By Claire Savage
An American woman who pleaded guilty to helping kill her own mother and stuffing the body in a suitcase during a luxury holiday in Bali has been sentenced to 26 years in prison.
Judge Matthew Kennelly gave Heather Mack credit for the approximately two years she spent in custody in Chicago awaiting trial since her return in 2021. Mack’s lawyer Michael Leonard said her formal sentence would be about 23 years long.
Heather Mack inside a cell before her trial in Bali, Indonesia, in 2015.Credit: AP
Federal prisoners in the US also get credit for good behaviour, roughly 50 days for each year. Prosecutors had recommended a 28-year prison sentence for Mack for conspiring with her boyfriend to kill Sheila von Wiese-Mack in 2014.
The government also wanted the 28-year-old Mack to get five years of supervised release, a $US250,000 ($380,000) fine and restitution of $US262,708. In a filing last week, prosecutors said the recommended sentence was “warranted and sufficient, but not greater than necessary to serve a just and appropriate punishment for Mack’s heinous crime”.
The sentencing hearing began on Wednesday (US time) with testimony from Bill Wiese, Wiese-Mack’s brother and Mack’s uncle. He asked Kennelly to impose the maximum sentence possible, saying Mack had never shown remorse.
“If it were up to me, Heather would spend the rest of her life behind bars,” Wiese said.
Bill Wiese, the brother of Sheila von Wiese-Mack, tells reporters after Mack’s sentencing that he and his wife (left), sister (middle-right), and niece feel that justice was served for the 2014 murder. Credit: AP
Mack, who wore an orange jumpsuit, orange slip-on shoes and glasses, remained mostly impassive as her uncle spoke, occasionally looking at attendees and giving small smiles to some.
Mack pleaded guilty last June to one count of conspiring to kill von Wiese-Mack with her then-boyfriend to gain access to a $US1.5 million trust fund. Prosecutors have said Mack, then 18 and pregnant, covered her mother’s mouth while Tommy Schaefer bludgeoned Wiese-Mack with a fruit bowl in a hotel room.
Prosecutors said Mack and Schaefer had planned the killing for months, and that video evidence showed Mack and Schaefer trying to get the small suitcase containing Wiese-Mack’s body into an Indonesian taxi.
In media reports at the time, police said a security guard found blood spots on the suitcase and, when the couple didn’t return to the taxi, he advised the driver to go to the police station.
An Indonesian police officer escorts Tommy Schaefer to the police station in 2014.Credit: AP
Mack, who lived with her mother in suburban Chicago’s Oak Park, served seven years of her 10-year Indonesian sentence for her 2015 conviction of being an accessory to Wiese-Mack’s murder. She was deported in 2021 and US agents arrested her on her arrival at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport.
Mack’s then-six-year-old daughter was with her when she was arrested in Chicago. The girl was placed with a relative after a custody fight.
Mack’s lawyers had sought a 15-year prison term, but with credit for her seven years in the Indonesian prison. She was automatically credited for the more than two years she spent in custody in Chicago.
“For the taxpayers to incur the hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars to incarcerate Ms Mack for an extended period of time within the BOP [US Bureau of Prisons] is particularly unnecessary,” Leonard said in a recent court filing.
The plea agreement called for a sentence of no more than 28 years and for two other charges against Mack to be dropped.
Schaefer was convicted of murder and he is serving an 18-year sentence in Indonesia. He is charged in the same US indictment. His mother, Kia Walker, was in the courtroom for Mack’s sentencing.
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