No retrial for David Tamihere for 1989 Swedish tourist killings

The Crown has announced this morning that it won’t be seeking a re-trial for David Tamihere, who until recently was one of the nation’s highest-profile double-murder convicts.

The decision, announced by prosecutor Claire Paterson during a brief administrative hearing in the High Court at Auckland, comes just over six months after the Supreme Court quashed the now 73-year-old’s 1990 convictions.

“A criminal trial is about what can be proved with admissable evidence,” Paterson said. “... There is no longer sufficient evidence to support Mr Tamihere being re-tried.”

That trial was unfair and based partly on evidence that was “concocted to secure convictions”, New Zealand’s highest court announced in March. But the court did not allow a full exoneration, leaving it to the Crown to decide if it would be feasible for a new trial nearly four decades later.

At the conclusion of today’s brief hearing, attended by media and documentary filmmakers from New Zealand and abroad, Justice Simon Mount told Tamihere he was allowed to leave the dock, a free man.

Tamihere first returned to court at the end of July expecting a decision, but the Crown announced at that time that more time was needed to assess the case.

Tamihere served 20 years in prison following his convictions for the murders of Swedish tourists Sven Urban Hoglin, 23, and Heidi Birgitta Paakkonen, 21, who were last seen alive together in 1989 on the Coromandel Peninsula.

The former defendant admitted before his trial that he stole the couple’s car and sold or dumped their possessions. But he insisted he had never met the backpackers.

His convictions were based in part on evidence from a fellow remand prisoner who, many years later, was discredited and prosecuted for perjury.

Hoglin’s remains were found in the bush by pig-hunters in 1991, many kilometres away from where they should have been if the prosecution’s theories were correct. Paakkonen’s remains have never been found.

Tamihere has always maintained his innocence, even after his release from prison in 2010. The case was reviewed twice by the Court of Appeal before the Supreme Court decision.

The Supreme Court justices found that the Crown’s later case theories, after the witness was discredited, had never been tested in front of a jury.

The last confirmed sighting of Höglin, 23, and fiancée, Paakkonen, 21, was in Thames on April 7, 1989. But some witnesses said they believed they saw the couple in the northern part of the Coromandel Peninsula the following day.

Their distinctive white Subaru four-wheel-drive station wagon with a bull bar was seen at Tararu Creek Rd, on the western side of the Coromandel Peninsula, north of Thames, on April 9.

Tamihere was already convicted and serving a life sentence when Höglin’s remains were found in 1991, in the bush many kilometres away from where they should have been if the prosecution’s theories were correct.

Paakkonen’s remains have never been discovered, although her jacket and wallet were found near Crosbies Clearing.

In 2024, the Court of Appeal found there had been a miscarriage of justice because of the evidence the discredited prison informant, Roberto Conchie Harris, gave at the original High Court trial. But the Court of Appeal also determined that new evidence in the case trumped that and “for that reason, the miscarriage does not justify setting the convictions aside”.

The Supreme Court disagreed.

“Were there a retrial, the Crown case would be a circumstantial one…” Paterson told the court in a prepared statement.

“That evidence has always been, and would be, strongly disputed, by Mr Tamihere. Some of that evidence is no longer available to the Crown. These witnesses who would give it are no longer available. Other evidence would not be admissible in a retrial, following amendments to evidential admissibility rules since the first trial.

”Additional forensic testing has been carried out but the results were inconclusive," she told the court.

“As a result of the passage of time, some 36 years, significant pieces of evidence that the Crown introduced in the 1990 trial are no longer available. Or, if available, will likely be subject to reliability challenge.

“The conclusion is, therefore, that… the evidential test for prosecution is not met.”

She emphasised, however, that prosecutors first met with the victims’ families to gather their views.

Craig Kapitan is an Auckland-based journalist covering courts and justice. He joined the Herald in 2021 and has reported on courts since 2002 in three newsrooms in the US and New Zealand.