Hakyung Lee, 45, discovered responsible of killing her youngsters, Minu Jo, 6, and Yuna Jo, 8, and hiding their our bodies in storage facility.
Printed On 23 Sep 2025
A lady has been discovered responsible by a New Zealand courtroom of murdering her two young children and hiding their our bodies in suitcases for years, till their stays had been unintentionally found.
A jury on the Auckland Excessive Court docket on Tuesday discovered Hakyung Lee, 45, guilty of the double murder after simply two hours of deliberations, rejecting an madness defence made by her legal professionals.
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Lee was discovered responsible of killing her six-year-old son, Minu Jo, and eight-year-old daughter, Yuna Jo, in June 2018, a number of months after her husband died from most cancers.
Justice Geoffrey Venning ordered that Lee stay in custody till her sentencing on November 26.
Homicide carries a compulsory life sentence in New Zealand, with judges required to set a jail time period of at the very least 10 years earlier than an offender can apply for parole.
The New Zealand case garnered worldwide headlines in 2022, when the kids’s stays had been discovered inside baggage at a disused storage facility in Auckland, after Lee stopped paying rental charges for the unit attributable to having run into monetary difficulties.
Mum of youngsters found lifeless in suitcases discovered responsible of homicide after chilling trialhttps://t.co/M1UXLO9JYx
— Newstalk ZB (@NewstalkZB) September 23, 2025
The surprising discovery was made when the contents of the storage unit had been auctioned on-line and the client took possession, discovering the our bodies inside suitcases.
Lee, who represented herself in courtroom with the help of two standby counsels, had argued that she was insane on the time of the killing.
Public broadcaster Radio New Zealand (RNZ) mentioned Lee’s standby lawyer, Lorraine Smith, had argued that the loss of life of Lee’s husband had led to a “deep descent” into madness and the killing of her youngsters.
Crown Prosecutor Natalie Walker mentioned that Lee’s actions after the killing of her youngsters had been “calculated”, and he or she knew what she was doing, RNZ reported.
Lee, who’s a New Zealand citizen, had left for South Korea after the killings in 2018 and adjusted her title. Following the invention of her youngsters’s our bodies, she was tracked down and extradited from South Korea in November 2022.
“I recommend this reveals her considering rationally, even clinically, about taking her youngsters’s lives after which masking up her heinous crimes,” Walker mentioned, in keeping with RNZ.
“It was a egocentric act to free herself from the burden of parenting alone,” she mentioned.
“It was not the altruistic act of a mom who had misplaced her thoughts and believed it was the morally proper factor to do – it was the other,” she added.
When the trial started on September 8, Justice Venning had mentioned that it will be distressing to Lee and granted her permission to observe the proceedings from one other room within the courtroom.
On Tuesday, Lee returned to the dock and stood along with her head bowed and her hair masking her face as the decision was introduced, New Zealand information shops reported.
