A major phase of Hakyung “Jasmine” Lee’s double murder trial has concluded with the Crown’s final factual witness giving a glimpse into her young children’s activities on what is believed to be their final day of life.
Justice Geoffrey Venning sent jurors home from the High Court at Auckland just after midday, with a promise they’d hear from defence witnesses starting tomorrow.
Standby lawyers Lorraine Smith and Chris Wilkinson-Smith have not indicated if Lee will be among the defence witnesses.
Her participation in the trial has been minimal to date.
The 45-year-old has not been in the same courtroom as jurors since the first day of the trial a week and a half ago, when she refused to plead to the murder charges.
The judge entered not guilty pleas on her behalf and allowed her to watch the rest of the trial from another courtroom through CCTV.
Defence lawyers have since clarified the not guilty plea is due to their assertion she was insane at the time of the killings - not because she didn’t do it.
Lee initially denied responsibility for the children’s deaths.
However, she signed a statement of agreed facts at the start of the trial acknowledging she killed the children with a prescription sleeping medication in late June 2018, seven months after her husband - their father - died from cancer.
In a new set of agreed facts read to jurors today, she also acknowledged leaving New Zealand permanently one month later via a business class flight to South Korea.
She did so under a new name and passport, both of which were requested soon after the children’s deaths.
While little is known beyond the broadly agreed facts about the children’s deaths, prosecutors have indicated they believe the children were killed on June 27, 2018.
Police digital forensic analyst Damain Govender spent the morning walking jurors through his examination of a PlayStation 4 that was found in the same Papatoetoe storage unit where the bodies of Yuna Jo, 8, and Minu Jo, 6, had been hidden for four years inside suitcases wrapped in plastic wrap and duct tape.
The console data shows that a user by the handle of “HeroMinu” appears to have logged onto the console at 10.53am that day, possibly to play Minecraft.
A player named “PrincessYuna35″ appears to have last logged on at 12.07pm, Govender said.
Lee’s movements in the days that follow are more clearly outlined.
Detective Sergeant Ryan Singleton, the officer in charge of the homicide investigation and today’s only other witness, briefly reviewed with jurors how police traced Lee’s actions on June 30, 2018, through receipts and Google Maps.
Lee left Mitre 10, having just bought rubbish bags and a padlock, at 3.03pm that day then logged in at Safe Store Papatoetoe at 3.12pm. Police recreated the drive three times, confirming that she could have easily made it from the first location to the second within nine minutes.
Records then show she left the storage facility at 3.25pm, returning at 3.41pm. The time gap was enough for a round trip to her home and back, the detective said.
The detective also outlined attempts by Lee’s mother, in the years that followed, to find the defendant and the children. Records show she went to an Auckland police station in December 2018, and an immigration check found that Lee had left the country.
A check was never conducted for Minu and Yuna - possibly, Singleton said, because police were not given dates of birth and their names weren’t spelt correctly.
The defendant’s mother followed up at a Hamilton police station four days later, but on neither occasion did she express any specific safety concerns and so missing persons reports were not filed, Singleton said.
The Korean Embassy in NZ contacted Lee’s mother in June 2022, after Lee listed her as next-of-kin upon being admitted to a mental health facility in Korea.
It would still be two more months before the children’s bodies were discovered, and five months before Lee was brought back to NZ to face trial.
Although the Crown has finished calling factual witnesses, there may still be other prosecution witnesses to come.
If the defence chooses to call mental health experts who suggest Lee was insane at the time of the killings, the Crown has an opportunity to call experts with contrasting opinions.
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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