I asked after his wife and children. They were good. I asked after Brad Shipton and Bob Schollum, the former cops who were his co-accused in the two trials. Both men were convicted of pack-rape in a separate trial (‘You were confident you could commit a serious crime and get away with it because you were policemen,’ said the judge) and jailed for a few years. He never really knew Schollum that well, and they’d lost touch. He remained friends with Shipton; they were young cops together, and supported each other emotionally when they attended fatalities. He visited Shipton in Tauranga once or twice a year. The last time he saw him, Shipton’s phone had sounded, instructing him to take his daily walk around the mountain at Mt Maunganui. He took off without another word. Shipton was going downhill with early-onset dementia. Maybe it wasn’t such a bad thing. Why would he want to remember anything from the past 10 years?
I liked Rickards. I liked the way his mind worked, his sense of humour, his zest for life. True, he took leave of his senses and his poise whenever he talked about Nicholas and the trials; like all obsessives, he talked too fast and too much; like Guy Hallwright, he failed to recognise one of the golden rules of the New Zealand moral code — he never took responsibility for his own behaviour or acknowledged that at the very least he showed poor judgment. But the fact remains that he was acquitted of all charges by two juries, who reached their own conclusions even though both trials were conducted in an atmosphere of public loathing which resembled hysteria; it didn’t seem much of a stretch to treat him like a human being.
‘Evil monster’, Nicholas called him, when I interviewed her a year after the trial. It was at a secluded house in the Hawke’s Bay in winter. She glared into the fireplace. She was small and wounded, biting on her Holiday cigarettes and burning her throat with rum and Coke. But she remained determined to have her story believed. Nicholas had taken the unusual decision as a rape complainant to waive her right to name suppression; she used her name and subsequent fame to campaign on behalf of rape ‘survivors’ — a stronger, more hopeful term than ‘victims’. And so began her work as a ‘national survivor advocate’ for Rape Prevention Education, and her position on the executive committee of Te Ohaakii a Hine — National Network Ending Sexual Violence Together. She will have helped countless people. For all the bad crap that’s gone on, so much good has come from it.
But was it based on a falsehood? None of her complaints were ever upheld. There was insufficient evidence to convict. Enough, apparently, to accuse. Nicholas’s version of events has been accepted by the wider public as the truth. Rickards never stood a chance. He said, ‘As soon as the shit hit the fan, the police buried me.’ He had served for 28 years and stood a good chance of being made police commissioner. It didn’t count for anything. He was suspended the day that Nicholas’s accusations were made public. The last time he wore his police uniform — with pride, and also with maximum theatrical impact — was when he turned up to the High Court on the first day of his trial.
2
It caused a sensation. He looked incredible, a hulk in tight-fitting blue (he’d lost 20 kilograms to make a good impression on the jury), with the line of his mouth set firm. ‘Not guilty,’ he yelled in answer to the charges. Then he took his place alongside fat Shipton and small Schollum, those two mad rooters of old, 49 and 54, respectively, in 2006, who seemed to regard their past engagements in threesome sex as a kind of hobby. Rickards, too, said in court that he was into it. And that was the core of the trial — the casual depravity of threesomes, or ‘swapsies’, as Nicholas called it. Rickards’ lawyer came up with a delicate euphemism: he described it as ‘a joint venture’. Whatever, it was debauched, and it drew a crowd. The trial was packed every day for three weeks. There was a tipsy character in a Hawaiian shirt, who took along a red canvas bag clinking with bottles of Japanese plum wine, and there was a crazy lady who got nabbed gossiping about the case to a juror in the court café — she got hauled into the cells for contempt.
It was a gruelling, sordid three weeks. Police laid 20 charges against the three defendants. Nicholas alleged that Rickards and Shipton had showed up uninvited to her 54 Corlett Street flat in Rotorua in 1985–86 on maybe a dozen occasions and abused her in the usual choreographies of group sex. She further claimed that they were joined by Schollum one summer’s afternoon at 36 Rutland Street — the nice term used in court for what she said happened was ‘the Rutland Street incident’. The actual description she gave was that she was vaginally and anally abused with a police baton. The three defendants denied the use of a baton, and said sex with Nicholas was always consensual. Rickards said he had never met Nicholas at the Rutland Street address.
It subverted the usual innocent image of Rotorua (the smell of sulphur, the glow of neon) and remade it as a kind of Sodom and Gomorrah, with the emphasis on Sodom. The 1980s setting as described by witnesses — rattling old Triumphs and Vauxhalls, drinks at the Cobb & Co bar — evoked that grim period in New Zealand society after the Springbok tour and right at the time that Rogernomics was gaily creating a new underclass.
Justice Tony Randerson began proceedings by instructing the media: ‘For the sake of clarity I order that the use of the expression
