Crime Stories with Nancy Grace - Body Bags: Dead on a Bali Vacation

Episode Date: November 13, 2021

Teen Heather Mack and her mother Sheila von Wiese-Mack plan a tropical vacation. They go to Bali to work on their relationship, but they're not the only ones. Heather Mack buys her boyfriend a ticket, using her mother's credit card. Within 10 hours of Tommy Schaefer's arrival, the 62-year-old socialite is dead. Von Wiese-Mack is bludgeoned to death by Schaeffer with a heavy fruit bowl, and her body stuffed inside a suitcase. The lovers and soon-to-be parents are charged and convicted. Tommy Schaefer is still in an Indonesian prison. Heather Mack served 7 years of her ten-year sentence and gave birth behind bars. She was recently released and expelled from Bali. Upon her arrival back in the U.S., Mack was taken into custody on multiple charges. Today, forensics expert and former death scene investigator Joseph Scott Morgan explains the carnage to Sheila von Wiese-Mack's body.  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You're listening to an iHeart Podcast. Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan. It's a given that any mother-daughter relationship is going to have good days and bad days, ups and downs throughout their life together. But what would drive a daughter to enter into an agreement with a young man that she has supposedly fallen in love with? Fly down to Bali, a 16-hour flight from L.A. Have that young man enter into a hotel room,

pick up a large decorative bowl, and beat that young woman's mother into oblivion. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags. Back with me again today is my good friend, Jackie Howard, executive producer of Crime Stories with Nancy Grace. Jackie, what do we have on this case? As you said, Joe, Heather Mack was serving a sentence in Bali for her part in the death of her mother. Mack was prosecuted and convicted in Indonesia over the 2014 killing of Sheila Von Weiss Mack at the St. Regis Bali Resort. After serving seven of her 10-year sentence, she was expelled from the country upon her release.

She was sent back to the U.S. along with her daughter. Mack was pregnant at the time of this murder. Heather Mack and her daughter landed at an airport in Chicago at O'Hare International, and at that moment she was arrested by the FBI on charges of conspiracy to kill in a foreign country, conspiracy to commit a foreign murder of a U.S. national, and obstruction. Now, Heather Mack has pleaded not guilty to all of those charges. But Joe, as you mentioned going in, the relationship between Heather Mack and her mother was contentious, to say the least. We do know that in her younger days, the relationship between Heather and her mother was very volatile. Police were called to their home more than 80 times.

In fact, we know that according to statements made to the police, Sheila would say that Heather would hit her and bite her. She even pushed her in the bathroom so hard one time that Sheila fell and broke her arm. What kind of damage is that going to do, Joe? Are injuries like that, bumps and bruises, are they going to leave any lasting images? Obviously, the broken bone would. You know, over a period of time, people are subjected to ongoing abuse and make no mistake, this is ongoing abuse.

It's familial abuse. It doesn't just have to be between a husband or a wife or, you know, a child and a parent. It doesn't just have to be between a parent and a young child. Actually, the reverse can happen. You can have older children that will abuse their parents. And, you know, in cases like this, where people are sustaining ongoing trauma throughout their life, you'll have external scars that occur. Say, for instance,

if they've been lacerated on the head somehow, where they've got these blunt force traumas, they bumped into things like the toilet, maybe the side of the tub or even a table, or if they've been struck by something. And, you know, you begin to think about also these fractures that the mother had sustained in her life. You know, I've seen any number of cases over the years with ongoing abuse where you take

an x-ray of a body and you can actually see it present these old healed fractures and they'll get these kind of nodular appearances to them, particularly if they go unreported, Jackie. If the family doesn't want to make a scene about it, if they don't want to talk about it relative to any of the authorities, sometimes they'll just allow these things to heal on their own, and no one says anything else. And here's the problem. If it happens once, it'll happen over and over and over again. And generally, the level of trauma increases with each one of these events because the

attacker feels very, very comfortable in doing this. It's not just about hurling verbal assaults on someone, you start to get into these physical confrontations, and the attacker always gains the upper hand because, you know what, they know that their victim is fearful of them. You're absolutely right, Joe. We do know that Sheila Von Weiss-Mack had told friends and family that in the past she had been afraid of her daughter. And this trip to Bali was an attempt to renew their relationship. The mother and daughter had been having trouble because the mother did not approve of the current relationship that Mac was in. She was dating Tommy Schaefer.

