Missouri woman who spent 43 years in prison freed after murder conviction overturned

A woman whose murder conviction was overturned after serving 43 years of a life sentence was freed Friday, despite attempts by the Missouri attorney general over the past month to keep her behind bars.

Sandra Hemme, 64, left a Chillicothe jail hours after a judge threatened to hold the attorney general’s office in contempt of court if it continued to fight her release. She reunited with her family at a nearby park, where she hugged her sister, daughter and granddaughter.

“You were just a baby when your mother sent me a picture of you,” she said. “You looked like your mother when you were little and you still do.”

Her granddaughter laughed. “I get this kind of thing a lot.”

Hemme was the longest-serving woman wrongfully imprisoned in the United States, according to her legal team at the Innocence Project. The judge initially ruled on June 14 that Hemme’s lawyers had established “clear and convincing evidence” of “actual innocence” and overturned her conviction. But Republican Attorney General Andrew Bailey challenged her release in court.

“It was too easy to convict an innocent person and much harder to get them out, to the point where court orders were ignored,” said his lawyer Sean O’Brien. “It shouldn’t be this hard to get an innocent person out.”

At a hearing Friday, Judge Ryan Horsman said that if Hemme is not released within hours, Bailey himself will have to appear in court Tuesday morning. He threatened to sue the attorney general’s office for contempt.

He also criticized Bailey’s office for calling the prison warden and asking him not to release Hemme after he ordered her to release her on her own recognizance. “I suggest you never do that,” Horsman said, adding: “Calling someone and telling them to disregard a court order is wrong.”

Hemme declined to speak to reporters after her release. O’Brien said she was going straight to her father’s side, who was hospitalized with kidney failure and recently moved to hospice care. “It’s been a long time coming,” he said of her release.

O’Brien had previously said the delays had caused their family “irreparable harm and emotional distress.”

There are still difficulties to overcome.

“She’s going to need help,” he said, noting that she won’t be eligible for Social Security because she’s been incarcerated for so long.

A situation that lawyers have “never seen”

Over the past month, a circuit judge, an appeals court and the Missouri Supreme Court have all agreed that Hemme should be released, but she remains behind bars, leaving her attorneys and legal experts baffled.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” said Michael Wolff, a former Missouri Supreme Court justice and professor and dean emeritus of the St. Louis University School of Law. “Once the courts have made their decision, they have to be obeyed.”

The only obstacle to her release came from the attorney general, who filed court motions to force her to serve additional years for decades-old prison assault cases. The warden of Chillicothe Correctional Facility initially refused to release Hemme, citing Bailey’s actions.

On June 14, Horsman ruled that “the totality of the evidence supports the conclusion that the victim is innocent.” On July 8, a state appeals court ruled that Hemme should be released while it continued to review the case. The next day, on July 9, Horsman ruled that Hemme should be released to return home to her sister. On Thursday, the Missouri Supreme Court declined to overturn lower court decisions that had allowed her to be released on her own recognizance and placed with her sister and brother-in-law.

Bailey, a Republican facing opposition in the Aug. 6 primary election, responded with another request Thursday night, asking the circuit court to reconsider its decision.

Hemme was serving a life sentence at Chillicothe Correctional Facility for the 1980 stabbing death of library employee Patricia Jeschke in St. Joseph, Missouri.

Hemme’s immediate release was complicated by the sentences she received for crimes committed in prison. She was sentenced to 10 years in prison in 1996 for assaulting a prison employee with a razor blade, and to two years in prison in 1984 for “proposing to commit violence.” Bailey had argued that Hemme posed a risk to her safety and the safety of others and that she should begin serving those sentences immediately.

Her lawyers countered that keeping her incarcerated longer would be a “draconian consequence.”

Some legal experts agree.

Peter Joy, a law professor at Washington University School of Law in St. Louis, said the attempt to keep Hemme in prison was “a shock to the conscience of any decent human being” because the evidence strongly suggests she did not commit the crime.

Bailey’s office did not immediately respond to messages seeking comment Friday.

Bailey, who was appointed attorney general after Eric Schmitt was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2022, has a history of opposing overturning convictions, even when local prosecutors cite evidence of actual innocence.

After an extensive examination, Horsman concluded in June that Hemme was sedated and in a “malleable mental state” when investigators repeatedly interviewed her at a psychiatric hospital after the killing. Her lawyers described her final confession as “often monosyllabic responses to leading questions.”

CBS News Previously reported which lawyers called his statements “extremely contradictory” and “factually impossible.”

At first, she did not mention a murder, then claimed Jeschke was killed by a man who police later determined was in Topeka at the time, and then said she knew about the murder because of “extrasensory perception,” according to her lawyers.

The Innocence Project accused police of manipulating Hemme into confessing.

“Police exploited her mental illness and forced her to give false statements while she was sedated and treated with antipsychotic medication,” the Innocence Project said in an online petition, according to previous CBS News report“The only evidence that ever connected Ms. Hemme to the crime was her own unreliable and false confession: statements taken while she was being treated at the state mental hospital and force-fed drugs designed to literally control her will.”

Other than the confession, no evidence linked her to the crime, the prosecutor said.

Meanwhile, the St. Joseph Police Department ignored evidence pointing to Michael Holman — a fellow officer who died in 2015 — and the prosecution was not informed of FBI findings that could have exonerated Hemme, so they were never disclosed until after his trials, the judge found.

Evidence presented to Horsman showed that Holman’s van had been seen outside Jeschke’s apartment, that he had tried to use her credit card and that her earrings had been found in his home. His alibi also could not be corroborated. CBS News reported.

In his report, Horsman called Hemme “a victim of manifest injustice.”