A twist in the tale: Steve Braunias on the trial of the mum who killed her children and hid their bodies in suitcases

There was a terrible and unexpected twist late into the already especially terrible murder trial of Hakyung (Jasmine) Lee in the High Court at Auckland late last month. Lee, 45, was accused of killing her two children. She had confessed to killing them. The magnified awfulness of it fell under
that delicately worded criminal law genre of post-death conduct: after she had killed her daughter Yuna, 8, and son Minu, 6, Lee patiently wrapped up their bodies in three layers of rubbish bags, tying each layer in a knot as she went about her funereal undertaking. She laid them in a fetal position inside two orange suitcases, and dumped them inside a rented storage unit – the children’s grave for the next four years.

It’s impossible to guess at the range of secrets and lies concealed within the storage lockers of the nation. Certainly, it’s a really great urban solution for covering your tracks. But to use it to entomb your own children, and then leave the country, setting up an automatic payment to Safe Store in Papatoetoe on the 28th of each month, was something so stupefying to contemplate it was equally impossible to know what to make of the shambling figure of Lee when she appeared in court on the opening day of the trial.

It was a brief appearance. She hung her head low and didn’t answer to the two charges of murder. Technically, she chose to represent herself, but she never said a word in court and her defence was run by two experienced lawyers in their roles as stand-by counsel.

After that, Lee was removed from courtroom 6, a little cupboard on the ground floor of the High Court, and taken upstairs to the obscurely located courtroom 14. I deduced her location on account of the fact that the door was locked and the curtains were drawn. She sat in the dock between her Korean interpreter and a security guard, and appeared in courtroom 6 on a video screen. She hung her head low and sat with her hands in her lap. She didn’t move. She was made of stone, a statue of grief or shame or guilt or something shaped by madness. But actually her presence in courtroom 6 throughout the trial was nothing solid or defined; she was spectral, a creepy and infinitely sad ghost with long black hair covering almost all of her face, supernatural and cursed.

Hakyung Lee in the Manukau District Court in November 2022 after her extradition from South Korea following the discovery of the bodies.

Defence was insanity

“She is sane,” Crown prosecutor Natalie Walker said in her opening address, “until the contrary is proven.” Lee’s defence was insanity. Her lawyers entered a plea of not guilty. They argued she had a disease of the mind and did not appreciate that murdering her children and disposing of their remains was morally wrong. That served as the only possible explanation for a crime that occupied the furthest shores of reason. I regarded it as a solid or credible defence until the twist.

The jury took little more than three hours to reach their verdict and that included a break for lunch, chowing down on the court-ordained meal of burgers and muffins in plastic containers secured with a pretty pink bow. They left courtroom 6 to deliberate at 10.35am and indicated at 1.48pm that they were ready to return. It was a damp Tuesday afternoon in spring. Lee was brought down the stairs from courtroom 14. Some juries voice their verdict with regret, others with quiet reluctance. The foreman of the Lee jury put loud emphasis on his verdict, both times he answered the charges: “Guilty.” Sentencing is set for November 26.

Apart from the speed of it – lawyers on either side anticipated waiting until the following day – the verdict came as no surprise. It wasn’t an unexpected event; it was the inevitable conclusion of the twist.

Smelled like a dead rat

In the shorthand of New Zealand crime, they were known as the suitcase murders. The bodies were found on August 11, 2022. Lee ran out of money to pay the storage fees. As per the contract, the abandoned contents were put up for sale. The winning Trade Me bid was $401. Hongi Wihongi estimated he could get his money back and turn a good profit on a microwave, washing machine, fridge and other items. He hired a trailer from Hirepool for $95 and placed the suitcases on top.

From the opening address of Walker, in her final trial as Crown solicitor for Manukau: “He drove home. He took the two suitcases off the trailer that he thought smelled of a dead rat, and placed them on his driveway. He used a butcher’s knife to cut through the layers of black plastic. The suitcase was locked. He optimistically thought he could open it by running his fingers over the combination. He cut through the suitcase and when opened, there was another black plastic bag tied in a knot. He cut through it only to find another one. The smell grew stronger. He cut through a third layer of plastic. He saw something quite shocking.”

Wihongi’s police statement was read out in court: “The smell was getting worse and there were stains like melted cheese and then I saw a leg.”

Walker: “It was the remains of a small child lying in the suitcase with their knees bent.”

