A judge has overturned the conviction of a Missouri woman who served 43 years in prison after pleading guilty to a murder in 1980 while mentally ill. The judge and the woman’s lawyer suggested the killer may have been a former police officer.
Judge Ryan Hosemann ruled late Friday that Sandra Hemm, now 64, has established evidence of her innocence and must be released within 30 days unless prosecutors retry her case in the death of 31-year-old library worker Patricia Jeschke.
The judge said Hemme’s lawyers were incompetent and the prosecution failed to reveal evidence that would have helped her defence.
Her lawyer, who filed a petition calling for Hem’s immediate release, said this was the longest a woman had been imprisoned after being wrongly convicted.
“We thank the court for recognising the grave injustice that Hem has endured for more than four decades,” her lawyers said in a statement, vowing to continue efforts to have the charges dropped and for Hem to be reunited with her family.
Hemme’s lawyers said that her wrists were in restraints, she was heavily sedated and “unable to hold her head up straight or respond with more than one syllable” when she was first questioned about Jeschke’s death.
In their petition for Hemme’s exoneration, her lawyers said authorities ignored her “highly contradictory” statements and suppressed evidence implicating then-officer Michael Holman, who tried to use Jeschke’s credit card. Holman died in 2015.
“Other than Ms Hem’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 was off work when her worried mother entered through the apartment window and discovered her naked body lying on the floor in a pool of blood.
Jeschke’s hands were tied behind her back with a telephone cord, pantyhose were wrapped around her neck and a knife was placed under her head.
Hemme was not under investigation in connection with the murder until about two weeks later, when he turned up at the home of the nurse who had treated her while armed with a knife and refusing 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, arriving at her 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 which caused involuntary muscle spasms.
She complained that her eyes were rolling, according to her lawyer’s 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 also began investigating Holman as a suspect: About a month after the murders, Holman was arrested for falsely reporting a pickup truck as stolen and collecting the insurance money.
The same truck had been seen near the crime scene, and Holman’s alibi of spending 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.
Holman claimed he found a credit card in a wallet left in the ditch.
When police searched Holman’s home, they found a pair of gold horseshoe-shaped earrings in a closet that Jeschke’s father recognized as ones he had bought for his daughter.
Police also recovered 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.
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.
