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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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Clint Rickards (rear) and another
man outside the High Court yesterday. A woman says suspended police
assistant commissioner Clint Rickards was the last person she saw with a set
of handcuffs before they were used to chain her to a bedpost while she was
sexually violated. But she also admits being unable
to identify him from a photograph taken at the same time in the 1980s. The woman yesterday told the High
Court at Auckland how, when she was 16, Rickards and his former colleagues
Brad Shipton and Bob Schollum forced her down on a bed and performed an
indecency with a whisky bottle. The three men deny charges of
kidnapping and indecently assaulting her 23 years ago in Rotorua. The woman said Shipton was
straddled over her hips when he pulled some handcuffs out and passed them to
Rickards, who was standing on her left. Schollum was to her right. She remembered her right hand
being chained to the post. "I couldn't tell you if it
was Rickards or Mr Schollum who did the handcuffing," she told the
court. She had gone to the house at the
invitation of Shipton, with whom she had been having a consensual sexual
relationship, and was met by the trio and two others she also believed to be
policemen but could not identify. She was asked by Crown Prosecutor
Brent Stanaway if she could have mistaken Rickards, whose defence is that the
incident never happened and the woman cannot be believed. "I have no doubt in my mind
whatsoever. I know it was Clint," she said. She said she was also sure the
others involved were Shipton and Schollum, who also say the incident did not
happen. Shipton, then 25, gave her a few
drinks of whisky and lemonade and suggested they have sex, to which she said,
"Not with all these guys around we're not". She described how two men scooped
her up and carried her off. "It was like a big joke to
them: 'Oh, she is not going to come willingly'." She fought back by screaming,
grabbing on to the door frames and biting. "I remember the comment being
made that for such a little thing I was quite a fighter." She said one of the unidentified
men was pacing up and down as though he didn't want to be there and she
pleaded unsuccessfully with him to help her. She did not know what the other
unidentified man was doing. After her attackers chained her to
the bed, she said, Shipton told one to get something from the lounge. She then described how they
performed the indecency with what she thought was the whisky bottle they had
been drinking from. "I called them a pack of
bastards and said they would pay for what they had done." Schollum stayed behind after the
attack and said she wasn't to tell anyone or "I could suffer more for it
and so could my family", which scared her. She then walked home and did not
see the men again, except for a visit from Schollum to ask her out, which she
refused. Asked by Mr Stanaway why she did not
complain to police at the time she said: "Who would believe me for
starters? I was fighting policemen. I was on my own. I had no back-up and was
probably very stupid to go with them." She said she did not know Louise
Nicholas. She also said she had been under a lot of pressure at the time the
police investigating that case approached her in 2004 because her
relationship was breaking up and she had four children at home. For Rickards, John Haigh, QC,
challenged a number of contradictions in her police statements and previous
court appearances. He asked the woman how - despite
Rickards serving as a uniformed officer and being on crutches and in a
plaster cast for much of the time during which the alleged incident occurred
- she could not recall seeing him incapacitated and only claimed to have seen
him in plain clothes. He told the woman her accumulated
inconsistencies showed she simply could not be believed and she was
"embellishing, constructing as she went along". Mr Haigh said her inability to
identify Rickards from a photo from the 1980s until a detective pointed him
out also showed she could not be believed. The QC asked why, if she was in a
house in suburban Rotorua and she was screaming and screaming as described,
"no one told you to be quiet and the neighbours didn't come". Mr Haigh answered his own
question: "Because it didn't happen." The woman: "Yes, it
did." For Shipton, Bill Nabney said the
woman had claimed his client did not have a moustache, but evidence would be
given later that he had one from the early 1980s and did not have it removed
until the 1990s. The woman had earlier told the
court how she initially found the attention Shipton paid her
"neat", and she had fallen in love with him quickly after meeting
him at her work, which was frequented by police officers, and at the Cobb
& Co bar. She said their "dates"
revolved around sex in the back of his car at Sulphur Pt on "There was no movies, no
dinner."
The accused * * Bradley Keith Shipton, 49. * Robert Francis Schollum, 54.
They deny kidnapping a 16-year-old
girl and indecently assaulting her with a bottle sometime between November
1983 and August 1984 in Rotorua.
* Now a 39-year-old mother of four,
her claims came to light when detectives were investigating the Louise
Nicholas rape allegations. * The detectives found references
to her in one of Shipton's old police notebooks. She made her claims after
they approached her, having never made a police complaint before. Her name is
suppressed.
Rickards, Shipton and Schollum
were acquitted last March of 20 charges, including the rape, sexual violation
and indecent assault of Louise Nicholas when she was a teenager in Rotorua in
1985 and 1986.
Set down for two weeks in the High
Court at |
