If Heather Mack is ultimately cleared in Indonesia of charges she murdered her mother, the Chicago woman will not be able to return to the Gold Coast condo the two once shared.
And if Mack wants to collect belongings she kept at Sheila von Wiese-Mack’s high-rise, she’ll have to take a trip to her aunt’s house in Missouri to retrieve them.
That’s according to the latest legal wrangling in the ongoing dispute between Mack, 19, and uncle William Wiese, her mother’s brother, over a $1.56 million trust left behind by von Wiese-Mack.
Court papers filed on Monday say Wiese sold his sister’s 18th floor residence in December for $610,000 without notifying Mack or her attorneys. Then he had Heather Mack’s belongings boxed up and shipped to St. Louis, the court papers say.
All the while, Wiese bad-mouthed Mack in the press and stonewalled her lawyers, who tried negotiating for Mack’s legal expenses to be paid out of the trust, according to the court papers.
Ultimately, Cook County Judge Neil H. Cohen ruled last month that Wiese, who oversees the trust, had to make $150,000 available for Mack’s defense.
But Wiese’s actions may have doomed Mack’s ongoing court case, the court papers say.
“William has not acted in Heather’s best interests,” Mack’s attorney alleges in the filing. “He called Heather’s mental capacity into question. . . . He cast Heather in a negative light by revealing sensitive and private information to the Chicago Tribune.”
Wiese declined to comment when reached Tuesday night.
But in a previous court filing, Wiese said he was concerned that Mack’s initial request to tap the trust lacked “oversight” and amounted to a “blank check” to Indonesian lawyer Ary Soenardi, whose practices Wiese found to be “suspect.”
Mack’s latest court filing asks the judge to force Wiese to cooperate more with her lawyers and follow “a duty of loyalty” that he owes to Mack as the overseer of her mother’s trust.
Murder charges were brought against Mack, who is pregnant, and her boyfriend Tommy Schaefer, 21, months after authorities discovered von Wiese-Mack ’s body stuffed inside a bloody suitcase outside a luxurious resort.
Authorities say the couple hired a cab outside the St. Regis Bali Resort and placed the suitcase in the trunk before wandering off. Heather Mack says she’s innocent, while court filings filed by her lawyers say Schaefer confessed.
Police say the couple had argued with Mack’s mother in the resort’s lobby shortly before the killing, which is alleged to have taken place inside a room at the hotel.
Oak Park Police reports and Cook County court records show von Wiese-Mack struggled to handle her daughter, with whom she had a volatile relationship, especially after Heather ’s father, the renowned composer James Mack, died in 2006.
But even before James Mack’s death, police were being called to the family’s Oak Park home. Since January 2004, police were called to the home 86 times, often to deal with Heather Mack ’s alleged violence toward her mother.
