A judge overturned the sentence of a woman from Missouri who was in a mental hospital when she admitted to killing someone in 1980, even though her lawyers say the real killer was a police officer who has since been discredited.
Late Friday night, Judge Ryan Horsman said that Sandra Hemme, who has been in prison for 43 years, had shown proof that she was innocent and should be freed within 30 days unless the prosecution retries her. He said that her lawyer wasn’t good at their job and that the prosecutors didn’t show her information that could have helped her.
Her lawyers say this is the longest time a woman has been locked up for a wrong judgment. They put in a move to get her released right away.
In a statement, Ms. Hemme’s lawyers said, “We are grateful to the Court for recognizing the grave injustice Ms. Hemme has endured for more than four decades.” They promised to keep working to get the charges dropped and Hemme back with her family.
A text or email message sent Saturday to Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey’s spokesman did not get a response right away.
Hemme was heavily sedated and wearing leather wrist restraints when she was first questioned about the death of 31-year-old library worker Patricia Jeschke. Her lawyers with the New York-based Innocence Project say she “could not hold her head up straight” or “articulate anything beyond monosyllabic responses.”
In a petition to clear her name, they said that the authorities had ignored Hemme’s “wildly contradictory” comments and hidden evidence that pointed the finger at Michael Holman, who was a police officer at the time of the murder and tried to use the dead woman’s credit card.
The judge wrote, “Ms. Hemme’s unreliable statements are the only thing that connects her to the crime.”
The judge then said, “On the other hand, this Court finds that the evidence directly links Holman to this crime and murder scene.”
It began when Jeschke missed work on November 13, 1980. Her scared mother broke in through a window at her apartment and found her naked daughter’s body on the floor covered in blood. She had a telephone cord around her back and her hands were tied behind her back. There were also stockings around her throat. She had a knife to her head.
The brutal killing made the news, and agents worked twelve-hour days to figure out what happened. But they didn’t notice Hemme until she showed up with a knife at the house of a nurse who had treated her before, almost two weeks later. She wouldn’t leave.
She had been to St. Joseph’s Hospital several times since she started hearing voices when she was 12 years old. The police found her in a room and took her back there.
She was released from that hospital the day before Jeschke’s body was found. That night, after traveling more than 100 miles (160 kilometers) across the state, she went to her parents’ house.
The police thought the timing was strange. At the start of the interrogations, Hemme was taking antipsychotic drugs that made his muscles twitch without his control. The letter said that she said her eyes were rolling back in her head.
Detectives said Hemme seemed “mentally confused” and didn’t seem to fully understand what they were asking.
“Every time the police got a statement from Ms. Hemme, it was very different from the last one, and it often included explanations of new facts that the police had just found out,” her lawyers wrote.
In the end, she said she saw a guy named Joseph Wabski kill Jeschke.
She met Wabski while they were both in the rehabilitation unit of the state hospital. Wabski was charged with capital murder. But the case was quickly dropped when it was found that he was in Topeka, Kansas, at the time at an alcohol rehab center.
Hemme cried when she found out he couldn’t be the killer. She said was the only killer.
Also, the cops began to look at a different suspect—one of their own. Holman was caught about a month after the murder for lying to his insurance company and getting money because his pickup truck had been stolen. The same truck was seen near the crime scene, and the officer’s story that he stayed the night with a woman at a nearby hotel couldn’t be proven.
Also, on the day her body was found, he tried to use Jeschke’s credit card at a camera shop in Kansas City, Missouri. Holman said he found the card in a bag that had been thrown away in a ditch. He was fired and died in 2015.
Police searched Holman’s house and found horseshoe-shaped gold earrings in a room. They also found jewelry that had been stolen from another woman earlier that year.
Jeschke’s dad said he knew those earrings because they were the ones he got for his daughter. But then the four-day investigation into Holman finished quickly, and many of the details that were found were not given to Hemme’s lawyers.
Hemme, meanwhile, was getting more and more desperate. On Christmas Day 1980, she wrote to her parents, “They want to put someone in jail so they can say the case is solved, even though I’m innocent.” She said she might as well say she was guilty.
She told him, “Just end it.” “I’m worn out.”
That’s what she did the next spring when she agreed to plead guilty to murder with the intent to kill in return for not being put to death.
Even that was hard; the judge turned down her guilty plea at first because she couldn’t give enough information about what happened. She said, “I 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.”
Her lawyer told her that the only way she could avoid being put to death was to plead yes to the charge. She gave more information after a break and some teaching.
In the end, that plea was thrown out after an appeal. But she was found guilty again in 1985 after a one-day trial where the jury wasn’t told about the interrogations that her present lawyers call “grotesquely coercive.”
In the petition, Larry Harman, who later became a judge and helped Hemme get her first guilty plea thrown out, said that he thought she was innocent.
“Every chance she had, the system failed her,” he said.
Source: AP News
