SCRIPT ONE - TRUE CRIME
In most families the bond between a mother and a daughter is unbreakable. That was not the case for Heather Mack and her mother Sheila von Weise Mack.
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Born Lois Heather Mack, the girl known as Heather was born to a prolific jazz musician James. L. Mack. The Mack family lived a good life, and Heather grew up in a mansion, with lavish holidays and a close relationship with her father.
James Mack was an elderly father. His friends had often expressed concerns with him having a child so late in life. But that did not stop James from being the best father he possibly could.
Unfortunately, due to his age and other circumstances, he was soon no longer able to play and run with his young daughter. This did not stop them from enjoying their vacations. However, one trip to Greece would be the last trip that Heather would enjoy with her father. He died of a pulmonary embolism. This did not stop Heather and her mother from finishing their vacation.
The years that followed her father’s death were miserable for Heather’s other, Sheila. In the space of nine years, the police were called to their residence a total of eighty-nine times for claims of theft and domestic violence.
In each case, Heather seemed to be the violent offender. One time she punched her mother’s broken ankle, and another time she was accused of breaking her mother’s arm. She had been accused of stealing thousands of dollars from her mother.
Things were not going well between the two. There are even reports that Heather underwent two abortions under the coercion of her mother. Their relationship only worsened when Heather started a relationship with a boy named Tommy Schaeffer.
Tommy was an aspiring rapper, who went by the name of Tommy EXX. His career was not doing well, and he was known to couch surf between friend’s houses to keep a roof over his head. According to Sheila, he was simply not a good fit for her daughter.
When her daughter refused to ditch the dead weight, Sheila moved them to an apartment on the Gold Coast to get away from it all. She was hoping that some distance from bad influences would help their relationship. What she hoped was to see a positive change in her daughter.
Unfortunately, that was not the case. As it turned out, Heather would fall pregnant a third time, with Tommy’s child. Heather dropped out of school and tensions between her and Sheila only grew worse.
Sheila had written to friends in e-mails that she was afraid of Heather’s violent tendencies, and that she was afraid of what she might do next. As it turned out, her fears were no unfounded.
In one final attempt to repair the relationship between Sheila and Heather, they took a trip to Bali just the two of them in August 2014. Some accounts state that there had been an attempt on Sheila’s end to get power of attorney over Heather so that she could make a decision on her behalf to have a third abortion.
What’s most likely is that Sheila had taken Heather on the trip to Bali to convince her of the abortion, and make one final attempt to get her daughter on the right track. However, things did not go according to plan.
The pair reportedly fought often and when Sheila injured her ankle, rendering her bedridden for the trip, things got entirely out of hand.
It all came to a head with only three days left of their vacation. Sheila appeared in the hotel reception, frantic that her daughter had gone missing. This happened in the early hours of the morning. However, just as security was preparing to start their process, Heather appeared through the front door of the hotel, with none other than her boyfriend Tommy Schaeffer on her arm.
Naturally, this resulted in a major argument taking place. Fuel was added to the fire when Sheila discovered that Heather had used her credit card information to pay for a business class ticket and another hotel room for Schaeffer.
Later, the couple would be spotted on security cameras walking between rooms, with Heather going to reception to ask for some duct tape. Later, it would appear that Heather and Tommy were leaving the hotel.
They flagged down a cab and asked to put their luggage in the trunk. However, the cab driver noticed something about the luggage that set off a red flag for him. There appeared to be what looked like blood on the luggage.
When the cab driver questioned the couple about the bag, they simply took off running. Cleverly, the cab driver and the hotel staff alerted the authorities about what had happened. When the bag was open, tragically the remains of Sheila von Weise Mack were found shoved inside.
It didn’t take long for authorities to locate Heather and Schaeffer at a nearby motel where they were officially detained. The two initially reported that they had been robbed and that the robbers were responsible for Sheila’s death. That they were lucky enough to have gotten away.
There were a lot of problems with this testimony, though. None of the cameras at the hotel showed any signs of a gang of robbers being present. There were no signs in the hotel room of that explanation and none of the hotel security had any reason to believe this was true.
Most of what the couple said simply didn’t seem true to them.
However, when faced with the possibility of a sentencing of death by firing squad, their story quickly changed and the truth came out.
That night, armed with the handle of a fruit bowl, Tommy Schaeffer confronted Sheila in her hotel room. They had decided to tell Sheila, together, that Heather was pregnant and that they intended to keep the baby. News that they claimed did not go well with Sheila.
Sheila then attacked Tommy and strangled him for thirty seconds, after which Tommy said he had to fight back. During the argument, Tommy Schaeffer pulled the fruit bowl handle from underneath his sweatshirt and began beating Sheila.
The official cause of death was listed as suffocation from a broken nose. The couple then decided to stuff Sheila’s body in a suitcase so that they could remove it from the hotel. In the process, they snapped her neck.
While initially this seemed like an argument that got out of hand, as the case progressed, the truth became far more sinister. Messages between Heather and Schaeffer proved that they had been talking about murdering Sheila for some time already.
During the investigation, Schaeffer’s cousin, Robert Bibbs was arrested for conspiracy for advising on how to carry out the murder after the couple approached him with the intention of hiring him as a hitman.
The motive is believed to be money. Heather stood to inherit a large sum of money from both her mother's and her father’s estates. With her mother out of the way, she could do whatever she pleased, live a lavish life, and support Tommy’s rapidly failing rap career.
During the investigation it also became clear that Sheila was aware of the pregnancy before the trip to Bali had been booked. This poked holes in the story that Heather and Schaeffer had told about flying Tommy to Bali to confess about the pregnancy.
