A defiant David Tamihere has pledged to keep fighting for a retrial after the Court of Appeal declined to quash his murder convictions 35 years after the Crown says he killed Swedish tourists Urban Hoglin and Heidi Paakkonen in the Coromandel bush.
In an interview with the Herald after the release of the Court of Appeal’s judgment on Thursday, Tamihere maintained his innocence.
He was disappointed but not surprised by the court’s ruling and wanted to keep fighting in the courts.
“You’ve got to grab them by the short and curlies and start squeezing before you get any results from them,” he said.
“I’ll keep at it. It’s the principle of the thing really.”
A panel of three Court of Appeal Judges found that while the use of evidence from a discredited jailhouse snitch since convicted of perjury amounted to a miscarriage of justice, it did not justify quashing his convictions.
His lawyer Murray Gibson confirmed he would be advising Tamihere to pursue the next and final avenue of appeal. His legal team, who are acting pro bono, would need to seek and be granted leave to appeal to the Supreme Court.
Tamihere is now in his 70s and lives a quiet life with his partner at their home in Sunnyvale, West Auckland, working part-time. As a life parolee, he still has to check in regularly with his probation officer.
They had argued the appeal on the trial evidence and that, based on the clear flaws in that evidence highlighted by the Court of Appeal, the case should at least go back before a jury, Tamihere said.
“We should at least get a retrial,” he said.
“You do get ticked off about it, this is 30-something years later.”
Police issued a statement after the judgment’s release welcoming the ruling and saying it was “hugely validating” for staff who had worked on investigations into the killing over previous decades.
The statement from assistant commissioner investigations Paul Basham included a plea directly to Tamihere to tell them the location of Paakkonen’s body, which has never been found.
“David Tamihere is the one person who can help bring closure to Heidi’s family,” Basham said.
“You know where Heidi’s body rests and her family has suffered enough. Tell us where to find Heidi, and help give her family the closure they deserve.”
Tamihere’s convictions are among several high profile cases in New Zealand secured with evidence from jailhouse snitches.
The use of prison informants is controversial because of their incentive to give the evidence prosecutors are looking for in exchange for reduced sentences or immunity from further prosecution.
Part of the reason his case was referred back to the Court of Appeal was he discredited the evidence of prison informant Roberto Conchie Harris, a murderer who has since died in prison.
He told Tamihere’s trial in 1990 that Tamihere had described nearly being sprung by two people in the bush.
His evidence tended to corroborate the account of two trampers, who said they encountered Tamihere with a young, blonde, European-looking woman near Crosbie’s Clearing north of Thames on April 8, 1989.
Harris was convicted of perjury in connection with that evidence in 2017, after which media organisations won the right to unmask him as the infamous “Witness C”.
In their judgment released on Thursday, the panel of three Court of Appeal judges, Justices Christine French, Forrest Miller and David Collins, said the admission of his evidence could have affected the jury in the 1990 trial.
“We find that the admission of the evidence of Roberto Conchie Harris at Mr Tamihere’s trial may have affected the jury’s verdicts and accordingly amounted to a miscarriage of justice,” their judgment said.
But they found the miscarriage of justice was not sufficient to set his convictions aside.
“Sometimes you just need to stand back and look at a case like this and say: ‘is there sufficient evidence for this man to be convicted?’ And I’d say certainly not,” he said.
He and his lawyer say that the judgment shows the Crown has now used three versions of events, different each time at the trial, his first conviction appeal in 1992 and now the latest failed appeal.
Gibson, who represented Tamihere in his appeal alongside James Carruthers, was philosophical about this week’s ruling.
He said he was hopeful of a different result if they are successful in obtaining leave to take the their arguments to the Supreme Court.
“Sometimes you just need to stand back and look at a case like this and say: ‘is there sufficient evidence for this man to be convicted?’ And I’d say Certainly not,” he said.
“This was the third explanation the Crown had put forward.”
The first explanation put forward at the trial, before Hoglin’s body was found, was that Tamihere killed the pair at Crosbie’s Clearing.
After he was convicted, and two years to the day after he was charged, Höglin’s body was found in a shallow grave by pig hunters near Whangamatā, more than 70km from where the Crown said the murders happened.
Now more than 30 years later, the court had adopted the Crown’s suggestion that the couple were killed near the east Coast, Gibson said.
“There’s no evidence that they went over there at all. And there’s no evidence they ever met Tamihere.”
Tamihere has long maintained he was innocent, pursuing his case on appeal even after he was released on parole from his life prison sentence in 2010.
After his conviction in 1990, Tamihere took his case through the appeal court to the Privy Council, and lost, before being granted a rare royal prerogative of mercy to be allowed to take it back to the Court of Appeal.
The latest Crown theory says Tamihere killed Hoglin first, close to where his body was found in a shallow grave two years later.
It says Tamihere then drove Paakkonen in the engaged couple’s car to another location, and killed her too.
“Where and how she died cannot be known,” the court decision said.
Tamihere has previously admitted stealing the couple’s car, but denied ever meeting them.
Two events since the 1990 trial led to the referral back to the Court of Appeal.
The first was the discovery of Hoglin’s remains in bush near the Wentworth Valley west of Whangamatā in 1991.
This was a considerable distance from where two trampers said they encountered Tamihere with a young, blonde, European-looking woman near Crosbie’s Clearing north of Thames on April 8, 1989.
The Swedes had last been seen in Thames the day before.
The second was the perjury convictions undermining the evidence of Conchie Harris.
Taken together, these developments raised doubts about the accuracy of the trampers’ identification of Tamihere.
But the court this week said it had considered new evidence that the jury had not heard.
It said it was satisfied that the trampers’ account of meeting Tamihere was correct, and the woman with him must have been Paakkonen.
The court was satisfied that Tamihere used a key he took from the couple to get into their car.
It said Tamihere had cut some items found in the bush, including the couple’s tent and Paakkonen’s used underwear.
The Court of Appeal’s decision said the Judges believed the case against Tamihere remained strong.
“It does not rest wholly on the trampers’ identification.
“Rather, it derives its strength from a number of sources, including his use of the couple’s key to gain access to their car and his treatment of his property.
“It also rests in part on his admissions when confronted with evidence that he could not explain away, and his proven lies.”
Höglin and Paakkonen went missing when they were hiking in dense Coromandel bush in April 1989.
At that time, Tamihere was on the run from police.
Three years earlier he had raped and threatened a 47-year-old woman in her home for more than six hours.
He pleaded guilty to that offence but had ignored his bail conditions and absconded to the bush, where he was living rough.
He also had a prior conviction for manslaughter after hitting 23-year-old stripper Mary Barcham on the head with a rifle in 1972, when he was 18.
On April 10, 1989, Tamihere came across the Swedish couple’s white Subaru, “loaded with gear” and parked near the start of a difficult walking track.
He stole the car – something he has always admitted.
Weeks later, after the Swedes’ disappearance had sparked the largest land-based search in New Zealand history, Tamihere was linked to the car.
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.
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 journalist Mike White 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 travelling 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”.
He skipped school Monday, prompting the search.