Innocent woman confessed to Missouri murder, lawyers say. Was the real killer a cop?
Michael Holman told his police colleagues that they were not going to believe the story he was about to tell them, of how he came to possess the credit card of a murdered woman.
It was Dec. 19, 1980, weeks after Patricia Jeschke, 31, did not show up for her secretary job at the St. Joseph Public Library and her mother crawled through her bedroom window and found a crime scene.
Holman, 22, admitted to a captain and a lieutenant interrogating him that he tried to use Jeschke’s credit card to buy $630.43 worth of photography equipment at a store in Kansas City, Kansas. The purchase was attempted — and rejected — on Nov. 13, shortly after Jeschke’s nude body was found on the floor of her apartment along North Riverside Road in eastern St. Joseph.
But Holman denied killing Jeschke. The alibi he gave went like this:
The day before, the patrolman said, he picked up a woman named Mary, had sex with her at a motel just yards from Jeschke’s apartment and, as he was walking back to his truck on Riverside Road, stepped on a purse in a ditch. In it, he said, he found the card he would try to use to buy a camera lens. He punched a hole in it, removing the “ia” from Patricia, and wrote “Patrick” on the back. He said he threw the purse, and the rest of its contents, in a dumpster.
Holman’s interviewers wanted to know more about “Mary” so they could verify his account, but he could not provide additional information. They asked him to draw a diagram of the inside of the motel, but he refused, according to their handwritten reports. After being allowed to meet with his uncle, a fellow officer, Holman stopped talking. He wanted his lawyer.
Holman became a suspect late in the investigation and was listed last by detectives on an index of 201 leads. By then, Buchanan County prosecutors had already charged two people in Jeschke’s strangulation: Joseph Wabski, 44, who was known to police, and 20-year-old Sandra Hemme, a patient at the St. Joseph State Hospital’s psychiatric ward who went by Sandy.
But days after charging Wabski, prosecutors dropped the capital murder case against him. They “proved him innocent” and verified his air-tight alibi with records showing he was at a halfway house in Topeka at the time of the killing.
That left just Hemme, who had claimed in some of her many and conflicting statements to police that Wabski stabbed Jeschke and choked her with pantyhose.
Lawyers with the New York-based Innocence Project now are trying to free Hemme, arguing that newly discovered evidence proves she is innocent. Hemme, who recently turned 63, has spent more than 42 years in prison.
The only evidence connecting Hemme to the killing, her attorneys say, were her “wildly contradictory” and “factually impossible” statements extracted from detectives.
And the jury that convicted Hemme in 1985, they added, never heard “damning evidence” withheld by state officials that implicated Holman, who they described as a corrupt officer.
‘I think I stabbed her’
By the time Hemme ended up in St. Joseph, she had been in and out of hospitals across Missouri for psychiatric treatment.
Hemme started smoking marijuana when she was 8 or 9. She first attempted suicide at 13, when she tried to overdose on cocaine, according to court records. After fights with her father, who was a part-time constable for the Odessa and Concordia police departments, she recalled, he would handcuff her and take her to the station.
She spent much of 1973 to 1980, the year of Jeschke’s murder, in institutions. Her symptoms included hearing voices. At the St. Joseph hospital, she was medicated with drugs so powerful that she was “unable to hold her head up straight,” her lawyers said.
It was there that detectives first visited Hemme on Nov. 28, 1980 — about two weeks after Jeschke was found dead. One of the detectives, Steven Fueston, saw Hemme was mentioned in a report about an unrelated disturbance involving a knife and thought she should be interviewed, he later testified. By then, detectives working long hours had interviewed “way over” 100 people.
The chief of medical staff allowed the detectives to see Hemme. They did not take a statement from her then, but Fueston showed Hemme a photograph of Jeschke, who was last seen alive as she drove home from work on the evening of Nov. 12. He asked if she knew her. She said Jeschke may have given her a ride that day. Hemme thought they might have gotten high together.
Fueston and an investigator with the prosecutor’s office returned to the hospital three days later and took Hemme’s first statement. Like the others to come, it was not recorded with audio or video.
