A US woman deported from Indonesia after serving prison time for her role in her mother’s 2014 “suitcase” murder was arrested on Wednesday on conspiracy charges when her plane arrived in Chicago, US authorities said.
Heather Mack, 26, conspired with her boyfriend to kill her mother, Sheila Von Wiese-Mack, stuff her body in a suitcase and load it into the trunk of a taxi during a vacation on the Indonesian island of Bali, the US Department of Justice said.
Mack was scheduled to appear in US District Court in Chicago, her home city, on Wednesday, it added in a statement.
Photo: AP
Indonesian authorities arrested Mack and her boyfriend, Tommy Schaefer, 28, after the August 2014 killing. Schaefer was sentenced in 2015 to 18 years for premeditated murder, while Mack, then 19, received a 10-year sentence for being an accessory to murder.
A 2017 US grand jury indictment that was unsealed on Wednesday alleged that Mack and Schaefer devised their plan to kill Von Wiese-Mack before they left the US for Bali, and that Schaefer asked his cousin, Ryan Bibbs, about ways of killing her.
Mack asked Bibbs if he knew anyone who would kill her mother for money, and he pleaded guilty in December 2016 to one count of conspiracy to commit foreign murder of a US national, the justice department said.
Under the department’s contention that her plan was conceived in the US, Mack faces two US counts of murder conspiracy and one of obstruction, and a maximum statutory penalty of life imprisonment if convicted on the conspiracy charges, the department said.
Mack was deported following her release from prison on Oct. 29 as her permit had expired, an Indonesian immigration official said. Schaefer remains in jail.
Mack’s lawyer said she was accompanied on the plane to Chicago by her daughter, to whom she had given birth before her sentencing.
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