Convicted killer Dean Wickliffe says he was cooking drugs while on parole to raise enough money to move his dead partner to a different cemetery.
The 63-year-old man this week pleaded guilty to one charge each of manufacturing methamphetamine and possessing it for supply.
Dean Wickliffe was arrested and jailed in December last year after being found with about 128 grams of the drug in Maketu.
He has spent more than half his life in prison - and was first jailed for shooting a Wellington jeweller in 1972.
His lawyer Glenn Dixon says Wickliffe needed money to exhume his dead partner from a cemetery in Tauranga and bury her body on his family's tribal land in Maketu.
He says Wickliffe had promised his former partner that he would do it.
Mr Dixon says Wickliffe accepts this is not an excuse for crime and feels that he has let a lot of people down.