A 64-year-old Missouri woman with a history of mental illness has been declared innocent by a judge for a murder that she has spent more than four decades behind bars for and that some now suspect a former police officer of.
Sandra Hemme’s innocence in the November 12, 1980, slaying of Patricia Jeschke in St. Joseph, Missouri, is “clear and convincing” the judge ruled last week.
But she remains behind bars, and Missouri’s top prosecutor on Tuesday asked a court to put the brakes on releasing her.
Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey also said his office will ask the state appeals court to review the judge’s ruling, which said that Hemmes must be freed within 30 days or retired.
Hemmes’ lawyers argued that evidence in the 1980 slaying points to the guilt of a now-dead St. Joseph police officer, Michael Holman, who committed a series of crimes before and after 31-year-old Jeschke’s death and was tied directly to the homicide, according to a petition for exoneration reviewed by Livingston County Circuit Judge Ryan Horsman.
The 118-page petition, which was reviewed by NBC News, was filed Friday.
Horsman also concluded Hemme’s trial attorney was substandard and prosecutors failed to disclose evidence that could have proven her innocence.
Hemme’s attorneys said she was “the longest-known wrongly incarcerated woman in the U.S.” and filed a motion seeking her immediate release.
Her lawyers say she is no threat, but the AG’s office argued in its motion Tuesday that Hemme has made statements about enjoying violence and that she attacked a prison worker with a razor blade. Hemme pleaded guilty in that attack in 1996.
No one with the Buchanan County prosecuting attorney’s office was reached for comment Tuesday about whether Hemme would be re-tried for Jeschke’s slaying.
According to the petition, the only evidence tying Hemme to the 1980 homicide were incriminating comments she made during interviews with police while in the throes of severe mental illness and under the influence of powerful drugs used to treat her.
“This Court finds that the evidence as a whole establishes that Ms. Hemme’s statements inculpating herself are inconsistent, contradicted by physical evidence and accounts of reliable, independent witnesses, and that Ms. Hemme’s impaired psychiatric condition when questioned substantially undermine the reliability of those statements as evidence of guilt,” Horsman said in the petition. “… This Court further finds that no evidence whatsoever outside of Ms. Hemme’s unreliable statements connects her to the crime.”
The Innocence Project, based in New York, took up Hemme’s case, and said in a statement she spent 43 years wrongfully incarcerated.
“No witnesses 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. Neither did any physical or forensic evidence link Ms. Hemme to the killing,” the statement said.
Hemme’s “false and unreliable” confessions were the basis for her conviction, but those statements were made while she was being treated at a state psychiatric hospital and “forcibly given medication literally designed to overpower her will,” according to the statement.
The Innocence Project pointed to Holman and accused St. Joseph police of hiding evidence that implicated a colleague.
“Fellow police officer Michael Holman, who was found using the victim’s credit card the day after the murder; whose truck was seen parked near the victim’s home at the time she was killed; in whose closet the victim’s earrings were discovered; and who in the months before and after Ms. Jeschke’s murder, committed many other crimes against women,” The Innocence Project said in a statement.
St. Joseph police were not immediately reached for comment Tuesday afternoon.
The day after her slaying, Jeschke’s worried mother climbed through a window into her apartment and discovered her daughter’s body. Her hands were tied behind her back and a pair of pantyhose was wrapped around her throat. A knife was under her head, the petition said.
The brutal slaying garnered headlines. But Hemme wasn’t on police’s radar until she showed up nearly two weeks later at the home of a nurse who once treated her, carrying a knife and refusing to leave.
Police found her in a closet, and took her back to St. Joseph’s Hospital, the latest in a string of hospitalizations that began when she started hearing voices at the age of 12.
She had been discharged from that hospital the day before Jeschke’s body was found, showing up at her parents’ house later that night after hitchhiking more than 100 miles.
Before she was first questioned by police, Hemme was in seclusion and physically restrained. She had been “forcibly administered antipsychotic medications via injection for more than 48 hours while involuntarily held at the hospital,” according to the petition.
Hemme was so heavily sedated that she “could not hold her head up straight” when she was first questioned, the petition said.
Hemme pleaded guilty in April 1981 in exchange for the death penalty being taken off the table.
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 like three days later, you know, when it came out in the paper and on the news.”
After a recess, she provided more information and the guilty plea was accepted. That plea later was thrown out on appeal. But she was convicted again in 1985 after a one-day trial.
Before Hemme’s conviction, Holman, the police officer, was being investigated by his department. About a month after the killing, Holman was accused of falsely reporting that his pickup had been stolen and collecting an insurance payout. It was the same truck spotted near the crime scene, and the officer’s alibi that he spent the night with a woman at a nearby motel couldn’t be corroborated.
Holman had also tried to use Jeschke’s credit card at a camera store in Kansas City, Missouri, the same day her body was found. The officer, who ultimately was fired and died in 2015, said he found the card in a purse in a ditch.
During a search of Holman’s home, police found a pair of gold horseshoe-shaped earrings in a closet.
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, many of the details uncovered were never given to Hemme’s attorneys, the petition said.
During Hemme’s trial, jurors only heard Holman possessed Jeschke’s credit card and tried to use it to buy a camera, according to the petition.
“The State also withheld evidence of his extensive criminal behavior, which included repeated home burglaries, crimes of dishonesty, and stalking offenses. Additional evidence also established that Holman was near Ms. Jeschke’s home the night she was killed; and that his explanation for why he was in the area on the evening of the murder was untrue, all of which the jury did not hear,” the judge concluded. “This Court also finds the record shows the SJPD failed to seriously investigate Holman as a suspect.”
