Judge OKs use of funds from slain mom's estate to pay lawyer in daughter's Bali murder trial
Updated: A 19-year-old Chicago woman on trial in Bali for the slaying of her mother at a resort hotel has won an emergency motion filed Thursday in Illinois state court seeking to get money for her defense from her mom’s $1.56 million estate.
In a Friday hearing, Cook County Chancery Court Judge Neil Cohen said he would release the $150,000 sought by Heather Mack under conditions that are still being developed, the Chicago Tribune reports. However, the judge warned that Sheila von Wiese-Mack’s estate would not be “the goose that laid the golden egg” and said he planned to name a retired judge as interim trustee.
Mack, an only child, is the sole beneficiary of her mother’s estate. Mack’s filing contended that her uncle, out-of-state attorney William Wiese, who has been serving as trustee, “has not released one penny” to pay her legal bills and has a conflict of interest because he would be next in line to inherit if Mack is found guilty and executed, according to the Chicago Sun-Times (sub. req.) and an earlier Chicago Tribune story.
Mack’s motion sought to have $150,000 sent to the U.S. Consulate in Indonesia for disbursement to her defense counsel. It says paying her attorney in the Bali trial is a life-or-death issue for Mack, who may lose her lawyer if he isn’t paid. A hearing is expected Friday.
Wiese declined to comment Thursday, on the advice of his attorney, when contacted by the Tribune. He previously said his sister loved her daughter despite their troubled relationship and, he believes, was surprised when Mack’s boyfriend, Tommy Schaefer, arrived in Bali from suburban Chicago during their vacation on the Indonesian island. Wiese told the Tribune that her family wants Mack to get a fair trial and is waiting to hear the evidence presented before forming any judgments.
Schaefer, 21, is also being tried in Denpasar District Court, separately from Mack, for premeditated murder, murder and disposing of a body to conceal a death, according to news.com.au and the Sydney Morning Herald. Mack faces an additional charge of assisting premeditated murder. Both could be sentenced to death by firing squad if they are convicted of premeditated murder, or up to 20 years if they are convicted of murder. The body-disposal charge carries a maximum nine-month sentence.
Indonesian authorities say the 62-year-old woman’s body was found stuffed into a bloody suitcase abandoned by her daughter and Schaefer in a taxi outside the St. Regis Bali Resort in August. The two had been denied access to their passports, which were in a hotel safe-deposit box in the mother’s name, by hotel staff, and the couple was later found by police in a budget hotel about six miles away, after von Wiese-Mack’s body was discovered, the newspaper articles recount.
Schaefer is accused of bludgeoning the victim to death in a St. Regis hotel room. The Cook County motion filed by suburban Chicago attorney Anthony Scifo says Mack maintains her innocence and alleges that Schaefer confessed to the murder.
However, Indonesian prosecutor Eddy Arta Wijaya said in court that Mack suggested to Schaefer before the Bali vacation that he hire a hit man to kill her mom for $50,000. Other claimed plots the couple allegedly considered included using a pillow to suffocate Mack’s mother and staging a fake suicide on the beach, the Sydney Morning Herald reports. Prosecutors say some of their communications on the subject were by text message, reports news.com.au.
During the trials that began Wednesday, the court also was told that Mack sat on the suitcase in which her mother’s body had been stuffed to get it closed and helped Schaefer clean the room after the slaying.
Von Wiese-Mack opposed the relationship between her daughter and Schaefer, and her slaying followed a wee-hours argument with her daughter in a hotel foyer in which she used a racial slur to refer to Schaefer, according to news.com.au and the Morning Herald. The mother reportedly had just learned that Schaefer was there, too, and that Mack had booked a room for Schaefer online that she expected her mother to pay for.
Related coverage:
ABAJournal.com: “Chicago woman found dead in suitcase in Bali had received $840K in cruise line settlement”
Updated at 12:50 p.m. to include and accord with Chicago Tribune story about judge’s ruling on Mack’s emergency motion.
