Tamihere is serving a life sentence and was released on parole in 2010. On the eve of the court hearing his appeal, he was a cleaner and lawnmower at a West Auckland marae.
Their white Subaru is seen on April 9, parked at the end of the Tararu Stream Rd, near Thames. This is the spot to parkwhen heading up the trail to Crosbies Clearing, a campsite in the heart of the Coromandel Range.
Swedish couple Urban Hoglin and Heidi Paakkonen, who disappeared in 1989. Her body has not been found.
On April 10, David Tamihere drives the car from the trailhead, eventually dumping it in Auckland a few days later. He’s on the run. He’d been on bail after being convicted of raping and threatening to kill a woman, and was living rough in the Coromandel bush.
Around the same time, police finally catch up with Tamihere. He’s already behind bars for rape when he’s charged with murdering Hoglin and Paakkonen; a tourist linked him to their car after recognising it in a photo, and telling police that Tamihere had given him a ride in it.
Tamihere initially denies but eventually admits to stealing the car and selling some of the couple’s belongings, but says he’s never met the couple.
So began an ongoing murder mystery spanning more than three decades, which includes:
poor police practices that almost jeopardised key testimony
accusations of police bribery
a retraction of testimony followed by a retraction of the retraction
Tamihere, who had a prior conviction for the 1972 manslaughter of Mary Barcham, a 23-year-old stripper, was found guilty and spent almost 20 years in prison before being paroled.
He’s spent half his life arguing his case and seeking a retrial. He claims that police framed him.
Circumstantial evidence
At the time of the 1990 trial, there were no bodies, and no murder weapon. Much of the evidence was circumstantial.
That included the testimony of two trampers who were at Crosbies Clearing on April 8, the same day or the day after the Swedes had started their hike. The trampers said they saw an ill-at-ease woman resembling Paakkonen with a man they later identified as Tamihere.
Several issues arose from their testimony:
They said the man was either clean-shaven or had a small moustache or some small beard growth; Tamihere’s moustache at the time was a big, bushy handlebar.
Best police practice was not followed.
The trampers were asked to identify the man they had seen and whether it was Tamihere, but weren’t shown an identity parade.
One of them identified Tamihere after seeing a photo of him held by police. They were also told to go to the Thames courthouse and see Tamihere for themselves, after which they both identified Tamihere as the man they’d seen at Crosbie’s Clearing.
Their evidence was initially ruled inadmissible, but a higher court reversed this because it found their testimony was high quality.
Other key witnesses at the trial were three jailhouse snitches, who all said that Tamihere had admitted the murders to them. Witness C, in particular, had shared a cell with Tamihere and provided specific details that had supposedly come from Tamihere’s constant boasting:
He’d sexually assaulted them both after meeting them at a picnic area.
He’d killed Hoglin by beating his head with a lump of wood.
He was with Paakkonen at one point when he “almost got sprung” by “a couple” who came across them. This tended to corroborate the trampers’ testimony.
He’d strangled Paakkonen, and then weighed down the bodies and dumped them both in the Firth of Thames.
He’d stolen Hoglin’s watch and given it to one of his sons.
Heidi Paakkonen and Urban Hoglin.
There was also Tamihere’s changing story when confronted with new evidence about where he’d been, or what he’d done with the couple’s property.
Tamihere was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment, with a minimum non-parole period of 10 years.
The importance of the details in Witness C’s testimony – who in 2018 was unmasked as life criminal Roberto Conchie Harris – remains contested. Were they central to the convictions, or would the verdicts still stand in their absence?
The ‘skeleton’ and the perjury
Two discoveries in particular have cast shadows of doubt over the case.
The first took place only 10 months after the verdicts: Hoglin’s body was found not at sea, but by pig hunters in a shallow grave in the bush near Whangamatā, about 70km from where police said the murders had taken place.
A pathologist said Hoglin did not die from a blow to the head, but appeared to have been stabbed. And the watch – supposedly stolen and given to Tamihere’s son – was also still on the body.
Tamihere appealed but the Court of Appeal, in 1992, said there was still “convincing circumstantial proof”, and Hoglin’s body – or skeleton, by the time it was found – didn’t provide any substantive new evidence. He was then denied leave to appeal to the Privy Council in 1994.
The second is the reason the case returned to the Court of Appeal at the end of last year: the long and twisted tale of Harris’ detailed testimony.
Five years after the verdicts, in 1995, Harris swore an affidavit retracting his evidence, saying he’d made it up on the promise of $100,000 from police, and help with parole.
This twist was publicly revealed the following year in dramatic fashion: in a phone interview between broadcaster Paul Holmes and Harris from prison. But soon afterwards, Harris retracted his retraction, saying he’d signed the affidavit because gang members in prison had threatened him.
A further twist came two decades later, in 2016, when lifetime criminal Arthur Taylor filed a private prosecution alleging that Harris’ testimony was all lies. Taylor, behind bars at the time and known as the “jailhouse lawyer”, said that Harris had confessed as much to him while in prison. The jailhouse snitch looked like a victim of further jailhouse snitching.
Any hope for Tamihere’s case had been extinguished in 1994 when he was denied a chance to be heard at the Privy Council. But when Harris was found guilty on eight counts of perjury, in 2017, that hope was suddenly rekindled.
It properly reignited in 2020, when Tamihere was granted the Royal Prerogative of Mercy, a rare legal avenue for criminal cases to be reopened where a person may have been wrongly convicted.
The following year, Harris, himself a convicted double-murderer, died while still in prison, age 70.
The long march of justice
Tamihere’s case returned to the Court of Appeal in November last year, 33 years after his original trial. The focus was on those two specifics: Hoglin’s body and Harris’ lies.
