After three years of denying responsibility in various forms, it might have been a Minecraft trophy that sealed child-killing mum Hakyung “Jasmine” Lee’s fate as a convicted double-murderer.
The $20 Triple Dip Lotto ticket didn’t help either.
The 45-year-old started her Auckland High Court trial earlier this month with silence and refusal to make eye contact when asked by Justice Geoffrey Venning how she wished to plead, despite a 2023 courtroom outburst in which she loudly proclaimed her innocence.
The previous denials were in the face of strong evidence Lee killed her daughter Yuna Jo, 8, and her little brother, Minu Jo, 6, inside the family’s Papatoetoe home, and hid their bodies in suitcases.
They were discovered four years later when Lee stopped paying the bills at a storage facility where she had dumped the luggage before moving overseas under a new name.
But by the start of the trial, despite her silence, she had signed a document acknowledging she alone was responsible for their deaths and concealed bodies. Instead, her standby lawyers would explain, she was asking jurors to find her not guilty due to insanity.
To reach such a verdict, the six-man and six-woman panel would have to be convinced she was suffering a disease of the mind so severe she didn’t understand that what she was doing was morally wrong when she killed her children.
Defence lawyer Lorraine Smith described her this week as a “fragile person” who could have only transformed from a doting mother to someone who could commit such unspeakable acts but for two words: mental illness.
“This was a happy little family and Jasmine loved Minu and Yuna, but then her husband got ill and died and she began her descent into a living hell,” Smith said.
But the Minecraft trophy, among other evidence like the Lotto ticket, created a timeline that prosecutors said showed the opposite - “a cold calculation ... showing ruthless rationality of action”.
“It was a selfish act to free herself from the burden of parenting alone,” Crown Solicitor Natalie Walker told jurors.
“It was not the altruistic act of a mother who had lost her mind and believed it was the morally right thing to do, it was the opposite.
“Ms Lee deliberately and in sound mind murdered Minu and Yuna ”
Jurors clearly preferred the Crown narrative, finding Lee guilty of both children’s murders today after just under 3.5 hours of deliberations.
Justice Venning has set a sentencing date for November 26, during which Lee will most likely face an automatic life sentence. The alternative, had she been acquitted, likely would have been a compulsory stay at the Mason Clinic lockdown psychiatric facility with no set end date.
With the trial now concluded, the full story of the seven-year path to justice can be reported for the first time.
Her name, initially, was Ji Eun Lee, although everyone in New Zealand called her by her chosen Western name, Jasmine.
She was a Sunday school teacher who met her youth leader husband in church and decided to quit her career in hotel hospitality to become a stay-at-home mum after their first child was born in 2009.
It appeared to be a good life, with her mother describing the couple as the envy of their church, and a teacher at their children’s primary school describing them as one of her favourite families.
But then in 2017, husband Ian Jo - who had supported the family through various roles at Auckland Airport - was diagnosed with an aggressive form of oesophageal cancer. He died in November that year.
In his last agonising days, there was the first foreshadowing of the grisly crime that was to follow seven months later.
Ian Jo had fled his hospice, and it was feared he might try to end his life on his own terms in a one-vehicle crash near East Auckland’s Duder Regional Park.
Lee convinced her husband to return with a texted threat: If he died, she and the children were going to die too.
The defendant later insisted to mental health professionals that it was an empty threat only intended to keep her husband safe. She had no intention of killing herself or her children, she said. She dismissed their worries in part as not understanding Korean culture.
But more hints would soon emerge during her peculiar grieving process.
For days, she didn’t tell the children about their father’s death, witnesses said. Then she permanently pulled them out of school and began to take a series of ritzy, impromptu trips, saying she could no longer bear to stay at the family home.
While in Australia’s Gold Coast, she told a longtime friend she wished she and the children had died on the plane ride over and revealed she would have preferred her children to die rather than her husband.
She told her mother she wanted to burn through the $330,000 life insurance payout before dying with the children. Her mother didn’t think she was capable of carrying out such a horrifying act but, as a precaution, threw out some poisonous garden chemicals before returning to her home in Hamilton.
It wouldn’t happen until months later - authorities believe on the afternoon or evening of June 27, 2018.