Hemme said she left the hospital at 1 p.m. Nov. 12, which was against medical advice. She was fairly high, having sniffed lighter fluid. A man, Joe, and a woman, who called herself Pat, pulled over in a car as she was walking in St. Joseph. She asked them for a ride to Concordia, in Lafayette County, where her parents lived. The man, who had a thick black mustache like Groucho Marx, said they could take her as far south as Dearborn, between St. Joe and Kansas City.
The pair dropped Hemme off at that exit before heading back north. It took her several more rides to get to Concordia. Two days later, Hemme said, she returned to the hospital.
Hemme’s story ended without a mention of murder. That changed the next day, when detectives returned to interview her again.
This time, Hemme said Joe’s last name was Wabski and described him as having a full beard. He talked about “human and animal sacrifices.” They drove to a house and, as Hemme sat in the car smoking cigarettes, Wabski took Pat inside. Wabski came out in a hurry, with blood on his hands.
“I killed that f—ing b—,” Wabski declared, threatening to kill Hemme, too, if she said anything.
Hemme’s account evolved the next day, when officers picked her up at the hospital. They wanted to know if Hemme could direct them to Jeschke’s apartment, which Fueston testified she did. Decades later, Hemme’s lawyers would say the police were the ones who drove her there.
When they arrived, Hemme started recounting the day of the killing, according to police. Wabski picked her up alone, she said. He drove to Jeschke’s apartment and, for the first time in Hemme’s telling, said he was “going to kill that b—.”
In her most graphic version yet, Hemme described witnessing Wabski murder Jeschke. She claimed Wabski grabbed Jeschke by the neck and struck her in the face. Hemme tried to stop him, but he pushed her arm away. Wabski attempted to rape Jeschke, then stabbed her repeatedly.
Detectives, however, realized days later that Wabski could not have been there. He was more than 70 miles away.
Confronted with that information, Hemme “fidgeted somewhat in her chair,” Fueston later testified. Sometimes, she explained, she wants to hurt herself or others; in the same breath, she said she did not know if she killed Jeschke. She mentioned once trying to stab a man in Baltimore. The hospital was not helping her, she told police; she thought she was going to go crazy.
By Dec. 10, 1980, almost two weeks after she was first visited by police, Hemme was sitting in the prosecutor’s office and telling authorities that she, alone, violently took Jeschke’s life. Writing Wabski out of her narrative, Hemme said it was Jeschke who picked her up that day. At the apartment, Hemme “lost it” and confronted her. She believed she had a hunting knife.
“I think I stabbed her with it,” Hemme said. “I don’t know. I don’t know.”
Afterward, Hemme said she hitched a ride to 6th Street in Kansas City, where she ditched Jeschke’s purse near Interstate 70. She made her way to Concordia, staying the night with her parents. The next day, she claimed, she discarded the knife at a battlefield park in Lexington.
Officers searched both areas for the items, but found nothing.
From jail, Hemme penned a letter to her mother on Christmas Day. She was innocent, she wrote, but might as well plead guilty. She was in pain with a bleeding ulcer. She was tired and wished she were dead. She asked her mom to raise her young daughter.
“Let her know her mommy didn’t kill that lady,” she wrote.
The guilty plea
Months later, on April 10, 1981, Hemme appeared before the Honorable Fred Schoenlaub to plead guilty to capital murder.
Prosecutor Mike Insco confirmed his office would not seek the death penalty in exchange for Hemme’s plea.
Schoenlaub wanted Hemme to explain, in her own words, what happened the day Jeschke was killed.
“Well, I killed Pat, you know,” said Hemme, then 21. “I stabbed her in the head and I choked her, you know, and I hit her a couple of times in the head. I don’t know why.”
It was, she added, like she was watching it “instead of doing it.”
Hemme described herself that day as intoxicated. Schoenlaub listened carefully and noticed she “expressed some doubt” about what she did before and after the killing.
“I really didn’t know I had done it until like three days later, you know, when it came out in the paper and on the news,” she said.
Hemme, however, could not provide enough evidence for Schoenlaub. He announced he was rejecting her guilty plea, saying the case would go to trial.
