Sandra Hemme was found guilty of a murder in Missouri in 1980, but according to her attorneys with the Innocence Project, the police officer is actually the prime suspect.
At the time of the murder, a Missouri police officer’s pickup truck was parked close to the home of the murder victim. Later, he was discovered to be in possession of her wishbone earrings. The day after her 1980 murder, he attempted to use her credit card to make a $630.43 purchase of photography equipment. However, Patricia Jeschke’s murder was never connected to Michael Holman, a St. Joseph police officer at the age of 22, who eventually served time in prison for other offenses before passing away in 2015.
A 20-year-old mental patient at St. Joseph’s State Hospital who was being treated for auditory hallucinations, derealization, and drug abuse was instead taken into custody by his coworkers. No eyewitness or DNA evidence ever linked Sandra Hemme to the murder, according to her attorneys at the Innocence Project, who took her case. Sandra Hemme had been receiving inpatient mental care since she was 12 years old.
Hemme was interrogated at the hospital while being “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. She eventually gave a confession, which, according to her defense attorneys, did not match the known circumstances of the crime.
Hemme has served 42 years in prison for a murder that, according to her attorneys, she did not commit. In addition, the Missouri Attorney General’s Office decided this month that Hemme is entitled to an evidentiary hearing that could ultimately result in her release, noting that her attorneys have presented “alleged facts that if true may entitle her to relief,” according to court records obtained by the Kansas City Star. This is a rare decision to review a case for exoneration.
The office did add, however, that Hemme’s comments to police contained information that was only known to the murderer, and it stated that it reserved the right to contest the guilty conviction.
Hemme, 63, would be the longest-known wrongfully imprisoned woman in the nation if she were released. The date for that hearing is July 10. No one in the attorney general’s office was available for comment.
In November 1980, Jeschke, a library employee who had been killed, was discovered naked on the floor of her apartment. She had been stabbed and strangled. Hemme informed police two weeks later that she believed she had stabbed the woman with a hunting knife, but she also said, “I don’t know. The Kansas City Star reported that “I don’t know.”
Hemme was found guilty in 1985 after a one-day trial, a few years later. Her confession, which they claim was coerced, was the only piece of evidence produced by the prosecution, claims the Innocence Project. No witnesses were cited by her attorney.
The policeman allegedly gave an unsupported alibi claiming he was with a lady named Mary at a motel when the murder occurred, but he allegedly declined to give more details about Mary, according to the Innocence Project.
According to the Innocence Project, three witnesses at that motel and its adjacent petrol station claimed they had no recollection of seeing the officer or the woman he had claimed to be with. According to the Kansas City Star, the cop was later investigated for insurance fraud and burglaries and spent time in jail in both Missouri and Nebraska.
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Just one year before to Hemme, St. Joseph Police had falsely charged another person suffering from a mental disorder. Another resident of St. Joseph’s State Hospital, Melvin Lee Reynolds, 24, was found guilty of killing a 4-year-old kid in 1979 as a result of a pressured confession. According to the Innocence Project, there were numerous overlapping officers in the two instances. After being convicted for four years, Reynolds was found not guilty.
Hemme’s attorneys contended in a 147-page writ of habeas corpus petition that her confession was “wildly contradictory, uncorroborated, and factually impossible.”
It surprised lawyers acquainted with the office when the attorney general responded by agreeing to a hearing to evaluate new evidence in the case.
Kent Gipson, a Kansas City attorney who has filed hundreds of post-conviction claims over the past 30 years, stated in an interview with the Kansas City Star that he could only think of one other exoneration case in which the attorney general’s office had agreed to an evidentiary hearing: Reginald Griffin’s death row case, which was overturned in 2011.
Republican U.S. Senator Eric Schmidt was succeeded by Republican Andrew Bailey as Attorney General of Missouri in January. Schmidt opposed efforts to free Kevin Strickland, who was cleared of a quadruple homicide in 2021 after serving 43 years in prison, and Lamar Johnson, whose conviction was reversed after 28 years in prison.
According to InJustice Watch, the Missouri Attorney General’s office has fought almost all cases of wrongful conviction for years, even while it alternated between Republican and Democratic control.
