WARNING: DISTURBING CONTENT
“You know how there are cases of mother committing suicide with the children? That was how I felt.”
Those were among the chilling alleged admissions of double-murder defendant Hakyung “Jasmine” Lee in November 2022 as she made conversation with a detective during her 11-hour extradition flight from South Korea.
But the former South Auckland resident - whose children Minu, 6, and Yuna, 8, had been found dead inside suitcases just three months earlier - went on to insist that it was all a misunderstanding.
“I knew that my mother cannot take care of my children and decided to hand the care and custody of the children to an institution,” she continued.
“I thought it was better for them to be taken care by the institution than me because of all the suicidal thoughts I was having.
“I did not know it would end up like this.”
Lee, whose jury trial began last week in the High Court at Auckland, started with an admission that it was in fact her who had killed the children. She had given herself and her children what she thought to be a deadly dose of a prescription sleeping pill, but she survived, her standby lawyers have said.
They have asked jurors to find Lee not guilty by reason of insanity.
But during the sleepless November 28, 2022, redeye flight, she was claiming ignorance about how the children were harmed.
“I know who did it but it does not matter,” Detective Sergeant Sung Kyu “Dan” Hwang recalled her saying unprompted.
“Whether I get found guilty or not does not change anything. I just want to say that I did not do it and I want to die in New Zealand along where my husband and children are. That is why I wanted and waited to go back to New Zealand.”
For the record, Detective Hwang told jurors, it was not a voluntary trip home that Lee was making it out to be. He had flown to South Korea with two other officers and an extradition warrant, after the gruesome discovery of the children’s bodies following a Trade Me storage shed auction made headlines in both countries.
The officer, who speaks fluent Korean and English after having moved to New Zealand at age 10, recalled Lee having a panic attack as he first met her at the airport gate for a handoff with Korean authorities. She appeared to be worried about media attention, he said.
Kwang recalled introducing himself, saying he didn’t think he needed to put her in handcuffs and assuring her that there was a plan in place to put her in an unmarked vehicle upon her arrival in New Zealand to keep media coverage to a minimum.
As she grabbed the window seat at the back of the plane and he sat down next to her, Kwang decided it was time to read Lee her rights in both English and Korean. He recalled telling her she didn’t need to talk about the case just then – they could do a proper interview once they arrived in New Zealand.
But over the course of the flight, he told jurors, Lee would make spontaneous comments without his prompting. He listened to her and acknowledged her statements but didn’t follow up with any questions, he said. When there were breaks in the conversation, he pulled out his police notepad and wrote down his recollections of what had just been said.
Those recollections were read to jurors verbatim today.
“I don’t know if you’ll believe me and it does not matter, but I’ve been waiting to get back to New Zealand,” she reportedly said.
“I got arrested all of the sudden. I was accused of something I have not done.”
The detective recalled Lee expressing shock that she had been held in custody in Korea for months. It was the anticipation of returning home to her late husband and children that held her together, she volunteered.
“It was painful staying in the prison for two months, resisting the temptation of killing myself, thinking about the children’s funeral, thinking about the accusation of something that I have not done.
“No one explained to me what evidence was held against me ...
“I understand that I am guilty of leaving the children in New Zealand, but even if I prove my innocence people will still point fingers at me saying that it’s my fault of leaving the children in New Zealand.”
She reiterated that the children were put in an orphanage.
If she had killed her children, she said, she would have tried to mask her identity in Korea. But she didn’t do that, she insisted, then gave a somewhat convoluted explanation as to why she no longer had her passport.
A stalker, she said, had taken her bag with the document inside.
“When I was being stalked by the stalker, he tried to strangle me,” she allegedly added. “It got to a point where I almost died. Then he threatened to kill me. I was scared and decided to just commit suicide. I stabbed myself eight times. I even reported this incident to police. Why would I reveal myself to the police if I had killed my children?”
She spent about four months in a mental health facility just prior to the children’s bodies being discovered, she told the detective. There, she said, she constantly had suicidal thoughts.