Insco asked for a recess. If Hemme’s “mind clears,” Schoenlaub said, he would reconsider.
About 15 minutes later, Hemme was back in court. Asked by the judge if her memory was better now than it had been 20 minutes earlier, she said it was.
Hemme then said Jeschke picked her up that day and, once at the apartment, she “attacked her.” The judge inquired: Why?
“To kill her,” Hemme said.
“Why did you want to kill her?” Schoenlaub asked.
“Drug dealings and so forth,” she replied.
“What do you mean, drug dealings?”
“Sales of drugs, you know,” Hemme answered, “and cheated out of a little bit of money.”
Hemme said she stabbed Jeschke, strangled her with “a pantyhose” and, after Jeschke died, tied her up with a phone cord. She called it a “spur of the moment type of thing.”
Insco said Hemme’s statements matched “perfectly” with the prosecution’s evidence. This time, Schoenlaub accepted her plea.
To those who loved Jeschke, the idea that she would owe Hemme drug money was ludicrous. She did not use drugs and was described as “very straight-laced.”
Hemme was taken to Renz Correctional Center, a then-prison farm near Jefferson City, to begin her life sentence. It wouldn’t be the last time her case drew scrutiny.
‘Flawed’ conviction thrown out
Nearly two years later, Hemme was back in court with a new lawyer, Larry Harman.
Harman was trying to get Hemme’s guilty plea thrown out by showing Dale Sullivan, her previous attorney, was ineffective. One of his witnesses was Hemme’s father, who testified that Sullivan said if Hemme “felt guilty,” she should plead guilty.
When Hemme took the stand, she said Sullivan and Insco told her what to say during the 1981 court recess. She claimed the prosecutor told her to mention the phone cord because it would show premeditation, and that Sullivan said to tell the story in a way that “sounded more believable.”
Sullivan did not have a defense and could “guarantee” Hemme would be sentenced to die if she went to trial, she said. He told Hemme she was just as guilty because she was there and could get the same sentence “even though I didn’t do it,” she testified. She was wrongly told she would be out within 13 years, that life without parole for 50 years was window dressing for the victim’s family.
Sullivan, who died in 2020, denied making those statements. Insco was not asked about the court recess at the time. The Star could not reach him for comment.
In her version of events at the hearing, Hemme said she watched the murder as a bystander and placed three men at the scene. Unlike before, none of them was Joseph Wabski.
Judge Frank Connett denied Hemme’s motion. But in 1984, the Missouri Court of Appeals overturned Hemme’s “fatally flawed” conviction, finding Sullivan ineffective and saying he failed to request a mental examination for her. There were no known witnesses to the killing, the judges noted, and the only description of the state’s evidence came from Hemme herself.
When Hemme stood trial in 1985, her words again would be the only evidence against her.
The new trial
The prosecution’s first few witnesses took jurors back to the day Jeschke, a somewhat shy but friendly 1971 Missouri Western graduate, was found dead.
Jeschke had recently revived an interest in her Catholic faith and attended classes at St. Francis Xavier Church. But she missed the one on the evening of Nov. 12.
Her mother got a call the next morning from the library’s director, saying Jeschke did not arrive at work. She and her husband drove to their daughter’s one-story duplex, where her car was parked outside. No one answered as they knocked on the locked doors.
After climbing through a window, Jeschke’s mother found her on the floor. A pillow covered her face, blood pooled around her head. Detectives found no evidence of forced entry.
In a one-day trial devoid of physical evidence and eyewitnesses, most of the six hours of testimony came from detectives who interviewed Hemme, then 25, and read her statements to the jury.
But even in her statements, Hemme was anything but consistent. One time, she said she knew about the murder because of extrasensory perception — or, as it is also known, the sixth sense.
“And of course, Pat was still at work at 5 p.m., the time that the defendant was telling you that this murder was taking place, isn’t that correct?” her trial lawyer, Robert Duncan, asked about one statement.
It was, a detective acknowledged.
While Hemme previously claimed she killed Jeschke over “drug dealings,” prosecutors did not mention it. They instead contended her motive was her uncontrollable urge to harm people.
