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A Chicago judge has refused to ease bail conditions and release Heather Mack, who is charged with conspiracy in the 2017 murder of her mother in Bali.
The decision means Mack, 27, will remain in custody without bail until his July trial in Chicago.
Mack was arrested upon her return to Chicago in November 2021 after spending more than seven years in an Indonesian prison for her role in the murder.
Mack’s wealthy mother, Sheila von Wiese-Mack, was murdered and packed into a suitcase before being left in a taxi on the island of Bali in 2014.
Heather Mack circa 2015 with her prison-born daughter Stella, who is now in the custody of Heather’s maternal cousin.
Mack and her ex-boyfriend were convicted of conspiring together to kill Sheila von Wiese-Mack (with her left) at a luxury resort in Bali and then packing her body in a suitcase (right)
Bill Wiese and Debbi Curran, brother and sister of Sheila von Wiese-Mack, leave the Derksen United States Federal Courthouse in downtown Chicago, Illinois on Wednesday, November 10, 2021.
Estelle Schaefer, the 6-year-old daughter of “suitcase killer” Heather Mack and Tommy Schaefer, was deported to the US along with her mother last year after Heather’s release from prison.
On Thursday, US District Judge Matthew Kennelly denied Mack bail while she awaits trial in July in Chicago, where she was charged with conspiracy to commit murder.
Mack and her then-boyfriend, Tommy Schaefer, were convicted in Indonesia, although US prosecutors brought their own case, accusing Mack of conspiring with Schaefer before their trip to Bali.
Defense attorney Michael Leonard said his client has behaved well while in custody and would not pose a flight risk or public threat if released on bail.
Leonard used Mack’s ‘love’ relationship with his seven-year-old daughter Stella as evidence to bolster his argument. The boy was born shortly after Mack and Schaefer were convicted in 2015.
However, US District Judge Matthew Kennelly refused to release Mack, saying “there is every reason to believe that he would pose a danger to others.”
Leonard said he and his client were “disappointed” that Kennelly denied him bail, but understood the judge’s decision because of the seriousness of the charges against Mack.
Prior to his mother’s death, Mack reportedly had a strained and often violent relationship with his mother. According to the Associated Press, the police responded many times to the family home in Oak Park, Illinois.
Von Wiese-Mack’s brothers spoke at the hearing, stating that they feared for their safety if Mack was released.
Debbi Curran, von Wiese-Mack’s younger sister whose own daughter is now raising Stella, called her niece a “manipulative teacher.”
As Curran spoke, Mack wiped away tears.
In 2017, Robert Bibbs was sentenced to nine years in prison in the US for advising Mack and Schaefer on how to kill von Weise-Mack. His apparent motive was to inherit money from Mack’s mother, who was the widow of jazz and classical music composer James L. Mack.
Schaefer currently remains in prison in Indonesia. He is serving an 18-year sentence. Mack was originally sentenced to 10 years, but was released early for good behavior.
In the United States, Mack pleaded not guilty to conspiracy to commit murder in a foreign country and obstruction of justice.
He previously claimed that he had hidden in a bathroom when Schaefer bludgeoned von Wiese-Mack to death with a fruit bowl inside a room at the Regis hotel in Bali. Mack was eighteen years old and pregnant at the time.
But prosecutors say she helped him pack the body into a suitcase and carried it downstairs, where they hailed a taxi and loaded it into the trunk. The couple ran away when the driver became suspicious, but he was arrested shortly after at a nearby budget hotel and put on trial.
Mack gave birth to their daughter Stella during the couple’s 2015 trial in Indonesia.
Mack said that Stella, who is now seven, doesn’t know why both her mother and father are incarcerated and wants to keep it that way. A younger Stella is shown here with her father, Tommy Schaefer.
Mack enjoyed a privileged upbringing in the exclusive Chicago suburb of Oak Park, growing up in a $1.5 million mansion with political researcher mother Sheila and father James L. Mack, a renowned jazz composer, who died in 2006 while she was family was on vacation in Greece.
During her incarceration, Mack recalled how von Wiese-Mack had left her husband’s body in the morgue to go sailing to Santorini, sparking a simmering hatred that intensified when her mother tried to stop her from dating Schaefer at school. secondary.
When Mack dropped out and became pregnant, von Wiese-Mack took her daughter to Bali to try to convince her to terminate the pregnancy. But she stole her mother’s credit card and used it to fly Schaefer into a $12,000 business class seat, she was told at her trial.
In text messages filed in court, Schaefer urged his teenage lover to suffocate Sheila so he could claim her estate, which he believed was worth as much as $11 million.
He ended up doing the job himself in gruesome fashion: beating the political strategist with a metal bowl until she suffocated with a broken nose.
Schaefer testified that Sheila had racially abused him and tried to strangle him during an argument about the pregnancy.
In reality, the lovestruck lovers had been planning to kill her for months and had already tried to kill her by overdose, to no avail.