The Scene of the Crime
Page 19
Cox paid his visit not long after. That night, Paul Thompson went to the apartment. He was furious that Bones had missed their gig at a club.
‘It was the first time that’d ever happened. So I went over and looked in the window. Pressed my nose against it. Couldn’t see anything. I said, “Bones! Wake up! You in there?” I went to the front door. It was unlocked. All I had to do was turn the front door knob. I actually had my hand on the handle. I could have gone in . . .’
The body was found the next day by Kevin Keepa from Sex and Chocolate. A neighbour saw him approach the apartment. They were asked in court, ‘What did he look like?’
‘A New Zealand type of guy.’
‘Do you mean Maori?’
‘Like Maori, yeah.’
Keepa started screaming to his wife, ‘Don’t come in! Don’t come in!’ Emergency services were called, and then he phoned Paul. ‘He was just screaming,’ Paul said. ‘He couldn’t talk properly. You couldn’t understand what he was saying. I was saying, “What? Did someone hurt Tony?”’
Rigor mortis had set in. There was blood, and vomit. A tap was running. Tony’s guitars were still on their stands, but a Christmas tree had fallen over. There was a bubble-blowing toy on the floor, bought that day at Kmart. He’d also got bread and onions, probably to make stuffing for Christmas Day.
Keepa told the court that he knelt beside Tony, and prayed for him. He quit the band not long afterwards.
Paul said, ‘I wish it’d been me who found Tony. I wish I’d just turned the handle and opened the door that night. But at the same time I’m thankful that it wasn’t me. Because I don’t know what kind of person I would be right now.’
It was getting late. Anita made another cup of tea. The three of us sat around the small table in the kitchen; their kids had fallen asleep, and Paul’s eyes were red from crying. He said, ‘After Tony died I didn’t even want to think about music. I remember lying on the floor — this is about a year later — and thinking, “Everything’s gone, the group’s dead, Kevin’s left, it’s the end of it. What’s the point without Bones?” And then Anita says, “Come on. Don’t let it die.” And slowly I started again. It was Tony’s death that gave me a determination to keep the band going. It’s given me more drive, more steel, more inspiration to continue this. Tony is written over everything we do.’
He brought in new musicians, and renamed the band Sex and Chocolate 2.0. They’ve become a popular live attraction, playing clubs, corporate events, weddings — in 2014, they were voted the best wedding entertainers in Queensland by the Australian Bridal Industry Academy.
Oh yes, he said, the story most definitely had a moral. It was to do with his best friend, that nice guy from the Bay of Plenty who was fiercely loved, who enjoyed his life, who lived the dream. He said, ‘Bones came here for the good life. He wanted that dream. This is the place to do it. The Gold Coast. Dreams — they can happen here.’
Chapter 13
The Rotorua Three: Clint Rickards
TVNZ creamed TV3 with the story.
— Phil Kitchin, Louise Nicholas: My Story
1
We met a week after Queen’s Birthday 2015 at a café around the corner from where I live in Te Atatu. It was good to see him again. I had stayed in touch with Clint Rickards after the Auckland High Court trials of 2006 and 2007, when Louise Nicholas and then another woman accused him of taking part in a horrifying pack-rape with two other brutes, all policemen. The women said that they were violated with scarcely believable instruments of pain — a police baton, and a whiskey bottle. Two juries found the accusations scarcely believable. Rickards, then a figure of supreme authority as assistant commissioner of police and Auckland district commander, was found not guilty of all charges. Of course his life was ruined by the scandal, and he was forced out of the police. We’d meet every now and then at a café in Pt Chevalier frequented by the mentally ill, shambling outpatients from a nearby drug rehab clinic, and a nice old dear who topped up her tea with gin. It was my local and I liked it there, but I had another reason for choosing the venue to catch up with Rickards: it was clandestine. I wasn’t ashamed to be seen with him, but I was wary of someone recognising him and wanting to cause a scene. Rickards didn’t exactly travel incognito. He was massive, and distinctive with his shaved head and deep-set eyes. When I emailed to meet, he replied: Yep just not at that crap café.
In 2015, Louise Nicholas was made an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit in the Queen’s Birthday honours list, named Anzac of the Year, and gave a speech at the parade grounds of the Royal New Zealand Police College to the 36 new police officers who graduated from the Louise Nicholas Recruit Wing. She said to media of the Queen’s Birthday gong: ‘For all the bad crap that’s gone on, so much good has come from it.’ Human Rights Commissioner Jackie Blue congratulated Nicholas on her Anzac award in a press release: ‘All of us are indebted to Louise’s staggering courage and refusal to accept injustice.’ Governor-General Jerry Mateparae presented the Anzac award, and read from a prepared statement: ‘Louise’s personal experience of harm and trauma has resulted in an ongoing commitment to help victims of sexual assault and to enable affirmative cultural change.’ Constable Shaun Murphy, one of the new police graduates, told reporters of the high regard they held for their patron: ‘She’s inspirational and has told us to always put the needs of the victims at the heart of what we do.’
