Heather Mack was sentenced to 10 years in prison in 2015.
Bali:
An American woman convicted with her boyfriend of murdering her mother and putting the body in a suitcase at a luxury hotel in Bali is being released from prison early, her lawyer said Monday.
In 2015, teen Heather Mack was sentenced to 10 years in prison, while her boyfriend Tommy Schaefer was sentenced to 18 years for the murder of Chicago socialite Sheila von Wiese Mack on the Indonesian holiday island.
Schaefer beat the 62-year-old victim to death with a bowl of fruit during a heated argument at the five-star St. Regis resort, before the couple left the suitcase containing the battered body in a taxi and fled.
Mack, who was pregnant at the time of the crime, was found guilty on a lower charge of aiding the murder.
The woman, now 25, was due to be released from Kerobokan prison in Bali in October, about three years early, her lawyer said, citing reduced sentences for good behavior.
“Her sentence will be completed in October… and then she will be completely free,” Yulius Benyamin Seran told AFP, without giving a specific release date.
Mack, who was 19 at the time of her conviction, would be returned to the United States upon her release, he added.
But she wanted to stay in Indonesia to take care of her six-year-old daughter, who grew up in a foster home in Bali.
“She doesn’t want her daughter to be deported back to the US…and hounded by the media,” Seran said.
Indonesian prison officials declined to comment on Mack’s release date.
In 2014, the beat-up body of von Wiese Mack was discovered in the taxi, outside the posh hotel where she had been staying with her daughter and Schaefer.
The couple had fled to another part of Bali, where the police arrested them.
Schaefer confessed to the murder at his trial, but claimed he was defending himself during an argument with von Wiese Mack, who was unhappy that her daughter was pregnant.
Prosecutors alleged that Schaefer von Wiese “blinded” Mack with the fruit bowl in a fit of rage after she threw a racist insult at him. Schaefer is black.
While her mother was being murdered, Mack hid in the bathroom and the couple then put the body in the suitcase together, heard the trial.
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