A mother who murdered her two children and stuffed them into suitcases stashed inside a storage locker was on Wednesday sentenced to life imprisonment in New Zealand.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Hakyung Lee, a New Zealand citizen originally from South Korea, was earlier this year found guilty of killing her children in a grisly crime dubbed the country’s “suitcase murders”.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
High Court judge Geoffrey Venning sentenced Lee to life imprisonment with a minimum non-parole period of 17 years, saying she had killed children who were “particularly vulnerable”.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The 45-year-old showed little emotion as she sat in court, bowing her head with eyes fixed to the floor as the judge handed down the sentence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Lee killed her son Minu Jo and daughter Yuna Jo, aged six and eight, in 2018 by lacing their fruit juice with an overdose of prescription medication.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Stricken with grief following her husband’s death from cancer, Lee said she had planned to kill herself alongside the children but got the dose wrong.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
She wrapped her dead children in plastic bags before stuffing them into suitcases that were then hidden at a suburban storage warehouse on the outskirts of Auckland, New Zealand’s largest city.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The bodies sat in storage until 2022, when an unsuspecting family pried open the contents of an abandoned storage locker they bought in an auction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Police used DNA and other forensic evidence to piece together who the children were, how long they had been dead, and ultimately who had killed them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Lee, who had long since changed her name and fled the country for her native South Korea, was eventually tracked down and arrested in the port city of Ulsan.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
She was extradited to face trial in New Zealand.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The sentencing hearing on Wednesday heard how the murders had left deep emotional scars on Lee’s family.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“If she wanted to die why didn’t she die alone?” Lee’s mother Choon Ja Lee said in a statement read to the court.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“Why did she take the innocent children with her?”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Lee’s brother-in-law said the children’s other grandmother was sick with cancer and still did not know about the murders.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sei Wook Cho said his “daily existence is a time bomb of fear” the grandmother would find out, according to a statement read to the court.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“It was my late brother’s will that I protect them,” read the statement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“They were our hope for the future. This is an ongoing sentence from which I can never be paroled.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The trial hinged not on whether Lee had murdered her children — which she had confessed to — but whether she knew her actions were morally wrong.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Her lawyers argued she was not guilty by reason of insanity, her crimes the result of a depressive spiral brought on by the death of her husband in 2017.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A forensic psychiatrist testified for the defence about Lee’s mental state, describing depression, suicidal thoughts and a belief that killing her children was the right thing to do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But the prosecution argued Lee’s behaviour was calculated, pointing to her efforts to hide the bodies before fleeing the country.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A mother who murdered her two children and stuffed them into suitcases stashed inside a storage locker was on Wednesday sentenced to life imprisonment in New Zealand. Hakyung Lee, a New Zealand citizen originally from South Korea, was earlier this year found guilty of killing her children in a grisly crime dubbed the country’s “suitcase […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":255,"featured_media":85656,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13068],"tags":[13914,14397],"class_list":["post-85659","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-new-zealand","tag-murder-2","tag-news-item"],"yoast_head":"\n