Days after her double-murder trial had already begun, Hakyung “Jasmine” Lee made a potentially ground-shifting revelation during a behind-the-scenes psychiatric interview.
She had been hearing voices in her head consistently for the past eight years, starting in the months leading up to the June 2018 killing of children Minu Jo, 6, and Yuna Jo, 8, she disclosed for the first time last Friday.
“She claimed that she heard ‘hallucinated’ voices telling her to kill the children,” forensic psychiatrist Erik Monasterio told jurors in the High Court at Auckland today.
The claim, if accepted by the jury as true, could have a major impact on Lee’s not guilty by reason of insanity defence. But Monasterio, the final witness in what has been a two-week trial, was careful to temper expectations.
“The nature of these is very atypical,” he said of the reported voices, adding it would be “extremely rare” for someone to harbour auditory hallucinations for eight years without a mental health professional noticing.
His conclusion, he said, was that he did not believe an insanity defence was available to Lee.
“In my opinion, there is no evidence that the defendant did not know or understand the moral wrongfulness of her actions at the material time,” Monasterio said.
Jurors are expected to make their own conclusion early next week after closing addresses by the Crown and Lee’s standby lawyers on Monday.
Lee, 45, had been in contact with mental health professionals immediately before her extradition to New Zealand in 2022 and multiple times since as she’s awaited trial in custody.
Monasterio, who was called by the Crown to rebut an expert called by the defence yesterday, acknowledged it was unusual to be conducting a forensic interview after a trial had begun but he was confident with his conclusions despite the time pressure.
He said Lee claimed to hear four or five different voices “all the time” in three different languages. But he said she couldn’t give more detailed examples of what was said.
Usually when one is schizophrenic, he pointed out, the person doesn’t describe voices in his or her head.
“It’s not a thought,” he said. “It’s a voice. It’s heard.”
He said it is for the jury to decide if the reported voices were “made up or not”, but he was confident that if they did exist they weren’t attributable to psychosis or a mental condition.
He said Lee probably experienced a major depressive disorder or a prolonged grief disorder after the death of her husband.
But those are diagnoses that could be seen in potentially up to 40% of the population after the death of a family member, he said, adding it would be a stretch to consider something so common a “disease of the mind”.
More importantly, he said, the disorders didn’t seem to impact her capacity to understand the world around her or problem-solve. She was able to make an application for a name change, hire a storage facility, sit a driver’s test and make preparations to move overseas, he noted.
His assessments contrasted with the initial report from fellow forensic psychiatrist Yvette Kelly, who said Lee suffered a disease of the mind that caused her to not realise the moral wrongfulness of killing her children.
That assessment was based in part on another interview in which Lee admitted for the first time after years of denial that she had killed her children.
Her only desire was to kill herself but she thought it would be cruel for her children to find her body and live as orphans, so she decided to give all three of them a fatal overdose of sleeping pills, Lee said. When she awoke to find her children dead, she tried a second overdose with the pills that were left, she told the psychiatrist.
But Kelly’s opinion appeared to change during cross-examination when Crown solicitor Natalie Walker suggested to her the children had still been alive when Lee bought plastic bags and duct tape and took steps to change her name. It was also suggested Lee had bought a Lotto ticket in the days after the children’s deaths.
If there were elements of premeditation, the expert said, “I would have to rethink the whole thing”.
She walked back the statement a bit today, as defence lawyer Chris Wilkinson-Smith questioned her one final time.
The bags and tape Lee bought at Mitre 10 could have been to prepare for moving, with no intention at the time of using them to conceal her children’s bodies, he suggested. And it will be up to the jury to decide if evidence from the family’s PlayStation console is reliable enough to convince them the children were still alive at the time of the shopping trip, Wilkinson-Smith said.
Kelly maintained her assessment that Lee had a disease of the mind, but she was tepid regarding her earlier determination that Lee also didn’t understand the moral wrongfulness of her actions.
“I’m curious as to why I’m getting all of this so late in the piece,” she said. “I feel like I really need to see the timeline to give a clear opinion about that.”
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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