Prosecutors in Indonesia are looking into online videos apparently posted by a Chicago woman who was sentenced to 10 years in the 2014 murder of her mother in Bali to determine whether to impose a tougher sentence, Reuters reports.
As the newswire notes, Heather Mack was convicted along with then-boyfriend Tommy Schaefer in the murder of her mother, Sheila von Wiese-Mack, whose body was found stuffed in a suitcase in a taxi outside a luxury hotel on the resort island.
In a series of three videos uploaded to YouTube on Feb. 2, Mack, 21, said that she had asked Schaefer to find someone to kill her mother but he refused.
“I don’t regret killing my mother ... but I regret bringing Tommy into it. Tommy is an innocent man,” she said in the video, adding that while Schaefer was innocent of the murder, he helped hide her mother’s body in the suitcase because she threatened to tell police that he had committed the crime.
“I don’t want to live in a lie anymore. I made it up in my heart ... that I wanted to kill my mother,” she said, adding that she believed her mother had killed her father several years earlier.
According to the Associated Press, Mack has cellphone and internet access in prison. Mack also confessed that she framed Schaefer because she knew that she would probably be arrested after killing her mother and she “didn’t want to get arrested by myself in a different country.”
A lawyer for Mack told Reuters that his client had been pressured into making the confession video.
“We suspect Tommy’s motivation is to attack Heather after they broke up,” the lawyer, Ben Seran, said.
However, Ashari Kurniawan, a public relations official in the Bali prosecutor’s office, told the newswire, “If Mack is indeed the mastermind of the murder, the video can be used as evidence in the case, and the sentence should be heavier than it is now.”
Mack and her mother had traveled together to Bali in August 2014 and were staying at the luxury St. Regis Bali Resort. Schaefer later joined them, surprising von Wiese-Mack, who did not know that he was coming to Indonesia.
Schaefer said in court that he had killed the older woman in self-defense; he was ultimately sentenced to 18 years in prison for premeditated murder. Mack was convicted of being an accessory to murder, and she gave birth to a daughter just before being sentenced.