Walker, 50, was a revelation in court. I suppose I have got used to the usual performative blather of Crown prosecutors from the downtown Auckland firm of Meredith Connell (now MC), with their thundering denunciations, withering scorns and dark shadows cast by their big swinging lanterns of justice. Walker holds the Crown warrant for Manukau in South Auckland as a director of Kayes Fletcher Walker.

They do things differently there. They have a culture. They place value on tolerance and respect. Walker, with high cheekbones and big hands, leads by example, and conducted herself in the Lee trial with a polite, good-natured manner, almost sunny, verging on a kind of Mary Poppins – she did not attack, did not go in for cheap dramas. All of the horror was already there. It just needed stating.

The Papatoetoe home where the children were killed in June 2018. Their bodies were hidden for four years in a nearby storage unit.

The children were killed on or around June 27, 2018 at their rented brick-and-tile home with red curtains in South Auckland. Their father, Lee’s husband, Ian Jo, had died of oesophageal cancer in late November the previous year. Isolated, grieving, suicidal, Lee took the children out of school, the three of them cooped up at home for months, playing Minecraft and eating takeaway dinners in a house without visitors.

They also took trips. “They were not holidays. Me and the kids couldn’t stay in that home,” Lee told a court-appointed psychiatrist.

Her court-appointed lawyer, Lorraine Smith, described the itinerary as “a descent into Hell”. They travelled to the Gold Coast two days after she buried her husband. They travelled to South Korea on Christmas Day, and stayed for two months. There was a trip to Rotorua in 2018, another visit to the Gold Coast, and the evidence suggested that four days after returning from Queenstown, she administered her children nortriptyline, a powerful adults-only drug with sedative effects, dissolved in fruit juice.

It may have killed them. It would be good to think so. The alternative is that the dose made them as weak and defenceless as kittens. Their cause of death was unspecified, which allowed for specificities of drowning and suffocation as possible methods of murder.

Busy shopping

Errands, always errands, in the busy days and nights of murderers wanting to get away with it. In the same year that Jasmine Lee lifted her dead children into suitcases, Jesse Kempson famously fussed around buying a suitcase at The Warehouse to pack the body of his victim Grace Millane, and then ticked off a checklist of rental car and shovel to bury her in a shallow grave.

Lee bought rubbish bags and a padlock from Mitre 10. She rented a storage unit. She sold her car. She changed her name. She vacated the flat and took good care in cleaning it to get the bond refunded. She bought mango hand cream ($9) at The Body Shop on July 6, Chi Chi Glamour Eyes make-up ($31.49) at Farmers on July 9, a push-up bra ($24.95) from Cotton On at the Sylvia Park mall, where she stopped for a Caribbean Crush at Tank, and, finally, she flew business class to Seoul at 10am on July 29. Her flight was four weeks after killing her son and daughter.

All the many receipts of her retail transactions were reproduced in a court document. They were poignant and bewildering signs of little bits and pieces of Lee’s life going on while two suitcases lay at the back of a storage unit. (Walker, in her opening address: “The bodies might never have been discovered if she had not run out of money.”) I dutifully wrote down the dates and prices in my 3B1 notebooks and made numerous attempts to order them in a timeline. But I drew no conclusions from the exercise. Lee’s shopping trips seemed as inexplicable and dysfunctional as her ghost haunting a video screen in courtroom 6. I thought of her at the malls of Auckland in that month between the killing and leaving in a kind of zombie state, more dead than alive, each transaction just another rung on the ladder leading down, down, down towards the black void of insanity.

She put each of her clothed, dead children in three layers of plastic, each of which she knotted.

On Lee’s behalf Smith used the word “descent” five times in her closing address. “Her descent into a living hell … a lonely descent into isolation and deep depression … an undisputable descent from being a mentally well woman into a woman suffering from mental illness”, etc.

But the repetitions were a signal that all was lost. Smith, 82, a brittle little battler of strong Catholic faith, was talking to herself. By that stage, the trial had produced its twist. You just had to take a closer study of the timeline.

Detectives realised what was going on right at the start of their patient and meticulous investigation. At the High Court, a detail was withheld until right at the end. The 33rd and final witness for the prosecution, a digital forensic analyst with the police, was called on Wednesday morning of the second week of the trial. I had asked Walker at the close of day on Tuesday whether she thought it was worth my while trekking into court to hear his evidence. The weather forecast was bad. “Yes,” she said.

