Sentencing was scheduled in Chicago yesterday for an American woman who pleaded guilty to helping kill her mother and stuffing the body in a suitcase during a luxury vacation at a Bali resort nearly a decade ago.
Federal prosecutors are recommending a 28-year prison sentence for Heather Mack (pic), considerably more time behind bars than defence lawyers are expected to ask when she is sentenced for conspiring to kill Sheila von Wiese-Mack in 2014.
The government is also seeking five years of supervised release for Mack, 28, a US$250,000 (RM1.17mil) fine and restitution of US$262,708 (RM1.23mil). In a filing last week, prosecutors said the recommended sentence “is warranted and sufficient, but not greater than necessary to serve a just and appropriate punishment for Mack’s heinous crime”.
Last June, Mack pleaded guilty to one count of conspiring to kill Wiese-Mack with her then-boyfriend to gain access to a US$1.5mil (RM7.02mil) trust fund.
Prosecutors have said that Mack, then 18 and pregnant, covered her mother’s mouth in a hotel room while Tommy Schaefer bludgeoned Wiese-Mack with a fruit bowl.
The case gained international attention in part because of photographs of the suitcase Wiese-Mack was placed in, which seemed too small to hold an adult woman’s body.
Prosecutors have said Mack and Schaefer had planned the killing for months. They also said they had video evidence that showed both Mack and Schaefer trying to get the suitcase with Wiese-Mack’s body inside it into an Indonesian taxi.
Mack, who lived with her mother in suburban Chicago’s Oak Park, served seven of her 10-year Indonesian sentence. She was deported in 2021 and US agents arrested her immediately after her plane landed at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport.
Mack’s lawyers are seeking a 15-year prison term – but with credit for seven years spent in the Indonesian prison for her 2015 conviction of being an accessory to Wiese-Mack’s murder. Separately, she would automatically get credit for more than two years spent in custody in Chicago since her return to the US.
Schaefer was convicted of murder and remains in Indonesia, where he is serving an 18-year sentence. He is charged in the same US indictment. — AP