Now, what Sheila Von Weiss-Mac did not know was that Heather had used her mother's credit card to buy Tommy an airplane ticket to Bali, a $12,000 purchase. Just 10 hours after he arrived, Sheila Von Weiss Mack was dead. So he was seen on the video camera coming into the room with the decorative bowl that you were mentioning tucked up under his shirt. So right away, we see that something is planned, Joe. You know, Jackie, it is planned. But, you know, one of the things I was thinking about in this case, and I've seen it in a few other cases over the course of my career,

is that sometimes the weapons that a perpetrator chooses are what we refer to as weapons of convenience or weapons of opportunity. You've got a young man that, as you had mentioned, had made this lengthy flight, very expensive flight down there to Bali. And at some point in time, we know that Heather got in contact with this kid while he was in the hotel and said, bring something heavy. What does that mean? Well, it can be implied at least that you're looking for an object to use to bludgeon somebody with. And so that our listeners understand what this means. When we hear about a term of bludgeoning, most of the time, that means that it's a heavy object that someone picks up and utilizes for the express purpose of beating someone, inflicting what we refer to as blunt force trauma. And in this case, boy, did the mother ever sustain extensive trauma? And I can get into that. But what's very important here is that the object itself, it's not like a cereal bowl.

Okay. Think of a bowl that has been identified as a decorative bowl. This bowl is probably not inexpensive. It's something that is owned by the hotel. It's high quality. And guess what? The glass surface on this thing is probably inches, not an inch, but probably inches thick, particularly down at the dome of it. So if someone's going to use a bowl in order to beat someone with, just imagine

gripping the lip of the bowl, okay? And you're going to turn it over almost like you're holding a helmet in your hand, only the dome of the helmet is going to be that. That's going to be the business end. That's the end that's actually going to make contact with the tissue, with the bone, and it's going to be driven into this individual's body. So, Joe, does it take necessarily a heavy object to do something like this? Or is it the force that the person that's using it is wielding that's going to do the damage. Which is it? Is it the heavy object or the force in general? You know, it's a combination of both, Jackie. And, you know, when you pick up a bowl like this or any heavy object, you have to think

about the energy that's being transferred if you're going to beat somebody from the hips of the perpetrator to the shoulder, extending out to the arm. And the further away you hold this thing at its distal point in the individual's arm, you get this tremendous amount of velocity that is generated as those hips and the shoulder go in to this motion. And it's a downward, kind of a downward event. I suspect that they had this poor woman on the floor. And as they swing this thing down, all of that energy is transferring to, like I said, this rather robust, heavy bowl. And it's being driven into her skull.

And let me tell you something. The damage that was involved in this assault, Jackie, is unlike anything that you normally see, there was a level of veracity to this that we can't really describe without being able to physically be there and see it. But let me tell you what had happened. If folks at home will essentially touch the area beneath both of your eyes and you feel those bony structures, those are called the suborbital rims. That goes into the orbits that the eyes actually fit into, the sockets. And then you have the bony prominence of the nose. Well, all of that, all of that was fractured. This poor woman was literally beaten to death.

We use that term a lot in our world of true crime. But in this case, it's absolutely the truth. Beaten to death, Joe. Can we explain what that is? Because there's some things that we find out about this case with Sheila Von Weiss-Mack. You were talking about the fractures in her face and that in itself led to bleeding, which led to some other issues. So let's first explain what it means to be beaten to death and then talk about what resulted from the damage that was done to her head. In this particular case, what we're looking at is, you know, her facial bones were actually fractured. And, you know, when we touch our face, we think about, you know, you touch beneath your eyes and you can feel the base of your eye sockets down there. You can also feel your nose and maybe your nose feels rather firm. Maybe the frontal bone of your skull, that's that leading bone that

