Essays

July 25, 2024

The True Crime Case More People Should Know

Photo courtesy of Innocence Project

By Anne Roderique-Jones

If you haven’t heard the story of 64-year-old Sandra Hemme, you’re not alone. Hemme is the longest-known wrongfully incarcerated woman in U.S. history. She was released last week.

When I first came across this case, I was surprised to see so little media coverage about it. That fact alone was concerning. What infuriated me even more was the clear injustice and lack of care that Hemme faced, along with so many who live with a mental illness. This issue is personal to me; I am from Missouri and my own brother lives with many of the same symptoms as Hemme, and has struggled with them his entire adult life. The more I dug into Hemme’s case, the more I began to understand the complicated web of those suffering from mental illness within our justice system. And the more I learned, the more I wanted to share Hemme’s story. 

My career didn’t always involve writing about murder convictions and the justice system. In fact, it was the complete opposite. I’ve been a journalist for over a decade. I started my career in bridal magazines, covering tablescape trends and dress designers, then later in food writing and even beauty. But during the pandemic — like so many others — my career pivoted. At the age of 41, I decided to write and host a true-crime podcast about my home state of Missouri with editaudio. Fast forward a few years, and nearly four million downloads later, I’m in my third season, which extensively covers the wrongful conviction of Sandra Hemme.

Before reporting on Sandra Hemme, I didn’t have experience with wrongful conviction cases. I am not a court reporter and I am not a lawyer. I didn’t know that, according to the Vera Institute of Justice, as of 2023, about 191,000 women were detained in jails and prisons across the U.S., with approximately 84,000 being held in local jails. Among the women in these local jails, 61 percent had not yet been found guilty of a crime and were awaiting trial. I didn’t know that one contributing factor to the high rate of women in jails pre-trial is that women are less likely to be able to afford to make bail or to pay other fees and fines that may prevent them from returning home to await their trials. I also didn’t know that about 73 percent of women exonerated in the last three decades were wrongfully convicted of crimes that never took place at all, according to data from the National Registry of Exonerations. These “crimes” included events later determined to be accidents, deaths by suicide, and crimes that were fabricated.

Hemme was a 20-year-old psychiatric patient at a Missouri hospital when she was found guilty of murder — despite any solid evidence, DNA, or connection with the victim. She has spent the past four-plus decades behind bars.

At the time of her arrest, she was a patient at the St. Joseph State Hospital’s psychiatric ward receiving treatment for hallucinations, derealization, and drug misuse. Her early life was spent in and out of institutionalized care, and she incriminated herself in the death of 31-year-old library employee Patricia Jeschke. According to court documents, Hemme was given false information from her legal counsel and had undergone multiple police interrogations, including one in which she was so heavily medicated that she was unable to hold her head up. 

Over 40 years later, all of this information about Hemme came out during an evidentiary hearing in January 2024 at the Livingston County Courthouse in Chillicothe, Missouri. 

A writer since 2007,  I thought I’d mastered the art of objectivity. But upon seeing a gray-haired woman walk into the courtroom in handcuffs, smiling at her family, I had to choke back tears. This woman, who has lived with debilitating mental illness her entire life, is now in court (yet again), trying to prove her innocence. 

It was during that hearing we learned that evidence was withheld by the State for decades that pointed to a police officer as the person who committed the crime. 

These cases are nothing like what we see on TV. There was no last day of trial, where Hemme burst out of the courtroom in a victorious win. There is no gavel-banging. There wasn’t even a jury. 

Hemme’s attorneys and family go home. Then five long months after the hearing, a ruling came in: Not guilty. 

The Court found that “the only evidence linking Ms. Hemme to the crime was that of her own inconsistent, disproven statements, statements that were taken while she was in psychiatric crisis and physical pain.”  Meanwhile, the evidence implicating police officer Michael Holman was so significant that “it would be difficult to imagine that the State could prove Ms. Hemme’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt based on the weight of the evidence now available that ties Holman to this victim and the crime and excludes Ms. Hemme.” Judge Ryan Horseman said “evidence directly” ties a now-deceased police officer to the killing of Patricia Jeschke. 

This was a historic ruling, not only for the state of Missouri, but also for the country. It should be a joyous moment. But victory is bittersweet. Hemme entered prison as a young adult. This week she left a senior citizen. A woman with living parents, sisters, a daughter, and an adult grandchild. A woman who still lives with mental illness and whose story deserves to be told. 

My hope is that stories like Hemme’s can create systematic change and that we never grow numb to these kinds of headlines.

Anne Roderique-Jones has written for The Washington Post, Travel & Leisure, Vogue and more. She is the writer and host of Ozarks True Crime: The Sandra Hemme Story, in production with editaudio. Listen to it here, wherever you get your podcasts.

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