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Sydney (Australia). - A New Zealand mother was sentenced to life in prison on Wednesday for the murder of her two children, whose bodies were found inside suitcases where they are believed to have remained for several years.
During the sentencing hearing today at the Auckland High Court (in the North Island of New Zealand), the defendant, Hakyung Lee, remained downcast and silent throughout the trial, which she attended from a separate room with the help of an interpreter.
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Judge Geoffrey John Venning of the Auckland High Court handed down the sentence and imposed a life sentence with a minimum non-parole period of 17 years, according to the public news portal RNZ. Lee, 45, was found guilty at the beginning of the year for the death of Yuna Jo, 8, and Minu Jo, 6, to whom she administered an overdose of sleeping pills before hiding their remains in a storage room and leaving the country to move to South Korea. The bodies of the minors were discovered in 2022, when the contents of the warehouse were auctioned online after months of abandonment. The Prosecution argued that the accused, who had emigrated to New Zealand when she was young with her parents, knew perfectly well what she was doing and that her subsequent actions — hiding the bodies and traveling to South Korea — demonstrated conscious planning. Her two supporting lawyers argued that the death of Lee's husband in 2017 had triggered a profound mental disorder that led Lee to believe that the only way out was to take her own life along with her children. The defense argued that the woman was "deeply disturbed" and that her actions were not conscious in legal terms. The woman, who was born in South Korea and obtained a New Zealand passport after residing in the country, returned to her country of origin in the second half of 2018 without any record of departure, according to police investigations. Since then, he had lived in Seoul and other locations before moving in early 2022 to an apartment in the town of Ulsan, about 300 kilometers from the South Korean capital. According to court documents obtained by the New Zealand public broadcaster RNZ, the accused's husband died in 2017 after his health worsened, and before his death, the documents indicated that Lee threatened to commit suicide and kill her children if her husband died. The sentence closes one of the most media-covered cases of recent years in New Zealand, which sparked outrage when the discovery of the suitcases was known in 2022.
