David Tamihere

Swedish tourists Sven Urban Höglin, 23, and his fiancée Heidi Birgitta Paakkonen, 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 the pair, and sentenced to life imprisonment based largely on the testimony of three prison inmates. Höglin's body was discovered in 1991, revealing evidence which contradicted the police case against him. Tamihere has always maintained he is innocent of the murders and filed a series of unsuccessful appeals during the 1990s. Tamihere was released on parole in November 2010 after serving 20 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.

On 8 April 1989, backpacking tourists Höglin and Paakkonen from Storfors, Sweden went into the bush near Thames. They vanished and were reported missing in May. The disappearance led to an intense police 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 MP John Tamihere.

David Tamihere had a prior conviction for the manslaughter of an Auckland stripper, 23-year-old Mary Barcham, whom he killed in 1972 when he was 18 by hitting her on the head with a rifle. In April 1986 he broke into an Auckland house, where he sexually violated and threatened to kill a 47-year-old woman over six hours. He pleaded guilty, but fled while on bail and was still at large, living rough in the bush on Coromandel Peninsula, when the two tourists disappeared. He wasn't found until 1989 after which he was jailed for six and a half years for the 1986 offences. In 1992 he was found guilty of assaulting a 62-year-old woman in her home in 1985.

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