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Season Five Home For The Holidays 11
73 Plays11 days ago
In Today’s Episode, we put together our Home for the Holiday cases.
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Sources:
Various News Sources Mentioned by Name
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Transcript
Introduction and Episode Overview
00:00:00
Speaker
The content you're about to hear may be graphic in nature. Listener discretion is advised.
00:00:22
Speaker
This is True Crime XS.
Holiday Stories and Case Introduction
00:00:27
Speaker
We're now officially into double digits of like the holiday stories where we've told so many in such a short period of time. And the last couple like have had some variation to them. This one, i I put together largely from newspapers dot.com. There's not a lot about this in terms of the like the exoneration itself, but St. Joseph's News, the Parson's Son, the Kansas City Times,
00:00:56
Speaker
um the St. Joseph Gazette, I think is the name of one of the papers there. They put a lot of this into newspapers dot.com. You can find this in a couple of different Wiki articles kind of all put together. I thought this was a really interesting story.
Wrongful Conviction and Innocence Project Involvement
00:01:11
Speaker
ah The distinction of this one is that one of the people involved had the longest prison tenure for being a wrongfully convicted American woman. I thought that was interesting. um There are multiple trials. um The Innocence Project has been involved in in this one. So they have some stuff on their website that you can go in and read a little bit about there. um There's ah a lot of paper and in terms of court documents, it falls into stuff that spills all the way into 2024. So like this year,
00:01:47
Speaker
some of this stuff has been in the court. So we don't know the ultimate outcome like for compensation and stuff on this one. But I thought, you know, it's the holidays. This is a case that's about 43 years old. It happened in November of 1980. It's a very interesting murder case. And when I looked at it, um there is like a brief tie to another case out of the same area.
00:02:16
Speaker
So I thought that we would take a crack at including it, um even though it is it kind of recent in some of the activity that's gone on here.
Murder of Patricia Jeske
00:02:25
Speaker
This is a story of a the November 12th, 1980 murder of a woman named ah Patricia Jeske. And this happens in St. Joseph, Missouri. Have you had you ever heard of this before? No, I haven't. So the way that this story starts is ah Patricia, Patricia Jeske is 31 years old, and she does not show up for her job at the desk at the St. Joseph Missouri Library. The library director is a woman named Dorothy Elliott, and she goes through all the motions of what you do when one of your employees doesn't show up. She tries to call her, but she gets to a point where
00:03:10
Speaker
ah she She's very concerned about Patricia. So she goes to her house. She's not able to get into her house. Her house is locked up. But Patricia's mother is her emergency contact. It's a woman named Helen McLaughlin. So Dorothy calls Helen and Helen comes over to the house and tries to figure out how to get into the house. She can't, so she breaks the back window and enters the house.
00:03:40
Speaker
And she discovers that Patricia is dead inside. She has a telephone cord around her neck, and she has a laceration to the back of her head. ah When they're doing this, it's actually November 13th, 1980. There's no signs of forced entry on her home, according to the police chief, who at the time was a man named James Robert Hayes. But again, this is 43 years ago. The last time anyone had seen Patricia alive was around 5pm on November the 12th, so the day before.
00:04:09
Speaker
She was naked. She had a laceration to the back of her head. And in addition to the telephone cord around her neck, there were signs that she had been sexually assaulted. She was ultimately determined to have died from a mixture of strangulation and blunt force trauma to her head. The
Investigation and Initial Arrests
00:04:28
Speaker
medical examiner said she'd probably been dead for somewhere between 12 and 16 hours before her body was discovered at 1pm the following day. Now, a man named Lloyd Paisley is put in charge of the investigation for the St. Joseph Police, and her parents put up a $1,000 reward. A journalist mistakenly publishes a blurb
00:04:54
Speaker
stating that a 24-year-old man had been charged with Patricia's murder after overhearing parts of a conversation between a captain and a lieutenant at the local police. For the local police's part, they said they investigated over 200 leads. A lot of the articles that you will read about this start off with the words, please have no suspects in slaying.
00:05:16
Speaker
Now, the case is covered by the local media really heavily because it was considered to be a pretty shocking crime. As far as the investigation goes, on December the 5th, the police arrest a woman named Sandra Lynn Hemmey and a man named Joseph Patrick Wapsky. Wapsky gets charged with murder and Sandra Hemmey gets charged with a class D felony of concealing knowledge of a crime. She's also charged with a class D felony assault for attempting to use a knife against a police officer in an unrelated case that took place around Thanksgiving, so after Patricia's murder. Timmy had been a patient at the St. Joseph State Hospital and for her part she stated that she had just been bumming around the area.
Sandra Hemmey's Confession and Trial
00:06:00
Speaker
Her parents actually lived in Cordia, Missouri. Now, when she was 13 years old, Sandra Hemme first attempted suicide. She had been hospitalized in various mental institutions over the next eight years for approximately six of those years. And that was in Kansas City, St. Louis, Jefferson City, and Columbia. And she had also been hospitalized in Maryland at one point.
00:06:25
Speaker
According to all accounts, she had attempted suicide multiple times. Sandra Hemme is the one who identifies Joseph Wapski as the killer of Patricia Jeske. For Wapski's part, he says that he doesn't know who Sandra Hemme is. Her initial story to the detectives that were investigating Patricia's murder, they weren't about murder at all. They were actually about her having gone hitchhiking with two people named Joe and Pat. She later changes her story and the next day she includes the man's full name as Joe Wapski. She says they went to a house with Pat and that Pat came out with blood on his hands stating, quote, I killed that fucking bitch after talking about
00:07:14
Speaker
and this is another quote, human and animal sacrifices. And according to Hemi's story, Pat had threatened to kill Hemi if she told anybody. So Hemi, for her part, was able to lead police to Patricia's house. But if you listen to what the lawyers say in the various court documents affiliated with this case, they state that the police just drove her straight there. Later on, Sandra Hemmey would say that she witnessed the murder and she attempted to stop Joe Wapske from killing Patricia Jeske. Police showed Sandra Hemmey pictures of the crime scene. Switching over to Joseph Wapske for a second, he had been in prison multiple times since 1958. He had an assault on two police officers in September of 1977. And at the time this all happened, he had been living at a halfway house.
