A mother in New Zealand who killed her two children and hid their bodies in suitcases has been sentenced to life in prison.
Hakyung Lee, who was found guilty in September of the shocking murders of eight-year-old Yuna Jo and six-year-old Minu Jo, has to spend at least 17 years behind bars before she is eligible for parole.
Lee, 45, argued she was insane at the time of the killings in 2018, which happened soon after her husband died. High Court judge Geoffrey Venning said Lee’s mental health played a part in the case, but that her actions were calculated.
The children’s remains were discovered only in 2022 by a couple who won an auction for the contents of an abandoned storage unit in Auckland.
During a trial lasting more than two weeks, Hakyung Lee’s defence lawyers told the court that her mental health deteriorated after Jo’s death, and that she came to believe it was best if the rest of the family died together.
Lee tried to kill herself and her children by giving them a dose of the antidepressant nortriptyline mixed in juice, but got the dose wrong and woke up to find her children were dead, her lawyers said.
Prosecutors argued that Lee’s was “a selfish act to free herself from the burden of parenting alone”.
After the killings, Lee changed her name and left New Zealand. She was arrested in South Korea – where she was born – in September 2022, and extradited back to New Zealand later that year.
The court heard on Wednesday how the killings pained Lee’s and her husband Ian Jo’s families.
In an emotional statement read out by prosecutors, Lee’s mother Choon Ja Lee said she regrets not taking her daughter to a counsellor, noting that Lee had “no will to live” after Jo died of cancer in November 2017.
“If she wanted to die, why didn’t she die alone? Why did she take the innocent children with her?” Choon Ja Lee wrote, according to New Zealand media reports.
Jo’s brother Jimmy said he “never imagined such a profound tragedy would ever befall our family”.
His own mother – Yuna’s and Minu’s other grandmother – still does not know they are dead, he said.
“It was my late brother’s will that I protect them,” said Jimmy Jo. “This is an ongoing sentence from which I can never be paroled.”
Lee was likely suffering from an “atypical depression” and prolonged grief reaction at the time of the murders, according to a psychiatric assessment conducted before the sentencing, local broadcaster RNZ reported.
Justice Venning ordered that Lee be treated as a “special patient” during her imprisonment, given her mental state.
“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, which had been cruelly taken from you,” the judge said.
