Sandra Hemme

The Crime

On Nov. 13, 1980, the body of Patricia Jeschke was found in the bedroom of her apartment on the east side of St. Joseph, Missouri. Ms. Jeschke was a secretary at the St. Joseph Public Library, and her mother had become concerned after a co-worker called and said Ms. Jeschke hadn’t shown up for work. 

Ms. Jeschke had been beaten and stabbed in the head. She had been strangled with pantyhose and her hands had been bound behind her back. 

Police found two black hairs in the bedroom and two lengths of cut antenna wire next to her body. 

The Investigation

On the morning of Nov. 12, Ms. Hemme had been discharged from a hospital where she had sought help for amphetamine abuse. Co-workers told police that Ms. Jeschke, who was wearing a white and gray outfit, had left work that day just before 5 p.m., and that she was going to a church function at 7. An acquaintance reported seeing Ms. Jeschke driving alone through downtown St. Joseph in her white sports car at about 5 p.m. Several witnesses also told police they saw a white pickup truck parked near Ms. Jeschke’s apartment in the early evening of Nov. 12.

On Nov. 25, a nurse summoned police, saying that a former patient was in her house with a knife and refused to leave. Police found Ms. Hemme, then 20 years old and with an extensive history of mental illness, in a closet. She was taken to St. Joseph State Hospital, a psychiatric facility. 

On Nov. 28, Detective Steven Fueston interviewed Ms. Hemme. Detective Fueston later said he showed Ms. Hemme a photo of Ms. Jeschke and that Ms. Hemme said that she might have gotten high with Ms. Jeschke and caught a ride with her in a small brown car on Nov. 12. 

In an interview with Detective Fueston on Dec. 1, Ms. Hemme said she got picked up by a man and a woman driving a late-model, light blue two-door car. She described the man as knock-kneed and double-jointed with a thick black mustache. She said they dropped her off near Dearborn, Missouri, about 25 miles south of St. Joseph, and she then hitchhiked the rest of the way to her parents’ home in Concordia, about 100 miles southeast. 

Detective Fueston noted that Hemme’s statement was “not consistent with other witness statements and reports, i.e. times and locations.”

Ms. Hemme gave a third statement on Dec. 2. She said that after leaving the hospital on Nov. 12, she had been picked up by the man and the woman whose photographs Detective Fueston had shown her on Nov. 28. She said the driver was a man named Joseph Wabski, and the woman called herself “Pat.” They drove to Skaggs Pharmacy, then to a two-story brick house, and then to Ms. Jeschke’s apartment. Ms. Hemme said she waited outside while Mr. Wabski went inside. When he returned, he had blood on his shirt, and said he had killed Ms. Jeschke. Ms. Hemme said Mr. Wabski dropped her off near Dearborn.

On Dec. 3, Detective Fueston took Ms. Hemme from the psychiatric hospital to the crime scene. He later said that she led him to Ms. Jeschke’s apartment and that she “knew about this incident because of ESP.”

Detective Fueston reported that Ms. Hemme described how Mr. Wabski committed the murder. He showed her several photographs, including: Ms. Jeschke’s body, her hands bound with the telephone wire, the pantyhose around her throat, the bedroom décor, and the antenna wire.

At the police station, Ms. Hemme gave a written statement saying that Mr. Wabski had picked her up and driven her to Ms. Jeschke’s apartment. She said she watched Mr. Wabski sexually assault and then kill Ms. Jeschke. 

Ms. Hemme gave another statement on Dec. 5 in which she described cutting an antenna wire for Mr. Wabski to use to bind Ms. Jeschke. She also said she had taken several items from Ms. Jeschke’s home.

Police arrested Ms. Hemme that day and charged her with concealing an offense. They also arrested Mr. Wabski and charged him with capital murder. Police then learned that Mr. Wabski was in a locked detox facility at the time of Ms. Jeschke’s murder. 

On Dec. 8, police learned that Ms. Jeschke’s credit card had been used on Nov. 13 at a camera store in Kansas City, Missouri. A Black man with a badge in his wallet had said the card was his. 

On Dec. 9, Detective Fueston confronted Ms. Hemme about Mr. Wabski’s alibi. Ms. Hemme became upset and said she did not know whether she killed Ms.  Jeschke. After this interview, Detective Fueston stepped aside as lead investigator because he was “not getting the truth.”