comprises your forehead, essentially. It feels robust, doesn't it? But once you begin to strike those areas, and of course, she was struck multiple times with this heavy decorative bowl. It's those little bones that indwell behind that area. You know, what's really fascinating when you do an autopsy on an individual, and we literally do take off the skull cap at autopsy to take out the brain, we have to examine the interior of the skull. Did you know that you can actually take a flashlight and place it, turn it on and place it up to the eye, to the eye area of a deceased individual. And you can see that light shining through

the floor of the skull, if you will. That's how thin those bones are. I want all of our listeners to think about this. That bone is actually about the thickness of an eggshell. And you get into the nose, those bones are very, very fragile as well. And so those have all been fractured. In addition to that, this poor woman has got a fractured vertebra and she's got other insulted areas all around the circumference of her skull. So you've got an event where this woman is not just being struck in the face. She's actually being struck in the rear, on the sides and on top of her head as well. You know, when you're actually beaten to death, this is what we mean by bludgeoning. It's grotesque. And what you're talking about is it's massive trauma where not only do you have multiple massive fracturing,

but you've got what are called micro fractures all through the body. That eggshell thickness bone that we were referring to, like the surface of the interior floor of the skull, if you will, and all of the sinus regions, those little bones literally come apart, just like an eggshell fragment. And so not only are you fragmenting the bone itself, but there are these little tiny holes in the bone that are actually called foramen. And that's where the vessels run up through. So every time you smash one of these bones, you actually clip foramen. And that's where the vessels run up through. So every time you smash one of these bones, you actually clip these vessels and the individual begins to bleed out internally. Those little vessels are all clipped, not to mention the major ones that are supplying

the brain itself. So you're dealing with massive fracturing and then the brain begins to swell because it's becoming engorged with blood, the brain is very fragile. And as it begins to engorge, it begins to swell and it can't function. It can't function at all. And so when we talk about things like being beaten to death or bludgeoned to death, just think of it in this sense that it is, in fact, massive, massive trauma. So along with what you're saying there, Joe, we know that when you have that kind of damage, tissue tearing, bone fracturing, the bones are going to damage the tissues inside. And as you said, we have bleeding. This led to a major finding for Sheila Von Weiss-Mack. You know, Jackie, it did.

And when I first read this, I remember covering this case. And when I first read it, I was reflecting on this because not only did the pathologist rule this death as massive blunt force trauma, the real kicker here is that this is an asphyxial death. And you think, you know, most of the time we talk about asphyxial deaths, we think about people that are being strangled or smothered or choked or, you know, or, you know, strangled, say, for instance, with a cord or a rope or maybe somebody's bare hands. Not in this case. You know what this actually turned out to be, Jackie,

is that you remember all those little bones in the blood that I was talking about that are fractured away within the context of the sinuses. Those little bones, as she is laying there and she's gasping for breath, gasping for her life, she's inhalating, inhalating all of this blood that's being generated from the skull trauma and also those little flecks of bone. And guess where they're going? They're all going down her trachea into her airway. And it's occluding her airway.

So she begins to asphyxiate as a result of this. So she's really got a double dose here, doesn't she? She's got this massive head trauma. And all the while, some people actually refer to this as an individual drowning in their own blood, if you will. And it's an absolutely horrific way to die. And the fascinating part about this is that the daughter and the boyfriend would have been present for this. They would have heard what would have been the best way to kind of term it would be a gurgling sound as she's breathing her last. You would have actually seen blood bubbling up out of her nose and out of her mouth as she's struggling to breathe.

And there her daughter stands, this daughter that in life this woman had given birth to and had nurtured throughout her life, provided a roof over her head. She watched her mother just there in this horrible state, essentially drowned to death on her own blood. Okay, so let's be technical here, Joe. You said drowning in her own blood, and you described this as an asphyxiation. Are they the same thing? I mean, did she drown or was she asphyxiated? Yeah, that's a point that needs to be made here. When people say that an individual drowns in their own blood, that essentially is kind of a metaphor for what's going on. But in essence,

