The woman said Shipton and Schollum (‘Brad and Bob’) would visit, usually in the evenings, and have sex with her and Nicholas. She thought she possibly had sex with Rickards as well, but couldn’t remember. She said, ‘There was always a friendly atmosphere. I don’t ever recall Louise being upset or her demeanour changing.’
In her statement to police, she said, ‘I recall a time in Louise’s room when she was having sex with one of them. I was in a room with one of the others — she certainly wasn’t saying no.’
She thought there were three or four visits. She said, ‘I was partly in awe of them, and slightly intimidated . . . I’m not sure why I participated. It was a case of it being easier to go along with it than resist it. I can see now all they came around for was sex. I didn’t see that at the time . . . I wasn’t forced into anything, and neither was Louise.’
Half of the prosecution’s case — the rape accusations against Rickards and Shipton in the Corlett Street flat — was probably lost then and there. In cross-examination, Haigh asked Nicholas to explain the ‘vast discrepancy’ in the versions of events told by her and her flatmate.
She said, ‘There’s no discrepancy. That’s her recollection. It’s not mine . . . I’ve always stated she was not there when these men called.’
Haigh said, ‘Well, I suggest her recollection is correct, and yours is contrived.’
‘I do not accept that at all.’
‘Have you deliberately set out to destroy Assistant Commissioner Rickards?’
‘I’ve come out and told the truth.’
‘I suggest you’ve enjoyed the media attention in an extraordinary way.’
‘That isn’t right,’ she said. ‘I was given an opportunity to tell my story. I didn’t instigate it. I was approached about the police investigation. It made me definitely think I had been duped something shocking. It’s why I went to the media.’
Haigh allowed a pause, and then said, ‘Repeatedly.’
6
Why would she lie? Who would want to go through the whole ordeal, putting their own name out there when they had the option of suppressing it, and make false accusations? What could possibly motivate someone to do something so wicked and harmful and weird? The accepted notion is that Nicholas came forward because she was telling the truth. She was brave. She had endured appalling treatment, and found the courage to bring ‘evil monsters’ to account. It’s possibly the correct version as well, but in court, at the actual trial, she was held up as a damaged soul who was a stranger to the truth.
‘She has told a series of calculated lies,’ Haigh said to the jury. ‘All her evidence is made-up, delusional, utterly false. If it wasn’t so tragically serious, one might almost regard it as laughable.’ He said she was in it for the attention, the intoxicating rush of publicity. He said she was a serial accuser; along with Rickards, Shipton and Schollum, she had accused a policeman in Murupara of raping her when she was 13, and three other officers stationed there as well. Much was made of her alleged comment to a schoolteacher that she had also been raped by a group of Maori horsemen. Nicholas denied she ever said it, that it was rubbish. Haigh dared to have fun with that one, timing his pauses to create black comedy. He said to her, ‘You also made allegations that five Maori on horseback raped you. After they had presumably dismounted.’
The defence also introduced a witness who said Nicholas had flirted with Schollum years afterwards, at a wedding: ‘She lifted up her skirt and showed him the top of her lacy stocking. Quite a way up the thigh.’ Nicholas denied it ever happened, that it was rubbish. Mabey asked her about a statement she had given to police about having sex with Schollum — long after the alleged abuse with the baton. ‘I must have said it. I signed the statement,’ she said in cross-examination. ‘But I do not recall it.’
Her credibility was further questioned over claims that she remembered what happened with Rickards, Shipton and Schollum only after counselling sessions led to the phenomenon or gobbledegook of ‘recovered memory’. She denied that was the case. ‘I didn’t have to dredge up what happened,’ Nicholas said. ‘It happened.’
The most damaging challenge to her story was the statement from her ex-flatmate. Bafflingly, her written evidence — she lived in Australia, and didn’t come to the trial in person — was introduced by the prosecution. In essence, though, she was star witness for the defence. After the trial, Nicholas and journalist Phil Kitchin secretly tape-recorded the flatmate at her home in Australia. The woman told a different story. Her recollection was a lot more vague. Kitchin writes in Louise Nicholas: My Story, ‘She was so flakey, so unreliable that her evidence should have never been allowed in court.’ Nicholas writes in their book, ‘There was something at work deep down in her life that wouldn’t let her tell the truth. What had those bastards done to her?’ The answer might be: nothing.
In court, the defence seized on the woman’s cheerful, breezy account of early evening threesomes. ‘It puts paid to the dark, forbidding atmosphere that Mrs Nicholas has described,’ Haigh said. ‘People obviously did go in for that sort of thing. People’s sexual preferences are startlingly broad.’ Startlingly, too, a witness later came forward to say that she had willingly engaged in having a police baton used on her during threesomes with Shipton and Schollum. Her evidence was suppressed during the trial. The journalists weren’t allowed to write anything; we sat there and stared at the woman as she shared the intimate details of her enjoyment of a sex toy varnished deep red and measuring 30 centimetres.
A story in The New Zealand Herald one morning announced that Rickards was about to take the witness stand. It had the impact of an advertisement. There was standing room only in Courtroom 12.