00:08:07
Speaker
So a halfway house is a place that people who have criminal backgrounds, I know in some areas they can be referred to as rehabilitation places, but here this is a place for someone who is coming out of prison to go onto parole or to be in some other type of supervised situation before they're just released back into society.
00:08:32
Speaker
multiple witnesses and receipts and some business records in Topeka, Kansas, confirmed that Joseph Wofsky couldn't have been anywhere near the murder of Patricia Jepsky. His dropped.
00:08:50
Speaker
and At one point, it was rumored that Wapski was suing the police for damages due to the false accusations of murder. From what I can tell, that's just something that appears in a blurb when an ambitious newspaper reporter was looking for ah sort of a sound bite or a quote. But Hemi ends up being charged with Patricia's murder on December the 10th, and she is denied bail. Now,
00:09:17
Speaker
For her part, the assault charge where she tried to take a knife to a police officer is dropped. So at this point, she is just facing charges for the murder of Patricia Jeske. She's initially scheduled to appear in court on December the 18th, but a grand jury convenes prior to this. And on December the 15th, she's indicted.
00:09:45
Speaker
This results in her being arraigned directly into the Circuit Court Division 3 instead. Now, because this happens and she has no preliminary hearing here, this results in evidence not being shown publicly until the trial begins. Her lawyer is a man named Dale Sullivan and he pretty much immediately requests that the court perform multiple examinations related to Sandra Hemme's mental health and her competency. Initially, Sandra Hemme pleats not guilty, but on April 10th of 1981, she changes her not guilty plea to guilty. The judge, for his part, it's a guy named Fred Showemub, he initially will not accept her guilty plea
00:10:36
Speaker
he felt like her allocation was too vague and that the defendant did not remember, quote, how she had gotten there. And he ordered that the case go forward to trial. But after some conversation between the attorneys, the judge agrees to accept her guilty plea. And he sentenced her to life in prison without parole for 50 years.
00:11:03
Speaker
Based on her claims to the judge, she said, quote, I had lost control and that, quote, I was pretty well intoxicated. Now, she claimed that she had met Patricia Jesky at Platt College and that she said that Patricia had picked her up while she was hitchhiking to Kansas City. And Sandra Hemme asked if she could get a shower at Patricia's house. Hemme says that While this was going on, they got into an argument over money that Patricia owed her due to some drug deal. In the course of her guilty plea, Hemi stated that the prosecution had promised her that if she pled guilty, the prosecutor wouldn't ask for the death penalty.
00:11:50
Speaker
She stated that she had used a hunting knife to kill Patricia before throwing it away at a park in Lexington, Missouri. And she also stated that she had taken Patricia Jeske's purse and she had thrown it away near Interstate 70. So police went and looked for the knife, which would be the purported murder weapon, could have caused some of the injuries to Patricia's head. And they go looking for the purse.
00:12:20
Speaker
and they don't find either item. Now, Zeski's father, Earl, this is Helen's husband, he took issue with the fact that Sandra Hemme claimed that she killed Patricia in a disagreement over some kind of drug deal. In fact, he stated that his daughter neither used nor sold any drugs.
00:12:48
Speaker
Okay, so for this part, we are basically looking at Sandra Hemmey going into prison for a long time.
Trial Inconsistencies and Mental Health Issues
00:12:57
Speaker
What do you think of this in terms of this being a, quote, trial? I mean, well, to speak to what you just were talking about, I feel like there's a lot of bunk involved in this. Yes, there's definitely bunk here. And It's always interesting to me, and and i don't I can't really think of examples to give, but it's always interesting to me when you've got when you're adding insult to injury, right? ah With regard to the story and then the fact that like she talks about, like,
00:13:33
Speaker
something to make the victim look even worse that by accounts of her family, I think you said her father, like she didn't do drugs, right? yeah She didn't sell drugs. She didn't use them. There's no reason why there would have been this altercation happening over some sort of drug transaction or whatever, right? Yeah. But it's always interesting that when it's a story to begin with, yeah it's made worse. Now, I don't really know what to make of it. I do feel like things like this go on too long. but This one certainly went on too long because it seems to me like somebody could have put a stop to the nonsense.
00:14:12
Speaker
Right? Yeah. As far as this being a trial, well, there's no question somebody died, right? I wanted to ask you, have you ever seen like the combination thing where they said that she died from a combination of blunt force trauma and his asphyxiation? Yeah, I mean, this is similar to what we talked about with Jake Holhill, where there were injuries on him that could have been strangulation, but he also had severe blunt force trauma. It's very similar to that. I pulled the court records on this because I had the same question you did there. And I i did it because like she's got this whole hunting knife thing she did. If you look at the court records on Sandra Hemme's case, the most interesting document was this 1984 appellate document. So this is after she's pled guilty. And her attorneys go in and basically say, look, this is crazy.
00:15:04
Speaker
ah this is from seventeen This is from September 4, 1984, the Missouri Court of Appeals. So this is who would get it right after the circuit court had it. Here's what they put in and how the court ruled. It says, this is an appeal from the order of the trial court denying a motion under Rule 27.26 to set aside the movement's conviction and sentence on her plea of guilty to the offensive capital murder. The sentence imposed on the plea was life imprisonment without eligibility for parole for 50 years. The issue is the asserted ineffectiveness of defense counsel and failing to raise issues of the movement's mental state at the time of the offense and her competence to enter this plea. The appellate was charged with murder of one Patricia Jeske on November 12, 1980 by stabbing and strangling the victim.
00:15:54
Speaker
So right there, stabbing and strangling is different than strangling and blunt force trauma to me. And if you read between the lines and some of this and what's coming up ahead, it looks like she had injuries that could have been either way that caused contusions on her head.
