MO attorney general agrees to hearing for woman imprisoned 42 years who claims innocence [The Kansas City Star]

In an uncommon move, the Missouri Attorney General’s Office has agreed that a woman who has spent four decades in prison for a St. Joseph murder she maintains she did not commit should be able to present evidence at a hearing.

Sandra Hemme, 63, has been behind bars for more than 42 years for the Nov. 12, 1980, killing of Patricia Jeschke, whose nude body was found on the floor of her apartment along North Riverside Road in eastern St. Joseph.

Lawyers with the New York-based Innocence Project filed a petition in February seeking to exonerate and free Hemme, arguing that she falsely confessed to a murder that the lawyers say was more likely committed by a corrupt St. Joseph police officer.

In its response last week, the attorney general’s office asked the circuit court judge overseeing the case, Ryan Horsman, to order the lawyers involved to be ready to set a date for an evidentiary hearing when they meet July 10.

The AG’s office reserved the right to raise defenses against Hemme’s claims, meaning its lawyers could try to get her case thrown out once more fact finding has been done. The office also said Hemme’s attorneys have “alleged facts that if true may entitle her to relief.”

The response was surprising to local attorneys, given that the AG’s office has for decades, under Republicans and Democrats, fought nearly every wrongful conviction case to come before it, as the news outlets Injustice Watch and The Appeal reported in 2020.

“I truly hope this means they will be evaluating the evidence and not having a knee-jerk reaction of opposing the petition,” said Elizabeth Ramsey, a St. Louis-based attorney who has successfully litigated against the attorney general.

Ramsey, who is not involved in Hemme’s case, said the AG’s office usually opposes evidentiary hearings in innocence claims.

Kent Gipson, a Kansas City-based attorney who has filed hundreds of post-conviction claims over three decades, could only think of one other innocence case where the attorney general’s office agreed to an evidentiary hearing. That was in the mid-2000s in the case of Reginald Griffin, who was not freed from Missouri’s death row until years later.

Gipson — who has criticized the AG for typically opposing every case “no matter what the facts are” — also considered the response in Hemme’s case atypical. But Gipson, who also is not involved in the case, said until the AG’s office concedes someone was wrongly convicted, he doubted the six-page court filing signaled a broader shift in the office’s culture.

“I hope I’m wrong, but I just don’t see this as a wholesale change in their attitude toward litigating these things,” he said.

The AG’s opposition to innocence claims has gained national attention in recent years, especially under former Attorney General Eric Schmitt, who is now a U.S. senator.

Schmitt’s office fought Jackson County Prosecutor Jean Peters Baker in her effort to free Kevin Strickland, who was exonerated in 2021 after spending 43 years in prison for a triple murder he did not commit. The AG also opposed then-St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner as she sought to exonerate Lamar Johnson, an innocent man who was freed in February after 28 years in prison.

A spokesperson for the attorney general’s office, now under Andrew Bailey, did not return messages seeking comment.

Sandra Hemme’s innocence claim

The only evidence connecting Hemme to the murder of Jeschke, a quiet St. Joseph library worker, were her “wildly contradictory” and “factually impossible” statements extracted from detectives, according to her attorneys.

A patient at the St. Joseph State Hospital’s psychiatric ward at the time, Hemme gave many conflicting statements to the police when questioned after the crime. She initially didn’t even mention a murder. She later claimed to have seen a man commit the killing — a theory that was pursued by police and prosecutors, who charged the man, until they realized he was miles away in Topeka at the time and could not have been there.

Another time, Hemme said she knew about the murder because of extrasensory perception — or, as it is also known, the sixth sense.

It wasn’t until nearly two weeks after her first encounter with detectives that Hemme told authorities that she, alone, violently took Jeschke’s life. Even then, she was anything but certain.

“I think I stabbed her with it,” Hemme said of a hunting knife. “I don’t know. I don’t know.”

Hemme initially pleaded guilty to capital murder, but her conviction was thrown out on appeal. She was then found guilty in 1985 during a one-day jury trial devoid of physical evidence and eyewitnesses. Her words were the only evidence against her.

In recounting the case in its response, the attorney general’s office did argue that Hemme’s numerous statements included details that she “could not have known unless” she committed the murder.

But the Innocence Project says the jury never heard “damning evidence” withheld by state officials that instead implicated Michael Holman, a 22-year-old police officer who was investigated for insurance fraud and burglaries. He did prison time in Missouri and Nebraska.

Shortly after Jeschke was found dead, Holman tried to use her credit card to buy $630.43 worth of photography equipment at a store in Kansas City, Kansas. A hair found on Jeschke’s bed sheet also exhibited “microscopic characteristics” similar to that of Holman’s.

Additionally, Jeschke’s earrings were found at Holman’s apartment — a fact that was hidden from Hemme’s lawyers at trial.

Holman, who died in 2015, was considered a suspect late in the homicide investigation. His colleagues looked into his alibi — a story of him having sex with a woman named “Mary” at a motel next to Jeschke’s apartment — but it could not be corroborated.

Hemme’s fight for freedom is supported by Lloyd Pasley, who was a senior member in St. Joe’s detective division in 1980 and went on to serve twice as the police department’s interim chief. He believes Hemme, who is imprisoned at the Chillicothe Correctional Center, is innocent and that the evidence points to Holman as Jeschke’s sole killer.

One of Hemme’s former attorneys, Larry Harman — who went on to serve as Clay County prosecutor, a special assistant AG and a circuit judge — believes detectives took advantage of Hemme’s “mentally fragile state.”

If Hemme is ultimately exonerated, her prison term would mark the longest known wrongful conviction of a woman in U.S. history.