A New Zealand woman is convicted of murdering her 2 children and leaving their bodies in suitcases

WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AP) — A jury in New Zealand on Tuesday found a woman guilty of murdering her two children and leaving their bodies in suitcases for years before they were discovered.

The verdict meant the jury at the High Court in Auckland rejected a defense of insanity made by lawyers for Hakyung Lee, who fled to South Korea after the killings before being extradited to face trial. The swift verdict arrived hours after jurors were sent to deliberate on Tuesday morning.

Lee was charged with killing Minu Jo, 6, and Yuna Jo, 8, in June 2018. The children’s remains were found inside luggage at an abandoned storage unit in Auckland in August 2022.

Lee, who is a New Zealand citizen, had traveled to South Korea and changed her name in 2018, shortly after the children are believed to have been killed. She was born in South Korea and went by the name Ji Eun Lee previously.

The 45-year-old woman was extradited from South Korea in November 2022. She denied the charges, with her lawyers arguing that she was insane at the time of the murders.

Lee’s lawyers conceded that Lee had killed the children by giving them an antidepressant medication, but attorney Lorraine Smith said the deaths happened after her client “descended into madness.” Lee had always been “fragile,” said Smith, but her mental illness became worse after her husband’s death.

Prosecutors said that Lee had likely suffered from depression but that it was not severe enough to support an insanity defense. In New Zealand, such a claim requires a murder defendant to prove they were incapable of understanding what they were doing or that it was wrong.

There was a “cold calculation” to Lee’s actions, prosecutor Natalie Walker told the court. Walker said Lee had killed her children out of selfishness and planned to begin a new life without them.

The children’s remains were discovered after Lee stopped paying rental fees for an Auckland storage unit when she ran into financial difficulties in 2022. The locker’s contents were auctioned online and the buyers found the bodies inside.

After Tuesday’s verdict, Justice Geoffrey Venning ordered that Lee remain in custody until she is sentenced on Nov. 26. Murder carries a mandatory life sentence in New Zealand, with judges required to set a prison term of at least 10 years before an offender can apply for parole.

Venning said when the trial began on Sept. 8 it would be distressing to Lee and granted her permission to watch the proceedings from another room in the courthouse. She returned to the dock for the verdict, and stood with her head bowed and her hair covering her face, New Zealand news outlets reported.

Charlotte Graham-mclay, The Associated Press