Heather Mack: ‘The Suitcase Killer’ gets 26 years in prison for killing her mother
An Illinois woman was sentenced Friday to 26 years in prison for her role in a conspiracy to murder her mother while they vacationed in Bali, Indonesia, back in in August 2014.
Heather L. Mack, 28, originally from Chicago, admitted in a plea agreement that she and her boyfriend, Tommy Schaefer, conspired to kill Mack’s mother, 62-year-old Sheila von Wiese-Mack, while Mack and her mother vacationed in Bali. Mack’s mother suffered years of domestic violence abuse at the hands of her daughter, according to The Independent.
Mack arranged for Schaefer to travel to Bali using her mother’s credit card. After Schaefer arrived, Mack and Schaefer exchanged a series of text messages about how and when to kill Mack’s mother, which included a discussion about suffocating or beating the victim.
Shortly after these text messages were exchanged, on August 12, 2014, Schaefer entered the victim’s hotel room and, while Mack was present, brutally beat and killed their unsuspecting victim. Mack and Schaefer then placed the victim’s body into a suitcase and tried to leave the hotel in a taxi.
Heather Mack is now infamously known worldwide as The Suitcase Killer.
When the driver of the taxi refused to accept their fare, Mack and Schaefer fled the hotel and abandoned the suitcase containing the victim’s body in the taxicab. Mack and Schaefer were arrested by Indonesian police the day after the murder at another hotel in Bali.
“Heather Mack planned to violently murder her own mother while on vacation in Bali,” said Acting Assistant Attorney General Nicole M. Argentieri of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division. “In Bali, Mack stood by while her mother was savagely beaten to death and then callously and unsuccessfully tried to dispose of her mother’s body. This significant sentence holds the defendant to account for this heinous crime. The department will
In 2015, Mack and Schaefer were convicted in Indonesia of local criminal charges related to the murder. Mack was sentenced to 10 years in prison and released after serving seven years. Schaefer was sentenced to 18 years in prison and currently remains imprisoned in Indonesia.
In November 2021, upon arrival in the United States, Mack was arrested on U.S. federal charges relating to the murder. Schaefer was also charged in the U.S. indictment, and those charges remain pending against him. Mack pleaded guilty on June 16, 2023, to one count of conspiracy to kill a U.S. national.
The FBI Chicago Field Office investigated the case, with assistance from the Justice Department’s Office of International Affairs and the FBI Legal Attaché Office in Jakarta, Indonesia. For more on this heinous crime, see the video accompanying this article.
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(Source: DoJ)
(Cover photo of Heather Mack behind bars, Image credit: Twitter)
Posted by Richard Webster, Ace News Today
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