U.S. prosecutors in Chicago are seeking 28 years in prison and maximum fines for a woman who brutally killed her mother at a luxury resort in Bali a decade ago and served time before pleading guilty to federal charges in Illinois.
Heather Mack, 28, has pleaded guilty to a federal charge of conspiracy to kill a United States national for her mother’s slaying in 2014. The Indonesian court found her guilty of holding Sheila von Wiese’s mouth shut as her boyfriend at the time, Tommy Schaefer, beat her to death. They then stuffed her body into a bloody suitcase at the St. Regis hotel and left it in a taxi.
Federal prosecutors wrote in a sentencing memo earlier this week that “The murder of von Wiese at the hands of the defendant and Schaefer was vicious.” Mack’s lawyers are seeking a sentence of 15 years maximum with time served credit for her Indonesian incarceration, arguing it would be “unwarranted” to keep her in prison longer after co-conspirator Robert Bibbs received a nine-year sentence for helping to plot the murder.
Schaefer, Bibbs’ cousin, is also accused of taking part in the murder in an effort to get “rich” off the money they thought they would have inherited from von Wiese. Prosecutors recovered text messages between Mack and Schaefer in which they coordinated the murder and fantasized about how to spend the money.
An autopsy found defensive wounds on von Wiese’s body and determined she died of blunt force trauma that fractured her nose and jaw and obstructed her airway. The couple then hid the bloody sheets and replaced them with a clean set, stuffed von Wiese into a suitcase and threw it in the trunk of a taxi outside the hotel lobby, according to prosecutors.
Mack was released after serving seven years of her 10-year Indonesian sentence and deported to the U.S., where police arrested her as soon as she arrived. Schaefer is still in prison overseas.