Indonesia has freed and deported a US man after he spent 11 years in prison for the premeditated murder of his then girlfriend’s mother on the tourist island of Bali, and he will now face federal charges in the United States.
Tommy Schaefer was sentenced to 18 years in jail for the 2014 murder of Sheila von Wiese-Mack, the mother of Heather Mack, during a luxury holiday in what became known as the Bali suitcase murder. Prosecutors allege the couple were trying to gain access to a $1.5m (£1.1m) trust fund.
Schaefer was deported to the US from Bali on Tuesday evening after receiving a number of remissions for good behaviour, according to a statement from Felucia Sengky Ratna, head of the Bali regional immigration office. The badly battered body of von Wiese-Mack, a 62-year-old wealthy Chicago socialite, was found in the boot of a taxi parked at the St Regis Bali resort in August 2014.
Mack, who was almost 19 and a few weeks pregnant at the time of the killing, served seven years of a 10-year sentence in Bali and was deported in October 2021. She was sentenced to 26 years in prison in Chicago in January 2024 after pleading guilty to helping kill her mother and stuffing the body in a suitcase. Schaefer now faces US federal charges of conspiracy to kill someone in a foreign country, conspiracy to commit murder, and tampering with a victim, and is scheduled to appear in court in Chicago on Thursday.