what's happening is that the blood is going down the airway. And as it's being inhalated, that means to breathe in, all of that tissue that's issuing forth out of these fractured sinus areas is being drawn down into the trachea and it's blocking the airway. So that's where the asphyxia comes in. Now, when the autopsy would have been performed, let me kind of paint the picture for you what they would have seen. When this poor woman's lungs were removed in her airway, which is something we do at autopsy, they would have opened them. And as they opened them, blood and probably clotted blood would have literally poured out of the trachea. And it's just not a normal finding. And as you begin to examine the lungs and you dissect the lungs and the little air sacs,

you'll actually find focal areas of hemorrhage that are contained therein. And that's her blood that's coming from her head, literally from these fractured areas. And she's breathing it into those tiny little air sacs into her lung. So yeah, it's kind of a drowning process in the sense that, you know, when an individual drowns in water, what are they doing? Well, they're inhalating water, and we know that water in the lungs is not compatible with life. Well, neither is blood, and neither is bone in this case. So yeah, I guess you could say in a way this woman did in fact drown on her own blood. What about defensive wounds, Joe? We know that as you have said, she was beaten very, very badly, but there, if I understand it correctly, there were wounds on her hands, on her arms that most

likely were defensive wounds. Describe those for me. Yeah. You know, most of the time when you see defensive wounds, Jackie, on an individual, they're going to present, particularly when we're talking about blunt force trauma, like a bludgeoning event like this, you're going to pick up on what are called focal areas of hemorrhage. All right. So they're going to come up as bruises. Again, that's just a $ dollar term for a bruise. And what's fascinating is that at the morgue, at the autopsy room, if we have the weapon that was used of your relatives' homes and they've got a fancy candy dish, for instance, and it'll have those kind of very sharp edges on it that were formed in some glass factory somewhere. Those patterns will actually begin to demonstrate on the soft tissue. You'd find them on the head, but let's just think about her hands and her arms. What's really horrifying about this is that because she had these injuries on her hands and arms, we know that she had an awareness. It's not like they just walked up behind her,

Jackie, and knocked her unconscious. No, no, no. That's not what happened in this case. This woman was initially attacked. This guy probably came at her with a bowl with incredible ferocity because it takes a lot of energy to do this. She has enough awareness where she's going to raise not one arm, not one hand, but both arms and both hands in order to try to fend him off. And the reason we know this is that there are multiple contusions over the surfaces of both hands and both arms. So this gives you an idea that she's attempting to fin this attacker off. Now, her daughter, Heather, says that the entire time this was going on, she was hiding in the bathroom and she's putting it all off on the boyfriend. But just think about how horrific this is that

the daughter's involved in this and she's trying to control mom. This guy's swinging this bowl around. We do know that she's gone to the ground at this point because we think back to her injuries. We know that she's got a fractured vertebra. Well, you don't fracture a vertebra simply by striking somebody in the nose with a bowl. That's something that she's trying to roll away from. And so he crashes his bowl down on her cervical vertebra and actually fractures it. People don't realize how much force that takes. So there's an awareness. We've got these defensive wounds that are playing into this. She's rolling around because she's got these injuries on multiple planes on the sides of her head, the top, of course, the front, and eventually in the back where this vertebra is fractured. You have your mama beaten to death by your boyfriend, and you're in a foreign country,

16-hour plane ride from L.A.? What are you going to do next? You're in a foreign country. What are you going to do with the body after this attack happens? Well, that was a good question that they had to figure out, Joe. What do you do with the body? We know that Heather Mack and her boyfriend put her mother inside a suitcase. That suitcase was transported downstairs as if they were checking out. It was put into a taxi and they tried to slip away to another hotel to not get caught. But what we find out is the taxi driver calls the police

once he pulls out the suitcase and there is large amounts of blood soaking through the suitcase. And I'll have to tell you, Joe, I really don't even know where to start on this, but so let's just start there. We know that once your heart stops beating, that blood stops pumping. So first, how did the suitcase get so bloody? Well, you know, when you see images of the suitcase, Jackie, it's kind of striking. You're handling luggage, and all of a sudden you come across this. It's actually a rigid suitcase. It's not some kind of gym bag-like thing.

