From the first time Hakyung “Jasmine” Lee called her mother to report that her husband had been diagnosed with a serious form of cancer, she began making references to suicide, jurors were told today at her double-murder trial.
Over the coming months, as the cancer battle continued and then was lost, she repeated the statement several times.
“The first time I thought it was just a passing phrase,” Choon Ja Lee explained of her daughter today in the High Court at Auckland. “But after hearing it a couple of times again, I was a bit nervous just in case.”
The witness said she advised her daughter to focus instead on helping her husband.
“Don’t have such weak thoughts,” she recalled saying.
But they persisted.
Hakyung Lee, 45, has acknowledged that she killed her children, Yuna Jo, 8, and Minu Jo, 6, in June 2018, seven months after the death of her husband, Ian Jo.
She has also conceded that she wrapped the children’s bodies in layers of plastic and duct tape before placing them in suitcases that she put in storage.
Her standby lawyers have told jurors she should be found not guilty by reason of insanity.
She had prepared what she thought was a fatal overdose of antidepressants for herself and the children, and was surprised to wake up, defence lawyer Lorraine Smith said at the start of the trial this week.
Lee was arrested four years later, after the contents of the storage locker were sold at a Trade Me auction.
To be acquitted by reason of insanity, the jury will have to be convinced that Lee was so mentally unwell that she didn’t understand that what she was doing was wrong.
Crown solicitor Natalie Walker has suggested Lee’s actions immediately after the killings – hiding the bodies, changing her identity and moving overseas – demonstrate a clear understanding of right and wrong.
Choon Ja Lee told jurors today that her daughter appeared to be part of “a happy family” before her husband’s cancer diagnosis.
“My son-in-law told me ... they never fought,” she said through a Korean translator, describing him as “a good person” who worked to support the family while her daughter stayed home to look after the kids.
In the last weeks of her son-in-law’s life, Choon Ja Lee said, she stayed at their Papatoetoe home to look after the children while her daughter spent most waking hours by his side in the hospice.
After his death in November 2022, there was a small funeral service, but the children had not been told that their father was dead.
“I hadn’t seen her crying, but I think she was crying late at night,” Choon Ja Lee said. “I’d seen her in the morning with her eyes swollen.”
Several days later, after the four of them visited Ian Jo’s grave, she recalled her daughter saying, “Let’s go anywhere.”
So they booked an expensive 11-day trip to the Gold Coast and left the next day. Hakyung Lee, who has received a $330,000 life insurance payout, appeared to spend tens of thousands of dollars on the trip. Her mother thought she was trying to find a way to fill the void, so she didn’t comment on her spending, she said.
“She seemed always sad, and it seemed like she was almost disassociating – staring into nothing,” Choon Ja Lee said.
Soon after their return to New Zealand, Hakyung Lee suggested they book a flight to Korea, but Choon Ja Lee suggested they go without her to save money.
At some point, her daughter made a statement about spending all the money and then dying with her children, but her mother said she didn’t take it literally.
“I think she said it without meaning, just because she was upset.”
But she felt the need to address the matter with her daughter, she said.
“She wasn’t eating any meals and it looked like she had no will to live, so I told her, ‘If you really want to follow your husband, go yourself and I’ll look after the kids.’
“She told me, ‘You don’t even speak English. How can I let you look after the kids?’ And then we laughed it off.”
The conversation was unsettling enough that Choon Ja Lee took one extra precaution before returning to her home in Hamilton three days after their flight home from Australia.
“Impulsively, I threw away all the garden chemicals that were kept in the shed,” she said.
“Because my daughter wasn’t in the right mental stage, I was worried she might make a bad choice out of impulse.”
Hakyung Lee and her children flew to Korea on Christmas Day 2017. Choon Ja Lee said she never saw the children again, only learning that they had returned to New Zealand through her son-in-law’s family.
Her worry grew in the years that followed, and she went to the police multiple times trying to find out the whereabouts of her daughter and grandchildren, she said.
It wasn’t until June 2022 that she received a call from her former pastor telling her he had been contacted by a psychiatric facility in Korea trying to find Choon Ja Lee. They had her daughter, she was told.
“When I called, the first thing I asked her was, ‘What happened to the kids?’ and she replied, ‘Mum, I don’t have kids.’”
But because her daughter was in a mental hospital, she just thought, “Oh, she must be really unwell.”
She didn’t have another opportunity to ask her daughter about it. Doctors advised her not to say anything to her daughter that might provoke her, so she avoided the subject, adding that she hoped the children were with extended family in Korea.
She flew to Korea for a month to be with her daughter, but different return flights had to be booked because her daughter caught Covid-19, she said. Her daughter was supposed to fly back one week later, but she never got on the flight.
Two days after Choon Ja Lee returned to New Zealand, police told her that the children’s bodies had been found.
It would be several more months before Hakyung Lee was brought back to New Zealand in the company of a detective, extradition order in hand.
During cross-examination today, Hakyung Lee’s standby lawyer pointed out that the defendant had met her husband through church in about 2006. She was a Sunday school teacher and he was president of the church’s youth group, jurors were told.
It was a model marriage, Smith suggested.
“Yes, of course,” Choon Ja Lee agreed. “People in church praised my son-in-law a lot, that he was the best husband. The relationship was very good between them ...
“Because Jasmine was a very active member of the church, everyone said she was good and praised her ... Everyone said that the two had good chemistry. They were very happy together.”
But something in her daughter changed after the cancer diagnosis, and especially after Ian Jo’s death, the witness said.
“She was struggling,” Choon Ja Lee explained. “It felt like a different person.”
Even the defendant’s children noticed, Choon Ja Lee said.
“Grandma, Grandma, my mum is weird, my mum is weird,” she recalled Yuna saying on at least one occasion as the child made a circular motion with her finger around her ear.
The trial is set to resume tomorrow before Justice Geoffrey Venning and the jury.
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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