After her husband died of cancer in late 2017, Auckland resident Hakyung “Jasmine” Lee used the life insurance payout to go on a spending spree that included clothes, spa treatments and extravagant travel with their two young children, whom she permanently pulled out of school.
It was the beginning of a spiral “into madness” that seven months later resulted in the deaths of 6-year-old son Minu and 8-year-old daughter Yuna, Lee’s standby lawyer told jurors today as the first day of evidence began in her double-murder trial.
“She was beginning to unravel as her descent into hell began,” Lorraine Smith said as Lee watched via closed-circuit TV from another courtroom, her head bowed and her long hair concealing the entirety of her face.
“She felt it was best if they all died together,” Smith said, explaining the defendant divided up old antidepressant sleeping medication between her and her children. “When she woke up, she saw the children were dead but she was alive.
“She has killed her children but she is not guilty of murder by reason of insanity.”
Crown solicitor Natalie Walker acknowledged during her opening remarks today that Lee’s actions in late June 2018 were “unfathomable”.
But the defendant’s suspicious activity immediately afterwards – changing her identity and flying business class to South Korea to start a new life – goes against the legal definition of insanity, the prosecutor said. It indicates she appreciated that killing was wrong, she said.
Lee, 45, was charged with murder in September 2022, one month after a family discovered the children’s bodies stuffed in two suitcases that had been obtained from the auction of an abandoned storage shed.
But by then, authorities said, she had been living for four years in Korea. She returned to New Zealand in November 2022 – this time accompanied by a detective with an extradition order.
“I was accused of something I have not done,” she allegedly told the detective during the long flight, explaining she had only agreed to return to New Zealand because she wanted to bury her children.
“I know who did it, but it doesn’t matter,” she allegedly said at another point. “I just want to say I did not do it and I want to die in New Zealand, where my husband and children are.”
As jury selection began yesterday in the High Court at Auckland, Justice Geoffrey Venning entered not guilty pleas on Lee’s behalf. She refused to respond when the murder charges were put to her.
The prosecution’s opening address was the first time a detailed account of the children’s deaths had been made public.
Lee acknowledged through her lawyers she drugged the children with Nortriptyline, a drug she had been prescribed in August 2017 after telling her GP she was having trouble sleeping.
She is charged with having killed the children sometime in the month between June 23 and July 27, but it’s now believed they died on the afternoon of June 27.
That’s the last time the children used their PlayStation accounts, under the handles “Princess” and “Hero”, to play Minecraft. In addition, her son’s body was found to be wearing underwear marked “Wednesday”, which matches that day.
Investigators found she had purchased duct tape and rubbish bags from a Manukau Mitre 10 that same day and returned to the store three days later to buy a padlock and more plastic bags.
The children would later be discovered in the foetal position in the two maroon suitcases, wrapped in three layers of plastic bags.
The court heard Lee paid for a storage shed at Safe Store Papatoetoe on June 28 and later took the suitcases to the facility. Movers were hired weeks later to take the rest of her household contents to the same shed.
On the same day of the children’s deaths, Walker said Lee purchased a courier envelope that would be used to apply for her new name. Up until that point, she had been known by the name Ji Eun Lee.
In the weeks that followed, she obtained a new driver’s licence and passport under the name Hakyung Lee and sat a driver’s test in a newly purchased VW Golf.
She spent $900 in a single trip to a hair salon.
Lee flew to Seoul under her new identity on July 29, 2018, two days after her final visit to the storage facility. She then continued to pay the storage fees from abroad until April 2022, when she ran into financial trouble while at a psychiatric facility in Korea, prosecutors said.
The contents of the shed were sold on Trade Me for $431 several months after Lee’s payments stopped. On August 11, 2022, the highest bidder made the gruesome discovery while sorting through the items outside his Clendon Park home.
The bidder had opened the first suitcase on the concrete driveway because of what he suspected to be a “dead rat” smell, he told police. An autopsy found the antidepressant, a drug not allowed for children, in both sets of remains.
“The Nortriptyline [in the children’s bodies] had a role, there’s no doubt about that,” pathologist Dr Simon Stables told jurors this afternoon.
But because of the state of decomposition, he said, it remained unknown whether the children had been given a fatal overdose or killed another way.
If stupefied by drugs, “it would be very easy to suffocate a child and leave no signs at all at post-mortem”, he said.
Either way amounts to murder, Walker told jurors during her closing address.
Jurors were told Lee moved to New Zealand 1993, aged 13, and attended Auckland Girls Grammar. She went back to Korea for a couple of years after her father’s death when she was 18 but then resettled in Auckland and obtained a hospitality degree from AUT.
She met her husband through church in 2006.
After the births of their children in 2010 and 2012, Lee stayed home while her husband supported the family through various jobs at Auckland Airport.
Ian Jo was diagnosed with oesophageal cancer in March 2017 and died eight months later. Over the course of his cancer battle, Lee made several alarming statements to her mother and nursing staff about not wanting to live if her husband died.
But for the most part, she insisted she would never hurt her children, witnesses are expected to say.
On one occasion, when her husband left hospice and it was feared he would end his own life, she texted: “If you die, I will die with our kids.”
After Ian Jo succumbed to cancer, Lee pulled her children out of Papatoetoe South School and allegedly told a teacher she didn’t want them to know their father had died until after back-to-back holidays in Australia’s Gold Coast and Korea.
She wasn’t sure if they’d return to school the next year, she allegedly said.
During the Australia trip in late 2017, Lee met up with an old friend and allegedly said she wished the plane had crashed on the way over so they could have all died together. She also allegedly told the friend she would have been less sad if her children had died instead of her husband, Walker told jurors.
In a separate conversation with her mother, Lee allegedly signalled she wanted to burn through the $330,000 life insurance payout then die with her children.
“I understand how you feel and where you’re coming from,” her mother responded, according to her account to police. “But if you want to die, die alone.
“Leave them [the children] with me. I will take care of them.”
The defendant scoffed at the idea, according to prosecutors.
“You can’t even speak English,” she allegedly responded to her mother. “How can you look after them?”
While not much is known about what Lee did during the four years she was in Korea, it appears she might have lived off her savings, Walker said.
By the time she killed her children, she had isolated herself and the children from her mother and all other relatives, jurors were told.
In the years that followed, her mother had gone to police in Auckland and Hamilton and to the Korean Consulate in an effort to find her daughter and grandchildren.
She would finally locate her daughter during Lee’s final months in Korea, after the mother was listed as a next of kin at the psychiatric facility where Lee was by then staying. Lee’s mother asked her where the grandchildren were.
“What are you talking about?” Lee is alleged to have responded. “I never had any children.”
With most of the facts now agreed, the jury’s main task will be to consider Lee’s mental state at the time of the killings.
The defence’s opening statement is always, by design, much shorter than the lengthy opening address allowed for the Crown. But Smith, Lee’s standby lawyer, promised jurors they would hear much more about mental health as the four-week trial continues.
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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