CHICAGO (CN) — A federal judge in the Windy City sentenced Heather Mack to 26 years in prison for murder conspiracy charges on Wednesday, almost a decade after the now-28 year old killed her mother on the Indonesian island of Bali.
The court also ordered her to pay $50,000 in fines and $262,000 in restitution. Once she’s released from prison, Mack will also have to serve five years of supervised release.
Mack, a native of the Chicago collar suburb of Oak Park, killed her mother Sheila von Wiese-Mack in August 2014 with the help of her then-boyfriend and the father of her child, Tommy Schaefer. The pair beat von Wiese-Mack to death before stuffing her body in a suitcase, which they subsequently abandoned in a taxi cab near the St. Regis Bali Resort. Von Wiese-Mack had been staying there while on a personal holiday, and Indonesian authorities arrested Mack and Schaefer after discovering the body the day after the killing.
Court records indicate the pair conspired to kill Mack's mother months in advance, leaning on the advice of Schaefer's cousin Robert Bibbs.
Lindsay Lococo, von Wiese-Mack’s niece, said through tears in court Wednesday that she’s never been able to look at a suitcase the same way.
Before U.S. District Judge Matthew Kennelly, a Bill Clinton appointee, delivered her sentence, Mack apologized and said if she could go back and change things, she would.
Mack has already served seven years in an Indonesian prison for the murder, which reportedly was motivated by her strained relationship with von Wiese-Mack and a desire to gain control of her deceased father James Mack's $1.5 million estate.
Mack was released early from her 10-year Indonesian murder conspiracy sentence in 2021, ostensibly for good behavior. But she was taken into federal custody immediately upon returning to Chicago with her young daughter in November 2021.
Tommy Schaefer, despite being named as Mack's co-defendant in the U.S. government's case, remains imprisoned in the island nation. Bibbs is also serving a nine-year sentence on similar murder conspiracy charges, after reaching a plea bargain with federal prosecutors.
At her arraignment, held a day after she landed at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport, Mack pleaded not guilty to the government's accusations. In June 2023, she reversed her plea after facing a number of legal setbacks, including the suspension of one of her lead attorneys, Jeffrey Steinback, from practicing law in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois without co-counsel present.
Mack was also motivated to changer her plea, her lawyers said in June, in order to avoid life behind bars on a guilty trial verdict, and a desire eventually to be reunited with her now-eight-year-old daughter, who, according to court records, is currently in the care of a maternal cousin in Colorado.
In exchange for changing her plea, the government agreed to cap Mack's sentencing recommendation at 28 years, and to drop additional obstruction of justice and injury to foreign government property charges that U.S. federal prosecutors filed against her in 2017.
But to von Wiese-Mack’s family members, even the maximum sentence isn’t enough. When von Wiese-Mack’s brother and best friend spoke ahead of Mack’s sentencing, both said she should spend the rest of her life in prison.
In court Wednesday, federal prosecutors pushed for Mack to receive the maximum 28-year sentence. Her own lawyers, citing her youth and her reportedly abusive upbringing, sought an eight-year sentence.
The sentencing memoranda from both sets of lawyers together paint a bleak picture: A mother bludgeoned to death by her only child; an abused child pushed beyond her ability to cope with her mother's erratic behavior.
Mack’s lawyers argued that von Wiese-Mack resented and abused her daughter because of her close relationship with her father, James Mack. Prosecutors, however, said that von Weise-Mack was a loving and caring mother and Mack was the real antagonist.
Von Wiese-Mack’s brother, Bill Wiese, described Mack as cold and conniving. He noted, in particular, how his niece purportedly called von Wiese-Mack’s estate lawyer immediately following her death.
“This is not the abuse and neglect story Heather tries to paint,” he said.
Diane Edelman, von Wiese-Mack’s friend of 25 years, said that her friend had long been scared of her daughter.
“Sheila was not an abuser,” she said. “She was the one abused.”
Edelman said von Wiese-Mack once openly told her that she feared her daughter would try to kill her.
James Mack’s cousin Onita Mack said von Wiese-Mack kept her daughter completely isolated from her extended family. She said Heather Mack was not allowed around her dad’s side of the family — because they are Black.
“There was no love in Heather’s childhood home,” she said. “She wasn’t raised like a normal kid, I’d say.”
Maria Conforti, once von Wiese-Mack and her daughter’s designated social worker, detailed a close and twisted mother-daughter relationship.
“I’ve never been so disturbed by what I saw in my career as a social worker,” Conforti said.
Conforti said von Wiese-Mack breastfed her daughter until she was seven years old, and forced the girl to sleep in her bed until she was 17 years old.
She added that von Wiese-Mack often said racist and disparaging things about Black people.
Conforti maintained that von Wiese-Mack resented her daughter because of her relationship with her now-deceased father. Conforti noted one instance where von Wiese-Mack said, “that bastard left everything to Heather and not a penny to me.”
Several months before he died, James, a well-known Chicago jazz musician, filed an injury lawsuit against Royal Caribbean Cruises for suffering a cut on his foot during a 2001 cruise that eventually turned septic. The case settled in 2011 for $1.5 million, with von Wiese-Mack eventually taking control of about $840K out of her late husband's trust fund.
It was that money which Mack sought to claim by killing her mother, prosecutors said, with her then-boyfriend joining the plot to earn a share of the wealth.
Mack said through sobs that no matter how twisted her relationship with her mother was, there was no excuse for her actions.
“I still miss and love my mother,” Mack said to the court on Wednesday. “All I can do now is be the best mother possible.”
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