“I have been suffering from mental disorder since when my husband was suffering from his illness,” the detective recalled her later continuing, referring to her husband’s cancer death in November 2017, seven months before her children were killed.
“One day I found myself tying a rope around my neck in my bedroom. I held myself together thinking about the children. The children would be so traumatised if they found me dead.”
She recalled her daughter crying constantly after the death of family patriarch Ian Jo and a decision to visit Australia’s Gold Coast to get everyone out of the house and away from the memories.
“Even when I went to Australia, I found myself trying to jump from the 30th floor of the hotel,” she allegedly said. “I did not do it, thinking of my children.”
She said she decided to pull her children out of school because they were traumatised.
Lee was later asked to read each page of the detective’s notes and initial each one, confirming they were accurate. Upon arriving in New Zealand, he met with a lawyer and decided not to give an official statement.
It was Detective Hwang’s last dealings with her, he told jurors.
Lee’s chattiness on the plane was in stark contrast to her demeanour in court. She has elected to watch the entirety of the trial via audio-video feed from another courtroom. She has looked down, her hair concealing her face, for almost every moment jurors have been seated.
When asked how she wished to plead at the start of the trial last week, she declined to answer or acknowledge the question, leading Justice Goeffrey Venning to enter not guilty pleas for her. While technically representing herself, lawyers Lorraine Smith and Chris Wilkinson-Smith have been authorised to act on her behalf.
Prosecutors Natalie Walker, Jay Tausi and Jong Kim have suggested to jurors that Lee doesn’t fit the narrow definition of legally insane. To be found not guiilty by reason of insanity, jurors will have to find Lee was so mentally unwell she didn’t realise what she was doing was wrong.
But her steps to conceal the bodies, change her identity and start a new life in Korea suggest she knew she had done wrong, prosecutors are expected to argue.
Jurors were sent home early today, with Justice Venning predicting they would hear from the Crown’s final factual witnesses tomorrow before mental health experts for both sides give evidence on Thursday and Friday.
The only other evidence they received today was a written statement from Gold Coast resident Eun Kyung “Christine” Cho, a longtime friend of the defendant’s from their days attending Auckland University of Technology together. She was a bridesmaid at Lee’s wedding.
Cho - who referred to the defendant by her original name, Ji Eun Lee - said she only learned that the defendant’s husband was sick in 2017 after another friend told her he had died.
“What I can say about Ji Eun is that she has a strong pride,” the friend recalled. “She does not talk about her personal issues with others. She also does not talk about her feelings.”
But she added: “From what I know, Ji Eun did not suffer from any mental health issues. She was always bright, smiley and joked around, just like any other normal person.”
The two met up at a fancy seafood restaurant in Surfer’s Paradise during Lee’s trip to Australia in early December 2017, a week after her husband’s death. She recalled that Lee was reluctant to talk about her husband, but Cho was persistent, thinking it would be healthier for her friend to talk about her feelings.
“From the conversation we had, I can clearly remember her telling me that: she never thought about this before but when she was flying to Gold Coast, she wished the plane to crash so her and her children can die together [and] she would have been less sad if her children died instead of her husband.”
Cho told police years later that she didn’t think the conversation was especially unusual or alarming.
“I just thought it was part of the grieving process that she was going through,” she explained.
Cho said she tried to meet up with Lee again before the holiday ended but Lee said she was busy. In the months that followed, she followed up with messages reminding Lee she was there to talk to if wanted.
But she received short replies, making her think Lee didn’t want to be contacted, she said. Lee stopped returning Cho’s messages altogether in April 2018, two months before she would kill her children.
Cho tried reaching out again in June, August, October and November of that year, to no avail. At one point, she realised her friend had changed her profile name on the messaging app to “Hakyung” Lee.
“Sis. Are you doing alright?” Cho asked a final time in November that year, by which time Lee had already started her new life in South Korea under her new identity. “I am starting to get worried.”
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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