A Missouri woman who spent 43 years in prison after incriminating herself in a 1980 murder while a psychiatric patient has been released from prison despite attempts last month by Missouri's attorney general to keep her behind bars.
Sandra Hemme, 64, was the longest-known wrongfully imprisoned woman in the United States, according to her legal team at the Innocence Project, after she was convicted of killing Patricia Jeschke, a 31-year-old library worker, more than 40 years ago.
But a judge overturned the conviction last month, finding that his lawyers had established evidence of his innocence and that a former police officer was the likely killer.
Judge overturns murder conviction of Missouri woman who spent more than 40 years in prison
Sandra Hemme, a Missouri woman who spent 43 years in prison after incriminating herself in a 1980 murder while a psychiatric patient, has been released from prison. (Main image, HG Biggs/The Kansas City Star via AP, inset via Missouri Department of Corrections/AP)
Hemme walked out of the Chillicothe jail on Friday and was embraced by her family and supporters at a nearby park. She hugged her sister, her daughter and her granddaughter.
“You were just a baby when your mom sent me a picture of you,” Hemme told her granddaughter smiling. “You looked a lot like your mom when you were little and you still look like her.”
His granddaughter laughed and said, “I get that a lot.”
Hemme declined to speak to reporters immediately after her release, which came despite Attorney General Andrew Bailey, a Republican, challenging her release in court. Bailey had argued that Hemme poses a risk to her safety and that of others.
Hemme received a 10-year sentence in 1996 for attacking a prison worker with a razor blade, and a two-year sentence in 1984 for “offering to commit violence,” and Bailey argued that Hemme should begin serving those sentences now.
During a court hearing on Friday, Judge Ryan Horsman threatened to hold the attorney general's office in contempt and said that if Hemme was not released within hours, Bailey himself would have to appear in court on Tuesday morning.
The judge also reprimanded Bailey's office for calling the warden and telling prison officials not to release Hemme after he ordered her to be released on her own recognizance.
Hemme's attorney, Sean O'Brien, criticized the delay in his release.
The Chillicothe Correctional Center in Chillicothe, Mo., is seen Thursday, July 18, 2024. Sandra Hemme, a Missouri woman, was released from the facility on Friday. (Heather Hollingsworth)
“It was too easy to convict an innocent person and much harder than it should have been to free him, even to the point where court orders were ignored,” O'Brien said. “It shouldn't be this hard to free an innocent person.”
When Hemme was initially questioned about Jeschke's death, her lawyers say she was handcuffed and so heavily sedated that she “could not hold her head up” or “articulate anything other than monosyllabic responses.”
Attorneys said in a previous motion for Hemme's exoneration that authorities ignored his “wildly contradictory” statements and suppressed evidence implicating then-police officer Michael Holman, who tried to use Jeschke's card. Holman died in 2015.
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The judge wrote that “there is no evidence, other than Ms. Hemme's unreliable statements, linking her to the crime.”
“To the contrary, this Court finds that the evidence directly links Holman to this crime scene and the murder,” the judge wrote.
On November 13, 1980, Jeschke missed work and his worried mother climbed through a window of their apartment and discovered his naked body on the floor in a pool of blood. Jeschke's hands were tied behind his back with a telephone cord, stockings were around his neck, and a knife was held under his head.
Hemme was not under investigation in connection with the murder until she turned up nearly two weeks later carrying a knife at the home of a nurse who once cared for her and refused to leave.
Police located Hemme in a closet and took her back to St. Joseph's Hospital. She had been hospitalized several times since she began hearing voices at age 12.
Hemme had been released from that same hospital the day before Jeschke’s body was found, and arrived at her parents’ home that same night after hitchhiking more than 100 miles across the state. The timing seemed suspicious to authorities, and Hemme was subsequently questioned.
Hemme was being treated with antipsychotics that had caused her to have involuntary muscle spasms when she was first questioned. She complained that her eyes were rolling back in her head, according to her lawyers' request.
Detectives said Hemme appeared “mentally confused” and could not fully understand their questions.
“Each time the police extracted a statement from Ms. Hemme, it was radically different from the previous one, often incorporating explanations of facts that the police had only recently discovered,” her lawyers wrote in the motion.
Hemme eventually claimed that he saw a man named Joseph Wabski kill Jeschke.
Wabski, whom Hemme met when they were both in the state hospital's detox unit, was initially charged with capital murder before prosecutors quickly learned he was in an alcohol treatment facility in Topeka, Kansas, at the time and dropped the charges against him.
After learning that Wabski was not the killer, Hemme cried and claimed that she was the killer.
Police were also beginning to consider Holman a suspect. About a month after the murder, Holman was arrested for falsely reporting his truck stolen and collecting an insurance settlement. The same truck was seen near the crime scene, and Holman's alibi, in 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 has since died, had also tried to use Jeschke's credit card at a camera store in Kansas City, Missouri, on the same day her body was discovered. Holman claimed he found the credit card in a purse that had been left in a ditch.
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During a search of Holman's home, police found a pair of horseshoe-shaped gold earrings in a closet, which Jeschke's father said he recognized as a pair he had bought for her. Police also found jewelry stolen from another woman during a robbery earlier that year.
The four-day investigation into Holman ended abruptly, with Hemme's attorneys saying they were never provided with many of the details uncovered.
Hemme wrote to his parents on Christmas Day 1980, telling them he might well change his plea to guilty.
“Even though I am innocent, they want to lock someone up so they can say the case is solved,” Hemme wrote.
“Let him finish,” she added. “I'm tired.”
The following spring, Hemme agreed to plead guilty to capital murder in exchange for not considering the death penalty.
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But the judge initially rejected his guilty plea because he did not share enough details about the incident.
Her lawyer told her that her chance of avoiding the death penalty depended on the judge accepting her plea. After a recess and some instructions, she gave the judge more details.
The plea was later thrown out on appeal, but she was convicted again in 1985 after a one-day trial in which jurors were not given details of what her current lawyers say were “grotesquely coercive” interrogations.
The system “failed him at every turn,” Larry Harman said in his lawyers' motion. Harman, now a judge, had previously helped Hemme get his initial guilty plea thrown out.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