00:16:12
Speaker
No witnesses to the crime are reported. The record of the plea hearing includes no description of the evidence the state would have offered in trial save only the statements obtained from the movement herself, which is Sandra Hemme here. The file suggests that Sandra Hemme was first interrogated about the crime on December 5, 1980.
00:16:30
Speaker
And on December 10, 1980, she confessed to having perpetrated the homicide. Certain facts relative to the movement's medical history and circumstances are not in dispute. Some of the information entered the record for the first time at the hearing on the 27.26 motion, while other details were available at the time the plea of guilty was accepted.
00:16:50
Speaker
The same judge who imposed sentence did not conduct the motion here. So counsel who presented the movement on the criminal charge testified at the motion hearing. But at that time, Sandra Hemme had retained another attorney to present this motion. The gist of this claim for the 27.26 motion was that criminal trial counsel had failed to make minimal preparation of the defense.
00:17:13
Speaker
and had instead actively promoted the entry of a guilty plea notwithstanding the movement's lengthy history of mental illness induced by drug abuse. Okay, so this 2726 hearing that they're talking about here, they're basically saying everybody was in court for Sandra Heminga to plead guilty. Her counsel, the prosecution, and no one was really representing her interest except for herself. And they're saying she was not competent to represent her own interest in this instance.
00:17:43
Speaker
And I actually believe that that is probably the case. OK, so I have to say that, like, I don't think Sandra Hemme's interests were being represented here. Not by anybody. Related to this appeal and this document that we have in in front of us, the counsel for her has made a mistake in terms of the people standing there with her while she is pleading guilty. Now, they go on to point out that She has a a long history of mental illness. They say it's induced by drug abuse, but I don't think that's even relevant. She is 21 years old when she's entering this guilty plea, knowing that she will be in prison until she is 71 years old before she can apply for parole. They say that she was 13 years old when she first attempted suicide and then she received psychiatric treatment for that in 1972. So the eight years that followed, which is the time between
00:18:43
Speaker
her being 13 and now in terms of this plea, she's only 21 years old, but she's been in and out of hospital so much that they characterize it as her having been hospitalized for almost six full years out of the eight years between the time she attempts to commit suicide for the first time and the crime that she's charged for in this case. According to the state's reconstruction of events, Sandra Hemme gets out of the hospital the day of the murder and gets back to the hospital that night. So she had been in the hospital prior to the murder, and at the time of her arrest, she was a patient at St. Joseph State Hospital. The record here does not include all the material from the criminal file in terms of the appeal, and the appeal court notes it.
00:19:35
Speaker
It does appear that the appellate was first charged with the subject offense on or about December the 5th, after which the grand jury returned an indictment. Now there's a little bit of difference between the version of what I was reading and this document. It says they returned the indictment on December the 23rd. So basically two days before Christmas. At that point in time, private counsel was retained for Sandra Hemme by her father. This would have been soon after her arrest and ahead of her indictment.
00:20:04
Speaker
There is no record of when the attorney undertook to represent it because the attorney filed no entry of appearance. He filed no motions, he filed no pleadings. He was selected according to the appellant's father because he had known the family for about 10 years and he had been a representative for the appellate, Sandra Hemme, as a juvenile when she was sent to a Kansas City hospital for psychiatric treatment and therapy before this crime.
00:20:31
Speaker
So basically, Dad has just reached out to a lawyer who's familiar with Sandra Hemme. The guilty plea takes place on April 10, 1981. Sandra Hemme enters the plea then. In the first segment of the hearing, Sandra Hemme professed not to have a clear recollection of the killing or any of the events from that day. As she described it, the occurrence was not her act, but as though she were a spectator watching from the outside. The responses she gave did not satisfy the court and the guilty plea was refused. So this is how the judge like starts to question things. The appellate court is looking at it and they say there is no indication in the record of the plea hearing that the trial court was given any information about the appellate's history of institutional treatment or that concern about the appellate's competence was at the root of the initial refusal to accept the plea.
00:21:20
Speaker
I see some stuff in the record that is slightly contradictory to that, but there are multiple judges that have seen her at this point. This is the judge seeing her in April 1981. As the court stated, the testimony offered by Sandra Hemmey was simply not sufficient to satisfy all of the elements of the offensive capital murder. The state made no offer to show what its proof would be apart from Sandra Hemmey's confession.
00:21:46
Speaker
At this point, the prosecutor interceded and got a recess. This was evidently to assist the appellate in clearing her memory. During the recess, according to appellate's testimony, at the motion hearing, the prosecutor and the defense attorney jointly instructed her as to how she would should respond to the court's questions to assure acceptance of the plea. After 15 minutes of a recess, the hearing resumes.
00:22:10
Speaker
The appellate described in some detail to the court the killing of Patricia Jeske, which had now been accomplished by the appellate a law and ah like so she's now saying she was the killer and how she did it and the plea gets accepted. The defense counsel asked no questions of the appellate and made no statement on her behalf The court immediately sentenced the appellate to life imprisonment without parole for 50 years. Five days later, she's transported out to the Department of Corrections to serve her sentence. Just to be clear what's happening here, they're considering this to be a trial, but she gets there. She had a not guilty plea. Her attorney basically says, I'm not ready to go to trial.
00:22:49
Speaker
And the appellate abruptly changes her plea to guilt. She doesn't? Right, but she was coaxed into what to say. Right. So right there, that that's a problem. That's something her attorney should not have allowed to happen. And not only did he allowed to happen, he went along with it. Honestly, the court shouldn't have allowed it to happen either because he could see it unfolding. Well, but it was during a recess. Well, you're right. OK, yeah, I agree. But it was during a recess. Right. That she's coaxed. Yes.
