Heather Mack, the Chicago woman in jail in Bali for her role in her mother’s brutal murder, said in an exclusive interview with People Magazine that her relationship with her mother was “complicated.”
The 19-year-old, who insists she didn’t kill her mother, said in the interview that Sheila von Wiese-Mack “never wanted to be separated from me and yet she also hated everything about me.”
Wiese-Mack, 62, was found badly beaten and stuffed inside a suitcase at a posh Bali resort in August, 2014.
Heather Mack’s boyfriend, 21-year-old Tommy Schaefer, was found guilty of battering von Wiese-Mack to death and was sentenced to 18 years in prison. Mack was sentenced to 10 years in prison, convicted of helping with the killing.
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.
Mack repeatedly insisted in the recent interview that she didn’t kill her mother, but noted the pair’s relationship grew difficult after her father’s 2006 death.
Von Wiese-Mack was the widow of highly regarded jazz and classical composer James L. Mack, who died in 2006 at the age of 76.
Mack told People the two were “close” but described von Wiese Mack as overbearing and said she made her daughter sleep in the same bed with her at night.
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She, and an unnamed family friend interviewed by the magazine, also claimed the two bonded over shoplifting “thousands and thousands of dollars worth” of expensive French cosmetics.
As Mack grew older, she said arguments between her and her mother grew heated and violent.
According to Oak Park police reports, police were repeatedly called to the family’s former home for reports of the teen attacking von Wiese-Mack.
Mack told People when she turned 18 she tried to move out of the house “multiple times” because she “couldn’t take it anymore.” But she said von Wiese-Mack would call her and send Mack pictures of herself threatening to commit suicide if Mack didn’t return.
By the time the pair left for their vacation in Bali police had been called to their home a total of 86 times, but often von Wiese-Mack would not allow police to take Mack into custody.
Recently released court documents showed text messages between Mack and Schaefer that prosecutors say the couple exchanged while planning von Wiese-Mack’s murder.
In one text message, Mack asked Schaefer to find a hit man to kill her mother, according to authorities. In the hours leading up to the killing, the couple traded texts in which they discussed plans to smother von Wiese-Mack with a pillow and stage her death as if she committed suicide, prosecutors said.
Last week, a 24-year-old relative of Schaefer was ordered confined to his mother’s Chicago home on charges he helped the pair kill von Wiese-Mack in Indonesia by texting tips from more than 9,000 miles away.
Still, when it came the day of her mother’s death, Mack claims nothing was pre-planned.
Mack told the magazine that she saw her mother attack Schaefer, Schaefer hit her and “that’s all he did.”
