Missouri woman’s conviction for a murder her lawyers say a police officer committed overturned after 43 years

A woman from Missouri who spent more than 43 years in prison for a murder his lawyers argue it was committed by a now-discredited police officer who could soon be released after a judge overturns his conviction. If she is released, Sandra Hemme’s prison sentence will mark the longest wrongful conviction of a woman in U.S. history, her lawyers said.

Judge Ryan Horsman ruled Friday that Hemme has established evidence of actual innocence and should be released within 30 days unless prosecutors retry her. He said her trial lawyer was ineffective and prosecutors failed to disclose evidence that would have helped her.

Hemme’s lawyers from the New York-based Innocence Project filed a motion calling for 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, pledging to maintain their efforts to dismiss the charges and reunite Hemme with her family.

A spokesman for Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey did not immediately respond to a text message or email from The Associated Press seeking comment Saturday.

Hemme was shackled with leather wrist cuffs and so heavily sedated that she “couldn’t hold her head up” or “articulate anything but monosyllabic responses” when she was first questioned about the death of 31-year-old library employee Patricia Jeschke , according to his lawyers.

They alleged, in a petition seeking her exoneration, that authorities ignored Hemme’s “extremely contradictory” statements and suppressed evidence implicating Michael Holman, a then-police officer who tried to use the murdered woman’s credit card.

“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,” Hemme’s lawyers said.

The judge wrote that “no evidence outside of Ms. Hemme’s unreliable statements connects her to the crime.”

“In contrast,” he added, “this Court finds that the evidence directly links Holman to this crime and murder scene.”

It all started on November 13, 1980, when Jeschke missed work. The worried mother climbed through the 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 neck. A knife was under her head.

The brutal murder made headlines, with detectives working 12-hour days to solve it. But Hemme wasn’t on their 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 Hospital, the latest in a series of hospitalizations that began when she began hearing voices at age 12.

She was released from that same hospital the day before Jeschke’s body was found, turning up at her parents’ house later that night after hitchhiking more than 100 miles across the state.

The timing seemed suspicious to authorities. When interrogations began, Hemme was being treated with antipsychotic medications that caused involuntary muscle spasms. She complained that her eyes were rolling, the petition said.

Detectives noted that Hemme appeared “mentally confused” and unable to understand their questions.

“Each time the police extracted a statement from Ms. Hemme, it changed dramatically from the previous one, often incorporating explanations of facts that the police had recently discovered,” her lawyers wrote.

Eventually, she claimed to have seen a man named Joseph Wabski kill Jeschke.

Wabski, who she met when they stayed in the state hospital’s detox unit around the same time, was charged with capital murder. But prosecutors quickly dropped the case after learning he was in an alcohol treatment center in Topeka, Kansas, at the time.

Upon learning that he could not be the killer, Hemme cried and said that he was the only killer.

But police were also beginning to investigate another suspect – one of their own. About a month after the murder, Holman was arrested for falsely reporting that his truck had been stolen and receiving an insurance payout. It was the same truck seen near the crime scene, and the officer’s alibi that he spent the night with a woman at a nearby motel could not be confirmed.

Additionally, he attempted to use Jeschke’s credit card at a camera store in Kansas City, Missouri, 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, many of the details uncovered never provided to Hemme’s lawyers.

Meanwhile, Hemme was getting desperate. She wrote to her parents on Christmas Day 1980, saying: “Even though I am innocent, they want to arrest someone so they can say the case is solved.” She said she might as well change her plea to guilty.

“Just let it be over,” she said. “I am tired.”

And that’s what she did the following spring, when she agreed to plead guilty to capital murder in exchange for the death penalty being lifted.

Even that was a challenge; The judge initially rejected her guilty plea because she was unable to share enough details about what happened, saying, “I didn’t really know I had done it until three days later, you know, when it was in the paper and on the news.”

Her lawyer told her that her chance of not being sentenced to death was to get the judge to accept her guilty plea. After a break and some guidance, she provided more information.

This appeal was later rejected on appeal. But she was convicted again in 1985 after a daylong trial in which jurors were not informed of what her current lawyers describe as “grotesquely coercive” interrogations.

Larry Harman, who helped Hemme overturn 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.”