00:23:15
Speaker
A defense, because basically the court said, I'm not accepting this plea. The prosecutor says, okay, can I have a brief recess? During the recess, they reconvene with the defense attorney, the defendant, and the prosecutor, and they are both feeding her the narrative she has to give to the judge in order for the plea to be accepted.
00:23:33
Speaker
Because depending on a judge's position, I mean, they can accept anything that comes before them, I guess. But you know in some cases, they want to make sure justice is happening. And that was one of the cases here. Her initial recount of you know whatever she said wasn't enough for him to accept the plea. right And I promise it didn't make any sense. I've seen this happen in like lesser charges, like I've witnessed it happen in court where the court is trying to accept the plea. What I haven't seen is where the defense attorney basically colludes with the prosecution to walk the defendant through their plea, which is pretty clearly being made because the person realizes like they're in deep trouble and their attorney doesn't make any efforts to try and
00:24:19
Speaker
And that it's wrong. it It doesn't serve the entrance of justice to me. OK, so I tried to imagine the circumstances where like that might be OK and thought about it. And even in a case where like you had somebody that like couldn't maintain the memory for long enough. Right. Right. That's where I'm at with it. Like when would it be okay for your defense attorney to be standing over you with the prosecutor also standing over you feeding you information? When would that be okay? And the answer is never. It would never be okay. And so if we're being fair to the court,
00:24:57
Speaker
They do sometimes accept pleas during this type of situation and in your right they if it's a recess and like they're all talking to her The court wouldn't necessarily know exactly what was going on I personally feel like they should recognize the signs depending on how long they've been on the bench But when you have this It would it would be her attorney's job to not have this happen. Well, and you're not wrong, but I have a feeling that like what you ever seen people turn into a puddle. Yes. Okay. So this is a bunch of puddles. So the prosecutor is not a puddle, but the defense attorney turns into a puddle. And what I mean by that is they just don't know what to do. So they sort of shrink and they don't
00:25:42
Speaker
know how to stand up to the prosecution, but clearly this other puddle, who is his client, she is now terrified and she doesn't want to go through ah all of this. So she's just going to plead guilty. I've seen people plead guilty for a myriad number of reasons that aren't, they're guilty. They don't want to go through the process. It looks like The evidence is strong against them. Like we have a- Which is exactly why you have a defense attorney. Right. So we have a bunch of things happening here. The Missouri Court of Appeals is hearing this part of it. After a hearing to determine whether or not they were representing their client's interest, that's the 2726 hearing that we're talking about.
00:26:25
Speaker
And ultimately, this has all resulted in her heading to the Department of Corrections. So she is going to serve her, essentially, life sentence. Because if you get in at 21 and you can't get parole before you're 71, I don't care what anybody says, that's ultimately a life sentence. So at this motion hearing, the attorney that turned into the puddle He testifies that he had prepared the case by reviewing the prosecuting attorney's file. He talked to Sandra Hemme. He examined her file from this from St. Joseph's Hospital. And he had made some investigation as to the other persons that Sandra Hemme had described as being involved. He gave that information to St. Joseph Police Department. He agreed at the time
00:27:08
Speaker
he He was acquainted with her history of hospitalization because that's how he knew her and that he had gone on for the previous eight years. He was relatively acquainted with her having been a patient at the time the offense was committed. So he kind of screws up there. But like, I don't think he knew one way or the other what was going on. I don't think he was paying attention. I think he was being a puddle.
00:27:29
Speaker
Now, by the time he's testifying again, he says Sendra him his history and condition did raise a doubt in his mind as to her competency, specifically her competency to proceed with a trial or to proceed with his plea. And he had a doubt as to to her mental capacity at the time that the crime was committed.
00:27:47
Speaker
Despite having these two doubts, he doesn't do anything at that time to file a motion for a mental examination. He doesn't give any information to the court in the form of a statement or witnesses to her history of hospitalization or treatment. And he gives no notice of any intention to rely on any type of defense related to what was potentially a mental disease or defect or competency. And as he described it, he wasn't impressed with his defense. He wasn't.
00:28:17
Speaker
He wasn't in front, this is the the defense attorney? Yeah, he didn't know what he was doing and he's admitting to ineffective assistance at this hearing. Okay. Well, and and at that point of where they're at. Okay. But here's my question. So is there a question of actual like innocence here? At this point in time, we're just trying to get her back in front of a judge. She has now babbled her way through several confessions. And I say that because they're totally and incoherent. I'm not insulting her. She just has no idea what she's doing. You have to remember you and I talk about this all the time. This is a 21 year old person who has a history of
00:28:56
Speaker
problems that have required rehabilitation and therapy and hospitalization for those things. So this is not a person who should be making decisions on her own at this point, let alone guilty pleas.
00:29:11
Speaker
Well, right. But it also would, that would be the very first flag that is raised with regard to like, Oh, you know, what's happening here? I don't know how she likes, I don't know how any of this starts. it It starts by her having a conversation with the police and blaming some people that couldn't possibly have been involved. That should have been the first big red flag that we have no idea what we're doing.
00:29:36
Speaker
Right. Okay. The point raised in this appeal, which is dispositive of the the case, is a claim that the appellant's guilty plea was involuntary because their trial counsel was entertaining some doubt as far to her competency to proceed, but then sought no adjudication on the issue. And he did not communicate this in any way to the judge. Where the accused is entered a plea of guilty, adequacy of representation is material only if ineffective representation has affected the voluntariness and understanding of the plea. So the conviction of an accused while legally incompetent is a denial of due process. You can read about this in Missouri law under Hall versus State or in US s law, Pate versus Robinson.