After the jury delivered its verdict, and everyone in courtroom 6 packed up, shook hands, and went their separate ways, I felt the usual sense of post-trial desolation. It had been a crummy and depressing experience. A mother who loved her kids had killed her kids. There was an amazing moment in Walker’s closing address when she was seized with the notion of what Lee actually had to do when she disposed of their remains. It was not in the script of the prosecutor’s 51-page, 20,000-word, often quite boring speech. Suddenly, her voice shook and her eyes moistened. She spoke slowly and paused after each time she said “knotted”. Walker said: “She put each of her clothed dead children in three layers of plastic, each of which she knotted, then lifted into the next layer and then knotted, lifted into the next layer and then knotted, and then lifted and put it into the suitcase, which she zipped up and locked and then lifted into a plastic bag.”

Auckland pathologist Dr Simon Stables was an early witness. He described the condition of the bodies in their shrouds. “After this time, you’d expect there just to be skeleton only, but because these children have been in an environment where there’s been no exposure to air, no exposure to insects or flies, they’ve been preserved actually relatively well … Sometimes the skin mummifies. This is what happened to these kids. It is unusual to find this level of tissue left. They had soft slippery tissue, almost paper-like….There was no blood present.”

With all that, you clung to small, good things that lightened the trial. There was the evidence of Kun Lu from Barfoot & Thompson, who made tenancy inspections of Lee’s house. He gave her $200 from his own pocket after her husband Ian died. There was the evidence of Barbara Lucas, a work colleague of Ian’s at Auckland International Airport. Jasmine gave her $500 and flowers to share with the airport team as a thank-you gift after Ian’s death. Lucas returned the $500 with a financial gift from the team.

Minu and Yuna: adored by the teachers at Papatoetoe South School.

Jurors’ tears

Most memorably, there was the evidence of Mary Robertson. Primary school teachers can be easy to read. There are the obvious dragons who love to assume authority over little kids, and then there are the living saints who love teaching little kids.

Walker asked her when she took her seat in the witness box, “Is it Mrs Robertson or Miss?

“Miss.” Miss Robertson has taught at Papatoetoe South School for 41 years and the love she declared for the dead children was the only time the jury cried. “Minu was just a beautiful joyful little bubbling boy.” And: “Yuna was very serious, but she had a smile that lit up the world.” Also: “She was beautifully behaved, really respectful and had a very tight group of friends and they would – their teachers adored both of them. Sorry.” She was apologising for crying, but it was the one moment of beauty and grace during the whole dismal enterprise in courtroom 6.

It was also really the only time the children came alive during the trial. The court heard very little about them. Flat inspection photos showed a duvet with a pattern of Frozen characters in Minu’s bedroom, and Yuna had a lovely feminine net curtain hung above her bed. Lorraine Smith said in her closing address, “How did we get from this wonderful happy young family to the tragedy of two children killed by their mother?”

Tthe family before Jo’s cancer diagnosis; Lee after killing her children.

Her answer was that the death of Ian Jo pushed Jasmine Lee over the edge. Life without him was intolerable. Her goal, Lee said in her confession, was to kill herself, and that the morally right thing to do was to kill her children first so they would not find her body. She succeeded in killing her children. But her own attempt to overdose on nortriptyline was a failure: she woke up the next day, and in her derangement, she bought rubbish sacks to dispose of their bodies.

Except this was not, it seems, what happened, and neither was it the correct order of events. It was all in the timeline. Forensic digital evidence was produced to show that the children were playing Minecraft on Wednesday, June 27, 2018, at 12.07pm. Lee bought the rubbish sacks at Mitre 10 Manukau at 12.45pm. I was initially very confused by these times. I had assumed she scurried around performing her Mitre 10 errands after they were dead. But the inference – left unsaid, left for the jury to figure out – was that she left the children at home and set about her tasks while they were still alive.

The twist was finally revealed in an astonishing cross-examination of the sole witness called by the defence, Dr Yvette Kelly, a psychiatrist who stated confidently that Lee was insane – until Walker asked her to examine the timeline, and consider that Lee planned their deaths.

To premeditate a murder is to know exactly what you are doing. Gently, serenely, a Mary Poppins brushing her fair hair over her ears, Walker destroyed the witness. I have never seen anything like it. It was a cross-examination for the ages.

Next week: An analysis of the devastating cross-examination in the Jasmine Lee murder trial.

SaveShare this article

Reminder, this is a Premium article and requires a subscription to read.

Copy LinkEmailFacebookTwitter/XLinkedInReddit