David Tamihere wants a ‘quite huge’ payout after his retrial is abandoned

The man convicted for the 1989 murders of Heidi Paakkonen and Urban Höglin walks away a free man and wants to be compensated for his time in prison, writes Henry Oliver in today’s excerpt from The Bulletin.

David Tamihere believes he should be entitled to a “quite huge” payout from the Crown for the 20 years he spent in prison, RNZ’s Matthew Theunissen reported this morning. Yesterday, the Crown decided not to pursue a retrial of Tamihere for the 1989 murders of Swedish backpackers Heidi Paakkonen and Urban Höglin. Justice Simon Mount discharged Tamihere on the two charges of murder and said he was free to go.

Speaking outside court yesterday, Tamihere said he would be having discussions on compensation with his lawyers. “I’d like to do it at the level that was around when I first got convicted ... it’s quite huge,” he said.

Why the Crown walked away

Crown prosecutor Claire Paterson told the Auckland High Court there was not sufficient evidence to pursue another trial, 1News’s Simon Mercep reported yesterday. A retrial would rely on disputed circumstantial evidence and inconclusive forensic testing. And, after more than 20 years, some evidence (including some witnesses) was no longer available.

According to yesterday’s report from RNZ, Paterson said the Crown’s case would rely on visual identification and observational evidence alleging Tamihere was with a woman resembling Paakkonen at Crosby’s Clearing on the Coromandel Peninsula. “That evidence has always been and would be strongly disputed by Mr Tamihere,” she said.

“Some of that evidence is no longer available to the Crown because the witnesses who would give it are no longer available,” Paterson said. “As a result of the passage of time, some 36 years, significant pieces of evidence that the Crown adduced in the 1990 trial are no longer available, or if available, will likely be subject to reliability challenge”.

The compensation process

Former High Court judge Rodney Hansen, who oversaw two high profile claims for wrongful murder convictions and imprisonments (Teina Pora, who got $3.5m, and Alan Hall who got $4.9m) told RNZ it usually fell to a retired judge or KC to determine whether the applicant was innocent on “the balance of probabilities” – a lower threshold than the “beyond reasonable doubt” necessary to convict in a criminal trial.

If Tamihere is found innocent on the balance of probabilities, there’d be different types of compensation available to him, including $150,000 for each year he spent in custody, $100,000 a year for loss of livelihood and $75,000 a year for time spent on bail or parole. “There is also provision for an award of a sum to recognise any impropriety in the way that the prosecution or the inquiry itself might have been conducted, so that if there has been irregularity, impropriety, or worse, then an additional sum can be included in the overall package,” Hansen said. Any major compensation claim must then be approved by cabinet.

A 36-year legal battle

Höglin, 23, and Paakkonen, 21, were last seen in Thames in 1989. Their disappearance and the subsequent trial was one of the country’s highest profile crimes. And it largely remains a mystery. Höglin’s body was found in 1991, after Tamihere had been convicted, but Paakkonen’s has never been found.

According to the earlier RNZ report, the Supreme Court quashed Tamihere’s convictions in April this year, finding the Court of Appeal made a mistake in 2024 in upholding them. The Supreme Court said admitting the perjured evidence of Roberto Conchie Harris (who was on remand with Tamihere and claimed he admitted to the killings) meant “there was a fundamental error at trial which made the trial unfair”.

Tamihere, who has maintained his innocence for 36 years, said the outcome felt “anticlimactic”. He’d gone into court ready for just another day of proceedings. “Then all of a sudden, it’s within a couple of minutes. It’s over. It’s finished”. He spent 20 years in jail and went to the Court of Appeal twice and lost both times. “Unless you've actually lived it, it’s hard to comprehend,” he said. “It's a long time, and it should never have been that long”.