WARNING: DISTRESSING CONTENT
The defence case for child-killing mum Hakyung “Jasmine” Lee appears to have hit a major setback today after its first and only witness – a psychiatrist who found her to be insane – acknowledged under cross-examination that she was having serious doubts about her assessment.
“It is certainly damning,” she said of the Crown’s suggested timeline for how the killings occurred.
Lee, 45, has acknowledged she killed children Minu Jo, 6, and Yuna Jo, 8, inside their Papatoetoe home in June 2018. She then wrapped the children in plastic and stuffed their remains in suitcases left at a storage facility – moving to South Korea with a new identity a month later.
Jurors for the first time today heard Lee’s own account of how she killed the children, as recently conveyed during a psychiatric interview with defence expert Yvette Kelly.
She mashed up sleeping pills in fruit juice and offered it to her children, who drank without protest. As the drowsiness set in the children “toddled off” to their beds, Kelly recounted.
Lee claimed to the psychiatrist she 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 defendant’s account came after years of denying responsibility for her children’s deaths.
“I don’t think when she saw me she was planning to tell me the story,” Kelly said. “It was a slow, difficult thing. I suspect it was really her admitting to herself at the time what had happened.”
To be found not guilty by reason of insanity, 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, the psychiatrist said in a report and throughout her testimony for most of the day.
“Her thoughts were such at the time that she thought the act was the right thing to do by her children,” Kelly said.
Lee told Kelly killing her children had 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 wellbeing,” 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.”
Lee told the psychiatrist that after waking the next day she checked 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 said, for people to often fail at suicide when dealing with pill dosages.
The defendant reported 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 responded.
The psychiatrist said: “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.
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 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.
Crown solicitor Natalie Walker spent much of the afternoon pointing out small errors in the psychiatric report, which Kelly dismissed as inconsequential and due to the time pressure the court had put her under.
Walker asked Kelly if she ever considered Lee was lying and that her real motive was to start a new life free of the constraints of being a single mum.
The expert had considered that, she responded, and she agreed Lee seemed to be lying about some things to make herself look better.
But Kelly held firm – for all but the last minutes of the day – in her belief that Lee only killed the children because she was suffering a major depressive disorder so severe she thought killing them was a morally acceptable alternative to leaving them motherless as she killed herself.
Then Walker introduced the timeline.
She pointed to data from the family’s PlayStation suggesting the children were still alive and at home at 12.07pm on June 27, at the same time Lee was purchasing a courier envelope. Lee then went to a justice of the peace at 12.23pm so an application to change her name could be witnessed and used the envelope to mail the document to the Department of Internal Affairs.
Receipts show Lee went to Mitre 10 that same afternoon, purchasing wheelie bin liners and duct tape that would later be used to conceal her children’s bodies.
She was putting plans in motion to conceal the bodies and change her identity before she had even killed her children, the prosecutor suggested.
“I’m going to suggest that after Ms Lee returned home that afternoon, at some point that’s when she gave the children the [sleeping pills] and took their lives,” Walker said.
According to Lee’s account to the psychiatrist, she woke up the next day and tried to kill herself with another attempted overdose. But Walker pointed to documents showing Lee was out submitting an application for a new driver’s licence, buying a suitcase at the mall and hiring the storage unit.
The prosecutor pointed to a security photo taken at the storage unit showing Lee to be dressed nicely and heavily made up.
And then the next day, on June 29, receipts showed Lee spending $900 at a hair salon and purchasing a Triple-Dip Lotto ticket.
While the salon bill didn’t necessarily raise concern, the fact Lee felt hopeful enough to purchase a Lotto ticket didn’t sit well, the psychiatrist conceded. And so did the alleged premeditation of going to Mitre 10 to purchase items while the children were still alive.
“I still believe she had depression at the time,” Kelly said. “But I accept she knew the moral wrongness of that.
“I think the planning around it was concerning. I would have to rethink the whole thing knowing the timing of the children’s deaths.”
The timing, the prosecutor said, doesn’t make it look like Lee was acting out of some misguided “altruistic act” trying to save them the pain of finding her body or being orphans.
That’s when the defence expert said: “It is certainly damning.”
With that concession, Walker finished her cross-examination.
With only minutes left until 5pm, defence lawyer Chris Wilkinson-Smith had a brief opportunity to suggest to the witness that the Crown’s suggested timeline is not set in stone.
He is expected to continue questioning the witness when the trial resumes tomorrow before Justice Geoffrey Venning and the jury.
The Crown has indicated it will call another forensic psychiatrist, who is expected to state from the outset of his testimony that Lee was not criminally insane.
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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