Murder of Urban Höglin and Heidi Paakkonen

Thames

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.

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, one of whom was subsequently convicted of perjury. He was released on parole in November 2010 after serving twenty years in prison, and continues to protest his innocence.

Höglin's body was discovered in 1991, revealing evidence which contradicted the police case against Tamihere, who filed a series of unsuccessful appeals during the 1990s. In 2023, Bob Jones claimed the lead detective on the case, John Hughes, admitted to him before he died that he had fabricated the evidence against Tamihere.

In July 2024, the New Zealand Court of Appeal decided that the false evidence presented at the original trial constituted a miscarriage of justice, but concluded there was still enough evidence to be satisfied beyond reasonable doubt of Tamihere's guilt. His conviction was upheld. Tamihere applied to the Supreme Court which heard his appeal in August 2025.

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