A Missouri woman who spent 43 years in prison after pleading guilty to a murder in 1980 while mentally ill was released from prison last month despite efforts by the Missouri attorney general to keep her behind bars.
Sandra Hemme, 64, was the longest-wrongfully imprisoned woman known in the United States after being convicted of murdering 31-year-old librarian Patricia Jeschke more than 40 years ago, according to lawyers for the Innocence Project.
But a judge overturned the conviction last month, finding that her lawyers had presented evidence of her innocence and that the former officer was likely the killer.
Judge overturns murder conviction of Missouri woman who spent more than 40 years in prison
Sandra Hemme, a Missouri woman who served 43 years in prison after pleading guilty to murder in 1980 while she was mentally ill, has been released. (Main image, H.G. Biggs/Kansas City Star via Associated Press; inset image, Missouri Department of Corrections/via Associated Press)
Hemi left the prison in Chillicothe on Friday and was embraced by family and supporters at a nearby park. She embraced her sister, daughter and granddaughter.
“You were just a baby when your mom sent you this picture,” Hem told her granddaughter, smiling. “You looked just like your mom when you were little, and you still look just like her now.”
Her granddaughter laughed and said, “People say that all the time.”
Hemme refused to speak to reporters immediately after his release, even though Republican Attorney General Andrew Bailey had opposed his release in court, arguing that he posed a threat to his own safety and the safety of others.
Hemme was sentenced to 10 years in 1996 for attacking a prison officer with a razor and two years in 1984 for “attempting to commit violence” and Mr Bailey argues he should now serve those sentences.
During a court hearing Friday, Judge Ryan Hosemann threatened to hold the attorney general’s office in contempt and said Bailey himself would have to appear in court Tuesday morning if Hemme wasn’t released within the next few hours.
The judge also reprimanded Bailey for his office calling the warden and telling prison staff not to release Heme after he ordered bail for the suspect.
Ms Hemme’s lawyer, Sean O’Brien, criticised the delay in her release.
A view of the Chillicothe Correctional Center in Chillicothe, Missouri, Thursday, July 18, 2024. Missouri woman Sandra Hemme was released from the facility on Friday. (Heather Hollingsworth)
“It was far too easy to convict an innocent person and it was far more difficult than it should have been to get her released, to the point where court orders were ignored,” O’Brien said. “It shouldn’t be this hard to release an innocent person.”
When Hemme was first questioned about Jeschke’s death, his wrists were restrained and he was so heavily sedated that he “was unable to hold his head upright” and “could not utter more than monosyllabic responses,” his lawyers said.
In a previous petition seeking exoneration, Hemme’s lawyers argued that authorities ignored Hemme’s “highly contradictory” statements and concealed evidence implicating then-officer Michael Holman, who tried to use Jeschke’s card. Holman died in 2015.
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“Other than Ms Hemm’s unreliable testimony, there is no evidence whatsoever linking her to any crime,” the judge wrote.
“In contrast, this court finds that the evidence directly links Mr. Holman to this crime and the murder scene,” the judge wrote.
On November 13, 1980, Jeschke took the day off from work, and her concerned mother entered through the apartment window and discovered her naked body lying on the floor in a pool of blood, her hands tied behind her back with a telephone cord, pantyhose around her neck, and a knife under her head.
Hemme was not under investigation in connection with the murder until about two weeks later, when he turned up with a knife at the home of a nurse who had once treated her and refused to leave.
Police found Hemme in the closet and took him to St. Joseph’s Hospital, where he had been hospitalized several times since he began hearing voices at age 12.
Hemme had been released from the same hospital the day before Jeschke’s body was discovered and hitchhiked more than 100 miles across the state to reach his parents’ home late that evening. Police found the timing suspicious and Hemme was subsequently questioned.
When he was first interrogated, Hem was being treated with antipsychotic drugs that caused involuntary muscle spasms and he complained of his eyes rolling, according to his lawyers’ petition.
Detectives said Hemme appeared “mentally disoriented” and was unable to fully comprehend the questions being asked.
“Each time police extracted a statement from Mr. Hem, his statements changed dramatically from his previous ones and often included explanations of facts that police had only recently discovered,” Hem’s lawyers wrote in the petition.
Hemme eventually claimed to have witnessed a man named Joseph Wabski murder Jeschke.
Wabski, who Hemme met during his stay at a state hospital’s detoxification unit, was initially charged with murder, but prosecutors soon discovered that Wabski was in an alcohol treatment center in Topeka, Kansas, at the time and dropped the charges.
After learning that Wabski was not the murderer, Hemme cried and claimed that he was the murderer.
Police had also begun to investigate Holman as a suspect: About a month after the murders, Holman was arrested for falsely reporting his pickup truck as stolen and collecting the insurance money. The same truck had been seen near the crime scene, and Holman’s alibi, which he claimed to have spent the night with a woman at a nearby motel, could not be confirmed.
Holman, who was eventually fired and later died, had attempted to use Jeschke’s credit card at a camera store in Kansas City, Missouri, on the same day Jeschke’s body was discovered, claiming to have found the credit card in a purse left in a ditch.
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When police searched Holman’s home, they found a pair of horseshoe-shaped gold earrings in a closet that Jeschke’s father recognized as ones he had bought for his daughter. Police also found jewelry stolen from another woman in a robbery earlier that year.
The four-day investigation into Holman ended abruptly, and Hemme’s lawyers said many of the details that had emerged were not provided.
Hemme wrote to his parents on Christmas Day 1980, saying he might consider changing his plea to guilty.
“I am innocent and they want to send someone to prison so they can say the case is closed,” Hemme wrote.
“Just let it end,” she added. “I’m tired.”
The following spring, Hemme agreed to plead guilty to murder in exchange for not considering the death penalty.
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However, a judge initially rejected her guilty plea, saying she had not given enough details about the incident.
Her lawyers told her that avoiding the death penalty depended on the judge accepting her guilty plea. After a recess and instruction, she gave the judge further details.
That challenge was later denied on appeal, but he was convicted again in 1985 after a one-day trial in which details of what his current lawyers say were “grossly coercive” interrogations were not given to the jury.
“The system failed her at every opportunity,” Larry Herman said in his lawyer’s petition. Herman, now a judge, had previously helped Hemme throw out her initial guilty plea.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
