In a chilling series of videos posted to YouTube, ’Bali Suitcase Murderer’ Heather Mack confessed to killing her mother in Bali and says her then boyfriend, Tommy Schaefer, is innocent.
Mack’s mother, Chicago socialite, Sheila von Wiese-Mack, was found brutally murdered, stuffed into a suitcase at the posh Bali St. Regis in August 2014.
In 2015, Schaefer, 23, was convicted for killing von Wiese-Mack and sentenced to 18 years in prison, while Mack, 21, got just 10 years for being an accessory to the murder. Schaefer testified in court that he delivered the fatal blow to von Wiese-Mack, hitting her over the head with a fruit bowl after she provoked him with a racial slur. Mack had claimed she hid in the bathroom crying in her mother’s last moments.
But now, Mack is telling a very different story.
In a series of “Confession” videos that she uploaded to YouTube on Feb. 2, 2017, Mack, with a totally straight face seemingly devoid of emotion, describes manipulating Schaefer and entrapping him in her plot to kill her mother in Bali.
“I’m Heather Mack, and I want to be set free. I don’t want to be living in a lie anymore,” she says near the beginning as a preface to her ‘confession’.
Mack starts out by saying that she “made it up in my heart, my mind, my soul, in my blood, in the oxygen running through my body that I wanted to kill my mother,” after learning two weeks prior to going to Bali that her mother had killed her father in a hotel in Athens, Green when Mack was 10 years old.
The obituary for Mack’s father, James L. Mack, says the man died of a pulmonary embolism during a family vacation in Green in 2006. Von Wiese-Mack’s younger sister, Debbie Curran, says Mack’s claims are “completely false.”
“Sheila loved Jim very deeply and was devastated by his death. We are also struck by the utter lack of any remorse from Heather over her mother’s murder,” Curran said, as quoted by the Chicago Tribune.
In her videos, Mack further describes bringing Schaefer to Bali, who she says had no idea about her plans. Mack also said that she would secretly use his phone to text—and immediately delete—murder-plot-type messages to her phone when he was sleeping.
Mack claims she had originally asked Schaefer to help her find someone to kill her mother for $50,000 but he refused, so she got a “savage” idea she would do it herself in a hotel to mirror how she alleges her mother filled her father.
It’s not clear what Mack’s motive is for suddenly releasing this ‘confession’ and prosecutors in Chicago seem to have evidence that could undermine her latest version of events, according to the Chicago Sun Times.
In her video, Mack claims she started to plot two weeks before her Bali trip, but American court records allege that she requested Schaefer kill her mother for $50,000 six months before von Wiese-Mack’s death, poking some pretty big holes in her timeline.
And then there’s also Schaefer’s cousin, Robert Ryan Justin Bibbs, 26, who plead guilty in a federal court in Chicago to helping plot the murder.
Despite Bibb’s confession and evidence alleging communication between Bibbs and Schaefer about the murder, Mack says in her confession video she has no idea why the FBI was looking into Bibbs and that he was completely uninvolved. Bibbs is due for sentencing in May.
Indonesian law enforcement officials have not yet commented on Mack’s confession and what actions, if any, they will take in response. There has also been no word on how Mack was able to record the video and upload it to Youtube while in prison.
