On her last day as a free person in the languid sunshine of Denpasar, Bali, Heather Mack found herself trapped in an invisible cage that only felt like freedom.
The beginning of the end for Heather and then-boyfriend Tommy Schaefer started with a manic night when Schaefer arrived at the St. Regis Hotel in Bali’s exclusive Nusa Dua area shortly before 1 a.m. on Tuesday, Aug. 12, 2014.
Schaefer had spent the flight across 13 time zones drinking in the posh confines of international business class. He and Heather spent the rest of the night meeting furtively on the beach together, texting back and forth between their rooms about how to kill Heather’s mother, Sheila Mack, and, for Tommy more drinking.
It all culminated just after 9 a.m. with the brutal murder of the 62-year-old woman as she lay in her bed.
For the rest of that day, the two engaged in a series of efforts to hide their crime, escape from the hotel without being seen and elude police while finding a place to hide. But the two young conspirators were already caught in that invisible cage; each had a return ticket to the states, but Heather had no passport — her mother had had hers locked in the hotel safe. They had a credit card stolen from Sheila and a little cash, but no other resources. And at 6 foot-3, Schaefer could run but could not hide for long.
When Heather attempted to check in at the Risata Resort in the Kuta neighborhood with no luggage and no passport, hotel staff became suspicious. When a staffer later heard of the killing in Nusa Dua, and Sheila’s name was recognized from the credit card Heather used, police were contacted.
The morning of August 13, shortly before 8 a.m., a police officer posing as a housekeeper knocked on the door of Room 1701 at the very back of the resort property. When a groggy Schaefer opened the door, officers pushed their way into the room and arrested the two without incident.
Now, 11 years later, Mack’s time as an international celebrity with financial resources in a sunny Balinese prison is a faded memory. Now, she is just one of hundreds of thousands of U.S. federal inmates. The once privileged and spoiled girl is now a woman about to turn 30, facing the cold and dreary prospect of nearly 20 more years of imprisonment behind steel bars and razor wire.
Reality bites
Australian journalist Andrea Dixon has spent more time with Mack since her 2014 arrest than anyone else, including flying back to the United States with her after her release from the Bali prison. Dixon, who continues to interview Mack regularly, is both writing a book and working with a production company on a documentary about Mack and her mother.
There is much Dixon will not talk about (“You’ll have to read the book”), but she was willing to speak generally about how Mack is dealing with prison and other things related to her case.
While Dixon does not view Mack as a sympathetic character, she said Mack is not the person people have been led to believe she is, saying, “She does some good things. It’s kind of contradictory.”
Dixon said she believes Mack still hasn’t come to terms with what happened 11 years ago. “I think she’s still stunned that it all happened,” she said.
She said Mack has been disabused of various notions over the past 11 years. One of the most jarring was her arrest by FBI agents as she de-planed in Chicago in November 2021.
“You can say she was happy on the plane,” Dixon said. “She only thought she was going to be questioned by the FBI.” But Mack, who had spoken of moving to California with her young daughter and starting a new life was, unbeknownst to her, already criminally indicted for conspiracy to commit the murder of her mother.
But Mack holds on to other notions. Dixon said Mack, who is not scheduled to be released from prison until she’s nearly 50 years old, continues to believe she’ll eventually get a sentence reduction.
“She never brings it up,” Dixon said of the long prison stretch. “She thinks she’ll be out early, for good behavior, etc.”
The et cetera refers to Mack’s unfounded belief that she will somehow have years taken off her sentence for the alleged sexual misbehavior of former Chicago MCC prison guard Brittany Hall. Mack’s transfer from the Chicago MCC to a regular prison was delayed for nearly seven months last year while an investigation was conducted into Hall’s alleged inappropriate sexual relationships with four MCC inmates, including Mack. Hall was fired and subsequently indicted. Her next court hearing is on Sept. 9.
Meanwhile, time appears to have lost any meaning for Mack. “I think she’s let go of the passing of time,” Dixon said. “She doesn’t know if it’s a weekday or a weekend.”
