Overview

• Jurors at the High Court of Auckland returned guilty verdicts after roughly two hours of deliberation.
• The defense argued diminished responsibility linked to a depressive spiral after her husband’s 2017 death, which the jury rejected.
• Prosecutors maintained the killings were deliberate and highlighted the concealment of the bodies in a storage unit.
• The children’s remains, discovered in August 2022 in suitcases at an Auckland facility, were estimated to be three to four years postmortem and the victims were aged 6 and 8.
• Hakyung Lee, a New Zealand citizen originally from South Korea, was extradited from there in 2022 after being identified as the children’s mother.