A Missouri woman’s murder conviction was recently reversed after she spent 43 years in jail; nevertheless, the state’s attorney general’s office is fighting to have her kept in prison despite an appeals court’s release order.
After the 1980 murder of Patricia Jeschke, a 31-year-old library clerk, Sandra ‘Sandy’ Hemme, 64 years old, was found guilty and given a life term.
Hemme was in a “malleable mental state” and severely sedated when investigators interrogated her many times in a mental hospital, according to Judge Ryan W. Horsman’s thorough evaluation.
Following Judge Horsman’s finding of innocence and declaration that authorities at the time were coerced into making false statements, a panel of justices from the appeals court ordered her release on July 8.
In a subsequent request for reconsideration, the AG’s office argued that the appeal court had not given them sufficient time to contest her release.
Before her trial, the prosecution was unaware of FBI results that may have exonerated her, and the police disregarded information relating to a discredited colleague who passed away in 2015.
Four decades later, the prosecutor who tried to pin the crime on her during her trial concurred with the court that her confession—which came after a series of contradicting statements—was the only piece of evidence connecting her to the killing.
In a court document, her lawyers characterized her last confession as monosyllabic responses to leading questions.
Jeschke was a resident of St. Joseph, Missouri, and she was arrested a few weeks subsequent to her death.
On November 13, 1980, after Jeschke failed to report for work, her concerned mother peered through an apartment window and saw her daughter’s corpse lying on the floor, encircled by blood, with her hands bound behind her back and a pair of pantyhose and a telephone wire encircling her neck. She had a blade resting beneath her.
In retrospect, it became clear that Hemme had left the hospital hours before Jeschke was last seen alive, having hitchhiked out of town. Moreover, a hundred miles to the east, she turned up that night at her parents’ house.
The legal team representing Hemme at the Innocence Project claims that she is now the longest-serving wrongfully jailed woman in the United States.