Dixon said she has never heard Mack complain about anything, even when mentioning numerous circumstances that would warrant it. The Hazelton women’s facility in the mountainous northeast corner of West Virginia, known as SFF (Secure Female Facility) has been the subject of numerous prisoner complaints regarding poor conditions and inadequate staffing and basic services.
“In the MCC, nothing prepared her for real prison,” Dixon said. “Now she’s in a unit with 70 women. There was recently a fight involving blades.”
“There’s mass punishment,” said Dixon. “If one person does something wrong, everyone gets locked down.”
Mack has been physically abused by other prisoners. A couple months ago, Dixon saw marks on her face during an online interview.
“She had a bruised face,” Dixon recalled. “When I asked her what happened, she said she’d been jumped.” Mack didn’t have much to say about it. Asked what might have triggered the beating, Dixon suggested, “Breathing?”
“You can be jumped for looking at someone the wrong way,” she said. “For owing someone money.” The prison environment, she said, requires hyper awareness.
“There’s a general level of vigilance, of having to be constantly alert to other people’s moods,” Dixon said.
Mack, who Dixon said was diagnosed as bi-polar in a presentencing report, was recommended for a prison with mental health facilities by her judge. But Hazelton doesn’t have those services.
“She hasn’t had any mental health treatment whatsoever,” Dixon said, with the exception of medication for anxiety.
As was the case in Bali, Mack has not been a behavioral problem in prison. “She’s been keen to do all the programs,” Dixon said.
Dixon doesn’t excuse Mack’s behavior and believes she’s being justly punished. But she says people have misunderstood how the murder came about. She said Mack was ultimately not the driving force in the killing.
“She initiated it, but he pushed it,” Dixon said of Schaefer. “He’d been trying to get Heather to kill her. But she said she just couldn’t do it.”
“Even that morning, when he was upstairs, he was saying, ‘Go hit her, do this, do that,” Dixon said. “And he went down and killed her.”
Heather, Dixon said, had a conflicted love/hate relationship with her mother. While she wanted her out of her life, and had battered her mother numerous times, she couldn’t bring herself to kill her. She wanted the money from a trust her father had set up for her.
“Whereas Tommy just went in to kill for money a woman he didn’t know,” Dixon said. “He’s not a complex character. He murdered for money.”
Dixon said Tommy was not originally meant to come to Bali but did after Heather could not bring herself to kill her mother. “Tommy had been pissed for two days. He was drunk the whole time,” said Dixon, who said Shaefer drank throughout the long flight to Bali in business class, and once at the hotel, “drank the mini-bars dry.”
“I’ve seen the photos of empty bottles at the mini bar,” Dixon said of Indonesian police evidence photos.
Dixon also takes issue with the contention by some, including prosecutors, that Mack is a threat to other people beside her mother.
“She had absolutely zero history of violence in Indonesia,” Dixon said, adding that Mack was, with the exception of her possible involvement with prison guard Brittany Hall, a model prisoner while in the MCC.
Another notion of which Mack was painfully disabused was the idea that Schaefer loved her. Dixon said Mack was emotionally devastated reading through the transcripts of texts between Schaefer and his cousin, Justin Bibbs. Through them she came to realize that Schaefer cared more about the money he anticipated receiving after killing Sheila Mack than he did about her.
“She found out the truth when she read all the discovery material,” Dixon said. “She was devastated. They were just using her.”
Dixon said Mack has said that the toughest times for her have been the lead up to getting out of Bali, and the months prior to her sentencing in Chicago.
She was, Dixon said, “Just ticking off the days.”
Nowadays Mack ticks of the days as she awaits the uncertain prospect of a transfer to a minimum security prison camp in Tampa, Florida, where conditions are better and the environment less dangerous. But she must serve at least one year in a medium security prison before even being eligible for a transfer.
It is the best she can realistically hope for as the days drift into weeks and then months, and the years accrue slowly.