And you've got blood smeared all on the outside of this thing. Well, that tells us a lot about the dynamic that went on after death. These individuals that were tasked, that's the daughter and the boyfriend, with getting this woman's body into this, people are calling it a large suitcase. It's really not that large. It's no larger than anything else you'd go out and buy at some luggage place or some shop out there. It's pretty standard. They would have to have tightly folded her up in here. And you're talking about this blood issuing from the body post-mortem. Well, yeah, it's going to issue from the body post-mortem.

First of all, blood is liquid, so it's going to seek the lowest point of gravity. And trust me, if you've got these horrendous injuries to your face, like this poor woman did, blood is going to seep out of there and it will be a copious. That means that's a fancy word for a lot. As forensic pathologists like to use the term copious, it's a lot of blood. It would have seeped out and depended upon how her body is positioned. And this is key. If they've got her body turned on its side in any way, trying to roll her around and manipulate her, this is no easy task to jam her into this suitcase. There will be blood everywhere. It'll be issuing from her now greatly fractured nose. It's traumatized.

She's probably got lacerations all over her face and all over the top of her head. And I cannot go another second without reminding everybody that, again, the head is the most vascular area of the body. It has the most vessels in it. So, therefore, logic would dictate you're probably going to have the most blood that's indwelling there. Remember, she'd lived long enough probably for her brain to swell up a little bit. So she's going to be engorged with this fluid. And so it's getting everywhere. Can you imagine? They're not equipped to do this. They're not wearing any kind of environmental protection suits or anything. They're up there in their standard everyday

clothes. And they're trying to manipulate this woman's body into the suitcase. So they're up there in their standard everyday clothes, and they're trying to manipulate this woman's body into the suitcase. So they're going to be covered with blood. And in forensics, what we refer to this as is transfer blood. So if you put your hands on a bloody surface or on a bloody body, and then you touch somewhere else, like the exterior of this suitcase, you'll have blood all on the outside of it. It'll be all over you. It'll be on the contacting surfaces underlying the suitcase because you're having to leverage. So it's going to be on the carpeted surface or the marble floor or the wooden floor that's supporting the suitcase. And then if you're having to leverage your body, say there's a coffee table, you have to move it out of the way.

And all these things people don't think about when they're contacting these surfaces. That's how we catch people lots of times with forensics, because people do not understand that everywhere they touch in this environment, there's going to be a trace left behind. And when you create such a bloody mess as was created with this attack, you'll have blood all over the place. So that explains why the exterior of this suitcase is just covered or bathed in blood. I would have to imagine also, Joe, that the pressure that they are putting on this body to get it to fit into a particular area, I guess it would have to kind of be like pushing on a balloon, trying to push air out of a balloon so that it is actually forcing the

blood out of the body at any opening that it can get out. You got a gold star today, Jackie. You've learned. I'm pleased with that comment. You're absolutely right. I like the analogy better of like squeezing an orange. If you cut a slit into an orange and you begin to squeeze the exterior of that orange, you don't have to squeeze it very hard, but if there's already an existing defect in the orange,

where's fluid going to go? Well, it's going to seek that area that has the least amount of tension on it. And all of that fluid, you know, for instance, like an orange is mostly water. So it's going to pour out of that area. And as they are manipulating her body, even though the heart is no longer pumping, if you're manipulating the legs, say bending them at the hips and at the knees and at the feet, you're having to contain the arms. That's almost got a pumping action, doesn't it? And you've already created these little defects or holes in the body from this bludgeoning event. You're pumping blood out of the body. You can't stop it. The only way you can really, I don't know, kind of slow it down is if you take something like a towel or a plastic bag and wrap the head in. But I got to tell you, Jackie, based upon what I've seen and what I've heard about this

case, this seems very frenzied. It doesn't seem like they put a lot of thought into it. And, you know, we think about that bowl. It's not like he went out and got a hammer. It's, you know, it's not like he went out and got a lead pipe. He went and got a decorative bowl of all things in the world that you're going to use to kill somebody with. This is what you choose. So that gives us an indication they're not putting a lot of thought into this. And of course, that's played out at the end of the day when they decide to leave the hotel. And for them to be able to leave the hotel, they had to dispose of the body.