More likely, Tommy was flown to Bali with the intent to murder Sheila. In this regard, a social media post in which he wrote that he was headed to Indonesia and that he might not come back.
Ultimately, the conversations between Sheila and her friends regarding Heather’s violence, the text messages between Heather and Schaeffer, and the details of the murder led the investigators to believe that the murder was premeditated.
The only part of Heather and Schaeffer’s stories that was true was the fact that she was, in fact, pregnant with his child.
In Indonesia, Heather Mack was sentenced to ten years in prison, while Tommy Schaeffer was sentenced to 18 years. Heather raised her baby for two years while in prison before giving the child up for foster care.
Tommy was known to say he felt raising his daughter in prison was a selfish move. Unsurprisingly, Heather and Tommy’s relationship did not survive the ordeal and thanks to a concerned family member, Heather’s inheritance has been transferred to her daughter, Stella.
After her sentence was served in Indonesia, Heather was deported back to the US where she was immediately arrested for conspiracy and obstruction. Heather pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to kill a US national.
She has been sentenced to twenty-six years in prison. Heather hopes to reconnect with her daughter Stella when her sentence is over. There are many who hope this simply would not be possible. It is believed by most that if Heather was unable to show care and compassion to her own mother, she couldn’t do it for her own daughter either.
Sheila died so that Heather and Tommy could be together, and spend her inheritance as they pleased. None of those goals were achieved, rendering her murder completely pointless.
Over the years, Heather has expressed that she has no remorse for what she has done. Both Tommy and Heather continue to show each other support from behind bars. Ultimately, Heather doesn’t seem to be bothered by her life behind bars. Sources say that she thrives within the prison lifestyle.
The case of Heather Mack and Tommy Schaeffer is a horrifying one. Most daughters could never imagine doing something so horrible to their mothers. While most mothers couldn’t possibly imagine fearing their daughters to such an extent.
As of today, Heather and Tommy continue to serve their prison sentences. Family of Sheila are having a hard time moving on from what has happened. Their only hope is that Stella will grow up to live a full life filled with care and love after spending her first two years raised in a prison system.
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SCRIPT TWO - POV MONSTER STORIES
I have always loved my job. Being the sheriff, I feel like I get to protect people. But even still, sometimes it doesn’t feel like enough. There are parts of my job where I feel I have no control over the bad things that happen to people, and it bothers me immensely.
The toughest thing I have learned is that I cannot control the way that people and things behave. I can only act accordingly, and do my best. But someone who wants to murder, will likely murder, no matter what I do.
This is something that comes up in therapy for me a lot. Every so often, I get fixated on a problem and then nothing I do can stop me from trying to fix it. There is this stretch of road that baffled me for many years.
Every few weeks the same accident occurs. Whether it is a car or a truck or a tractor, they all report the same thing. That the car simply started behaving strangely, and then they ran off the road. Thankfully, nobody has died yet. But there has been a lot of damage and sometimes it costs the city loads of money to have vehicles pulled out of the ditch.
I looked into it and saw that there were many reports. All of them said the same thing. All of them seemed to happen every thirty-six days. This stood out to me, as it was oddly specific. Then, I saw that there had been other files in the same section, but that those had been deleted.
I had never seen so many deleted files in my life before. I got fed up with it all and decided one day that I would wait for the next report of the accident. I would then wait thirty-six days, and drive that stretch myself to get an idea of what was happening.
There was evidence that some scientists had voluntarily gone to look into it at one point, but their report had shown nothing of interest. I refuse to believe it. There had to be something that was making it all happened.
So, when it was time, I got into my vehicle, and drove along that stretch. I drove back and forth for hours. For a moment I wondered if it wasn’t just a rumor that reckless drivers were using as an excuse for their accidents.
But then, my radio burst to life and was blasting static. No matter how hard I tried to switch it off, it wouldn’t happen. The horn on my car started blasting on its own too, and my car lost all power to the accelerator.
I tugged on the emergency brake and came to a stop. My heart was pounding. I’m not kidding when I say that it was really scary and that I was also almost right off the road by the time I got the car to stop. I took a moment to catch my breath and then stepped out of the car.
I wanted to see what was around me, if there were any buildings that could have been emitting something that could cause that kind of reaction. But I couldn’t see any structures around. I made note of the exact location, and then walked along the road to look for any markers.
But as I was standing at the side of the road, I heard what sounded like a loud grunt. I shone my flashlight across the field. It was filled with long grass, but I knew that there had to be an animal in there somewhere.
The grass parted and I caught a glimpse of something large and dark. I decided to try and get its attention so that I could see what it was. So, I yelled as loudly as I could.
I didn’t expect that the creature would stand up on its hind legs and look directly at me. It had these bright glowing eyes, and on its legs it was taller than I was. It had hideous, large teeth, and sunken eyes. Everything about the creature was just wrong.
I decided not to stick around and I booked it back to my car. But I couldn’t call it in, because my radio was still just giving static. At that point, the animal dropped back down onto its feet with a loud thud, and I watched as it disappeared into the grass.
As soon as I lost sight of it, my car and radio started functioning properly again and I was able to drive off. I went right back to the station and filed my report, claiming that I believed the creature had something to do with it.
I also phoned my buddy in animal control, and asked him to take a look at it, but he said they were banned from those fields’ years ago. It struck me as odd.
About a month later I went to check the system to see if another report had been filed, it was about the right time. What I saw was that the report that I had filed had been deleted. My account of events no longer existed.
