A 19-year-old daughter and her 21-year-old boyfriend are under arrest in Indonesia after the body of the girl’s mother was found stuffed inside a suitcase at an expensive Bali holiday resort.
Chicago teen Heather Mack and boyfriend Tommy Schaefer called a taxi to their hotel at the St Regis Resort in Nusa Dua on Tuesday (August 12). After lading the large suitcase into the boot and asking the driver to wait while they check out, hotel CCTV shows them fleeing through a back door. After about two hours, the driver approached hotel security who noticed blood on the outside of the suitcase and sent him to the local police station where 62-year-old Sheila von Wiese-Mack’s battered body was discovered wrapped in a bed sheet.
Heather Mack and Tommy Schaefer were tracked down sleeping at another hotel several hours later and arrested. Both claimed they had been ambushed by an armed gang from whom they managed to escape, but not before they had killed Mrs von Wiese-Mack. Police said security cameras at the $500 per night hotel recorded Schaefer and his girlfriend’s mother arguing the night before, but no motive for murder has yet been established.
An autopsy showed Mrs von Wiese-Mack suffered several blunt force trauma injuries to her head and several defence wounds suggesting she fought to protect herself before eventually succumbing.
Sheila von Wiese-Mack was the widow of well-known Chicago jazz and classical composer/arranger James L ‘Maestro’ Mack, who worked with such luminaries as Ramsey Lewis, Tyrone Davis and Jerry Butler. He died of a pulmonary embolism in 2006 while on holiday with his wife and Heather in Greece.
