A woman from Missouri who spent more than 43 years in prison for a murder Her lawyers said the killing was committed by a now-discredited police officer, who could soon be released after a judge overturned the conviction. If released, Sandra Hemme’s prison sentence will mark the longest known wrongful conviction of a woman in U.S. history, her lawyers said.
Judge Ryan Horsman ruled late Friday that Hemme has shown evidence of actual innocence and must be released within 30 days unless prosecutors retry her. He said her trial attorney was ineffective and prosecutors failed to release evidence that would have helped her.
Hemme’s lawyers from the New York-based Innocence Project filed a motion seeking her immediate release.
“We are grateful to the Court for recognizing the grave injustice that Ms. Hemme has endured for more than four decades,” her lawyers said in a statement, vowing to continue their efforts to have the charges dropped and Hemme reunite with her family.
A spokesman for Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey did not immediately respond to a text or email message from The Associated Press seeking comment on Saturday.
Innocence Project
Hemme was shackled in leather wrist cuffs and so heavily sedated that she “couldn’t hold her head up” or “articulate anything other than monosyllabic answers” when she was first questioned about the death of 31-year-old library worker Patricia Jeschke, according to to her lawyers.
They alleged in a petition seeking her exoneration that authorities ignored Hemme’s “extremely contradictory” statements and withheld evidence implicating Michael Holman, a then-police officer who tried to use the murdered woman’s credit card.
“There are no witnesses that linked Ms. Hemme to the murder, the victim or the crime scene. She had no motive to harm Ms. Jeschke, nor was there any evidence that the two had ever met,” Hemme’s lawyers said.
The judge wrote that “no evidence beyond Ms. Hemme’s unreliable statements links her to the crime.”
“In contrast,” he added, “the Court finds that the evidence directly links Holman to this crime and murder scene.”
It started on November 13, 1980, when Jeschke missed work. Her concerned mother climbed through a window of her apartment and discovered her daughter’s naked body on the floor, surrounded by blood. Her hands were tied behind her back with a telephone cord and pantyhose were wrapped around her throat. There was a knife under her head.
The brutal murder made headlines and detectives worked twelve hours a day to solve it. But Hemme wasn’t on their radar until she showed up at the home of a nurse who once treated her nearly two weeks later, holding a knife and refusing to leave.
Police found her in a closet and returned her to St. Joseph’s Hospital, the latest in a series of hospitalizations that began when she began hearing voices at age 12.
She had been released from that same hospital the day before Jeschke’s body was found and showed up at her parents’ house later that evening after hitchhiking more than 100 miles across the state.
The timing seemed suspicious to law enforcement. When the interrogations began, Hemme was being treated with antipsychotic drugs that had caused involuntary muscle spasms. She complained that her eyes rolled back in her head, the petition said.
Detectives noted that Hemme appeared “mentally confused” and could not fully understand their questions.
“Each time the police retrieved a statement from Ms. Hemme, it changed dramatically from the previous one, often explaining facts that the police had recently discovered,” her attorneys wrote.
Ultimately, she claimed to have seen a man named Joseph Wabski kill Jeschke.
Wabski, whom she met while they were staying at the state hospital’s detoxification unit at the same time, was charged with murder. But prosecutors quickly dropped the case when they learned he was at an alcohol treatment center in Topeka, Kansas, at the time.
When she heard that he could not be the murderer, Hemme cried and said that he was the only murderer.
But police also began looking at another suspect – one of their own. About a month after the murder, Holman was arrested for falsely reporting his pickup truck was stolen and collecting an insurance payout. It was the same truck seen near the crime scene, and the officer’s alibi that he had spent the night with a woman at a nearby motel could not be confirmed.
In addition, he had attempted to use Jeschke’s credit card at a camera store in Kansas City, Missouri, on the same day her body was found. Holman, who was eventually fired and died in 2015, said he found the card in a bag that had been discarded in a ditch.
During a search of Holman’s home, police found a pair of gold horseshoe-shaped earrings in a closet, along with jewelry stolen from another woman during a burglary earlier that year.
Jeschke’s father said he recognized the earrings as a pair he bought for his daughter. But then the four-day investigation into Holman ended abruptly, with many of the details discovered never passed on to Hemme’s lawyers.
Hemme, meanwhile, became desperate. She wrote to her parents on Christmas Day 1980, saying, “Even though I’m innocent, they want to lock someone up so they can say the case is solved.” She said she might as well change her plea to guilty.
“Let it end,” she said. “I’m tired.”
And that’s what she did the following spring, when she agreed to plead guilty to murder in exchange for eliminating the death penalty.
Even that was a challenge; The judge initially rejected her guilty plea because she couldn’t share enough details about what happened, saying, “I really didn’t know I had done it until it appeared in the newspaper and on The News three days later.”
Her lawyer told her that her chance of not being sentenced to death was for the judge to accept her guilty plea. After a break and some coaching, she provided more information.
That plea was later rejected on appeal. But she was convicted again in 1985 after a one-day trial in which jurors were not told what her current lawyers described as “grotesquely coercive” interrogations.
Larry Harman, who helped Hemme dismiss her initial guilty plea and later became a judge, said in the petition that he believed she was innocent.
“The system,” he said, “failed her at every opportunity.”