And their decision was to put Sheila Von Weissmack into the suitcase and knowing Joe what they had to do is just mind-boggling to me besides the fact that they killed her mother what they did to dispose of this body how do you put a human inside of a suitcase. You know, Jackie, one of the things that I found kind of fascinating about this, this young man, and we've talked about how this is kind of what I would refer to as a disorganized event. He actually went down to the front desk after having committed this horrible crime and asked people at the front desk for duct tape. Can you imagine? So the reason is, is that they've got to do something in order to secure her body within

the suitcase. Either one of two things, either they can't tighten her down enough, like binding her to get her down to the size that they need her to her body to comply to, to get within this rigid suitcase, or they can't get the case closed well enough. And so they're having to, you know, kind of wrap this thing up. I think that what was going on is they couldn't contain her body well enough. So they're having to, to kind of bind her down to get her into this environment. Can't imagine that these people felt that comfortable around something this grotesque. And so there's a certain level of tension that comes along with this.

And you don't think about what you're doing. But what you do know is that you want to put as much distance between yourself and this crime. And the crime is symbolized by this body. They want to try to put as much distance between themselves and this crime. And the crime is symbolized by this body. They want to try to put as much distance between themselves and this body. But how do you do that? Because remember, they're not in Chicago. They're not familiar with the streets. They have no idea. They're disoriented to where everything is. And now on top of that, you've got to get rid of human remains. It's a very daunting task. So how do you do it, though, Joe?

How do you put a body, knowing that lividity is going to set in where the joints stiffen and making movement of a body, making the movements difficult? So what would they have to have done? I mean, are you talking about breaking bones, which is hard to do just with the human hands? Are you talking about popping tendons or, I mean, what physically happened here to her body? Well, we, we, there's no indication that there was any kind of dismemberment that, that, that took place, but what can happen in order to, uh, manipulate bodies into small spaces is not necessarily the fracturing of bones, but you can place enough tension, enough force rather is a better term, enough force onto, say, the extremities like the knees and particularly the hip joints. So that generally gives people the most trouble and shoulders to disjoint them. Now, just let that sink in for a second, because that takes a tremendous amount of force because you have all of these ligament attachments that have to become dislodged.

Just the joint where the hip fits in to the pelvic girdle is very robust. So in a case like this, where you're not doing dismemberment, you're literally going to have to disjoint the body and kind of fold it in on itself. And that's going to take time. And I'm glad you brought up postmortem lividity in this case. And the reason is, is that with a case like this, one of the things you're going to want to examine is the distribution of blood settling in the body. Now, this is not something that I would imagine, and I've got a reason for this. This is not something I would imagine that they did willy-nilly to begin with. They had to think about this at least for a moment. Now,

they didn't plan it very well, but they had to get that body out of there. So they're sitting there scratching their heads. How are we going to do this? So all the while this woman's body is laying there, blood's settling. You can't stop gravity. Blood is settling. So you're going to have a presentation. Say she's the final blow that killed her, maybe put her face down on the floor. Well, blood is going to settle to the front of her body. Well, all of a sudden you've got this presentation of postmortem avidity anteriorly, which means front, and then you fold her over and you put her into the suitcase. Now she's kind of laying on her side. Well, it takes several hours for lividity to actually set in. So you'll get multiple points of settling of lividity on this

body. And that gives you an indication that somebody's manipulated the body. And again, that goes to the picture you're trying to present of what they did post-mortem relative to their activities. One other essential part here is that there were witnesses to them exiting the hotel. They've got bags, and of course, they've got the bag that contains her body, the victim's body. But you know what they didn't take notice of? Any kind of blood on the perpetrator's body.

So what does that tell us? Well, it tells us that they probably took at least some amount of time to clean themselves up. Because, you know, let's face it, anything's going to set off an alarm with people that are paying attention. If you've got blood smeared up and down the side of your face, on your neck, on your hands, and that sort of thing, Bali's a tropical environment, so you're not going to be wearing heavy clothes. It's not like you're going to walk out with a parka on. You might be wearing shorts and maybe a tank top or a T-shirt. All of your body surfaces are going to be exposed,

so people will see your skin. You have to take time to clean up because, as we have already established, this is just an absolutely horror show of crime scene. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags. You're listening to an iHeart Podcast.