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Home / police allegations / Rickards,
Shipton, Schollum vs Jane Doe Page 1 - 2007 Trial of
Rickards, Shipton, Schollum Week 1 |
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Assistant Commissioner Clint Rickards
(right) arrives at court with his lawyer, John Haigh, QC. Photo / Kenny
Rodger Suspended police Assistant
Commissioner Clint Rickards is accused of standing over a handcuffed
16-year-old girl while she was sexually violated with a whisky bottle. The details were made public for
the first time yesterday as Rickards and former policemen Brad Shipton and
Bob Schollum went on trial in the High Court at The case - in which the
complainant has name suppression - was discovered by detectives investigating
the Louise Nicholas rape allegations on which the trio were acquitted by a
jury last year. Crown prosecutor Mark Zarifeh told
the court how the girl was in a consensual sexual relationship with Shipton
when she was taken to a house in Rotorua where the men and two others she
also thought to be police officers were drinking. Mr Zarifeh said she was handed a
drink and the men implied they were going to have sex with her, which she
refused. Shipton then said something like
"she wasn't going to go willingly" and she was picked up and taken
to a bedroom struggling and screaming. Shipton allegedly straddled the girl -
who was about 1.52m in height and weighed around 50kg - and passed some
handcuffs to either Rickards or Schollum, who were standing on either side. The other two men were also in the
room with one of them pacing about. Mr Zarifeh said the girl was told
"not to fight it" as her underwear was forcibly removed and an
indecency was performed using what she thought was the whisky bottle they had
been drinking from. Mr Zarifeh said the girl was in
agony and screaming for it to stop when Schollum said, "She's had
enough". The other men left the room while
Schollum stayed behind and told her not to say anything as she lay curled up
and crying. She then dressed, left the house
on foot, but did not make a complaint, the court was told. Some days later Schollum approached
her again and asked her out. That was her last contact with any of the
accused. Mr Zarifeh said the girl had met
Shipton, then in his mid-20s, while working at a business frequented by
police from the Rotorua station and also saw him at the Cobb & Co bar.
She had been flattered by his attention and started to see him in a
relationship that mainly involved him picking her up in a car and taking her
to have sex at a spot beside Mr Zarifeh said that before the
attack Shipton had suggested his friend Bob could become involved in their
sexual liaisons, but the girl refused. He said Schollum once turned up at her
mother's house and she refused the suggestion, and again on another occasion
when Shipton and Schollum took her to the spot beside the lake, also before
the attack. In a brief opening statement, John
Haigh, QC, for Rickards, said his defence was simple: "There was no
incident ... He did not know this woman before the incident, he did not know
her after and he does not know her today." Rickards, whose base salary is
understood to be $150,000 to $159,000 a year, has been stood down since he
was charged two years ago. Shipton and Schollum have left the police. Bill Nabney, for Shipton, said he
denied any such incident took place, although he admitted knowing her. Paul
Mabey, QC, for Schollum said his client also denied involvement in any such
incident. The three were acquitted last
March of 20 charges, including the alleged rape, sexual violation and
indecent assault of Mrs Nicholas when she was a Rotorua teenager in the
1980s. Mrs Nicholas is not one of 12 crown witnesses to be called in the
present case. The alleged victim, now 39, began
giving her evidence yesterday afternoon, describing how she would be chatted
up by Shipton while drinking - underage - at the Cobb & Co. She said she was
"confused" about whether he was married, because she sometimes saw
him wearing a ring and sometimes he wasn't. She remembered Shipton as
"very confident", Schollum as more friendly and Rickards as a
"serious, strange sort of guy". The trial before Justice Judith
Potter and a jury of eight men and four women is expected to take two weeks. * The alleged victim was uncovered
when detectives investigating the Louise Nicholas rape claims found a name
and number jotted down in a police notebook at Brad Shipton's Tauranga home
in July 2004. The court heard how the notebook
had two shortened versions of the woman's name with a phone number next to
it. Detectives then used old They approached the alleged
victim, who made the allegations, having never before complained to the
police about the incident. |
