'Suitcase Killer' Heather Mack Sentenced To 26 Years In Prison

CHICAGO — Heather Mack, the woman accused of helping kill her mother and then stuffing her body into a suitcase, was sentenced to 26 years in prison by a federal judge in Chicago on Wednesday after she pleaded guilty to conspiring to kill her mother in 2014 in Bali.

Mack, 28, pleaded guilty to conspiring to kill a U.S. citizen last year after initially pleading not guilty in the death of her mother. Mack faces a collection of criminal charges in the 2014 death of Chicago socialite Sheila von Weise-Mack, who was killed by Mack and her boyfriend, Tommy Schaefer at a Bali resort, prosecutors said.

On Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Matthew Kennelly delivered the 26-year sentence, which came within two years of the punishment federal prosecutors had been seeking. Mack was convicted of the crime in 2015 and spent seven years in prison in Indonesia before she was arrested in 2021 by FBI agents at O’Hare International Airport.

Mack was convicted in the plot to kill her mother, along with Schaefer, to allow her access to a $1.5 million trust fund, prosecutors said.

Police said that the pair killed Weise-Mack inside a hotel room, and that Schaefer bludgeoned the woman in the head with a fruit bowl. Mack, then 18 years old and pregnant, covered her mother’s mouth while her boyfriend carried out the attack, police said.

Mack’s attorneys are seeking only 15 years in prison for Mack in Wednesday’s sentencing, asking a judge to consider the fact that Mack already served seven years in prison overseas.

Shafer was sentenced to 18 years in prison and remains in Indonesia, where he is serving his sentence.

Prosecutors said that Mack and Schaefer had planned to carry out the attack for months, and were seen trying to load a suitcase with Weise-Mack’s body inside it into a car in Indonesia.

Mack agreed to a plea deal while awaiting trial and pleaded guilty to conspiracy charges of killing a U.S. national. Mack and her mother lived in Oak Park. In addition to seeking 28 years in prison for Mack, federal prosecutors are also seeking Mack to pay more than $260,000 to her mother’s estate and $250,000 in fines.

After serving seven years in prison in Indonesia, Mack returned to the United States with her daughter, who was turned over to relatives when Mack was taken into custody. The young girl was 6 at the time of her mother's arrest at O'Hare.

The Chicago Tribune reported that the plea agreement does not require Mack to cooperate with investigators or to testify against Schaefer. In a motion filed last week, prosecutors said that Wiese-Mack planned the trip to Bali to try to salvage her relationship with her daughter, who by then, prosecutors argued, had already begun conspiring with Schaefer to kill her mother.

“The evidence indicates von Wiese struggled to stay alive, meaning that in the last moments of her life, she realized that her daughter, and only child, was responsible for her death,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Ann Marie Ursini and Frank Rangoussis, a special prosecutor with the Department of Justice, wrote in the brief, according to the Tribune. “Von Wiese had been worried that Mack would one day kill her, and it is hard to fathom the physical and emotional pain von Wiese endured in the final moments of her life.”

The Associated Press contributed reporting