00:30:18
Speaker
A person is not competent to proceed if because of a mental disease or defect he lacks the capacity to understand the proceedings against them or to assist in his own defense. That is also Missouri from 1978 that's Bryant versus State. If counsel for the accused comes to an honest belief that his client lacks present capacity for rational understanding and cooperation He is under a duty to obtain adjudication of the issue because the ongoing criminal conviction process relies on the absence of doubt by defense counsel as to the client's competency. And that's Miller versus State, also Missouri law. So they're reviewing all of this and in in the review of a trial court order denying relief under this 2726 motion, the appellate court is limited
00:31:03
Speaker
to a determination of whether the judgment of the trial court is clearly erroneous. The trial court's findings are clearly erroneous only when the appellate court is left with a firm conviction that a mistake has been committed. Appellate court says, we are concerned in ruling this appeal only with the issue stated, that is, whether the appellate was competent to proceed between the date of the charge and the date of a guilty plea, and whether counsel is ineffective in failing to initiate adjudication of the question.
00:31:31
Speaker
The trial court in its findings declared that Appellate was competent to enter her plea and further construed the testimony of Appellate's trial counsel not to be indicative of doubt that Appellate was competent when the plea was entered. These findings are clearly erroneous.
00:31:45
Speaker
All of the facts recited earlier in this opinion, including appellate's long history of treatment for mental problems, her repeated attempts at suicide, her then current status as a patient receiving treatment at St. Joseph State Hospital on the date the offense was committed and on the date of her arrest, her confused initial plea testimony psychologically described as derealization,
00:32:08
Speaker
were all uncontested and if fully known by the trial court should have and no doubt would have prompted an inquiry to ascertain the appellant's actual mental condition before acceptance of the plea. Added to this is the unequivocal testimony by appellate's trial counsel that he did have doubt, not only as to appellant's mental condition when the crime occurred, but also doubt as to her competency to proceed. There's no latitude on this evidence for any other construction or interpretation.
00:32:36
Speaker
Trial counsel was remiss in failing to request a mental examination of Appellant as the initial step of trial preparation and in failing to make known to the trial court his doubt about Appellant's competence and the medical and personal history on which the doubt was based. In these circumstances Appellant was if ineffectively served by counsel who stood mute and the court erred in not so finding. Appellate was not afforded her due process right to effective counsel, and her conviction is therefore fatally flawed. The judgment of conviction is reversed, and the cause is remanded with direction that Appellate be allowed to withdraw her plea of guilty." Okay, so that's how we that's how we like deal with the first, quote, trial, which is not a trial, it's just really one hearing after her indictment. Well, and plus she went she entered a plea. Correct.
00:33:26
Speaker
I mean, a trial is where a judge or a jury finds it, right? And that's not what happened.
Link to Mickey Jo West Case
00:33:31
Speaker
if the appellate If the judicial system were school, this would have been the appellate court putting a gigantic F on the paper. yes yeah so That's how I was imagining this happening. Because it's just like failure after failure after failure. Like, are you even paying attention to what's happening, right? well so you would think that like what we just talked about is enough for a trial court to look at this and go, all right, we got to deal with this. It's not what happened.
00:34:00
Speaker
Well, in a better world, I would, yeah. So if you go to the Wiki page now, and this has been slightly updated recently, I like to get in there and and tinker on the sandbox on Wiki. So this is what it says. it It was a disaster. Now it's more of a disaster. I tried to fix it. People want to go back to this. I think it's someone who is not a native English speaker who is typing up the Wiki entry for Patricia's case. And they keep changing everything. i edit and fix back, so whatever.
00:34:32
Speaker
here's what it says the header on there says second trial says sandra hemy was questioned about the disappearance of mickey joe west the day after pleading guilty andrew himmy claimed that a cult buried the body of micki jo west near st joseph he claimed that mickeki jo was a member of the cult and that her body was cut open and had her organs removed
00:35:00
Speaker
i don't know why they put that in there It is relevant to this case, and it is right after she pleads guilty. Are you? Well, I i don't know, though, because my initial thing is like, OK, so why is this coming up? And like, are you going to explain who Mickey Joe is? Because like I'm going through now. Well, right. But you know, in that.
00:35:21
Speaker
Because, you know, we're talking about the death of ah Patricia. Correct. So mi Mickey West came up in one of the initial confessions. Now, I have not found exactly where it came up, but it has to be mentioned prior to her indictment because there's a date in here saying that sometime And depending on which version, I believe she was indicted on December 23rd. I believe the grand jury convened on December 16th, although some of the paperwork in this is court documents. It does say that she was indicted on December 16th. I don't believe that's the case. I believe her arrest had occurred in the weeks prior. But remember, this is a person who's in a in a state hospital the whole time. It's not like they're running around to find her somewhere and have to bring her in for a real arrest. She's just being arrested in situ. So she's being arrested in process, but for the most part, she's in the hospital, then in the jail, then back to the hospital. Mickey Joe West comes up sometime between December 5th and December the 16th.
00:36:26
Speaker
I don't know who she mentions it to, but it's in one of the three recorded confessions that she's alleged to have given that make no other sense either. So the later confessions include mentions of things like the knife and the purse. Those are pretty clearly coached. We don't really get here in terms of public information. I believe it's police officers coaching her.
