Shipton, always rooting or talking about rooting. From his police interview, read out in court: ‘I put it to Louise a threesome would be good for her . . . My sexual encounters with Louise have always been group sex. Me and Bob, or me and Clint . . . She openly expressed her sexuality . . . I believe she had sex with other officers. She frequented the police canteen, and Cobb & Co, where police drank. She was one of those girls . . .’ He talked and talked and talked; he couldn’t shut up; the interview lasted three hours. Asked why he thought Nicholas ‘thoroughly enjoyed’ their sexual encounters, he said: ‘It’s the same as when you have sex with your wife. The vibes, the reaction you’re getting.’ God almighty. Shipton, the priapic blowhard; Shipton, raving about ‘vibes’ as he equated his conquest of a teenage secretary with sex in the marital bed.
No one other than family was particularly concerned about the lecherous fatty’s fate. In any case, Shipton and Schollum were already in jail for their part in the sickening pack-rape of a girl in Mt Maunganui. But Rickards still had his freedom at stake. Haigh had tried to get Rickards a separate trial, to distance his client from the two co-accused jailbirds. He’d also applied to have it heard in Rotorua. He was happy with Auckland as the choice; the city he wanted to avoid was disapproving Wellington.
I joined Haigh now and then for a lunchtime drink during the long wait. He was always warm, lively company, and his death in 2012 at the age of 65 was felt with enormous sadness throughout Auckland’s legal profession. A thousand people packed Holy Trinity Cathedral for his funeral. Rickards was among the mourners; he knew he owed Haigh his liberty. When the charges were laid, he called Crown prosecutor Simon Moore to ask who he recommended he should engage. Moore suggested Paul Davison, John Billington, and Haigh. Part of the reason Rickards chose Haigh was because of his speciality as an employment lawyer: at that stage, Rickards wanted to fight for his job. By the time of the trial, he just wanted to stay out of jail.
As soon as the jury retired, the extended Rickards family moved into the courthouse, and it became a Maori thing. There was a sad, mournful prayer in te reo on the first night. But radio broadcaster Willie Jackson turned up the next day in support, and introduced a boisterousness, dispensing wisecracks and good humour. At midday on the 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 may be indulging in racist misremembering, but I’m pretty sure someone strummed on a guitar.
All day the tension had swelled, raised itself to boiling point; something had to break. It broke at quarter to three on Friday afternoon when word finally came through that the jury had reached its verdict. Lawyers, defendants, press, court staff and the public were herded into the courtroom. It was filled to capacity. Five minutes passed in complete silence. A silence that long picks up everything around it — hope, fear, anguish, dread. And then the jury came in. The foreperson was a young woman. She read out their 20 unanimous verdicts.
Nicholas fled the court. The three defendants wept for joy. They probably thought it was the last they would ever see of her.
8
To the victor, the spoils. Five days after the verdict, John Haigh could be found loping along the quiet waterfront streets of Picton, and was a picture of health and happiness. He was on holiday with his wife, Sue. ‘Let’s drive to Mapua this afternoon, Johnny,’ she said.
I sat down with him on the shore and we talked about his life and career for a while. I was particularly interested that he was the son of ‘Fighting Frank’ Haigh, a legendary lawyer of high principle and socialist conviction, who represented the watersiders’ union in the 1951 waterfront strike: ‘My mother remembers other lawyers refusing to have anything to do with him, or her.’
He remembered that his father took him on a protest march in Queen Street in 1960, in the ‘No Maoris, No Tour’ Springbok protest. He said: ‘I don’t have the courage he had.’
His father was 48 when Haigh was born. Were they close? ‘He wasn’t a great family man. He was focused on the bigger issues. He worked virtually every night, and about 48, 50 weekends every year. He didn’t want me to go into law at all. Dead against it. Because he knew what it took out of him, I think.’
But he did go into law; was part of that wanting his father’s approval and respect? John replied, ‘There’s always a desire to please . . . I wish he’d been alive when I was made a silk.’
And it had come to this: the son defending a policeman charged with raping a young, vulnerable woman. It seemed more likely that his father — champion of the underdog, who waged war on social injustice — would have wanted to represent Nicholas. I asked Haigh the old chestnut about whether he thought his client was innocent.
He said, ‘First of all, I don’t allow myself the indulgence of determining whether clients are innocent or guilty. Some lawyers do. I don’t. I think it removes the necessary detachment. But after we received the majority of police disclosure, I formed the view that he had not committed the offences as charged at all.’
The jury hadn’t been told that the co-accused were already in prison or that the three of them would face another rape trial. A group of women who supported Nicholas threatened to make it public. Haigh said, ‘They were acting out of ignorance, because they’re saying that somehow the truth eluded the
