Murder of Urban Höglin and Heidi Paakkonen
Police, residents, and military personnel conducted the largest land-based search undertaken in New Zealand, attempting to find the couple.
[1] In December 1990, David Wayne Tamihere (born 1953) was convicted of murdering Höglin and Paakkonen, and sentenced to life imprisonment based largely on the testimony of three prison inmates.
[2][3] Höglin's body was discovered in 1991, revealing evidence which contradicted the police case against Tamihere, who has always maintained his innocence[4] and filed a series of unsuccessful appeals during the 1990s.
On 8 April 1989, backpacking tourists Urban Höglin and Heidi Paakkonen of Storfors, Värmland County, Sweden, went into the bush near Thames, a town on the Coromandel Peninsula on New Zealand's North Island.
He pleaded guilty but fled while on bail, and was living rough in the bush on the Coromandel Peninsula when Höglin and Paakkonen disappeared.
[2] According to Tamihere, on 10 April 1989, he came across Höglin and Paakkonen's white Subaru, which was parked at the end of Tararu Creek Road and 'loaded with gear'.
[10][11] Tamihere broke into the car, planning on driving up to Auckland, but the next day he gave three visitors to the area a tour of the peninsula.
One of the inmates, later identified as Conchie Harris, said Tamihere claimed to have tied Höglin to a tree, beat him about his head with a lump of wood and sexually assaulted him.
[14] In December 1990, the jury found Tamihere guilty of the murder and theft, and he was sentenced to life imprisonment with a ten-year non-parole period.
[16] However, the existence of this affidavit only came to light a year later on 17 July 1996, when Harris spoke to broadcaster Paul Holmes in a prison telephone interview.
[19] Twenty years later, long after Tamihere had been released on parole, jailhouse lawyer Arthur Taylor brought a private prosecution against Witness C for perjury.
[21] Taylor was represented in court by lawyer Murray Gibson, who said the perjury verdict against Witness C called into question everything about Tamihere's conviction.
[23] In November 2009, New Zealand journalist Pat Booth, formerly of the Auckland Star, alleged that the Crown prosecutor and the police inquiry head in the Tamihere case, John Hughes, were both leading figures in the earlier prosecution of Arthur Allan Thomas, which had involved the planting of evidence, perjury, and withholding of information and evidence from the defence.
[6] In November 2023, journalist Mike White reported in the Sunday Star-Times that John Hughes, who died in 2006, was friends with Bob Jones.
[26] In October 1991, ten months after Tamihere's conviction, pig hunters discovered Höglin's skeleton near Whangamatā, 73 km from where police alleged the murders took place.
The Court of Appeal rejected the case in May 1992, finding there was "nothing substantive in defence claims that the skeleton revealed new evidence"[28] and that the Crown had provided "convincing circumstantial proof".
[34] On 21 April 2020, Tamihere was granted a royal prerogative of mercy by the Governor-General, Dame Patsy Reddy, on the advice of the Minister of Justice, Andrew Little, enabling the case to be reviewed again by the Court of Appeal.
The first was the false testimony provided at the original trial by prison informant, Roberto Conchie Harris, who claimed Tamihere confessed to him.
[40] In 1999, Leanne Pooley made a television documentary Relative Guilt about the impact on Tamihere's extended family of his arrest, trial and conviction.
