Sentencing scheduled Wednesday for Heather Mack in mom’s Bali slaying, stuffing into suitcase

Sentencing is scheduled Wednesday in Chicago for an American woman who pleaded guilty to helping kill her mother and stuffing the body in a suitcase during a luxury vacation at a Bali resort nearly a decade ago.

Federal prosecutors are recommending a 28-year prison sentence for Heather Mack, considerably more time behind bars than defense lawyers are expected to ask when she is sentenced for conspiring to kill Sheila von Wiese-Mack in 2014.

The government also is seeking five years of supervised release for Mack, 28, a $250,000 fine and restitution of $262,708. In a filing last week, prosecutors said the recommended sentence “is warranted and sufficient, but not greater than necessary to serve a just and appropriate punishment for Mack’s heinous crime.”

Mack pleaded guilty last June to one count of conspiring to kill Wiese-Mack with her then-boyfriend to gain access to a $1.5 million trust fund. Prosecutors have said that Mack, then 18 and pregnant, covered her mother’s mouth in a hotel room while Tommy Schaefer bludgeoned Wiese-Mack with a fruit bowl.

The case gained international attention in part because of photographs of the suitcase Wiese-Mack was placed in, which seemed too small to hold an adult woman’s body.

Prosecutors have said Mack and Schaefer had planned the killing for months. They also said they had video evidence that showed both Mack and Schaefer trying to get the suitcase with Wiese-Mack’s body inside it into an Indonesian taxicab.

Mack, who lived with her mother in suburban Chicago’s Oak Park, served seven years of her 10-year Indonesian sentence. She was deported in 2021 and U.S. agents arrested her immediately after her plane landed at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport.

Mack’s then-6-year-old