Missouri woman Sandra Hemme sues St. Joseph, police after 43 years behind bars
A Missouri woman who spent 43 years in prison for a murder she did not commit filed a federal civil rights lawsuit this week against the city of St. Joseph and former St. Joseph police officers.
Sandra Lynn Hemme filed the suit Thursday, which accuses investigators of fabricating evidence, coercing a false confession and suppressing evidence that could have proven her innocence.
Hemme, now in her 60’s, was exonerated in 2024 after a judge found she had been wrongly convicted in the 1980 murder of Patricia Jeschke. The lawsuit says Hemme was a 20-year-old psychiatric patient and was heavily medicated when police subjected her to repeated interrogations.
The suit, filed in the U.S. District Court in the Western District of Missouri, claims actions by investigators at the time ultimately coerced a confession that did not match the facts of the crime.
“She was in the wrong place at the wrong time,” said Mark Emison, one of Hemme’s attorneys. “She was vulnerable and taken advantage of, and she’s had a horrendous four decades because of that, that she’ll never get back.”
Suit claims botched murder investigation
The complaint alleges police ignored and actively concealed evidence pointing to another possible suspect, Michael Holman, a former St. Joseph police officer who died in 2015. Holman was allegedly found in possession of the victim’s earrings and attempted to use her credit card the day after the murder.
Officers are accused of halting the investigation into Holman to protect him and instead pursuing Hemme despite having no physical evidence tying her to the crime.
Hemme initially pleaded guilty, but later withdrew the plea. She was retried in 1985 and convicted again based solely on the coerced confession, the suit claims.
“(Hemme) was deprived of her freedom for over four decades — virtually, her entire adult life,” the suit reads. “She lost the opportunity to connect with family, to recover from her illness, to form friendships and to live a meaningful life.”
Hemme’s exoneration
After her wrongful conviction, it took Hemme more than 40 years to prove her innocence.
She contacted the Innocence Project and the organization took up her case in 2018.
In 2023, her lawyers filed a lengthy petition in Livingston County Circuit Court. They retrieved documents from the Jeschke murder case and on Holman from the St. Joseph Police Department that had not been previously disclosed.
No physical evidence ever connected Hemme to the crime.
Psychiatrist Judith Edersheim concluded in an evaluation that Hemme was at high risk for falsely confessing due to her serious mental illness and the antipsychotic medication she had been put on, which likely disrupted her cognitive thinking.
In June 2024, Livingston County Judge Ryan Horsman ruled that Hemme’s constitutional rights had been violated and granted her release.
Hemme’s full exoneration was hindered by Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey’s office, which opposed her innocence case and fought to send her back to prison.
But the Missouri Court of Appeals refused to overturn Judge Horsman’s ruling, and in March 2025, prosecutors declined to retry the case, resulting in Hemme’s unconditional release.
Sean O’Brien, a Kansas City-based attorney who represented Hemme alongside Innocence Project attorneys, called her case “a failure of everything,” including the St. Joseph police steering the investigation away from one of their own.
Lawsuit seeks damages, jury trial
Now free, Hemme is seeking accountability for what her attorneys describe as a decades-long cover-up and the longest known wrongful conviction of a woman in U.S. history.
Emison said although she will be forever changed by the wrongful conviction, Hemme has been resilient and has the support of a loving family.
Despite her exoneration, Hemme is not eligible to be compensated by the state, The Star previously reported. Missouri’s compensation law only provides money for those exonerated through DNA evidence.
“Unfortunately, that’s the law in Missouri,” Emison said. “So this (lawsuit) is the remedy available to her. This is her only way to achieve civil justice for what’s been taken from her.”
The lawsuit filed Thursday seeks compensatory and punitive damages for years lost and systemic failures that led to her imprisonment.
Hemme’s lawyers are seeking a jury trial on all counts in the complaint.
Previous reporting by Katie Moore contributed.
This story was originally published July 25, 2025 at 4:05 PM.
