RESOLVING THE LEDGER
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Following 12 years of incarceration over the sensational 2014 murder of Oak Park’s Sheila von Wiese-Mack in Indonesia, the man long accused of beating her to death is asking a federal judge in Chicago to let him out of jail.
Tommy Schaefer, 33, filed a motion for release Friday, moments before a scheduled appearance before U.S. District Judge Matthew Kennelly. The judge said he would consider the request during a hearing Aug. 27.
Schaefer made his request six months after being returned to Chicago from Indonesia, where he’d been imprisoned for more than 11 years over the 2014 murder. He is the ex-boyfriend of Heather Mack, von Wiese-Mack’s daughter.
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Kennelly sentenced Mack , 30, to 26 years in prison in 2024 for conspiring with Schaefer to kill her mother overseas. Schaefer is set for trial Jan. 11.
Schaefer’s attorney, Michael Baker, argued in a four-page court filing Friday that Schaefer is not actually charged with a crime of violence in the United States. Rather, he is charged with conspiracy and obstruction of justice.
Baker went on to write that Schaefer suffers from “serious and ongoing health problems.” He contracted COVID-19 in Indonesia, Baker wrote, and he’s since been diagnosed with a post-infectious condition. Cardiac evaluations are ongoing.
“The conditions of Mr. Schaefer’s pretrial detention are not adequate to properly monitor, manage, or treat his condition, and his continued incarceration delays the very evaluation his providers have ordered,” Baker wrote. “Release from custody, with conditions, would permit Mr. Schaefer to complete that workup and to obtain the medical care and monitoring his condition requires.”
Baker suggested electronic monitoring, home confinement and an unnamed third-party custodian. He denied that Schaefer is a flight risk or danger to the community.
Federal prosecutors are likely to oppose Schaefer’s request.
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Mack and Schaefer are accused of planning von Wiese-Mack’s murder to access her $1.5 million estate. The killing triggered tabloid headlines around the world after her body was found stuffed in a suitcase outside the posh St. Regis Bali Resort.
Mack broached the idea of killing her mother with Schaefer as early as February 2014, the feds say. Schaefer wrote in a Facebook chat that month, “that b---- heather is crazy” and added “she asked me to find someone to kill her mom for 50k.”
The feds say Mack ultimately enlisted Schaefer, secretly booking a $12,000 plane ticket for him so he could rendezvous with her while she vacationed with her mother in Bali in August 2014.
Then, over the course of nearly 40 minutes on the morning of Aug. 12, 2014, prosecutors say Mack and Schaefer exchanged tense, excited text messages as they prepared to murder von Wiese-Mack. They allegedly used the phrase “saying hi” as code for the killing, and they referred to each other as Bonnie and Clyde.
Soon after, prosecutors say, von Wiese-Mack “was brutally beaten after being taken by surprise as she lay in her hotel bed.”
Mack’s plea agreement alleged that Schaefer “repeatedly beat [von Wiese-Mack] in the head and face,” ending her life.
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