She was convicted of helping to kill her mother, whose battered body was found stuffed inside a suitcase during an exotic Bali vacation, but Heather Mack maintains it is she who may be the victim.
In written correspondence to a Cook County judge presiding over her $1.56 million trust case, Mack said “with all due respect” to her slain mother, she believes Sheila von Wiese-Mack lied and falsified court documents years earlier to gain control over a more substantial inheritance the daughter was due from her father’s estate.
Mack, who is serving a 10-year prison sentence overseas but has access to email, a cellphone and the Internet, provided the Tribune a copy of the eight-page letter to the judge and a separate written list of “non-negotiable settlement” terms. In her writings, as well as during a telephone interview, Mack said she didn’t want to criticize her mother publicly but she has little other option after her trust lawyers have refused to investigate her claims.
“May my mother forever rest in peace,” Mack wrote in the more sharply worded letter with her terms and addressed “to whom it may concern.” She continued, “But the fact of the matter is stolen money is stolen money. … If a little digging is done, surely we can find out exactly where Sheila struck gold.”
The 62-year-old Chicago woman’s body was discovered in a suitcase left in a taxi during a lavish August 2014 vacation with her daughter. The woman’s siblings and friends have told the Tribune von Wiese-Mack planned the trip as a new beginning in their troubled relationship and did not know her daughter’s boyfriend, Tommy Schaefer, also traveled to the island.
Mack and Schaefer were convicted in April of the grisly murder, which garnered international intrigue with each development, including the revelation that the then-teenage girl was pregnant. Mack, now 20, gave birth to a healthy baby girl in March and is raising the child, named Stella, in the prison per local custom until age 2. The child is next in line for the money.
As the criminal proceedings played out in Indonesia, a battle over Mack’s trust has been ongoing in Chicago. As trustee, Mack’s uncle argues that she should be barred from reaping financial benefit from her crime under Illinois’ slayer statute, which says a person who unjustifiably causes the death of another person cannot receive property as a result of the death of that person.
About one-third of the trust has been spent on legal fees and investment losses, and Judge Neil Cohen denied Mack further access to the money after her conviction until the slayer statute question is answered.
Mack told the Tribune that she and Schaefer, 22, who is the baby’s father, will drop claim to the remaining $1 million so that it goes to their daughter but only after certain demands are met, including to supply Mack with a copy of her father’s will and trust and a full accounting of her parents’ assets dating to when he died in 2006. She asked that law firms involved in the matters be subpoenaed as well.
“This case should have never went to court,” Mack wrote to the judge. “We should have talked it out as family. But obviously, I am not considered family. I never was.”
Her other conditions include that Stella receives her inheritance at age 18, that her uncle be removed as trustee and that she receive an unspecified payout as well. Mack argues that the slayer statute should not apply because the money originated with her father, who named her sole beneficiary.
“I suggest a lump sum is appropriate,” Mack wrote in the two-page correspondence. “Also, I want my food, health and support and education to be settled on for when I am free because I will be the guardian of Stella upon my release from prison.”
She continued, “We already have plans arranged for Stella when she leaves the prison. We also already have a guardian (for Stella). Stella will not be going back to America at all whatsoever until both Tommy and I are released from prison. Even then, there is absolutely no surety that we will ever return to America.”
Schaefer, formerly of Oak Park, is serving an 18-year prison term. He testified during his trial that von Wiese-Mack became angry when he came to her hotel room that morning to tell her that Mack was pregnant. He testified that he struck her with a heavy metal fruit bowl handle but only after she made a racial slur, threatened to harm the unborn baby and began strangling him.
Mack said she hid in the bathroom. But their testimony belied emails obtained by the Tribune earlier this year that show von Wiese-Mack knew about her daughter’s pregnancy even before leaving for vacation.
Authorities allege that Mack and Schaefer openly communicated in text messages about their murderous plot and used the phrase “saying hi” as code for the actual moment of attack. They nicknamed each other “Bonnie and Clyde,” a nod to the 1930s outlaw couple.
Schaefer deleted many of the text messages before the couple’s capture that next morning, but authorities retrieved them. For example, on the morning of the slaying, at 8:20 a.m., Mack is alleged to have texted Schaefer, “There’s no better time to say hi is there?”
Mack was 10 when her father, acclaimed composer James L. Mack, died of a pulmonary embolism during a family vacation in Greece.
He signed his will five days before he died and named his daughter, Heather, the sole beneficiary. His wife was the executor of his estate. She netted $340,667 after legal fees for her share of a 2011 lawsuit settlement surrounding his death, according to court records. Another $500,000 went to James Mack’s estate.
In summer 2011, a judge authorized von Wiese-Mack to pay herself the remaining $500,000 as the estate’s “sole beneficiary.” A transcript of the court proceeding does not exist, according to the Cook County circuit clerk’s office.
Heather Mack alleges that her mother misled the court to get the money.
“My worry is there are still assets out there somewhere … i.e. property, stocks, and shares which are rightfully mine,” Mack wrote.
The case is due back in court Dec. 17, and attorneys for Mack’s uncle are expected to challenge the validity of her claims.
Four lawyers have represented Mack in the trust case. Several of them cited a breakdown in their relationship with her as reason for leaving the case. Mack has long sought to get answers regarding her father’s trust and has tried to communicate directly with the judge through letters and phone calls. She slammed the attorneys and alleged she has “too many malpractice lawsuits to count.”
Cohen, though, citing code-of-conduct rules that forbid a judge from having out-of-court communications with parties in a case, did not accept the written communications during a recent court hearing. But the judge did allow a fifth lawyer to enter the case on Mack’s behalf. Attorney Vanessa Favia, who previously represented the unborn child, agreed to represent Mack for free.
Cohen said it is important that Mack’s voice is heard in the case.
“This is not going to be a Kafkaesque court,” the judge said recently.
Meanwhile, in an Instagram entry over the weekend, Mack posted an undated photograph of her mother and her during happier times with a caption in Indonesian that, translated into English, means her mother will always be “inside my soul.”
Twitter @christygutowsk1
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