Lee and her children had returned home from a trip to Queenstown on June 23.
In her own account, recently relayed to a pair of psychiatrists in separate interviews, Lee said she couldn’t remember the exact date.
What she could remember, she said, was dissolving sleeping pills Nortriptyline into juice and offering it to her unsuspecting children.
As it kicked in, the children both walked off to their bedrooms, then she prepared what she hoped was a fatal dose for herself, she explained in one account.
She was surprised to wake up the next day, but her children were dead, she said. She then took the remainder of the pills and tried again, but again woke up a day later, according to her account.
The children’s deaths, she claimed, were more of an afterthought. The real goal, she said, was to kill herself after months of crippling depression.
She thought it would be more cruel to leave the children behind to find her body and live out their lives as orphans, she explained to a psychiatrist who would later end up the defence’s sole witness.
Police meticulously went through Lee’s bank records for that period and there were two days - the 25th and 26th of June - when there were no financial transactions. At first glance, they appeared to match Lee’s story of having slept for two days after successive unsuccessful suicide attempts.
But then came the Minecraft trophies.
On June 27, someone logged onto the family’s PlayStation under her son’s “HeroMinu” profile at 10.53am. Police know this because his account updated with a Minecraft trophy set at that time. At 12.07pm, her daughter’s “PrincessYuna” profile also updated.
By that time, it appears the children had been left alone at the house, the Crown suggested.
Financial transactions and documents suggest Lee went to a justice of the peace that morning in an effort to get her name changed. At 12.07pm, she bought an envelope from Manukau City Post and 16 minutes later she paid for courier tracking - it would seem for the name change document.
At 12.45pm, she went to Mitre 10 and bought plastic rubbish bags, bubble wrap and duct tape followed by a lunch purchase 12 minutes later. The suitcases the children were later found in were wrapped in rubbish bags and duct tape.
Under the Crown theory, Lee then went home and killed her children - not suicidal but wanting to start a new identity and a new life without them.
She either gave them a fatal dose of the sleeping pill or gave them enough to subdue them then killed them by other methods such as suffocation, it was suggested.
An examination of the 6-year-old’s remains years later would bolster the theory that they died that day. He was wearing days-of-the-week underwear marked with the word “Wednesday,” which coincided with the 27th.
If she was taking steps to change her name and buy items to conceal their bodies before their deaths, that suggests premeditation rather than an impromptu, irrational act, the Crown argued.
Transactions in the days that followed also called into question Lee’s claim that she was so suicidal and without hope that she couldn’t see what she was doing was wrong.
On Thursday, she submitted an application to sit a test for her full driver’s licence, purchased a new suitcase and travel adaptor for an overseas trip, and paid $497 to begin her storage contract with Safe Store Papatoetoe.
On Friday, she sat her driver’s test, purchased the Lotto ticket and spent about 2.5 hours and $900 at an Albany hair salon.
On Saturday, she returned to Mitre 10 and purchased more plastic bags and a padlock. She returned to Safe Store three times that day - at some point, prosecutors suggested, taking the bodies of her children there.
In the month that followed, Lee would hire movers to put all of the family’s other belongings in the storage shed before flying business class to South Korea under her new name and passport. She wouldn’t return to NZ again until four years later, after her insurance money had run out and under police escort.
Little is known about Lee’s time living overseas until March 2022, when she was admitted to a psychiatric hospital in Seoul.
On her hospital admission documents, a psychiatrist noted she claimed to have been so suicidal she had ingested 170 sleeping pills on one occasion and stabbed herself eight times in the neck on another.
She said she underwent surgery in intensive care after the first stabbing, but NZ authorities could not find hospital records confirming or denying the account.
While talking to psychiatrists there, Lee didn’t mention her deceased children. She denied being a mother at all. Lee instead said she decided to kill herself after a man she had met on a dating app started stalking her and then tried to strangle and rob her.
Her mother, whose attempts to find Lee and her grandchildren over the years had fallen on deaf ears, was contacted by the psychiatric facility in June 2022 and flew to Korea to be reunited with her daughter.
But doctors warned her not to say anything that might upset her daughter, so she didn’t persist after asking one time where Yuna and Minu were.
