A flyer from the memorial service at Crosbie’s Clearing held by members of Police and Search and Rescue.
A flyer from the memorial service at Crosbie’s Clearing held by members of Police and Search and Rescue.
A podcaster investigating the 1989 murders of Swedish backpackers Heidi Paakkonen and Urban Hoglin has put up a $10,000 reward for information that leads to the location of Paakkonen’s remains.
Ryan Wolf, the podcaster behind Guilt - Finding Heidi, has said he aims to retrieve Paakkonen’s body.
Hoglin’s body was discovered in 1989 by pig hunters near Whangamatā, 70 kilometres from Thames, where the pair were last sighted.
Their disappearance resulted in one of the biggest land-based searches undertaken in New Zealand.
David Wayne Tamihere was convicted of the double murder in 1990 and paroled in 2010.
In 2020, the case was referred back to the Court of Appeal because the original guilty verdict could have been unsafe. The case has yet to be heard.
On September 16, Wolf was joined by an experienced search and rescue operator, a former police forensic expert and a group of volunteers at private forestry land near Whangamatā to search for the remains of Paakkonen.
The area became of interest to Wolf, a Kiwi actor and lawyer, after he heard a first-hand account from a veteran forestry worker. The man said that, in 1989, he came across a heavily damaged access gate on a road leading into the forest, before smelling an odour consistent with decomposition.
“In May of 1989, [the unnamed forestry worker] recalls the gate being smashed in really bad, he had a note of it in his diary,” Wolf said at the time.
“He had said he thought it might have been ripped out by a vehicle or something. And at the same time, he recalled stopping by a gate and when he and his brother hopped out there was a horrendous smell, he recalled thinking, ‘Shit, someone’s dead round here.’ He and his brother had a quick look but saw nothing.”
Podcast host Ryan Wolf, an actor and lawyer, at the search for Heidi Paakonnen's remains on Saturday, September 16, at an undisclosed location near Whangamatā.
The forestry worker was present at the search and spoke with HC Post about the incident.
“I’ve been coming on this block since the 1950s – it was a rehab block from the Great War, and I know it pretty well. [The smell] could have been a bloated cow, that could have been all we smelled – you just don’t know.
“However, it was one of those smells that kept bugging ya, and you think, ‘I should have done more’.”
The man said he “looked as far as the creek” in his attempts to find the source of the smell.
Wolf said information gleaned from the diary of an unidentified woman suggested a link between sightings of Hoglin and Paakkonen’s vehicle and the search area two years after their murder.
Artwork for the podcast Guilt - Finding Heidi.
No remains were recovered by Wolf and his team on September 16, prompting him to offer a $10,000 reward for information that led to Paakkonen’s body.
Speaking with the HC Post today, Wolf said his decision to offer a reward came after advice from people he had consulted for the podcast:
“People I was dealing with in the underworld kept saying to me, you should put a reward up - it might do something, and I just thought initially I could approach to Police (to post the reward money) but then someone mentioned why don’t you do crowdfunding?”
He initially posted the reward on a Givealittle page at the end of October, but this week he posted on Facebook that the page couldn’t be moderated because of money-laundering rules, “so I’m putting it up myself – $10k, for a month (or as long as I can afford)”.
“The same rules apply. For information leading to Heidi’s remains. The money will be put in a trust account in the coming days (details to come).”
Experts from Land Search and Rescue and former police forensics staff were part of the search.
Wolf said he hoped the offer of money would galvanise the community in Coromandel and New Zealand to help solve the decades-old case.
“I’ve drained my bank account, and honestly, I’d love to pay that money. If someone can come forward and we can find her, it will send such a powerful message that the community can come together and do this.
“It would be a big F you to the evil bastards that think they can do this and get away with it.
“I thought, Ryan, if this is one good thing you do in your life - it’s worth 10 grand.”
Wolf added potential new witnesses had come forward on the back of the podcast series, and he was wading through “a lot of new information” which he described as being “the core of this thing”.
" A lot of these people don’t want to speak publicly - not all of them though, and there is some stuff that will come out. The floodgates have slowly opened as I think that the fear that people had has dissipated, hearing others come forward through the podcast.”
He said any new information needed to be precise as to the location of the search area near Whangamatā, given the case’s historical nature and the environmental shifts that had altered the landscape.
“The final pieces of what happened are falling into place, but we need an accurate area to look in as it really is a needle in a haystack.”
Wolf said he had been overwhelmed by the level of public support and positive feedback received.
“In terms of people wanting to get involved in the search, everyone is still so passionate and we have narrowed down some other search areas. The plan is to conduct a couple more and keep this thing going.
