In an explosive interview from her Bali jail cell, Heather Mack has revealed never-before heard details about her mother’s murder and claimed the family vacation killing that has made national headlines was partially pre-meditated.
Speaking to Crime Watch Daily a little more than one year into her 10-year sentence inside the notorious Kerobokan Prison, Mack revealed that her mother’s killing at the hands of her boyfriend Tommy Schaefer, was “half premeditated, half not.”
“In my head, I never thought it was going to actually happen,” she said.
Sheila von Wiese-Mack, 62, was bludgeoned to death, her body found stuffed inside a suitcase in a taxi at the resort in Bali in August 2014. 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.
Speaking publicly about details she said weren’t reported even in court transcripts, Mack said her mother’s murder was fueled by the teen’s pregnancy announcement and Schaefer’s surprise visit on what was supposed to be a mother-daughter getaway.
“She was so angry, I told her I was pregnant and she went around the room looking for a knife and she was just screaming and screaming and telling me that that was when I was going to die, that was when I was going to die,” Mack said in the interview. “I said, ‘Tommy help me and Tommy walked over to her and she went and she grabbed Tommy’s neck. it wasn’t hard. Tommy could have shoved her off, Tommy could have ran away, Tommy’s a very strong man, but I was just screaming and screaming and screaming and he just smacked her -- smacked her, smacked her, smacked her over and over and over and over and I ran to the bathroom and I said, ‘Tommy, what are we going to do?”
That statement was somewhat mentioned in court when Schaefer testified at his trial that von Wiese-Mack was angry when she learned her daughter was pregnant. The couple's baby girl, Stella, was born in prison.
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But text messages painted a very different picture of what happened that day.
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.
Schaefer admitted to repeatedly striking von Wiese-Mack with a fruit bowl, claiming self-defense, and was sentenced to 18 years in prison. Mack is serving 10 years for assisting.
Mack revealed in the interview that it wasn’t the first time she informed her mother she was pregnant. The first time she revealed she was pregnant, Mack also said her mother “would chased me around the house with a knife.”
As for why the couple decided to stuff the body into the suitcase, Mack said “she was already dead and I was just hugging her and hugging her and hugging her.”
“I wouldn’t let her go and he just said, ‘Now we have to run’ and I said, ‘I’m not leaving her here,’” Mack said.
Mack has previously detailed her troubled and sometimes violent relationship with her mother.
“She just didn’t want me. She didn’t want Heather Mack the way Heather Mack was,” she said.
But von Wiese-Mack’s family said that wasn’t the case.
“She had lots of love, that’s a total manipulation,” her aunt Debbi Curran told Crime Watch Daily.
In the years prior to her murder, von Wiese-Mack called Chicago-area police multiple times on her violent daughter.
NBC Chicago learned through a Freedom of Information Act request filed by the Wednesday Journal in Oak Park, that von Wiese-Mack told police 18 months before her murder that she believed her daughter would kill her. The reporting officer at the time sent a memo to his supervisor documenting his concern.
A battle over Mack's $1.56 million trust has been ongoing in Chicago. In a letter to a judge, Mack said she believes her mother was trying years earlier to get control over Mack's inheritance from her late father.
“This is her stage right now, this is the biggest stage she’ll ever have and she’s going to act her way through whatever she needs to,” Curran said.
