Lingering questions about Heather Mack’s fate have haunted her family for nearly a decade, ever since they found themselves thrust into the public spectacle triggered by the grim, violent murder Mack plotted in 2014 for her mother, Sheila von Wiese-Mack.
The nine years since have “destroyed” von Wiese-Mack’s sister, a judge heard Wednesday. The lasting trauma and pain is “sickening,” von Wiese-Mack’s brother told him.
As for Mack’s 8-year-old daughter, a courtroom heard that she “is an amazing, intelligent, empathetic, kind and brave young girl, not because of Heather Mack, but in spite of her.” However, she “does not want to be raised by Heather,” the judge was told.
She likely won’t be.
At the end of a four-hour hearing Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Matthew Kennelly injected some certainty into Mack’s story, sentencing her to 26 years in prison for conspiring to kill her 62-year-old mother during a family trip to Bali. Von Wiese-Mack’s body was found in a suitcase left outside the St. Regis Bali Resort on Aug. 12, 2014.
Mack’s sentence is in addition to the seven years she spent imprisoned in Indonesia. It means Mack, 28, likely has another 20 years to go inside the U.S. prison system before she is released in her late 40s. By then her daughter, Stella, would be the same age Mack is now.
“The world knew that justice was not served in Indonesia,” Bill Wiese, von Wiese-Mack’s brother, told reporters after the hearing. “We are relieved that the court today gave Sheila the justice she so rightly deserves.”
Mack’s lawyer Michael Leonard said she was “surprised” and “disappointed” by the decision.
“She didn’t show outright emotion, but clearly she was on pins and needles the whole time,” Leonard told reporters, “including while she was sitting there today.”
Heather Mack says she misses her mother
Mack watched most of Wednesday’s hearing from a seat at the courtroom defense table. Wearing glasses and orange jail garb, she often kept her hands in her lap and her ankles crossed, rotating her chair back and forth as she listened.
She later stood to address the judge. When she did so, she insisted that her famously volatile relationship with her mother before the murder wasn’t relevant to her sentence. She said she made her own decisions and had grown into a different person. She called herself the “mother of an 8-year-old girl who I deeply love.” She apologized to her aunt and uncle.
And finally, she said she loved and missed her mother.
“There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t think of her,” Mack said. “I miss her smile, her ‘I love yous,’ and mostly her holding me.”
Bill Wiese later told reporters he appreciated Mack’s apology.
Trouble in Oak Park
Kennelly heard dueling views of Mack’s upbringing in Oak Park, though. Wiese and other members of his family pushed back on claims by Mack’s lawyers that von Wiese-Mack abused Mack physically and emotionally as a child. Bill Wiese called Mack a “monster” and a “master manipulator.”
And he said his sister believed in her “as only a mother can.”
The judge also heard a relative of Mack’s late father, as well as a counselor who once worked with Mack and her mother, level allegations of abuse and racism against von Wiese-Mack. Mack’s mother was white and her father was Black.
“The government would have us believe that Heather Mack suddenly just grew up into a teenager and somewhere, around 15 or 16 started, without provocation or any kind of reason, attacking her mother,” defense attorney Jeffrey Steinback said. “It doesn’t strike people as unusual, that that just happened unprovoked? She chose to do this?”
Kennelly ultimately harkened back to Mack’s argument that the strife between Mack and her mother really didn’t matter.
“Ms. von Wiese could have been the worst parent in the history of humanity,” Kennelly said. “She didn’t deserve to die.”
Heather Mack’s daughter Stella is ‘safe and loved’
Before handing down the sentence, Kennelly also heard the words of Lisa Hellmann, the maternal cousin of Mack who last year was named guardian of Stella. Mack gave birth to the girl during her 2015 trial in Indonesia. Hellmann’s comments were read to the judge by Bill Wiese’s wife, Carolyn Wiese.
Hellmann explained that, along with a therapist, she “made the tough decision to share the truth about [Stella’s] parents with her, which she could easily discover without adult support with a simple Google search of her name.”
“I held her convulsing body as she sobbed with grief about the loss of an idealized mother she will never have and a grandmother she will never know,” Hellmann said of Stella. “And I reiterated to her, that she is not her parents, and none of this was her fault.”
Hellmann said Stella “has learned to ride a bike and ski, she has gone camping, she has gone to birthday parties, playdates and sleepovers, she has learned to play basketball and softball, and is thriving simply getting to be a kid.”
“She is home with her family,” Hellmann said. “And she is safe and loved.”
Kennelly ordered Mack to pay $262,708, with interest, in restitution to her mother’s estate — of which Stella is now the sole beneficiary.
Mack once faced a firing squad
Wednesday’s hearing played out nine years and five months after the world learned that the body of von Wiese-Mack had been found stuffed inside a suitcase on Bali — and that her 18-year-old daughter faced a potential firing squad for her murder.
What followed was a yearslong international legal drama involving an aggressive FBI investigation, civil litigation that reached from the Daley Center to Indonesia, a bizarre YouTube confession, the trial being interrupted by the birth of Mack’s child, and questions about whether Mack would ever face consequences for her crime in the United States.
Those questions continued until November 2021, when a plane carrying Mack and Stella neared O’Hare International Airport, and a secret 2017 indictment against Mack and her former boyfriend Tommy Schaefer was finally unsealed.
The bizarre and gruesome circumstances of the killing attracted tabloid-style coverage around the world, with some outlets dubbing von Wiese-Mack’s death the “Bali Suitcase Murder.” Mack’s exploits as a young, attractive and notorious killer in an Indonesian jail fueled the coverage further.
Federal prosecutors recently recounted violence in the Mack home before the murder — how Mack allegedly bit her mother, shoved her to the ground so hard that von Wiese-Mack broke her arm, and at one point went around their home breaking plates and picture frames during an argument over household chores.
Meanwhile, as early as February 2014, prosecutors allege Mack had broached the idea of killing her mother with Schaefer.
“So that b---- heather is crazy huh,” Schaefer wrote in a Facebook chat that month. He added, “she asked me to find someone to kill her mom for 50k.”
Family urges to remember Sheila von Wiese-Mack, not ‘suitcase murder’
The feds say Mack ultimately enlisted Schaefer, secretly booking a $12,000 plane ticket for him so he could rendezvous with her while she vacationed with her mother in Bali in August 2014.
Then, over the course of nearly 40 minutes on the morning of Aug. 12, 2014, prosecutors say Mack and Schaefer exchanged tense, excited text messages as they prepared to murder von Wiese-Mack. They allegedly used the phrase “saying hi” as code for the killing, and they referred to each other as Bonnie and Clyde.
Soon after, prosecutors say von Wiese-Mack “was brutally beaten after being taken by surprise as she lay in her hotel bed.” Mack’s plea agreement alleges that Schaefer “repeatedly beat Von Wiese in the head and face,” ending her life.
Schaefer is still serving an 18-year sentence in Indonesia for the murder.
On Wednesday, von Wiese-Mack’s brother told reporters she loved spending her life listening to classical music and going to the opera. He said “she had more books than anyone I know.”
He said she was thoughtful, loved to learn and enjoyed taking family photos. He said she had a beautiful smile.
And he asked that people “please remember her as this person.
“Not the woman stuffed into a suitcase.”