00:36:51
Speaker
In my mind, I've never gotten past Lloyd Paisley somehow being involved with this. He was the lead investigator on Patricia's case. But let's talk about Mickey Joe for just a second because it's crazy. So in 1979, going all the way back, a young girl named Ruth West, her brother, Calvin West, and Calvin's wife, 19 year old, Mickey Joe West,
00:37:19
Speaker
They leave the area of St. Joseph, Missouri, and they head out to California. A man named Marvin Ervin allegedly goes with them. Ruth West and Marvin Irwin get married in Ventura, California. They do not have a happy marriage. They return to St. Joseph, Missouri area at some point in the near future and their relationship had degraded. In August of 1979, Ruth takes her kid and they leave this guy, Marvin Irwin. They go to a motel in Elwood, Kansas. Now,
00:38:00
Speaker
She only tells her mom, her sister, and the couple who had helped her move there, and Mickey Jo West. That's her brother's wife, her sister-in-law. On September 11th, Mickey Jo is supposed to show up at her job at her hospital, but she never arrives. That same day, this weird guy Marvin Ervin and two of his friends, they break into this motel in Elwood, Kansas, and they drag Ruth West and their son into a car. They drive them back to St. Joseph, Missouri. Mickey Joe is never seen again. The suspect in Mickey Joe's case has always been Marvin Ervin. Later that year, Ruth West filed to divorce him because
00:38:53
Speaker
The St. Joseph's police keep polygraphing Marvin Ervin and he doesn't pass. He doesn't exactly fail, but everything they ask him about Mickey Joe is inconclusive. They have another domestic dispute between them and Marvin Irvin is arrested chasing Ruth West across St. Joseph, of Missouri, after she has run out of her house, semi-clothed and barefoot. On September 11, 1986, seven years since Mickey Jo has gone missing to the day,
00:39:27
Speaker
An anonymous letter is found c inside a Kansas City shopping mall. The letter is addressed to the St. Joseph police, and it contains details about the writer being a person who was with Marvin Ervin at the time of Mickey Joe West's disappearance. The writer claims that Marvin killed her. But the writer didn't leave details about who he or she was, and police were not able to follow up on an exact lead.
00:39:52
Speaker
In 1988, two years later, a television reporter named Thurman Mitchell received a letter addressed to him. The letter contained details about where Mickey Joe West's body could be found, the writer inviting Mitchell to show him where Mickey's body was. Instead of meeting up with the sender,
00:40:09
Speaker
Thurman Mitchell does a news story on the letter and he asks for the sender to come forward. That same year, Marvin Ervin and another woman had moved to Ames, Iowa and Marvin was working as a railroad worker.
00:40:25
Speaker
On March 30, Janet Hugerich filed a police report because Marvin Ervin had shot over her head like in the air multiple times. The resulting police kind confrontation between the Ames, Iowa police and Marvin Ervin ended with a police chase across multiple counties 20 officers in pursuit, and they end up arresting him. Marvin Ervin pled guilty to those offenses, which were basically fleeing and eluding, and a couple of weapons charges, and he gets five years probation. While he's in jail awaiting charges for something else, Marvin Ervin denied killing anyone.
00:41:09
Speaker
His brother openly believed that officials were setting up Marvin and that they wanted him for some cases. So they were determined to try and get him for this. He is also involved in another case of disappearance of two young women, Patricia Rose and Crystal Simmons. So by all counts, he is a murderer.
00:41:34
Speaker
Detectives learn that not only is a suspect in the Patricia Rosen Crystal Simmons disappearance in 1990, he's also a suspect in the disappearance of Mickey Joe West. They use this to build up a case. Now over time, Marvin changes his mind and he just pleads guilty to all of it.
00:41:52
Speaker
He does tell authorities that Mickey Joe's Joe West body ah can be located. And during his sentencing, he said that in 1979, he took Mickey Joe West to a cornfield in Kansas. He killed her there and he buried her body. And this is close to the motel where yeah basically he tortured her for the information of where Ruth was, killed her and buried her body.
00:42:15
Speaker
He gets sentenced to life in prison. Eventually he pleads guilty to a couple of different counts. He leads investigators to this farm in Kansas where he said he disposed of Mickey Joe West in October of 1991. Authorities bring out search dogs and a bulldozer. There's heavy rainfall. The search gets delayed. They do this again on October the 11th. The search team still isn't able to find her body. As of right now, Mickey Joe West's body has never been found.
00:42:43
Speaker
I'm giving you that background because for some reason, Sandra Hemme makes up this crazy confession of knowing about this cult who Mickey Jo West is allegedly a part of. And it makes about as much sense as me including it here, but It's part of her case. In November of 1982, that's what leads us to this appellate document I was just pulling from. Sandra Hemme recantured confession. She wants to have her guilty plea withdrawal and her sentence vacated. Her attorneys come up with this claim that she waived her constitutional rights without understanding them and that her previous counsel was ineffective. The more she talks, the more crazy she sounds.
00:43:28
Speaker
But the attorneys use that to their advantage. And they say that Sandra Hemme should have had a mental evaluation no matter what was going on. So she gets a second trial.
Second Trial and Release
00:43:41
Speaker
Even though her this motion is rejected, the Missouri Court of Appeals, they rule what I just read to you and they decide that she has to go before a judge and the trial court has to take all of this seriously. So she officially goes on trial in 1985 and she gets found guilty a second time. The trial was a day long The only evidence presented was Sandra Hemme's confession from years earlier. The prosecution altered Hemme's motive from a financial dispute to being dangerous and having an uncontrollable urge to harm people, effectively negating the defense's strategy of presenting her as incompetent.
00:44:27
Speaker
Three weeks later, Sandra Hemme, a new attorneys file an appellate motion and they file a motion for a new trial and it's denied at some point in time in here and I don't have exact dates. There is an FBI connection to all of this because they examine the crime scene. They eliminate any physical connection between Sandra Hemme and the murder scene of Patricia Jansky, was who we were talking about in the first place. The reason I say at some point in time is because in January of 2024,
00:44:59
Speaker
The defense comes back and asks for an evidentiary hearing based on Brady violations by the St. Joseph police not revealing they had brought the FBI in on this case. That was a huge deal for me. Bringing them in was pretty important. Now, you don't know anything about these cases, right? I'll go a little more in detail if that's the case. I don't want to I don't want to drag you through much more of this, but I want to talk about her. And then I'll tell you kind of what happened. Which would you like that you're first? I don't even know what you're asking me at this point. I'm so confused. OK.
00:45:37
Speaker
So whatever you feel like is whatever you want to do. Why are you so confused? Where can I help? I cannot figure out how she's convicted.
00:45:50
Speaker
I would love to know who killed Patricia. Okay. So they hold a hearing January, 2024. And during this hearing, Steve Weston, who's a former detective, he states that he had to stop the police interviews with Sandra Hemme, or there would have been more confessions. But he realized that she didn't seem to be totally coherent. And when he's further pressed on that, he says, not only was she not totally coherent, I didn't understand anything she was saying.
