Mother jailed for suitcase murders
Auckland High Court has sentenced Hakyung Lee to life imprisonment, with a minimum term of 17 years, for the 2018 murders of her two children whose remains were found in a storage unit in 2022. The judge ordered Lee to begin her sentence in a secure psychiatric facility under New Zealand’s compulsory mental health treatment law, saying she must return to prison once well enough.
A New Zealand court has sentenced Hakyung Lee to life imprisonment, with a minimum non-parole period of 17 years, after a jury found her guilty of murdering her two children in 2018. Justice Geoffrey Venning told Lee at a hearing in Auckland that she would start her sentence as a patient in a locked psychiatric facility under New Zealand’s compulsory mental health treatment law and must return to prison when she is deemed well enough to serve the sentence in custody, according to reports by BBC News and local media.
Lee was convicted in September of killing Minu Jo, 6, and Yuna Jo, 8. The children’s remains were discovered in 2022 after Lee stopped paying rental fees on an Auckland storage unit; the unit’s contents were later auctioned online and buyers found the bodies inside, local reporting said.
Prosecutors say Lee drugged the children with an antidepressant; Lee’s lawyers conceded she gave the medication but argued she was suffering severe mental illness at the time. At sentencing, Justice Venning acknowledged Lee’s severe depression but said her actions were deliberate and calculated. “You could not cope when [your husband] became seriously unwell, and perhaps you could not bear to have the children around you as a constant reminder of your former happy life,” he said, according to BBC News.
New Zealand law allows a successful insanity defence only when a defendant proves they were incapable of understanding their actions or that those actions were wrong; the jury rejected that defence in Lee’s case. Lee fled to South Korea after the killings, changed her name, and was later extradited to New Zealand to face trial.
She is a New Zealand citizen born in South Korea and had previously used the name Ji Eun Lee. Family statements read in court expressed profound grief and devastation; Lee’s mother said the news felt like “a pain that cut through my bones,” while an uncle said he felt he had failed his niece and nephew.
Inspector Tofilau Faamanuia Va’aelua acknowledged assistance from South Korean authorities in the investigation and noted the tragic milestone: “Yuna and Minu would have been 16 and 13 today,” police said. For residents of the British Virgin Islands, the case is a stark reminder of the intersections between mental health, child safety and international police cooperation.
It also highlights how routine processes such as storage unit auctions can unexpectedly bring offences to light and the importance of reporting concerns about vulnerable family members to the relevant authorities, who can refer cases to social and mental health services.
Primary source: VINO