Mr. Wabski’s charges were dismissed on Dec. 10 and that same day, Detectives Mike Hirter and Terry Boyer questioned Ms. Hemme. They said she admitted she had killed Ms. Jeschke acting alone. She said that Ms. Jeschke, whom she knew from the library, picked her up in a small brown car and they went to Ms. Jeschke’s apartment. She said that Ms. Jeschke decided to take a shower. “I confronted her in the hall. I don’t know. I lost it. I’m standing on the outside looking in,” Ms. Hemme said.

Ms. Hemme said she had planned to bind Jeschke’s hands with the antenna wire but the material was not flexible enough. She said she strangled Jeschke with pantyhose.  She was charged with capital murder that day.

On Dec. 18, Michael Holman, an officer with the St. Joseph Police Department, was under suspicion of insurance fraud in connection with the reported theft of his pickup truck in July. The truck, a white Ford, matched witness descriptions of a vehicle seen near Ms. Jeschke’s apartment. On Dec. 19, a clerk identified Officer Holman as the man who had Ms. Jeschke’s credit card. 

When Officer Holman was interviewed, he said that on the day of Ms. Jeschke’s murder, he had gone to a motel across the street from her apartment to have sex with a woman he called “Mary.” When he was leaving, at around 6:30 p.m., he found Ms. Jeschke’s purse in a ditch. He said he discarded the purse, but kept the credit card, admitting that he had tried to use it the next day in Kansas City.

Officer Holman denied any involvement in Ms. Jeschke’s murder. A manager at the motel would later say he didn’t recognize Officer Holman, and there was no entry on the hotel registry that could have been Officer Holman.

Officer Holman consented to a search of his house. Police found two jewelry boxes, neither of which his wife said she had ever seen. However, the investigation into Officer Holman stalled.

On Jan. 23, 1981, Bobby Cummings wrote Ms. Hemme at the Buchanan County Jail. “Dear Sandy,” he wrote. “Do you remember me. I gave you the ride to the Dearborn exit on [Nov. 12, 1980]. Would it be possible to see you?” 

Mr. Cummings had dark hair and a physical disability similar to cerebral palsy. Ms. Hemme would then tell police that Mr. Cummings and another man killed Ms. Jeschke. The police interviewed Mr. Cummings. He said he had picked up Ms. Hemme and that after she walked on his back to relieve his chronic pain, he left her at the Dearborn exit. 

On April 10, 1981, Ms. Hemme pled guilty to capital murder in Buchanan County Circuit Court. The prosecution recommended she be sentenced to life in prison. Initially, Judge Fred Schoenlaub refused to accept her plea, saying she had “not given sufficient testimony to satisfy all elements of the charge.”

After a short recess, Ms. Hemme again pled guilty, although at one point she said she didn’t realize she had committed the crime until she read about it in the newspaper.

Two months later, on June 8, 1981, Officer Holman pled guilty to insurance fraud on his truck and the prosecution agreed not to prosecute him “for any other criminal matters now under investigation.”

In 1982, Ms. Hemme moved to withdraw her plea. Her attorney, Larry Harman, said that her initial attorney, Dale Sullivan, had been ineffective for failing to fully investigate Ms. Hemme’s mental health, including whether she was competent to stand trial and voluntarily enter a plea or suffering from psychiatric illness at the time of the crime. 

The motion was denied. On Sept. 4, 1984, the Western District of the Missouri Court of Appeals reversed and ordered a new trial. 

The Trial

The court stated that while Mr. Sullivan admitted doubts about Ms. Hemme’s competency to proceed and mental capacity at the time of the crime, he had neither filed for a mental examination, provided information on her history of hospitalization and treatment, nor given notice of intent to use a mental disease defense.

After Ms. Hemme withdrew her plea, she went to trial on June 4, 1985. The trial lasted one day. 

Other than her statements, which were read to the jury, no evidence connected her to the crime. The prosecution and defense stipulated that Officer Holman had attempted to use Ms. Jeschke’s credit card and that an FBI analysis reported that the hair found on Ms. Jeschke’s bed had “microscopic similarities” to Officer Holman’s hair. “The possibility that this head hair originated from Michael Holman cannot be eliminated but neither can it be conclusively said it came from Holman,” the stipulation said.

