Tamihere and Thomas – worrying links

OPINION: So David Tamihere is still in jail after 20 years with the Parole Board's obstinate ninth refusal to free him, effectively doubling his original 10-year non-parole sentence.

But there are other far more disturbing facts from his conviction which match the more familiar framing of Arthur Thomas for the Crewe murders.

Two top Crown people from the Thomas scandal, using similar investigation and court tactics, drove home the case against Tamihere.

The policeman heading that investigation was earlier criticised by the Thomas commission for giving "substantially important evidence" which was wrong and damaging against Thomas.

The commission said on the strength of this: "Thomas was strenuously cross-examined and his credibility was attacked both then and during the crown prosecutor's final address ... we are forced to conclude that the police preferred to leave the matter in a state which allowed this ... If the fact that his [the policeman's] evidence was wrong was not known to the police, it should have been ... this failure to establish the truth was improper conduct."

In other words, the incorrect and damaging evidence suited the police case and they chose not to correct it.

Of course, there are major differences. Arthur Thomas was a naive young farmer, an innocent man overwhelmed by police and legal power, jailed without reason for more than eight years, later pardoned.

Among David Tamihere's serious convictions was manslaughter of a prostitute and he was on the run while bailed on a rape charge.

His 1990 jury heard evidence from an investigation team led by that earlier Thomas case police witness - by then promoted to inspector - before it found Tamihere guilty of murdering Swedish tourists Heidi Paakkonen and her fiance Urban Hoglin in bush near Thames.

Strategically placed exhibit photos of these two attractive young people faced the jury during the Crown's circumstantial case against him

Two damning Crown accusations were that he took a distinctive wristwatch off Hoglin, dead or alive, and later gave it to his son, and "evidence" of a Tamihere confession from two jail informers who said Tamihere told them gory details of cutting up the bodies and dumping them at sea.

Both crucial pieces of fiction fell over badly the following year when pig hunters found Hoglin's skeleton 70km away from where police told the jury he had been murdered.

That destroyed the jail informers' evidence of the bodies being dumped at sea.

Worse for the Crown's credibility, on Hoglin's wrist was the watch police said Tamihere had taken off him and given to his son.

Unfazed, the Court of Appeal refused to reopen the case, incredibly ruling "nothing substantive in defence claims that the skeleton revealed new evidence".

The seriously faulty evidence ruined by the finding of the Hoglin body didn't surprise Thomas case investigators like myself and Dr Jim Sprott.

For more than eight years, we had analysed earlier controversial work by the Crown prosecutor in the Tamihere case and the police inquiry head.

They were both leading figures in the Thomas investigation which involved planting of evidence and lies to convict him.

In both cases, police and prosecution produced similar versions of evidence on watches said to have been taken from victims' bodies by their killers.

I can still hear the Crown prosecutor at the second Thomas trial describing how Thomas had stripped a rolled gold watch from Harvey Crewe's dead wrist and cold-bloodedly taken it in to be repaired with a new glass and cleaned of blood around its strap, that he later picked it up and it was never found.

Blood? The prosecutor left the jury in no doubt it was Harvey Crewe's blood.

In the first trial, he used the same evidence about repairs - but said the watch was Thomas' damaged in a struggle with Crewe which was clearly wrong.

The same prosecutor - later a judge - told the Tamihere jury that the dark, rather menacing man in the dock took off Hoglin's watch - probably after his death - and then callously passed it on to his young son as a gift.

In both cases those dramatic touches, which helped convince the jury, were wrong.

The sequels: Back in 1977 - alerted by an anonymous phone voice: "Find John Fisher" - I found him within five hours in Feilding.

Overnight, he found in a jigsaw puzzle box among his children's toys, his old rolled gold watch which was the false basis for the police theory.

He told me how he had once taken it into a Pukekohe jeweller to repair its cracked glass and clean congealed blood around the strap. The blood? He was a part-time butcher and wore it while slaughtering stock.

Between the two Thomas trials, he'd told this to Feilding police, then given a signed statement to two detectives who flew down from Auckland.

But police never called him as a witness, nor did they advise the defence of his existence as they are required to do. Simple reason: His account didn't match the police line.

My inquiries revealed that the Pukekohe jeweller's repair mark in the watch showed it was repaired on January 12, 1971 - six months after the Crewes died. So Thomas couldn't have taken it in for repair and later picked it up. By then he was in prison awaiting his first trial, only weeks away.

When Thomas was pardoned, held to be innocent and granted compensation by a commission of inquiry, they found he'd been framed by police investigators who planted cartridge evidence, distorted facts and withheld vital information from the defence. The part-time butcher became a major witness and I handed his old watch to the commission as a telling exhibit.

That commission also dealt extremely harshly with belated police attempts to produce fake jail confession evidence against Thomas from two prisoners - as they later did against Tamihere.

The commission refused to hear testimony from one of them after a psychiatrist diagnosed him as suffering from "paranoid schizophrenia and delusions of grandeur and intrigue".

The commission described the other as "prepared to break the law for personal gain ... shrewd, cunning, devious and manipulative and a man who would go to considerable lengths to shorten his long sentence ... a police informer on other matters ... had very good reason to lie, must have hoped, realistically or not, that police would use their influence to shorten his sentence".

I understand that the Thomas commission's serious misgivings were later borne out - that one of the prisoners who testified against Tamihere was later freed earlier than expected when supported by submissions from the head of the police team.

One big difference. The Thomas commission ruled the jail evidence out - "We are satisfied that the prison confessions never took place and that the evidence of the two prisoners was a tissue of lies." But the obvious fiction in the jail evidence the Tamihere jury heard was not challenged.

The report of the Thomas commission delivered on November 11, 1980, said: "It causes us grave concern that very senior police officers were so obviously ready to place credence on such unreliable, self-interested, and in the case of the first witness, deluded evidence."

That was nine years before similar evidence, produced and presented by the same people, helped convict David Tamihere.

Nor was there any hint to this jury that this ploy had been tried before - and failed.

Or that one of the prison informers had testified in three cases for the police, notably for the head of this inquiry, each time haggling for a cut in his sentence.

Had the case against him been reopened - as it should have been after the discovery of the body of Urban Hoglin in 1991 - important and worrying similarities between the earlier framing of Arthur Thomas and the jailing of David Tamihere, would have been uncovered.

David Tamihere might have been freed and not be waiting, 20 years later, for a parole that never seems to come.

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