00:46:16
Speaker
Oh, wait, that's what my problem is. So like none of it makes any sense, right? Right. So but June 14th, 2024, a judge named Ryan Horseman, he issues 118 page memorandum and he states that the evidence that directly tied another person to this crime it was more important than Sandra Hemings involvement at all.
00:46:39
Speaker
I would say that the the person who they could have literally scheduled her mental evaluation when the crime was happening because she was already at the facility, I would say that that person's confession would be ah less to be considered than the physical evidence. Yes.
00:46:58
Speaker
and like i Except they just they they took it and ran with it because she's confessing. They could have said anything to her, and she would have confessed to it with a grand story. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. and And she would tell you how it was related to every other criminal case you've ever heard of, if you just mentioned the name. Right. But so there are okay right there, right there, that's where I start not believing like how it could possibly have continued, right? Yes.
00:47:29
Speaker
Except it did. So this massive document is written up and Ryan Horseman says, Sandra Hemme's trial counsel is ineffective. The prosecutors in Buchanan County in Missouri, they were given 30 days to either give her a retrial or dismiss this charges and send her home. They opted to send her home.
00:47:50
Speaker
Sandra Hemme was now a grandmother. On July 19, 2024, at 5.50 p.m., she was released from Chillicothe Correctional Center. She's gonna go live with her sister, and her lawyer now says that she's gonna need help because due to her long prison tenure of 43 years, she will be ineligible for Social Security. All right, so one of the things that comes out in this memo is during the original arrest, indictment, and prosecution of Sandra Hemme, Dale Sullivan, the lawyer who was standing there in his puddle.
Michael Holman and Police Cover-up
00:48:29
Speaker
When he was informed by two journalists from two different newspapers, the St. Joseph Gazette and the St. Joseph News Press, which I mentioned were sources for this, that they believed that the police were covering up one of their officers hiding evidence from the defense in this case. He had been given the name of a possible suspect who was affiliated with the St. Joseph Police Department.
00:48:54
Speaker
One of the reporters told him that the man had been seen in the vicinity of Patricia Jeske's house and had later used Patricia's credit cards to purchase a camera in Kansas City, Missouri, the day after her body had been discovered. Pubic hair samples were taken from Patricia Jeske's body and the man who used the credit cards.
00:49:15
Speaker
Michael Inzco was the prosecuting attorney for Buchanan County, Missouri, and he stated, we do not expect to file any charges against anyone else in the Patricia Jeske case. Police denied this. They denied having anything to do with covering anything up. They stated that the FBI had never been involved in this, and the man who took the credit card had taken it from Patricia's purse after finding it near a cabin that he rented. However,
00:49:44
Speaker
An FBI report did exist. and Dale Sullivan ends up seeking out a copy of it. But the allegations of what he was told about these reporters from these two different newspapers and the actual FBI report, according to Dale Sullivan, quote, varied substantially. A police officer named Michael Holman, he gets brought up briefly during the 1985 trial. A week after Patricia Jeske's murder,
00:50:15
Speaker
Michael Holman quit his job as an officer for the St. Joseph's Police Department. He attempted to purchase $630 worth of photography equipment. Hairs from Holman and Patricia Jeske's bedsheets had similar microscopic characteristics.
00:50:34
Speaker
Now, according to Michael Holman, he claimed he had had sex with a woman named Mary in a motel near Patricia's house, and that he found a purse with the credit card while walking back to his truck. He authored the name on the credit card from Patricia to Patrick. The woman, Mary, could not be contacted to verify his alibi, and Holman refused to draw a diagram of the motel room's interior.
00:51:03
Speaker
His alibi was never proven and the motel manager never ah did not remember ah someone named Mary ever staying there during this period of time. Now, Michael Holman later gets arrested. He's incarcerated in Missouri. He's shipped off to Nebraska. He died in 2015. The hair in Patricia Jeske's bedsheets was later determined to have been from a black man named Vernon Burris.
00:51:31
Speaker
He was the only black police officer who came to the crime scene. What was in the FBI report was that St. Joseph had asked them to compare Vernon Burris' hair, the hair from Patricia Jeske's scene. It didn't match. This is the first case I've ever truly gotten to the end of and thought, I have no idea what happened. Well, that makes two of us bad.
00:51:55
Speaker
Because to me, I start putting it together a little bit and then I get, you know, that something else comes up and then, no, that's not it. That doesn't make sense, right? no It almost seems like police did this, then they used this. They never understood how they explained away the sexual assault. i they you know I've seen it written up in the court documents in a couple of different places where they changed it to molestation.
00:52:28
Speaker
And I thought they may have been tinkering there. um There was an assistant prosecutor named Pat Robb. You know, he was very good with semantics. And in my opinion, he's the reason that Holman was still out wandering around. So. but Well, we know, OK, with the rare exception, for one thing, out now they, you know,
00:52:53
Speaker
Well, I don't know what the explanation was, but we know that with a rare exception, a female is not going to strangle another female ah to death. Generally speaking, yes.
00:53:07
Speaker
it's going to be that's going to be very difficult in those types of situations unless, you know like I said, there's ah you know there's exceptions to be had, but it's going to be rare no matter what. But the strength it takes to strangle another person is typically going to be a male strangling a ah female. Right.
00:53:26
Speaker
Okay. Or you could also say like, I guess a child could be strangled as well by either. But anyway, there's nothing about the motivation here that makes any sense ah that they initially are talking to Sandra Hem, right? it Nothing about Patricia's murder scene makes it seem like you should be looking for a woman that is in a mental institute. Correct.
00:53:53
Speaker
it clearly is a crime of sexual violence that ended in her death. That's a very common sort of a non-motive motive, right? yeah Whatever happened, there's no signs of forced entry, which makes it kind of a dud investigation from the very beginning. Now you do have a police officer, I believe much later, saying like, yeah,
00:54:16
Speaker
When she was talking, I didn't understand what she was saying. I quit interviewing her because I really couldn't understand what she was getting at. I'm not sure exactly where that happened in that span of time. It was in the 2024 hearing.
