A woman who spent the last 43 years in jail for the murder of someone she likely never met is to be released after spending more than two-thirds of her life behind bars.
Sandra Hemme, who has a mental illness, was in her early 20s when she was jailed in 1980 for the murder of Patricia Jeschke, a librarian in the town of St. Joseph, Missouri. In a court order on Friday, June 14, Judge Ryan W. Horsman overturned the capital murder conviction of Ms Hemme, who is now 64 years old, saying she was “the victim of a manifest injustice.”
Instead, the judge said that the investigation into Patricia Jeschke’s murder failed to properly look into a local police officer who had “substantial” evidence linking him to the crime. Ms Hemme had no motive to kill Patricia Jeschke, the judge said - and Jane Pucher, a lawyer for the Innocence Project, explained that the two had probably never even met.
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The Innocence Project says she falsely confessed and evidence points to a corrupt cop (Neil Nakahodo/TNS via ZUMA Press Wire/REX/Shutterstock)Judge Ryan’s 118-page order said: “It would be difficult to imagine that the State could prove Ms. Hemme’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt,” he also added that he found her “innocence to be clear and convincing.” No witnesses placed Ms Hemme at the scene of the crime and no forensic evidence linked her to the killing - on the contrary, the judge’s decision said: “In fact, everything that was forensically tested excluded her.”
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Prosecutors were able to convince a jury of her guilt solely on the grounds of a confession which her lawyers described as “wildly contradictory, uncorroborated, and factually impossible,” People magazine reports. She was intensively questioned at St. Joseph State Hospital, where she was “so heavily medicated that she was unable to even hold her head up and was restrained and strapped to a chair,” according to the Innocence Project.
Cops went to St. Joseph State Hospital where Sandra Hemme was a psychiatric patient before securing a false confession from her (Innocent Project)On Friday Judge Ryan ruled her confession had been given to police “while she was in psychiatric crisis and physical pain,” he said that confession, the single piece of evidence linking her to the crime, was “inconsistent” and “disproven”. Meanwhile, he said there was “substantial and objective” evidence against a now-deceased St. Joseph police officer called Michael Holman but that Holman had never been properly investigated at the time.
Holman was found to have a pair of Patricia Jeschke’s distinctive wishbone earrings in his possession, as well as her credit card. He even tried to buy $630.43 (£496) worth of photography equipment with it on the day her body was found. Holman’s pickup truck was seen by multiple witnesses near Patricia Jeschke’s home the evening she was killed, while his explanation for being in the area was proven to be a lie. Hairs found at the crime scene were also “consistent with his own,” per the judge.
Sandra Hemme (center) with her sister (left) and mother (right) (Innocent Project)While the jury in the court case were told about the credit card and the hairs, they were never made aware of the earrings or Holman’s lies about his whereabouts the night of the killing. Holman’s fellow officers “failed to seriously investigate Holman as a suspect,” the judge said.
Hemme remains incarcerated at Chillicothe Correctional Center to this day. The judge ordered that she must be released within 30 days of his order unless prosecutors go to trial to stop that happening.
The Mirror has approached the office of Missouri’s Attorney General Andrew Bailey to ask if prosecutors plan to retry the case, at the time of publication there had been no response.
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