She Was Convicted of a 1980 Murder — But Lawyers Say Cops Exploited Mental Illness, Coerced False Confession

The Missouri police officer’s pickup truck was parked near the murder victim's house at the time of the killing. Her wishbone earrings were later found in his possession. And he tried to use her credit card — $630.43 for photography equipment — the day after her 1980 murder. But Michael Holman, then a 22-year-old St. Joseph police officer who later served prison time for other crimes before his 2015 death, was never charged with Patricia Jeschke’s murder. 

Instead, his colleagues arrested a 20-year-old psychiatric patient at St. Joseph's State Hospital who was being treated for auditory hallucinations, derealization and drug misuse. According to her lawyers at the Innocence Project, which took her case, Sandra Hemme, who had been in inpatient psychiatric treatment since the age of 12, did not know the murder victim and no witnesses or DNA evidence ever connected her to the crime.

Interrogated at the hospital, and “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, Hemme eventually provided a confession that her defense attorneys say did not square with the known facts of the crime.

Hemme has been incarcerated for 42 years for a murder her lawyers say she did not commit. And in a rare decision to review a case for exoneration, the Missouri Attorney General’s Office agreed this month that Hemme is entitled to an evidentiary hearing that could eventually lead to her freedom, noting that her lawyers have presented “alleged facts that if true may entitle her to relief,” according to court records obtained by the Kansas City Star.

However, the office also said that Hemme’s statements to police included details unknowable to anyone but the murderer and reserved its right to defend the guilty verdict.

If exonerated, Hemme, now 63, would be the longest-known wrongly incarcerated woman in the country. That hearing will be set July 10. The attorney general’s office could not be reached for comment.

Jeschke, the murdered library worker, was found naked on her apartment floor, strangled and stabbed to death in November 1980. Two weeks later, Hemme told police she thought she had stabbed the woman with a hunting knife, but she added, “I don’t know. I don’t know,” according to reporting by the Kansas City Star.

A few years later, in 1985, Hemme was convicted during a one-day trial. According to the Innocence Project, her confession — which they maintain was coerced — was the only evidence presented by prosecutors. Her lawyer called no witnesses.

Meanwhile, according to the Innocence Project, the police officer had presented an uncorroborated alibi that at the time of the murder he was at a motel with a woman named Mary — a woman he allegedly refused to provide additional information about.

Three witnesses at that motel and attached gas station said they did not remember seeing the officer or the woman he claimed to be with, the Innocence Project said. The officer was later investigated for insurance fraud and burglaries and spent time behind bars in both Missouri and Nebraska, the Kansas City Star reported.

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St. Joseph Police had wrongfully accused another person with a mental illness just a year before Hemme. In 1979, another St. Joseph’s State Hospital resident, Melvin Lee Reynolds, 24, was convicted of murdering a 4-year-old boy based on a coerced confession. The two cases included many overlapping officers, the Innocence Project said. Reynolds was exonerated four years after his conviction.

In a 147-page petition for writ of habeas corpus, Hemme’s lawyers argued that her confession was “wildly contradictory, uncorroborated, and factually impossible.”

The attorney general’s response, agreeing to a hearing to consider evidence never before presented in the case, struck lawyers familiar with the office as surprising.

In an interview with the Kansas City Star, Kent Gipson, a lawyer in Kansas City who has filed hundreds of post-conviction claims in the past 30 years, recalled only a single other exoneration case in which the attorney general’s office had agreed to an evidentiary hearing– in the death row case of Reginald Griffin, who was exonerated in 2011. 

Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey, a Republican, took over the position from U.S. Senator Eric Schmidt, also a Republican, in January. Schmidt opposed exoneration efforts in the cases of Kevin Strickland, who was exonerated of a triple murder in 2021 after serving 43 years behind bars, and of Lamar Johnson who was incarcerated for 28 years before his conviction was overturned. 

For decades, the Missouri Attorney General’s office – even as it switched between Republican and Democratic hands – has contested nearly every wrongful conviction case brought before it, InJustice Watch has reported.