Husband tells of dress gift for Louise Nicholas

Ross Nicholas, husband of Louise, outside the High Court during a break yesterday. Picture / Greg Bowker

The thought of a white dress, a dress he bought his young girlfriend 20 years ago on holiday, makes Ross Nicholas cry.

He is telling an ordinary story, about how when he was 21 and took a pretty young secretary on holiday to Whangamata, how they saw the dress in a surf shop, how he bought it for her.

They were new lovers then; he'd first admired Louise Crawford, as she was then, when she was a checkout girl at the K-Market fruit shop in Rotorua. They got together in November 1985.

"When we got there [to Whangamata] it was pouring with rain, so we went shopping, I saw a nice white dress that she liked so I ... " Mr Nicholas gasps, shakes his head, crumples his chin, looks down at his hands. The court crier pushes a box of tissues towards Mr Nicholas; he takes one and buries his eyes in it; lips shaking, letting out the occasional snort; embarrassingly loud in the silence of vast Courtroom 12.

The jurors know why this 40-year-old man is crying over a dress. It is the dress his wife claims she was wearing on the day she accuses then-policemen Brad Shipton, Bob Schollum and Clint Rickards of raping her and assaulting her with a police baton.

This is the dress Mrs Nicholas says they pulled off her, even though she bunched it underneath her to try to keep it on.

"I was sitting on the bed, because of the length of the dress I was sitting on it, and they tried to remove the dress and finally it came off," she said in court on Tuesday. Then off came her half-slip, bra, knickers; then they raped her, she claimed.

Now, Ross Nicholas is trying to pull himself together. Prosecutor Mark Zarifeh keeps going with the questions, asks Mr Nicholas to describe the dress. "It was muslin, white muslin dress with crochet on the front. It was quite expensive in those days, it was about $90," he says, the sobs subsiding to sniffs.

Defence counsel John Haigh, QC, representing Clint Rickards, wants to know if Mrs Nicholas stopped wearing the dress after this alleged rape, or if "she continued to wear that muslin dress for many, many years afterwards?"

Mr Nicholas nods, thinks for a second - yes, she kept wearing it through the 1980s. "Yeah, the last time I remember her wearing it was someone's wedding we were at once, she was wearing it."

Mr Nicholas says he never personally met any of the three men, whom his wife accuses of regularly visiting her at home during the day, expecting sex and getting it.

But half an hour later, Mr Nicholas has to admit he might be mistaken about another of his memories. He tells the jury how one day, after he hurt his back chopping firewood for Louise, he was resting alone at her Corlett St house in the middle of the day when Shipton and Rickards arrived at the door, in uniform.

"There was a knock on the door ... I could see a blue sort of image through the glass, so I opened it. I think they were quite surprised to see that I was there, just the way they looked at me. They said, 'Is Trevor [Clayton, another officer] here?' I said no ... they just turned around and walked away."

Under cross-examination from Haigh, Mr Nicholas has to admit that in a police statement in 1995 he described the same incident involving Shipton and Schollum, not Shipton and Rickards.

"Well, see, I didn't know what was happening in those days, so for all I know I could have got it wrong back then [in 1995] ... I must have got it wrong," Mr Nicholas says. He's sure now, he tells the court later under Crown re-examination. "Now, thinking about it, it was Brad Shipton and Clint Rickards."

The questions over, Mr Nicholas leaves the witness box and walks out of court, still holding his tissue.