David Tamihere will not face a retrial over the murders of Heidi Paakkonen and Urban Höglin

David Tamihere will not face a retrial over the 1989 murders of Swedish backpackers Heidi Paakkonen and Urban Höglin.Tamihere's convictions were earlier this year quashed by the Supreme Court, which said it was up to Crown prosecutors to decide whether to hold another trial.On Wednesday, in the High Court at Auckland, Crown prosecutor Claire Patterson told the court there was no longer sufficient evidence to proceed with a further prosecution.Justice Simon Mount discharged Tamihere on the two charges of murder and said he was free to go.Tamihere, who is now in his 70s, quickly left the court.Patterson said the Crown solicitor had concluded that there was no longer sufficient evidence to support Tamihere being retried."It would rely substantially on visual identification and observation evidence, allegedly placing Mr Tamihere and a woman resembling Ms Paakkonen at Crosby's Clearing on the Coromandel Peninsula at a relevant time. That evidence has always been and would be strongly disputed by Mr Tamihere."Some of that evidence is no longer available to the Crown because the witnesses who would give it are no longer available."Other evidence would not be admissible at a retrial following amendments to evidential admissibility rules since the first trial, Patterson 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 conclusion is therefore that the evidential test for prosecution is no longer met. As I have said, if the evidential test for prosecution is not met, then a prosecution cannot proceed, irrespective of the public interest analysis considered," Patterson said.Tamihere's lawyer, Murray Gibson, told the court that based on the evidence and counsel's submissions, the Crown was required to withdraw the charges."This speaks for itself. Their moral and legal obligation was clearly to dismiss the charges."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.Many aspects remain a mystery.Höglin's body was found in 1991, after Tamihere had been convicted, but Paakkonen's body has never been found.At the time the couple went missing, Tamihere had been living in the bush in the Coromandel for about three years.Much of the Crown's original case was circumstantial. It included evidence that Tamihere had been seen driving around the Coromandel region in the couple's ute.Tamihere admitted dumping or selling their possessions but maintained he had never met them.The Crown's case also relied on testimony from former inmate Roberto Conchie Harris, who said Tamihere told him he killed the Swedes. However Harris was convicted of perjury over evidence in 2017.Tamihere first appealed his convictions in 1992, after Höglin's body was found wearing a watch that a prosecution witness had initially said he had seen at Tamihere's house.The body was also 70km away from where the Crown first suspected he had been killed.That appeal was unsuccessful but the 2017 perjury conviction of Harris prompted a new round of appeals from Tamihere.In 2024, the Court of Appeal declined to quash the convictions, saying despite the problems with some crown evidence, there was still enough to safely say Tamihere was guilty.The Supreme Court released its decision in March that finally quashed the convictions.It said Harris's evidence meant the trial was fundamentally unfair, and that there had been a "radical recasting" of the Crown case since the original trial.That effectively meant the case had never truly been tested by a jury.The court said it was possible a jury would still find Tamihere guilty, but that could only be decided in a retrial.