Two of the last things the jury heard were not about Hemme, who is white, but about Michael Holman, who was Black and died at age 57 in 2015.
Duncan, who did not call any witnesses in Hemme’s defense, told the jury about Holman’s attempt to use Jeschke’s card at the Western Photographic Store in KCK. He also told them about a hair found on Jeschke’s bed sheet that exhibited “microscopic characteristics” similar to that of Holman’s.
“The possibility that this head hair originated from Michael Holman cannot be eliminated, but neither can it be conclusively said that it came from Michael Holman,” Duncan said, reading from facts that prosecutors agreed were true.
In his closing arguments, Duncan said nothing tied Hemme to the ghastly crime besides her statements. Her stories kept getting better and better throughout her nine police interviews. He called holes in the prosecution’s case “big enough to drive a 747 airplane through.” He took aim at Holman, saying there was “far more evidence” to convict him.
Patrick Robb, the assistant prosecutor who tried the case, countered that Hemme had played “a cat-and-mouse game” with detectives before she came clean. She knew details only the killer could, he argued. On the hair, he said the first officer at Jeschke’s apartment that day was also Black.
Following three and a half hours of deliberations, the jury of eight women and four men returned a verdict in State of Missouri vs. Sandra Hemme: Guilty.
One of the things the jury did not hear was that a man named Bobby Cummings wrote to Hemme while she was in jail, asking if she remembered hitchhiking in his car on the afternoon of the killing. Or that in a police interview, Cummings said he was the one who drove her to the Dearborn exit.
Patrolman’s ‘mysterious role’
Shortly after Hemme was found guilty, Holman’s own convictions were laid out in a St. Joseph Gazette story under the headline, “Ex-officer had mysterious role in Hemme case.”
Days after the murder, the newspaper reported, Holman was arrested for collecting theft insurance on a truck that was not actually stolen. He lost his job. He was picked up again days later for possessing stolen property, including a rifle taken from a home.
Holman spent a year in prison and, once out, was charged with breaking into a house in north St. Joseph, according to the Gazette. He later did time for stealing in Nebraska. Eventually, he landed at the Missouri State Penitentiary in Jefferson City when his probation was revoked.
During the murder investigation, detectives tried to corroborate Holman’s alibi.
Fueston went to the motel where Holman said he had sex with “Mary.” But the manager did not recall anyone named Mary staying there Nov. 12.
The detective showed photos, including one of Holman, to the manager and a nearby gas station attendant. Neither recognized anyone in the lineup.
Fueston, who retired as a sergeant in 1999, told The Star he thought Hemme was guilty, but also called it “well within the realm of possibility” that Holman was involved. If Hemme were released from prison, he added, it “wouldn’t bother me in the slightest.”
The evidence against Holman, though, was “more extensive and significant than previously known,” Hemme’s lawyers argued in a petition they filed in February in Livingston County, where she remains imprisoned at the Chillicothe Correctional Center.
Besides the credit card and bed sheet hair, Harman, who was Hemme’s attorney between 1981 and 1984, could not recall other information that might tie Holman to the crime. But he recently was told that a unique pair of Jeschke’s gold, wishbone-shaped earrings were found in Holman’s apartment in 1980 — months before Hemme pleaded guilty.
The patrolman’s wife told St. Joe police she had never seen them before. Jeschke’s father, however, recognized the earrings as ones he had bought for his daughter at a Montana gift shop. He identified them in the presence of the police chief at the time, James Robert “Bob” Hayes.
Hemme’s lawyers say the undisclosed earrings amount to “intimate physical evidence” linking Holman to Jeschke. And, they contend, the earrings undermine Holman’s “excuse” for why he had Jeschke’s credit card.
The attorneys laid out other evidence in their court filing. Witnesses, they said, also saw Holman’s pickup truck — the one he admitted he falsely reported stolen — near Jeschke’s apartment that day.
The hair in Jeschke’s sheets, it turned out, did not match Vernon Burris, the only Black officer called to the murder scene, according to FBI analysis.
And while none of the prints recovered came from Hemme, her lawyers wrote, Holman “could not be excluded as the source” of latent palm prints discovered at the scene.
