At a hearing this week, the attorneys representing a Missouri woman who has been jailed for over forty years for a murder that her supporters insist she did not commit contended that the evidence implicates a police officer who was formerly under investigation for thefts and subsequently sent to prison.
Sandra Hemme’s lawyers claim that her “wildly contradictory” and “factually impossible” comments given to detectives while she was a patient at a mental hospital constitute the sole evidence connecting her to the 1980 murder of Patricia Jeschke, a librarian at the St. Joseph Public Library. The 63-year-old Hemme, who is known as Sandy, received a life sentence.
Her lawyers petitioned for a hearing to submit proof of her innocence, and the court agreed after reviewing their 147-page document. According to the Kansas City Star, Judge Ryan Horsman of Livingston County will make a ruling in the near future.
If Hemme is found not guilty, her incarceration would be the oldest known instance of a woman being wrongfully convicted in the United States.
The legal team representing a Missouri convict who has been serving a life sentence for a murder committed in 1980 has claimed that the officer was actually the perpetrator. (Digital Fox News)
According to Steven Fueston, a former investigator with the St. Joseph Police Department, “she didn’t seem totally coherent” during one of Hemme’s interviews at the St. Joseph State Hospital, which is why he interrupted the session.
According to the Innocence Project, Hemme’s story shifted from denying involvement to falsely confessing to Jeschke’s murder and blaming a man with an impeccable alibi over the course of eight sessions of interrogation.
The 22-year-old police officer Michael Holman, who was under investigation for burglaries and insurance fraud and subsequently sent to prison, is the one who Hemme’s legal team claims is the real culprit. We lost him in 2015.
Holman was interrogated once when he was a suspect. After discovering a pocketbook in a ditch, he claimed to have used Jeschke’s credit card, according to detectives. His truck was also found in the vicinity of the murder scene; however, the explanation he gave for his presence close could not be verified.
Additionally, Holman was found in possession of a set of gold horseshoe-shaped earrings that had been identified by Jeschke’s father.
