WARNING: DISTRESSING CONTENT
She mashed up the sleeping pills in fruit juice and offered it to her children, who drank without protest.
As the drowsiness set in for Minu Jo, 6, and Yuna Jo, 8, they “toddled off” to the bedrooms of their Papatoetoe, South Auckland, home.
Hakyung “Jasmine” Lee, 45, then took what she thought would be her own fatal dose of the same drug, but she woke up about 24 hours later still alive.
The bleak account of her children’s deaths was recently revealed for the first time to psychiatrist Yvette Kelly, who entered the witness box in the High Court at Auckland today as the defence’s only witness in Lee’s double-murder trial.
The account came after years of Lee denying all responsibility for her children’s June 2018 deaths. It was a slow revelation and at times like getting blood from a stone, Kelly said with a laugh.
“I don’t think when she saw me she was planning to tell me the story,” Kelly later explained. “It was a slow, difficult thing. I suspect it was really her admitting to herself at the time what had happened.”
Lee - who then hid the children’s bodies in suitcases, changed her identity and moved to South Korea - has pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity.
In such cases, the onus is on the defence rather than prosecutors to prove a defendant was so mentally unwell at the time of the killing that he or she didn’t know what they were doing was morally wrong. Lee meets that criteria, lawyer Lorraine Smith told the jury this morning.
The defence-called psychiatrist then expanded on the idea.
“Her thoughts were such at the time that she thought the act was the right thing to do by her children,” Kelly explained.
Lee told Kelly that killing her children happened spontaneously, even though she had been having suicidal thoughts for over a year as her husband was diagnosed and then died from cancer.
“She just decided this was the time she wanted to die and the children should come with her for her well-being,” Kelly recalled being told. “She described the deaths of the children as secondary to her own death.
“Their death was not the goal. Ms Lee described her own death as the goal.”
Upon waking up the next day, Lee told the psychiatrist, she went to check on her children and realised they were non-responsive. The health professional asked her why she didn’t call for help.
“At that point, she didn’t want them to be revived,” Kelly recounted. “She just wanted to die herself.”
Lee told the psychiatrist she tried to overdose a second time with the leftover pills but woke up again the next day. It’s not unusual, Kelly emphasised, for people to often fail at suicide when dealing with pill dosages.
The defendant reported that she then tried to hang herself with a phone charger cord but the knots wouldn’t hold and she considered getting into a one-vehicle car crash.
“Why didn’t you do it?” the psychiatrist recalled asking her.
“I wasn’t convinced that it would kill me,” the defendant allegedly responded.
The psychiatrist added: “I think at that point she was starting to get a little concerned about the repercussions of her children’s deaths.”
Lee said she considered turning herself in but was afraid of going to prison.
As for why she put her children’s bodies in suitcases then abandoned them in storage, Lee said she didn’t have a plan or know what to do.
“She wanted to bury the children but she didn’t know how she could achieve that,” Kelly told jurors. “She’s now relieved that the children have been buried with her husband rather than in the storage facility.”
Lee said she changed her name only because “she wanted to erase everything about herself ... due to her own self-loathing”.
After several suicide failures, Kelly said, it appeared Lee decided to “take a break” and try again once in Korea. But while there were other attempts over the four years before she was extradited back to New Zealand, they also failed, the psychiatrist was told.
Asked in retrospect if she regretted what occurred, Lee said she wishes it had been her who died and not the children. But she couldn’t come up with “an alternative story as to what she could have done”, the expert witness said.
“She says she now sees that killing the children was the wrong thing to do ... but at the time she felt it was the right thing to do,” Kelly said.
Kelly diagnosed the defendant as having a major depressive disorder that led to not being able to tell her actions were morally wrong. She stressed that people can understand things are legally wrong but still believe they are doing the right thing.
Crown solicitor Natalie Walker began to cross-examine the psychiatrist just before the jury’s lunch break. That cross-examination is expected to continue this afteternoon.
The Crown has also indicated it may call its own mental health expert.
Craig Kapitan is an Auckland-based journalist covering courts and justice. He joined the Herald in 2021 and has reported on courts since 2002 in three newsrooms in the US and New Zealand.
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