“Mum, I don’t have kids,” she recalled her daughter saying,
Lee had been scheduled to return to NZ in August 2022, but that was when her children’s bodies were finally discovered after four years.
While under psychiatric care, she was unable to continue making payments to the storage facility, and after several months the contents of the shed had been auctioned off on Trade Me for about $400.
The family that won the auction opened the first suitcase in their front yard, not wanting to take it inside because of the odd smell.
The scene that followed was so macabre it made headlines around the world. Widespread interest in the case hasn’t abated since then.
Lee was extradited to NZ in November 2022, and the denials began immediately.
She insisted to a bilingual New Zealand Police detective who accompanied her on the redeye flight that she had left her children in orphanages to protect them from the suicidal thoughts she was having at the time.
“I know who did it but it does not matter,” the detective 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 NZ along where my husband and children are. That is why I wanted and waited to go back to NZ.”
Multiple court-ordered psychiatric evaluations would follow in the years to come. Most details of that process can only be reported now because it was argued that earlier reporting could have jeopardised her right to a fair trial.
By early 2023, Lee’s assigned lawyers were citing her mental health as a reason to keep her name suppressed in New Zealand even though her name had been reported overseas.
The name suppression bid failed, in part because Lee expressed indifference to her lawyer’s efforts - insisting she had nothing to hide.
“I don’t care [about] the trial…it’s none of my business any more," she told a psychiatrist.
“The truth isn’t going to change. They can ask me a 100….a 1000 times if I killed my kids and I’ll say 100…1000 times that I didn’t do it. It’s the truth, it’s a fact.
“If the judge says, ‘Show me the proof,’ I’m a mother - that’s the proof. My husband is gone, I’m the only parent... That’s the proof I didn’t do it. I know I don’t have to prove my innocence, but I have the proof… I’m a mother.”
She reiterated that stance in April 2023, via an outburst during a brief routine court appearance: “I didn’t do it, it’s the truth,” she said, raising her hand to address the court moments before she was led away by security officers.
Lee’s fitness to stand trial was considered in March 2023 and again in May this year, but on both occasions, she was found to be able to understand court proceedings enough for a trial to take place.
It was at the May hearing that her standby lawyers told the court they would be pursuing a not guilty by reason of insanity defence, although it could not yet be reported at the time.
The media also didn’t report when Lee was temporarily admitted to the Mason Clinic in February 2024, two months ahead of her original trial date.
On April 29 last year, as a jury panel waited downstairs for what was supposed to be the first day of her trial, her standby lawyers asked for it to be adjourned even if there wouldn’t be a new date available until 2026.
There had been a major breakthrough in the last five days, explained Philip Hamlin, who had been one of her standby lawyers at the time.
After months of standoffishness, she had opened up to the lawyers about her case for the first time, he explained.
“She wanted this trial to start, go ahead and prove her innocence,” he told Justice Rebecca Edwards, who had been scheduled to oversee the original trial.
“It’s not quite that easy, because what she’s told us means further investigation and inquiries need to be made.”
Hamlin suggested a private investigator was needed to track down potentially critical new defence evidence in New Zealand and South Korea.
“I really have no other option but to adjourn this trial for fair trial rights,” Justice Edwards reluctantly agreed.
But by the time the trial began earlier this month, those lines of inquiry appeared to have been abandoned in light of the insanity defence.
With the landscape of Lee’s trial suddenly shifted by her admission she had killed her children, many witnesses were no longer needed in person.
Jurors were instead read agreed facts or earlier affidavits that had been collected by police - cutting the duration of the trial nearly in half from the four weeks that had been initially envisioned.
But two witnesses remained critical to the jury’s decision: forensic psychiatrists Yvette Kelly, called by the defence, and Erik Monasterio, called by the Crown.
In the end, it came down to one question for which the two experts at first starkly disagreed: Was she so mentally unwell she didn’t understand the moral wrongness of what she was doing?
“I have no doubt she was labouring under a complex and prolonged grief reaction, but I have no evidence that she was impaired or experienced symptoms of psychosis or severe cognitive impairment,” Monasterio told jurors.
While Lee told the psychiatrist recently, for the first time, that she was hearing voices that told her to kill her children, the Crown expert dismissed the claim as not credible.