Ms. Hemme’s defense attorney, Robert Duncan, portrayed Ms. Hemme as “a drugged-out girl in a detox center” who falsely confessed after repeated questioning.

Mr. Duncan said there was far more evidence against Officer Holman. 

The prosecution argued that no one knew how Officer Holman got Ms. Jeschke’s credit card and that the hairs found at the crime scene could have been left by the first responding officer, who, like Officer Holman, was also Black. 

A jury convicted Ms. Hemme of capital murder on June 5, 1985. She was again sentenced to life in prison, without the possibility of parole for 50 years. The conviction was affirmed in March 1986.

The Exoneration

Around 2006, Ms. Hemme, after starting a new medication that effectively managed her mental illness, began reaching out for assistance, contacting the Innocence Project in New York. The organization sought to test the physical evidence for DNA, but the evidence had been destroyed. 

On Feb. 21, 2023, Ms. Hemme filed a state petition for a writ of habeas corpus. Now represented by Jane Pucher and Andrew Lee of the Innocence Project and Sean O’Brien, a law professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, Ms. Hemme asserted that the State had failed to disclose exculpatory evidence and that her previous defense attorneys had failed to adequately investigate how her mental illness and its treatment might have led to a false confession.

According to the petition, the State failed to disclose a police report showing that Ms. Jeschke’s father had identified earrings found at Officer Holman’s house as earrings that he had purchased for his daughter in Montana several years earlier. The state also had failed to  disclose the limited investigation of Officer Holman as an alternate suspect, as well as the extent of his criminal conduct, which continued after Ms. Hemme’s arrest and included two burglaries and a peeping Tom incident in 1981, a few months after Ms. Hemme pled guilty. 

The petition included a report by Dr. Judith Edersheim, the co-founder and co-director of the Center for Law, Brain and Behavior, and an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, which said, in part: “The undisputed circumstances of the police interrogations, combined with Ms. Hemme’s chronic mental illness and impaired functioning prior to and during the interrogations, all provide evidence that supports her consistent claim that any self-incriminating statements she might have made during her interrogations and plea colloquy were false.”

Without the confession, the petition said, there was no evidence connecting Ms. Hemme to the crime, which supported her claim of actual innocence.

As part of the discovery process and in response to public-records requests by Ms. Hemme’s legal team, the state released other records from the St. Joseph Police Department. These included a report the police department received from the FBI that Ms. Hemme and Ms. Jeschke were eliminated as possible sources of a partial palm print found on the antenna wire. Officer Holman could not be eliminated. 

Judge Ryan Horsman held an evidentiary hearing on the petition in January 2024. 

James Trainum, a retired homicide detective and nationally known expert on false confessions, testified that Ms. Hemme’s confession was contaminated by the large amount of published information about the crime. In addition, Ms. Hemme’s confession had other hallmarks of falsity, including her unfounded accusations against Mr. Wabski. 

Doctor Edersheim testified about Ms. Hemme’s long history of mental illness, which began when she was 12 years old. Ms. Hemme had been placed in institutions and given electro-convulsive therapy multiple times. Her clinicians said she heard voices, saw things, suffered suicidal ideations, and engaged in chronic self-mutilation. 

On June 14, 2024, Judge Horsman granted Ms. Hemme’s habeas petition and ordered a new trial. He said the State had failed to turn over critical evidence that either excluded Ms. Hemme or pointed to Officer Holman as the likely perpetrator. 

He also said that Ms. Hemme’s trial defense attorney had been ineffective and should have introduced evidence regarding Ms. Hemme’s mental condition.

The State appealed, and Attorney General Andrew Bailey sought to block Ms. Hemme’s release from prison. The courts rejected his efforts, and after Judge Horsman threatened Attorney General Bailey with contempt of court, Ms. Hemme was released from prison on July 19, 2024, after serving more than 43 years in prison.

On Oct. 22, 2024, the Missouri Court of Appeals for the Western District affirmed Judge Horsman’s habeas ruling. Ms. Hemme’s attorneys moved for her unconditional release, which Judge Horsman signed on Dec. 3, 2024.