Mahvash Ikram
Thirty-six years after David Tamihere was jailed for murdering two Swedish backpackers, the Supreme Court has quashed his convictions and ordered a retrial.
Tamihere, who has consistently maintained he did not kill Heidi Paakkonen and Sven Urban Höglin, was convicted of double murder in 1990 and served 20 years in prison. He was released on parole in November 2010.
The Swedish couple disappeared on the Coromandel Peninsula in April 1989.
Tamihere appealed his case twice to the Court of Appeal and then ultimately to the Supreme Court, which ruled on Tuesday that his original 1990 High Court trial was unfair.
A key prosecution witness, prison snitch Roberto Conchie Harris, was convicted of perjury in 2017. His evidence, the Supreme Court said, had been had been “concocted to secure convictions”.
The Supreme Court said the Court of Appeal then made a “fundamental error” by upholding Tamihere’s convictions after wrongly applying a provision under s 385 (1) of the Crimes Act.
The Supreme Court also said the volume of new evidence that had come to light since the trial in 1990 had led to a “radically different Crown theory” about the case. This raised questions of credibility and reliability about the previous evidence.
Significantly, this theory had never been tested before a jury.
“We emphasise that there are simply too many questions on the Crown’s new theory of the case, which have not been tested, for an appellate court to reach a conclusion about guilt,” the Supreme Court said.
But it said a new trial did not mean a jury could not find Tamihere guilty based on the new evidence and it was up to the Crown to decide if it wanted to try him again.
Perjury and new evidence
At the original High Court trial, Harris testified that Tamihere had admitted to the murders while both were in prison together. But he later recanted, claiming the police had offered him a bribe to testify against Tamihere, and changed his evidence again a year later.
The Independent Police Conduct Authority found the allegations of bribery to be false.
The police theory was that Tamihere kidnapped and murdered Paakkonen and Höglin on a walking track leading to a location called Crosbies Clearing.
The police and Crown relied on eyewitness accounts by two trampers who said they saw Tamihere and a woman resembling Paakkonen at Crosbies Clearing on 8 April 1989. Harris’ evidence at trial supported the trampers’ description of Tamihere and Paakkonen.
But in 1991, a year after Tamihere’s conviction, Höglin’s body was discovered more than 70km away, near Wentworth Valley. According to forensic evidence, Höglin had likely been killed close to where his body was found, rather than near Crosbies Clearing.
Police had also claimed Tamihere had stolen Höglin’s watch and had given to his son but the watch was found on Höglin’s body.
Based on these facts, Tamihere took his case – unsuccessfully – to the Court of Appeal.
After Harris was convicted of perjury, Tamihere appealed once again. This time the Court of Appeal accepted that although the perjured evidence had led to a miscarriage of justice, Tamihere’s trial had still been fair and there was sufficient other evidence to prove he was guilty beyond reasonable doubt.
Paakkonen’s body has never been found.
Read the Supreme Court’s decision here
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