He cited the opinion of a doctor in Korea who evaluated Lee five days before her extradition: “A significant doubt is raised regarding the reliability of the details reported by the patient. She has a histrionic personality and an exaggerated and passionate appearance even during interview”.
Monasterio reached a similar conclusion.
“In my opinion, it’s probable that the defendant is intentionally withholding information regarding significant elements of the alleged offences,” he said.
He explained Lee’s actions immediately after the children’s deaths, including getting a new passport and moving overseas, showed “capacity to undertake organised, complex, and cognitively demanding activities” that wouldn’t be possible if she was so unwell she didn’t know right from wrong.
There was no “severe detachment from reality” that the courts usually see in insanity cases, he opined.
The defence-called psychiatrist disagreed.
Lee’s severe depression was paired with an irrational belief that she had somehow caused the deaths of her husband and her father 20 years earlier, and a belief she was to blame for her son having been born with a cleft lip, Kelly testified.
It caused a confused state in which Lee spontaneously decided killing her children was the altruistic thing to do as she planned her own death, the psychiatrist said.
However, the expert’s opinion on Lee’s grasp of moral wrongfulness shifted somewhat when prosecutors put to her their theory that Lee had been taking steps to change her name and buying items to conceal the bodies hours before she killed the children.
If the timeline was correct and there was evidence of premeditation, then “it is certainly damning”, the expert conceded.
During closing arguments this week, the defence insisted that premeditation hadn’t been established.
Smith called into question the veracity of the PlayStation evidence, pointing out that it was retrieved by a police employee with a game controller after Sony wouldn’t provide user data.
But even if the children were still alive while Lee was taking steps to change her name, it wasn’t necessarily a sign of nefarious intent, the defence lawyer argued. In Korean culture people sometimes change their names to ward off bad luck, she explained.
And the rubbish bags and duct tape bought at Mitre 10 that day could have been intended only for packing up belongings to put in storage with the intent of moving the entire family to Korea, Smith suggested.
The idea it was a premeditated killing might be “superficially attractive”, she said, but it “disintegrates under closer inspection”.
She noted that Lee didn’t change her surname or date of birth, suggesting she wasn’t actually trying to hide.
“If Jasmine really was a cold, calculating murderer don’t you think she would have tried to get rid of all these belongings?” Smith said.
“If she was sane and not mentally ill, wouldn’t you think she would take the children’s bodies some place where they could never be found?”
She accused the Crown of trying to “ignore how ill this woman was“.
It stretched back as far as her late teens, when she tried to step in front of traffic after an argument with her parents but was stopped by a bystander, she said.
Lee first started to break as her husband was dying, but she had her mother there for support and the intervention of a hospice counsellor, Smith said.
But for seven months after his death, she said, there was “a lonely descent into isolation” as she pushed away anyone who tried to support her.
“There is a vicious circle. The more depressed Jasmine gets, the more isolated she becomes,” Smith said.
“The more isolated she is, that lessens the chances that her mental illness will trigger an alert to professional people who could step in and give her the help that she needed...
“So this was a very dark time in the winter of 2018 for Jasmine and the children. And this time there was no one coming to save them.”
The prosecution agreed it was a dark time, but they disagreed it had anything to do with a break from reality.
The defendant can’t be trusted, Walker said, suggesting the defendant was caught in lie after lie until she finally found a psychiatrist willing to take her evolving story at face value.
“I suggest Ms Lee was interrogated a little more rigorously by Dr Monasterio, particularly on the implausibility of her account that she tried to commit suicide using only half of the remaining pills,” Walker told jurors.
“As Dr Monasterio said to you in his evidence, it is imperative that forensic psychiatrists aim to substantiate the accounts provided to them by defendants and to do this by reference to the available disclosure.”
She reminded jurors of each “unthinkable” step the mother took to hide what she had done.
“Ms Lee ... put each of her clothed, dead children in three layers of plastic each - each of which she knotted then lifted into the next layer and then knotted, lifted into the next layer, and then knotted and then lifted and put into the suitcase, which she zipped up and locked and then lifted into a plastic bag which she taped...
“It’s quite unimaginable, and yet that’s what she did.
“It would’ve required real planning, real care, real determination.”
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.