A judge has overturned the conviction of a Missouri woman who was a psychiatric patient when she incriminated herself in a 1980 murder that her attorney argued was actually committed by a now-discredited police officer.
Judge Ryan Horsman ruled late Friday that Sandra Hemme, who has spent 43 years in prison, has proven her innocence and must be released within 30 days unless prosecutors try again. He said trial counsel was ineffective and prosecutors failed to disclose evidence that would have helped them.
Her lawyer says it is the longest time a woman has been jailed for her crime. He filed a motion for his immediate release.
“We are grateful to the Court for recognizing the grave injustice Ms. Hemme has endured for more than forty years,” said the lawyer in a statement, promising to keep up efforts to eliminate the charges and reunite Hemme with the family.
A spokesman for Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey did not immediately respond to a text message or email seeking comment Saturday.
Hemme was shackled in leather wrist-thickness and was so sedated that he “couldn’t hold his head straight” or “utter anything beyond a monosyllabic response” when he was first asked about the death of library employee Patricia Jeschke, 31, according to. for her attorney with the New York-based Innocence Project.
He said in a petition seeking his release that authorities ignored Hemme’s “contradictory” statements and withheld evidence implicating Michael Holman, the police officer who tried to use the woman’s credit card.
The judge wrote that “there is no evidence of any kind outside of Ms. Hemme’s unreliable testimony that connects her to the crime.”
“In contrast,” he added, “this court finds that the evidence directly connects Holman to the scene of this crime and murder.”
It started on November 13, 1980, when Jeschke missed work. The worried mother climbed through the window of her apartment and found the daughter’s naked body on the floor, surrounded by blood. Her hands were tied behind her back with a telephone cord and a pair of tights were wrapped around her throat. The knife was under his head.
The brutal murder made headlines, with detectives working 12-hour days to solve it. But Hemme wasn’t on the radar until almost two weeks later at the home of the nurse who once treated her, carrying a knife and refusing to leave.
Police found him in a closet, and brought him back to St. John’s Hospital.
He had been discharged from the hospital the day before Jeschke’s body was found, showing up at his parents’ home that night after riding more than 100 miles (160 kilometers) across the country.
The timing seemed suspicious to law enforcement. When the interrogation began, Hemme was treated with antipsychotic drugs that caused involuntary muscle spasms. He complained that his eyes were rolling back in his head, the petition said.
Detectives noted that Hemme appeared “mentally confused” and could not understand his questions.
“Each time the police took the statement of Ms. Hemme changed dramatically from the last, often incorporating an explanation of the fact that the police had recently discovered,” her lawyer wrote.
Eventually, he claimed to have watched a man named Joseph Wabski kill Jeschke.
Wabski, who met while they were living in the detoxification unit of a state hospital at the same time, was charged with capital murder. But prosecutors quickly dropped the case when they learned he was in an alcohol treatment center in Topeka, Kansas, at the time.
After realizing that she can’t be the killer, Hemme cries and she says that she is the lone killer.
But the police are also starting to look at other suspects – one of their own. About a month after the killing, Holman was arrested for falsely reporting that his pickup truck was stolen and collecting an insurance payment. The truck was spotted near the crime scene, and the officer’s alibi that he spent the night with a woman in a nearby motel could not be confirmed.
Later, he had tried to use Jeschke’s credit card at a camera store in Kansas City, Missouri, the same day the body was found. Holman, who was eventually fired and killed in 2015, said he found the card in his wallet that had been dumped in a ditch.
During a search of Holman’s home, police found gold horseshoe-shaped earrings in a closet, along with jewelry stolen from another woman in a burglary earlier that year.
Jeschke’s father said he recognized the earrings as the pair he bought for his daughter. But then the four-day investigation Holman ended abruptly, many details were discovered never given to Hemme’s lawyer.
Meanwhile, Hemme grew more desperate. He wrote to his parents on Christmas Day 1980, saying, “Even if I’m not guilty, they want to get rid of someone else, so they can say the case is over.” He said he may also change his plea to guilty.
“Just let it be done,” she said. “I’m tired.”
And that’s what he did the following spring, when he agreed to plead guilty to capital murder in exchange for the death penalty being taken off the table.
Even there are challenges; the judge initially rejected the guilty plea because he could not share enough details about the incident, saying: “I really didn’t know I had done it until three days later, you know, when it was in the papers and in the news.”
His lawyer told him that his only chance to avoid the death penalty is for the judge to accept his plea. After a break and some training, he gave me more information.
The request was later thrown out on appeal. But he was convicted again in 1985 after a one-day trial in which jurors were not told about what lawyers now say was “grotesquely coercive” interrogation.
Larry Harman, who helped Hemme get his initial guilty plea thrown out and later became a judge, said in the petition that he believes he is innocent.
“The system,” he said, “failed him at every opportunity.”
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Associated Press researcher Jennifer Farrar in New York contributed.
