A Missouri woman who has spent 43 years in prison for murder had her conviction overturned after defense lawyers argued that a corrupt cop committed the grisly killing.
Sandra Hemme, 64, was ordered freed within 30 days unless prosecutors retry her, the Associated Press reported Saturday.
A spokesperson for Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey didn't immediately respond to messages, AP said.
Judge Ryan Horsman ruled late Friday that Hemme had presented evidence of actual innocence and that prosecutors wrongly withheld information that could have cleared her, AP said.
Hemme's lawyers filed a motion for her immediate release and said the case marked the longest time a woman has been imprisoned on a wrongful conviction.
"We are grateful to the Court for acknowledging the grave injustice Ms. Hemme has endured for more than four decades," her lawyers said in a statement.
In 1981, Hemme pleaded guilty to avoid the death penalty in the slaying of library worker Patricia Jeschke, 31, whose mother found her nude body in a pool of blood in Jeschke's St. Joseph, Missouri, apartment on Nov. 13, 1980.
Jescke's hands were tied behind her back with a telephone cord, a pair of pantyhose was wrapped around her neck and a knife was under her head.
The case against Hemme, who had a history of mental illness, was based on incriminating statements she made a month later after being arrested when she showed up with a knife at the home of a nurse who had treated her.
During her interrogation in a hospital, Hemme was being treated with antipsychotic drugs and seemed "mentally confused," according to the detectives who questioned her.
Her guilty plea was thrown out on appeal but she was convicted again in 1985 following a one-day trial at which jurors weren't told about what her lawyers now call the "grotesquely coercive" nature of her questioning by police.
Meanwhile, investigators also identified another suspect, then-police officer Michael Holman, who was a arrested about a month after the slaying for falsely reporting the theft of his pickup truck, which was spotted near the crime scene
Holman also tried to use Jeschke's credit card on the same day her body was found and a search of his home turned up a pair of Jeschke's earrings and jewelry stolen from another woman during a burglary earlier in the year.
But the investigation of him was abruptly dropped after four days and prosecutors never told Hemme's lawyer about it.
Holman was eventually fired from the police force and died in 2015, AP said.
In Friday's ruling, the judge wrote that "no evidence whatsoever outside of Ms. Hemme's unreliable statements connects her to the crime."
"In contrast, this Court finds that the evidence directly ties Holman to this crime and murder scene," Horsman added.
