lurid and sordid.
The more the judge and
the lawyers said it wasn't about morality, the more you knew it was. Nicholas
said it was rape; the defendants denied every charge, but admitted to
incidents of group sex. "They came around for sex," said Nicholas,
miserably. "It was normal sex," said Rickards, joylessly. The court
heard a lot about sex - in the lounge, in a car, in a caravan awning,
sometimes even in a bedroom. Prosecution laid 20
charges against the three defendants. They had a time, and a place: 1985 and
1986, in Rotorua, at two separate addresses. Nicholas alleged Rickards and
Shipton bowled around to her house uninvited on maybe a dozen occasions and
raped her in the usual choreographies of group sex. She further alleged they
were joined by Schollum one summer's afternoon - this is the infamous
"Rutland Street incident" - when she said they all raped her before
Shipton came back into the bedroom armed with vaseline and a baton. What
happened next became criminal indictments 11 and 12. First, she said, she was
on her back. "And then I'm all on fours," she told the court. "How
the hell that happened I don't know. I thought it was finished. But it wasn't
finished..." It's finished. You can
only go on the evidence, and the prosecution evidence didn't stack up. It
fell apart when Nicholas was cross-examined; it fell apart when police
statements given by her flatmate -bizarrely, this was introduced by
prosecution - were in such stark contrast with the rape allegations. The
flatmate said she had sex with Shipton, and possibly with Rickards - she
couldn't remember whether she did, he told the court he could remember quite
well that they did - when the pair visited on three or four occasions. She
said Nicholas was there, also having sex with Rickards and Shipton, and that
she didn't "ever recall her being upset". But Nicholas said the flatmate
was never there when Rickards and Shipton visited for sex. How could she
account, then, for her flatmate's version? In cross-examination, her replies
were weird: "I'm not calling her a liar by any means... I'm not saying
she's got it wrong, but that's her recall... I'm not disputing that that's
how she sees it happened... That's her prerogative." God only knows -
actually, so do 12 people - what the verdicts hinged on. What a task. During
the trial, an old boy on the jury who wore a Promise Keepers vest ("Men
Of Integrity") to court each day also appeared to doze off each day. He
wasn't the only one whose head rocked and fell to his chest during Justice
Randerson's droning, three-hour summary -I plead guilty, your honour. But everyone on the
jury must have been aware of the stakes while the outside world of courtroom
12 waited 73 hours and 50 minutes for a verdict. That was when the air felt
tight and unbearable, when everyone begged for release. As for the secret
world of the jurors, all you could tell is that it existed for three days and
two nights, with filled rolls from Pandoro bakery for lunch, and 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? In the
past, juries have been treated to rather less appetising scoffs around the
corner at the Copthorne Prosser hotel. This jury was saved that experience;
it might have had something to do with the fact that one of the Copthorne's
guests in the past three weeks was Louise Nicholas, who could be seen on her
top floor balcony when the five smokers on the jury were allowed outside the
court to fag up directly opposite the hotel. THE ABSENCE of Nicholas
and her family made for a lop-sided affair in courtroom 12. It became defence
headquarters. Tania Rickards, Caron Schollum and Sharon Shipton attended
every day; they were there to declare the innocence of their husbands. The
trial attracted the curious - the man with the happy face and Hawaiian shirt
who took along a red canvas bag clinking with bottles of Japanese plum wine,
the woman who got nabbed talking about the case to a juror in the court cafe,
and was hauled into the cells for the weekend on a contempt charge. As
another mild distraction, you could pop next door and listen to evidence
about another sex trial - it involved an amazing world of fine dining, gay
sex, class A drugs, a Porsche, all-night clubbing, and an observation from a
witness that someone can't have been drinking French champagne, because it
was served in a champenoise glass. Another world.
Courtroom 12 was the 1980s show, with references to riot squad policing at
the 1981 Springbok tour, and Rickards qualifying for the New Zealand judo
team at the 1986 Edinburgh Commonwealth Games. It was also an examination of
budget life in a provincial town, on a policeman's salary - the cut-price
drinks at the Rotorua police canteen, the regular table at the public bar at
Cobb & Co. There was a claim about that staple good night out at a New
Zealand party: got drunk, got laid, got sick and threw up. Nicholas talked
about buying a bedroom suite on HP from Smith & Brown, playing indoor
cricket with the BNZ social team, forking out her share of $130 weekly rent
for a three-bedroom house. The scene was also set when Nicholas used a word
to describe group sex: "swapsies". John Haigh, QC, acting
for Rickards, told the court: "Louise Nicholas was not a child."
But she was only 17, 18 in those years, a school leaver whose first job was
working the checkout at a fruit and vegetable market, and who then got a job
as a bank secretary. She had a 10-speed bike, she smoked, she was a very
pretty teenager. What did she know about life? In a statement Shipton gave to
police in 1995, he said: "She was one of those girls... There was no
secret that she was very loose." You know that an interpretation of this
is that he is calling her the police bike. Young, dumb, in a town with no
mercy. As for the defendants -
what were they like then? Rickards was 24, living with his partner and their
two kids, wanting to go out more but struggling to pay the mortgage. Shipton
was 27. He was the numbers man. Shipton, always Shipton, at every threesome
alleged by either Nicholas or himself; Shipton, saying he watched while
Rickards had sex with Nicholas, 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". Schollum was in his 30s, but thought by
everyone to be the youngest of the three, described as a fun guy - one
witness called him "Bobby", and that humanised him, made him sound
real. There was too little
that sounded real in courtroom 12. Is criminal justice ever set up to decide
a rape claim beyond reducing it to black and white? This trial regarded
credibility as a crucial issue; she said versus what they said, truth or
lies, rape or consent. I doubt it was as simple as that. For what it's worth,
I was sceptical about Nicholas even when she was giving evidence to
prosecution; but I was sceptical about Rickards, too, when he appeared in the
witness stand. I thought they both told some truth. I thought the verdicts
were correct. You had to go on the evidence. And on the courtroom lawyering;
over the three weeks, the star performer was Schollum's lawyer, Paul Mabey,
QC, a neat, quiet figure of fabulous restraint, patient and thoughtful in
cross-examination, and who gave a brilliant, beady-eyed and surprisingly
physical closing address. For the prosecution, Christchurch solicitor Brett
Stanaway dressed so fine in a suit tailored from a bolt of beautiful French
fabric - black, with very fine red polka-dots - but what he fashioned for the
jury was, in the end, stretched too thin. It was a hideous
business, a wretched three weeks. That was consistent, but it evolved, too;
last Wednesday, when the jury retired, the extended Rickards family arrived,
and it became a Maori thing. There was a prayer that night. I don't know if
I've ever seen anything so horribly sad. But former MP Willie Jackson turned
up the next day - his mother is Rickards's auntie - and introduced a
boisterousness, dispensing wisecracks and good humour. Just as importantly,
on 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
wondered about Nicholas, whether she was eating lunch in her hotel room with
a view of the court building and a street lined with English plane trees. Actually, I didn't
think about her for very long. There just seemed so much about the story she
had told that felt like bad fiction. There was "the fourth man" she
couldn't identify, who she said watched while she was being sexually
assaulted with the vile baton; there were the references she made about that
quackery known as "recovered memory". But even bad fiction is
powerful, and enthralling, when it finds itself caught up in events swirling
around in the outside world. Enough. Her story is now outside of courtroom
12, outside of anyone else noticing, in private, at last. |
