‘Finding Heidi’ podcaster posts $10k reward for tip-off
A podcaster investigating the 1989 murders of Swedish backpackers Heidi Paakkonen and Urban Hoglin has put up a $10,000 reward for information that leads to the location of Paakkonen’s remains.
Ryan Wolf, the podcaster behind Guilt: Finding Heidi, has said he aims to retrieve Paakkonen’s body.
Hoglin’s body was discovered in 1989 by pig hunters near Whangamata¯, 70km from Thames where the pair were last sighted.
Their disappearance resulted in one of the biggest land-based searches undertaken in New Zealand.
David Wayne Tamihere was convicted of the double murder in 1990 and paroled in 2010.
In 2020, the case was referred to the Court of Appeal because the original guilty verdict could have been unsafe. The case has yet to be heard.
On September 16, Wolf was joined by a search and rescue operator, a former forensic expert and a group of volunteers at private forestry land near Whangamata¯ to search for the remains of Paakkonen.
The area became of interest to Wolf, an actor and lawyer, after he heard from a veteran forestry worker. The man said that, in 1989, he came across a heavily damaged access gate on a road leading into the forest, before smelling an odour consistent with decomposition.
“In May of 1989, [the unnamed forestry worker] recalls the gate being smashed in really bad, he had a note of it in his diary,” Wolf said at the time.
“He had said he thought it might have been ripped out by a vehicle or something. And at the same time, he recalled stopping by a gate and when he and his brother hopped out there was a horrendous smell, he recalled thinking, ‘S***, someone’s dead round here.’ He and his brother had a quick look but saw nothing.”
Wolf said information gleaned from the diary of an unidentified woman suggested a link between sightings of Hoglin and Paakkonen’s vehicle and the search area two years after their murder.
No remains were recovered by Wolf and his team, prompting him to offer a $10,000 reward for information that led to Paakkonen’s body.
Wolf said he hoped the offer of money would galvanise the community to help solve the decades-old case.
“I’ve drained my bank account, and honestly, I’d love to pay that money. If someone can come forward and we can find her, it will send such a powerful message that the community can come together and do this.
“I thought, ‘Ryan, if this is one good thing you do in your life — it’s worth 10 grand’.”
Wolf added new witnesses had come forward on the back of the podcast series, and he was wading through “a lot of new information” which he described as being “the core of this thing . . . A lot of these people don’t want to speak publicly — [but] there is some stuff that will come out. The floodgates have slowly opened as the fear that people had has dissipated [as] others come forward.”
He said any new information needed to be precise as to the location of the search area near Whangamata¯, given the case’s historical nature and the environmental shifts that had altered the landscape.
“The final pieces of what happened are falling into place, but we need an accurate area to look in as it really is a needle in a haystack.”