Rickards said at the Te Atatu café: ‘She’ll be made a Dame one day. Telling you now.’ He’s probably right, and he said it in all due seriousness with a laugh and a shrug. He was a lot less bitter than the last time we spoke, a lot more relaxed. The second we walked inside, a man called out, ‘Clint! How’s it going, mate?’ He was on the board of the Waipareira Trust, which employed Rickards after he was acquitted. Rickards now works as a lawyer. He studied for his degree at Auckland University, and was admitted into the bar at a ceremony held at the Auckland High Court, which he had experienced during his own trials as a circle of hell. He practised criminal law; I’d read the manuscript of his unpublished memoir, which included his account of an unexpected approach: ‘I get all sorts ringing me asking for help. One of the most bizarre, and least deserving, was Samurai sword madman Antonie Dixon, who called from prison, wanting to give me $20K for reviewing his file, just so he could get a “police perspective”. He was dead two weeks later.’
He worked on Treaty settlements for five years. But the main claims were settled, and he returned to criminal defence work to make ends meet. It was the usual rats-and-mice stuff — assault, burglary, traffic offences — but he stepped away from sexual offences for obvious reasons. In April 2015, one of his clients made the news — a 21-year-old Pacific Islander was accused of beating up a police officer. Rickards said he liked the work, although it didn’t pay much. He had begun a PhD, partly as an intellectual challenge, and also to set himself up in Treaty settlement policy work.
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 t
oo 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 “pack-rape” is prohibited.’ Three weeks later, after the verdicts, he had the last word on the pack-rape trial. ‘This trial was relatively straightforward,’ he said, ‘but complicated by outside events swirling around in the world.’ He meant the attention, the outrage, the moral climate. Inside the sealed world of Courtroom 12, criminal law was practised at an exceptional standard.
John Haigh QC acted for Rickards. He was tall, grave, lugubrious. He led the defence team, and imposed his intelligence on proceedings. His oratory was compelling. But the star performer was actually Schollum’s lawyer, Paul Mabey QC. The only equivocal thing about him was his name. A small, discreet man who made you think of Le Carré’s favourite spy, George Smiley, Mabey was meticulous and devastating in cross-examination. Nicholas hated him, as well as Haigh. She said of them when I interviewed her that afternoon by the fire in the Hawke’s Bay: ‘Nasty bastards. There was no need to be so brutal. They can burn in hell for all I care.’ But they were defending their clients, who had been accused of heinous crimes.
Christchurch solicitor Brent Stanaway appeared for the Crown. An aristocratic fellow who walked with a very high step, Stanaway was dressed so fine in a suit tailored from a bolt of beautiful French fabric — black, with a very light red polka-dot. He came across as arch and rather louche, and was no match for Haigh and Mabey. Or Rickards: his cross-examination was poor. They’d once worked together when Rickards was working undercover in Invercargill. Stanaway put it to Rickards that he’d learned to become a ‘practised liar’ as an undercover cop. But this was absurd. Rickards pointed out that he’d very often given evidence to Stanaway when they worked together on prosecuting drug dealers, and his word had been good enough for him then.
The lawyers framed the narrative, gave it shape. But the most important people in Courtroom 12 were the accused, and their accuser. Louise Nicholas gave evidence on day two of the trial.
3
She didn’t look well. She didn’t look at all well. She was small, narrow, thin; she looked starved. She later told me that she lived on coffee and cigarettes during the trial.
The judge removed the public, and blinds were put over the courtroom window.
She began by telling Stanaway about her early life in Murupara, and moving to Rotorua as a teenager. She got a job at the BNZ, and found a flat. She talked about buying a bedroom suite on HP from Smith & Brown, playing indoor cricket with the BNZ social team, forking out her share of the $130 weekly rent. A normal life; until one night after work she went to the police bar with friends, and met Shipton.
They talked. She was just his type: she had a pulse. Shipton and Rickards, she said, began coming to her house uninvited.
She said, ‘The reason they were coming round was for sex. My heart would just drop. I didn’t want them there. I said, “I don’t want you to do this.” Never at any stage did I consent to anything.’
Stanaway asked, ‘What happened?’
She said, ‘They would start by undressing me, normally the bottom half, then theirs. They’d put me on the floor on my back. Shipton would hop on first. Rickards would put his penis in my mouth. And they’d swap, or put me in other positions like on all fours. That’s just what happened and there was nothing I could do about it.’
Shipton arrived once on his own. Stanaway asked, ‘What happened?’
She said, ‘It was in the lounge. It was just sex. Sex.’ The word sounded flat, emptied out.
Stanaway asked, ‘When did these visits occur?’
‘When I was off work or sick.’
‘Was that pre-arranged?’
‘No.’
‘How did they know you were home?’
Nicholas said, ‘I wouldn’t have a clue.’ Neither did anyone else.
4
And then she told her harrowing story about ‘the Rutland Street incident’. It was listened to in utter silence.
They went inside. She said she was led into a bedroom. ‘I kept saying, “I don’t want to do this.”’
Stanaway asked, ‘What happened?’
What she said happened came out in a long anguished moan sans punctuation, and it sounded like this: ‘Schollum laid me on the bed on my back and got on top of me and had sexual intercourse with me and while that was happening Rickards is on my left and he’s naked and he puts his penis in my mouth and this went on for some time and then Schollum got off and licked my vagina while I’m still giving Rickards oral sex and then he moved away and then Shipton got on and then Schollum turned up and took Rickards’ place and it seemed like it was going on forever and then it was all finished and then I saw Shipton with this police baton in one hand and Vaseline in the other and I said no fucking way mate no fucking way and I’m moving back I can’t go any further I’m up against the bedroom wall and he had this dirty smirk on his face and then I was on all fours and then he . . .’