The Crown argued Harris’ testimony was an inconsequential “slender strand” of the prosecution’s case, and the guilty verdicts would have happened without it.
It further argued that the discovery of Hoglin’s body strengthened its case, claiming new evidence showing Tamihere had been staying near where the body was found. The fact that this was 70km from where the murders were originally thought to have happened showed that Tamihere had lied about his movements to keep the investigation far from the body.
The defence said the opposite: the perjured details – including being almost sprung by a couple – were central to the Crown case because they made the jury more likely to accept the other circumstantial evidence, such as the trampers’ testimony. The lack of any victim’s body further enhanced this likelihood.
The court’s decision, released today, agreed with the Crown and declined to quash Tamihere’s convictions. It noted the new evidence that Tamihere had a bivvy site less than a kilometre from where Hoglin’s body was found, and that he’d been in the area in early April.
The trampers’ evidence identifying Tamihere at Crosbie’s Clearing on April 8 with a woman resembling Paakkonen was reliable, the court said.
While this on its own did not prove Tamihere’s identity beyond reasonable doubt, that threshold is reached when combined with other evidence including Tamihere’s use of the couple’s key to access their car – establishing a direct connection to them – his “proven lies” about his movements, and the way he treated their possessions (he knew the owners weren’t coming back for them).
The trampers had also identified several items they’d seen at Crosbie’s Clearing – a poncho, hooped tent, and tomahawk – that were similar to items later found in Tamihere’s house. “It would be a most extraordinary coincidence if the items found at his house were not those the trampers described seeing with the man at Crosbies Clearing.”
The court said it was impossible to know what happened but the evidence pointed to the couple parking their car at or near Wentworth Valley – near Tamihere’s bivvy site – on April 7 or 8. They encountered Tamihere, and Hoglin was killed. Paakkonen was abducted, and their car was then driven to Tararu Creek Rd, where it was seen on April 9.
Paakkonen could have been killed near where her wallet and jacket were found, about halfway between Crosbies Clearing and the end of Tararu Creek Rd.
David Tamihere in handcuffs with police in 1989/90. Photo / NZH
He is now 70. He has a wife, sons and grandchildren, and lives a fairly normal life mowing lawns and cleaning at a West Auckland marae.
He told the Herald last year on the eve of the Court of Appeal hearing that he had “no clue” what happened to the Swedish couple, and hoped the court would order a retrial.
“There’s a lot of stuff, the grounds that our side are arguing, that should be put before a jury.”
Of all those years in prison, he said: “You can get all bitter and twisted about it, but all that does is end up in the nuthouse. You’ve got to get to a stage where, if you’re gonna let it prey on your mind, you know insanity is on the other side of that door.
“Shit happens, and this happened, so we just keep going... Everyone likes to believe the police, the Crown, and [that] the system is all hunky dory. Life’s not like that. It never was.”
Tamihere has always claimed that police framed him.
The head of the investigation, Detective Inspector John Hughes, had also been involved in the case against Arthur Allan Thomas, who was found guilty over the Crewe murders in 1970.
Thomas was released after nine years in jail and given nearly $1 million in compensation; a Royal Commission of Inquiry said that detectives had planted fake evidence, and police had produced fake confessions from two prisoners.
”It causes us grave concern that very senior Police officers were so obviously ready to place credence on such unreliable, self-interested, and, in the case of the first inmate, deluded evidence,” the commission’s report said.
David Tamihere at the Auckland High Court hearing for Harris' perjury case in 2016. Photo / Jason Oxenham.
The report did not name any officers in relation to the confessions, nor was there any sign of Hughes’ involvement in the planting of fake evidence.
But Hughes did provide evidence about Thomas being in the Crewe home that was wrong, and which allowed Thomas’ credibility to be attacked under cross-examination.
Hughes died in 2006. The Post reported last year that Hughes had bragged to Sir Bob Jones that “I nailed [Tamihere] by making up all the evidence”.
Hughes was also spoken to as part of the Independent Police Conduct Authority (IPCA) investigation, in 1996, into Harris’ claims of a $100,000 police offer and help to get parole in exchange for saying Tamihere had confessed the murders to him.
Hughes told the IPCA that the claim of a $100,000 bribe was “absolute rubbish”.
“I believed that he [Harris] was sincere for his motive for coming forward... He was respectful to the Crown, Defence Counsel and everyone and explained why he was there. He was sick of listening to Tamihere quoting about what he had done,” Hughes told the IPCA.
Hughes admitted to traveling to Christchurch to appear at Harris’ parole hearing in 1992, telling the Parole Board that Harris had given evidence at the Tamihere trial, “nothing more”. The board postponed its decision until a further hearing six months later, when it recommended releasing Harris.
The IPCA found the allegations of police misconduct had “no validity whatsoever”.
More than two decades later, a jury found Harris guilty of perjury during Tamihere’s trial, sparking the events that reopened the case in the Court of Appeal last year.
The late John Hughes led the police investigation into David Tamihere for double murder. Photo / NZ Herald
Timeline
1989: Paakkonen and Hoglin disappear on the Coromandel Peninsula
1990: Tamihere is convicted of murdering the couple and sentenced to life imprisonment
1991: Hoglin’s remains are found near Whangamatā
1992: The Court of Appeal rejects Tamihere’s appeal
1994: Tamihere denied leave to appeal to the Privy Council
1995: Witness C swears an affidavit retracting his evidence
Derek Cheng is a senior journalist who started at the Herald in 2004. He has worked several stints in the press gallery team and is a former deputy political editor.
