David Tamihere

He had a prior conviction for the manslaughter of Mary Barcham, a 23-year-old stripper in Auckland, whom he killed in 1972 when he was aged 18 by hitting her on the head with a rifle.

In April 1986 Tamihere broke into an Auckland house, where he raped and threatened a 47-year-old woman for over six hours.

He pleaded guilty but fled while on bail, and was living rough in the bush on the Coromandel Peninsula when Höglin and Paakkonen disappeared.

Swedish tourists Sven Urban Höglin, aged 23, and his fiancée Heidi Birgitta Paakkonen, aged 21, disappeared while tramping on the Coromandel Peninsula of New Zealand in 1989.

Police, residents, and military personnel conducted the largest land-based search undertaken in New Zealand, attempting to find the couple.

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.

The couple vanished and were reported missing in May.

Their disappearance led to an intense investigation under the name Operation Stockholm and attracted substantial media interest.

Police, local residents, search and rescue and military personnel carried out the largest land-based search undertaken in New Zealand, performing grid-searches centred on Crosbie's Clearing, 12 km from Thames.

David Tamihere is the brother of former Labour MP John Tamihere.

Tamihere was not found until 1989, after which he was jailed for six and a half years for the 1986 offences.

On 10 April 1989, Tamihere came across Höglin and Paakkonen's white Subaru, which was parked at Crosbies Clearing and 'loaded with gear'.

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.

He drove one of the tourists to Auckland the day after that and dumped the car at Auckland railway station.

Tamihere was picked up on the 1986 rape charge on 24 May 1989, two days before the story broke that Höglin and Paakkonen were missing.

His link to the couple surfaced when one of the three tourists recognised photographs of their Subaru and told police in June that Tamihere had given him a ride in it.

Tamihere, already in prison on the rape charge, was then charged with murdering Höglin and Paakkonen.

Two trampers who visited Crosbie's Clearing on April 8, 1989, saw a woman resembling Paakkonen.

They spoke to the man she was with and later identified him as Tamihere.

Justice David Tompkins ruled that due to incorrect identification techniques used by the police, their evidence was tainted - but the Crown took this decision to the Court of Appeal and allowed the trampers' testimony to be included.

Three prison inmates, granted name suppression by the court, claimed that Tamihere confessed to murdering the couple.

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.

He also claimed to have raped Paakkonen, then strangled her, before dumping their bodies out to sea.

He said Tamihere also claimed he had given Hoglin's watch to his son.

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.

The Crown's case against Tamihere in October 1990 was largely circumstantial.

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.

Höglin's body was discovered in 1991, revealing evidence which contradicted the police case against Tamihere, who has always maintained his innocence and filed a series of unsuccessful appeals during the 1990s.

In 1992, he was found guilty of assaulting a 62-year-old woman in her home in 1985.

On 25 August 1995, five years after the trial, Witness C (Conchie Harris) swore an affidavit retracting the testimony he provided at the trial.

He said police told him what to say and said: “a sum of money up to $100,000 was available should I decide to give a statement helpful to the Police". Harris also claimed police indicated they would support his early release at his parole hearing if he did what they wanted.

He publicly admitted to lying at Tamihere's trial and confirmed that the affidavit he had signed in 1995, stating that he had lied and given false evidence, was the truth.

He told Holmes that his original testimony against Tamihere had been "playing on his mind" and "they definitely have an innocent man inside".

The affidavit states that that the officer in charge of this deception was former Detective John Hughes (See Lead detective below).

Witness C later tried to withdraw his affidavit and claimed that his original trial testimony was the correct version of events.

He said he only signed the affidavit because he and his family were under threat of violent reprisal because of his reputation as a jailhouse "nark".

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.

Tamihere was released on parole in November 2010 after serving twenty years.

In 2017, Secret Witness C, one of the former prisoners who had testified against Tamihere at his murder trial, was found guilty of perjury.

In November 2023, The Post reported that detective John Hughes who investigated the case disclosed that he "nailed [Tamihere] by making up all the evidence."