In the 1970s, a man falsely confessed to murder in St. Joseph. It now sounds familiar
Lawyers who argue that Sandra Hemme falsely confessed to the murder for which she has spent four decades in prison say she was not the first mentally ill person targeted by St. Joseph police to “wrongly solve a crime.”
In a petition seeking to exonerate Hemme, the New York-based Innocence Project said the only evidence tying her to the 1980 killing of Patricia Jeschke were her wildly inaccurate statements extracted from detectives. At the time, she was a psychiatric patient.
As Hemme’s case worked its way through the courts, St. Joseph law enforcement was roiled in another controversy: the wrongful conviction of Melvin Lee Reynolds.
Reynolds falsely confessed to murdering a 4-year-old boy in 1978 following hours of police interrogation. After spending four years in prison, he was exonerated and freed in 1983, when a self-proclaimed serial killer, Charles Hatcher, pleaded guilty to the murder.
As recounted in “Innocent Blood,” a book about the case by a St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter at the time, Reynolds could not see an end to an hours-long lie detector test.
“Did you kill the boy?” a lieutenant asked him.
“No,” Reynolds replied. “But I’ll say so if you want me to.”
As detailed in the book, detectives brought Reynolds back for questioning over the span of months. They hypnotized him; they gave him “truth serum.” After a “total of nearly 40 hours” of interrogation, Reynolds gave the lawmen what they were hounding him for.
Some of the officers who extracted Reynolds’ false confession worked on the investigation that landed Hemme in prison, according to court records.
Hemme, then 25, was found guilty at a 1985 trial of murdering Jeschke. She previously pleaded guilty, but her plea was thrown out on appeal. No physical evidence or witnesses tied her to the murder. Her contradictory statements were the only evidence against her.
Now 63, Hemme remains at the Chillicothe Correctional Center as Innocence Project attorneys seek to free her. Her lawyers and others, including a former interim police chief, say more evidence suggests that a disgraced police officer committed the murder.
In an affidavit, Larry Harman — who represented Hemme in the 1980s and went on to become Clay County’s prosecutor, and then a judge — said his concerns in Hemme’s case reflect criticisms of the police investigation into Reynolds.
“I believe she may have incriminated herself in part because she ‘adopted’ as ‘true’ certain information conveyed in questions asked of her, information publicly available through the news media, or statements made and questions by law enforcement officers,” he wrote.
Reynolds, like Hemme, spent time in the St. Joseph State Hospital.
“Like in the case of Ms. Hemme, St. Joseph police obtained a confession from Reynolds after interrogating him repeatedly, resulting in a statement that also did not align with the known facts of the crime in question,” Hemme’s lawyers wrote in their petition.
This story was originally published March 8, 2023 at 5:30 AM.
