{"id":36053,"date":"2025-09-22T04:32:07","date_gmt":"2025-09-22T04:32:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/36053\/"},"modified":"2025-09-22T04:32:07","modified_gmt":"2025-09-22T04:32:07","slug":"crown-tells-jury-hakyung-lee-was-not-insane-she-knew-killing-her-children-was-murder","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/36053\/","title":{"rendered":"Crown tells jury Hakyung Lee was not insane – she knew killing her children was murder"},"content":{"rendered":"

Addressing the jury this morning for the final time, Crown lawyer Natalie Walker reminded jurors of how Lee came to be found in a South Korean psychiatric hospital<\/a>, four years after she and her children disappeared. <\/p>\n

Lee had managed to get in contact with her mother\u2019s pastor, who spoke to her over the phone in June 2022. <\/p>\n

\"HakyungHakyung Lee has admitted she killed her 8-year-old daughter, Yuna Jo (left), and 6-year-old son, Minu Jo, in June 2018. She is on trial in the High Court at Auckland for two counts of murder but her standby lawyers say she is not guilty by reason of insanity. Photo \/ NZ Police<\/p>\n

Walker said the pastor was aware Lee\u2019s two children had been missing for some time, and asked what happened to them. <\/p>\n

\u201cTo which she replied, \u2018I have no children\u2019,\u201d Walker told the court.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis was the first in a series of lies told by the defendant, Ms Lee, in relation to the deaths of her daughter Yuna Jo, and son Minu Jo.<\/p>\n

\u201cHer mother asked the same question and was told the same lie.\u201d <\/p>\n

Walker said she wanted to illustrate to the jury how much of an unreliable historian Lee was. <\/p>\n

\u201cThe only evidence of her defence – that she attempted suicide and took her children\u2019s lives as she didn\u2019t want them to live without both parents – comes only from her.\u201d <\/p>\n

Walker said Lee had provided five different accounts about the deaths of her children since 2022. The prosecutor suggested none was true. <\/p>\n

\u201cFirst is that she had no children. Second, that she had the children but she left them behind in an institution. <\/p>\n

\u201cThird, that someone murdered her children, she knew who it was but it wasn\u2019t her. Fourth she was the person who killed her children by drug overdose but was suffering from a major depressive disorder at the time and thought it was the right thing to do. <\/p>\n

\u201cAnd fifth and finally, that voices told her to kill her children and she still thought it was the right thing to do.\u201d <\/p>\n

A security photo from Safe Store Papatoetoe shows Hakyung “Jasmine” Lee on the day she hired a storage unit. Her children’s remains were hidden at the facility for four years. Photo \/ Supplied<\/p>\n

The potential that Lee planned her actions has formed a part of the Crown\u2019s argument. <\/p>\n

Walker reminded the jury of PlayStation data suggesting the children were alive at the same time Lee was purchasing a courier envelope on June 27, used to apply for a name change the same day.<\/p>\n

Receipts showed Lee also went to Mitre 10 and purchased wheelie bin liners and duct tape, which the Crown said could have been used to conceal her children\u2019s bodies. <\/p>\n

All this, Walker said, meant it would be fair for the jury to infer the killings were intentional, and not the spontaneous actions of someone severely mentally unwell. <\/p>\n

Walker said it was this timeline, which shifted the position of the only defence witness, forensic psychiatrist Dr Yvette Kelly. <\/p>\n

During cross-examination last week, Kelly appeared to reassess her findings that Lee was unaware that what she was doing was morally wrong. <\/p>\n

However, Kelly maintained that Lee had a disease of the mind. <\/p>\n

But Walker said the evidence of Crown witness forensic psychiatrist Erik Monasterio disputed this claim. <\/p>\n

Monasterio accepted Lee was likely depressed, and suffering from a complex and prolonged grief reaction. <\/p>\n

But he believed she was not impaired, adding that major depression was common in the community. <\/p>\n

Walker also spoke of the effort Lee went to, on her own, to wrap her two dead children in three layers of plastic bags. <\/p>\n

\u201cEach of which she knotted, then lifted into the next layer, then knotted, lifted into the next layer, then knotted, then lifted and put into the suitcase… it\u2019s quite unimaginable.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd yet, that\u2019s what she did.\u201d <\/p>\n

Walker finished by telling the jury, there were no grounds for an insanity defence. <\/p>\n

\u201cIt was not the altruistic act of the mother who had lost her mind and believed it was the morally right thing to do \u2013 it was the opposite. <\/p>\n

\u201cMs Lee deliberately and in sound mind murdered Minu and Yuna, and the right verdicts are verdicts of guilty.\u201d <\/p>\n

Defence closing remarks have begun this afternoon. <\/p>\n

Sign up to The Daily H<\/a>, a free newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Addressing the jury this morning for the final time, Crown lawyer Natalie Walker reminded jurors of how Lee…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":36054,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[1061,10808,33445,1874,3011,3368,11155,1364,33444,12517,11156,6451,6657,101,6178,4275,111,43,139,5006,69,33446,19954,11325,312,20863,3271,27250,33448,11159,6642,2846,6736,102,33447,25152,1530],"class_list":["post-36053","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-zealand","tag-children","tag-crown","tag-fatally","tag-found","tag-four","tag-guilty","tag-hakyung","tag-her","tag-insane","tag-jury","tag-killing","tag-knew","tag-lee","tag-left","tag-mother","tag-murder","tag-new-zealand","tag-news","tag-newzealand","tag-not","tag-nz","tag-overdosed","tag-pills","tag-plastic","tag-says","tag-she","tag-should","tag-sleeping","tag-stored","tag-suitcases","tag-tells","tag-them","tag-was","tag-with","tag-wrapped","tag-wrong","tag-years"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36053","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36053"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36053\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/36054"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36053"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36053"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36053"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}