00:54:28
Speaker
OK, so way later and, you know, with a memory of it, no less. But don't you see, like, all kinds of just blatant failures here? I feel like a friend of mine was like, hey, my kid is in trouble. I need your help. The very first thing I would do looking at this case is I would say, well, clearly this is not a woman that has committed this crime with regard to Patricia's murder. I don't think it's a woman. I never thought that in everything that I was reading about it.
00:54:57
Speaker
I never got the impression this must be a woman or this could be a woman. Right. And so right from the jump, you're going, okay, so we've got a female, no forced entry, she's strangled and sexually assaulted, sexually molested. However you want to cut that, it is going to be exceptionally rare for a woman to even stage something like that on another woman. Yeah. Okay. exceptionally rare. And so while this could possibly, there's there's always an exception. But I will say that more than likely either the mental instability of a possible perpetrator would either seal the deal there or completely make it impossible. Because if you're talking about a sexual assault between females, it it has to have some sort of other element. Females don't have penises, okay?
00:55:52
Speaker
Yeah, i I didn't get to the bottom of like how they got around that. The closest I got, I pulled one article that I felt like the St. Joseph Gazette was onto something with. This is from June 7th of 1985. It's from a guy named Terry Raffensperger. If you look this up, he's the courthouse reporter at the time. My guess is he probably talked to these attorneys and gave him a heads up about this. This little clipping says ex-officer had mysterious role in Hemet case.
00:56:22
Speaker
The trial and capital murder conviction this week of Sandra Hemme for the killing of Patricia Jeske brought out information about the brutal killing that had never been disclosed in the four and a half years since it occurred. But the evidence presented in the trial did little to clear up unanswered questions about the suggested involvement of a former police officer who became a key figure in defense attorney Robert Duncan's closing argument to the jury. Duncan argued while there was no physical or trace evidence to tie him to the crime scene at Jesky's home on Riverside Road, a black hair found on the victim's bedsheets could not be ruled out as having come from Michael Holman. A fragment of a negroid hair too small to compare was also found. Holman, then 22, is a black man who had been on the police department for 18 months.
00:57:04
Speaker
The day Jeske's body was found, November 13th, Holman was caught using the dead woman's credit card in a Kansas City, Kansas photography store. During the trial, the jury was not told that Holman was a police officer, nor how he came to have that credit card. After the trial, assistant Assistant Prosecutor Pat Robb was able to clear up a few of the lingering questions about Holman, who is now in the Missouri State Penitentiary in Jefferson City.
00:57:29
Speaker
According to Pat Robb, Holman told investigators that he found Jesky's discarded purse in a ditch along Riverside Road the evening of November the 12th, the night she was murdered. He admitted taking the master charge card, and he tried to buy $630 worth of camera equipment with it.
00:57:48
Speaker
Hemi told police she threw Jeske's purse away near Worsick Street in downtown Kansas crosses over Interstate Highway 70. Rob said that Michael Holman had an alibi for November the 12th and that he could account for his time, but Rob said Holman was alone and no one else could verify it.
00:58:06
Speaker
Less than a week after the murder, Holman was arrested by St. Joseph police and charged with theft by deceit. He had collected theft insurance on a truck, which was not stolen. He was then fired from his job. Four days later, Holman was arrested again, this time on a state warrant charging him with receiving stolen property. Police using two search warrants recovered a stolen rifle, camera, and a box of jewelry.
00:58:30
Speaker
Those items reportedly were taken from Holman. On April 7, 1981, in an interview with then-Detective Lt. John Muenbacher, or muwenbacher Hemi first talked about Holman being involved with her and the murder of Jeske. Rob said she never mentioned Holman until it was reported in the local news media, and in February that Holman had used Jeske's credit card.
00:58:56
Speaker
So basically an article came out in February that that he had been involved in that part. But Pat Robb said that investigators then took photographs of six black men to Hammeh and asked her to identify Holman. She picked out three of the photos as possibly being him. None of the three was Holman.
00:59:15
Speaker
In March of 1981, a month before Hammeh named Holman as the killer, he was arraigned on two grand jury indictments for receiving stolen property and stealing by deceit. The two crimes he had ordered and charged for. In June of 1981, he pleaded guilty and he was sent to prison for two years. Out of prison a year later, in June of 1982, he was convicted of stealing and forgery, according to Pat Robb. In 1982, he was also charged with breaking into a residence on Shamrock Lane.
00:59:44
Speaker
On parole in 1984, he was convicted of stealing this time in Nebraska, and he did prison time there. After he got out of prison, he was returned to St. Joseph. His probation was revoked, and he was sent to prison in Jefferson City. That sounds a lot more like the suspect you should be looking at for the death of Patricia Jeske.
01:00:05
Speaker
They have these
Reflections on Sandra's Case and Justice System
01:00:06
Speaker
hairs. Yeah, I agree. Allegedly, the FBI had looked at them. I think today they could probably do more testing on them. Sandra Hemme is going to be home for the holidays. One of the first ones that's like a 2024 home for the holidays. And I apologize for this all being so confusing. I tried to put it together in the best way possible. possible But the truth is the prosecution in this case was just all over the place.
01:00:31
Speaker
It really was. And it's it's really sad. It's actually one of the, it's a very sad injustice when you think. I've looked it up recently to see like how this was going to go down. Like I want to see who are they going to hang this on? And they pretend like it's definitely Sandra Hemme and they just couldn't re-prosecut her because of the Brady violations, but... She hasn't come at this crime. That's ridiculous.
01:01:01
Speaker
for a crime that, like in my opinion, she was never capable of committing in the first place.
01:01:10
Speaker
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01:03:17
Speaker
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01:04:10
Speaker
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01:04:34
Speaker
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