The police gave it their best shot, he said, but they simply came up short. The accusations didn’t stack up. ‘The size of the investigation, the resources they put into it . . . I can’t think of anything that might have equalled it. Well, maybe that tragedy here in the Marlborough Sounds,’ he said. We looked out to the deep, green water, where Ben Smart and Olivia Hope had been murdered.
9
The standard happy male fantasy of a threesome is one man, two women. Rickards, Shipton and Schollum acted out another fantasy, travelling in pairs, in pursuit of the mathematic of one woman, two of them. To see them a year after the Nicholas trial, once again sitting in the dock at the Auckland High Court, once again defending charges of sexual offending, was to realise that they were the threesome that endured, that stuck together.
The second trial was a kind of reunion. The three defendants were accused of kidnapping and indecently assaulting a woman, once again in Rotorua, in the 1980s. The same themes of power and sex and abuse, the same denials.
The same lawyers. Brent Stanaway modelled his latest range of groovy ties. John Haigh carried his familiar gloomy air of a man about to attend or more likely conduct a funeral. Paul Mabey had once again climbed into his snug little QC jacket of many buttons, and once again performed his slow, assured, precise craft in cross-examination — it was to his questioning that the woman said, ‘I know poor Louise Nicholas lost her case and I am trying damn hard to make sure these guys get done.’ The prosecution case wasn’t entirely lost then and there, but perhaps it never really recovered.
She said she met Shipton at Cobb & Co. She was 16 and had just left school. She fell in love. She said they would go driving in his car, park up at Sulphur Point, and have sex. But Shipton must have felt lonely, because he soon began asking her to have sex with him and Schollum.
She said she went to visit Shipton at a house one day. She said other cops were drinking in the lounge, passing around whiskey, and Shipton suggested they all go into the bedroom where they would pass her around. No, she said. She said Shipton picked her up and took her into the bedroom where they had group sex, and Shipton — Shipton, always Shipton — assaulted her with what she thought was a whiskey bottle.
Shipton and Schollum gave statements to the police saying that they had had sex with the woman, but that the assault didn’t happen. As for Rickards, his defence was simple: he’d no idea who the woman was, had never even heard of her, had never seen or met her until she arrived in court.
In any case, Haigh told the jury, Rickards’ leg was in plaster during the time she claimed the offences took place. As hard evidence, that was the leg he had to stand on.
There were other discrepancies, other gaps in the story, and the prosecution’s case fizzled out. Shipton and Schollum were free to go back to jail. Rickards was free to go, and to at least try to obey one of the golden rules of the New Zealand way of life — once something is finished, move on.
10
He had and he hadn’t, but mostly he basically had. ‘Life just sucks sometimes,’ he said at the Te Atatu café. ‘That’s all I can take from what happened.’
He ordered hot chocolate. A toddler waddled past, and gave Rickards a toothless grin. He wiggled his fingers at the little boy, and gave him a lovely smile. He said he still wanted to do something about getting his memoir published. I advised against it. I said he could probably do without the grief. He said he didn’t expect it would change anyone’s mind about him.
Wasn’t he just as inflexible in his own thinking? He wrote in his manuscript: ‘Phil Kitchin needs to be held to account, NZ Police need to be held to account, and, more importantly, Louise Nicholas needs to be held to account.’ His book details why. But it doesn’t hold himself to account. Surely his own behaviour led to his downfall? As Heather Henare from Women’s Refuge said after the Nicholas trial, ‘As a police officer he and his colleagues took advantage of a young woman in a situation that was beyond her control.’ Also, engaging in threesome sex with another cop was never going to be a smart career move; as an ambitious young detective wanting promotion to positions of trust, he must have been aware that he was playing with fire.
Strangely, it didn’t occur to me to give him a stern lecture on issues of morality when we met. In fact, the above lines — about his behaviour, playing with fire, etc. — wasn’t even what I thought. They were said to me a few days after I met Rickards by another journalist who had covered the Nicholas trial. My own thinking didn’t stretch that far; I was more taken with the notion that Rickards had kind of gone rogue after his early experience as an undercover cop. He got assigned to Invercargill at 19. He writes excitingly about those 14 months: ‘drinking with the lowest of the low — freezing workers, shearers, pub bouncers and gamblers — in fleapit clubs and hotels all over Southland’. Throughout, he experienced the intensity of living a double life, the constant adrenalin of being discovered. Maybe it was something he craved when he returned to Rotorua. He was never debriefed; he said he came out a changed person, someone a lot less conservative.
We talked a bit about that at the café. We talked for two and a half hours, and inevitably a lot of it was about various aspects of the trials, of the past. I asked him