Records show the FBI informed local police in 1981 that “clearly and completely recorded” prints of Holman, and several other possible suspects, were needed for conclusive comparisons.
“Despite the FBI request, there is no indication that the St. Joseph Police Department sent any more finger or palm prints belonging to Holman or any other alternate suspect for definitive analysis,” Hemme’s attorneys wrote.
No one on the force at the time remains employed there. Today’s police department had no comment on the case.
‘Mentally ill and vulnerable’
Harman, the former Hemme lawyer, said he believes the police took advantage of Hemme’s “mentally fragile state” when they interviewed her.
“I’m not saying they deliberately took a statement from her to frame an innocent person,” he wrote in a 2022 affidavit, “but her mental frailty was obvious enough that they should have known to be more cautious.”
Harman went on to serve as Clay County prosecutor, a special assistant Missouri attorney general and a circuit judge for 26 years. The system, he said, failed Hemme.
“In multiple respects, the system should have done a better job protecting someone so young, mentally ill and vulnerable,” he wrote.
Hemme’s statements show she was trying to appease her interrogators, her current lawyers say. But she was only able to provide details, they said, after police showed her photos of Jeschke’s injuries.
Judith Edersheim, a forensic psychiatrist, recently determined that Hemme’s “underlying psychological vulnerabilities” increased the likelihood that she falsely incriminated herself. Her report also noted that Hemme is a survivor of physical and sexual violence.
Across the U.S., false confessions have contributed to the wrongful convictions of 400 people, according to the National Registry of Exonerations.
One of them, a Missouri man named George Allen Jr., had schizophrenia. He spent 30 years in prison after police physically and psychologically coerced him into confessing to raping and murdering a St. Louis woman. He was freed in 2012.
Former top cop: Hemme is innocent
Lloyd Pasley, who was a senior member in St. Joe’s detective division in 1980, recalled telling Hayes, the police chief, that interviewing Hemme would not produce “anything credible.”
In a recent affidavit, Pasley said he believed Hemme gave details based on leading questions or other forms of “unintentional suggestion.”
Pasley, now 91, was one of the officers who interrogated Holman. But Hayes took him off the case after the interview, he remembered. The investigation into Holman ended after just four days. But as far as Pasley knew, no one ever confirmed his whereabouts that night.
About two decades later, Hayes was sent to prison for involuntary manslaughter after he fatally shot his neighbor in 1997. He died in 2010.
Pasley worked at the department on and off for about 40 years, including twice as interim chief. He suspected that a man killed Jeschke during a burglary. She lived alone, yet her toilet seat was up.
In his affidavit, Pasley declared publicly, for the first time, that he believes Hemme is innocent and played no role in Jeschke’s slaying.
“I believe the evidence points to Michael Holman as the sole perpetrator of Patricia Jeschke’s murder,” he added.
When Holman was investigated for insurance fraud, a service weapon he had reported stolen was discovered in his storage unit, Pasley wrote. But before Pasley found out about it and could send it for testing, the gun was cleaned and put “back in service.”
“I have always wondered if that pistol could have been the blunt object Mr. Holman used while killing Ms. Jeschke,” he wrote.
Sitting at his kitchen table last week, Pasley said he was not alone in his belief that Holman was the killer. A lieutenant, who has since died, was also “convinced” of it. Now, Pasley said, he is trying to help right a wrong.
“She should be freed,” he told The Star.
Jeschke’s close friend, Nancy Barmann, also always believed Holman had something to do with the killing. In an affidavit, she said she does not understand why he “was never held responsible.”
Jane Pucher, a senior staff attorney at the Innocence Project, said instead of investigating a fellow officer, the police zeroed in on Hemme, who could not have been “more vulnerable to police suggestion and coercion.”
“It was clear that Sandy had no reliable information about this crime but she was an easy target,” Pucher said.
Ryan Horsman, the presiding judge of the 43rd Circuit Court, has been assigned to Hemme’s case. An initial hearing is set for July 10.
If Hemme is ultimately exonerated, her prison term will mark the longest known wrongful conviction of a woman in U.S. history.
This story was originally published March 8, 2023 at 5:30 AM.
