Listen Live
WOL Featured Video
CLOSE

A 19-year-old woman and her boyfriend were sentenced to prison on Tuesday by a Bali court in the brutal death of the woman’s mother, whose body was stuffed into a suitcase last summer during a luxury vacation in Bali, the Chicago Tribune reports.

An Indonesian court found Heather Mack and her boyfriend Tommy Schaefer, 21, guilty of premeditated murder in the death of the woman’s mother, Sheila von Wiese-Mack, after she allegedly expressed disapproval of their relationship, the report says. Both are Black, and the mother was White.

The Denpasar District Court sentenced Schaefer to 18 years in prison and Mack to 10 years in the intentional killing of Wiese-Mack, 62, while vacationing in August. Her badly battered body was discovered in a suitcase inside the trunk of a taxi at the St. Regis Bali Resort, the report notes.

The three-judge panel said it decided to be lenient toward Mack, 19, because she recently gave birth to the couple’s daughter, according to the Tribune.

The couple has a week to appeal the decision. Von Wiese-Mack was married to Mack’s father, the highly regarded jazz and classical composer James L. Mack, who died in 2006 at the age of 76.

From the Chicago Tribune:

Schaefer testified at his trial that von Wiese-Mack was angry when she learned about her daughter’s pregnancy and tried to strangle him, prompting him to strike her with metal fruit bowl.

Prosecutors said Mack helped Schaefer stuff her mother’s body into the suitcase by sitting on it to enable Schaefer to close it. They then placed the suitcase in the trunk of the taxi and told the driver they were going to check out of the hotel and would return, but never did, prosecutors said.

They said Mack and Schaefer plotted to kill Mack’s mother because she didn’t endorse their relationship, and that Mack once proposed that Schaefer hire a hit man for $50,000.

SOURCE: Chicago Tribune | PHOTO CREDIT: Twitter

SEE ALSO:

Missouri Police Officers & Officials Quit After Town Elects First Black Female Mayor

Couple Sentenced In Death Of Mother Whose Body Was Stuffed Into Suitcase In Bali  was originally published on newsone.com