A judge has overturned the conviction of a Missouri woman who was a psychiatric patient when she incriminated herself in a 1980 killing that her attorneys argue was actually committed by a now-discredited police officer.

Judge Ryan Horsman ruled late Friday that Sandra Hemme, who has spent 43 years behind bars, had established evidence of actual innocence and must be freed within 30 days unless prosecutors retry her. He said her trial counsel was ineffective and prosecutors failed to disclose evidence that would have helped her.

Her attorneys say this is the longest time a women has been been incarcerated for a wrongful conviction. They filed a motion seeking her immediate release.

“We are grateful to the Court for acknowledging the grave injustice Ms. Hemme has endured for more than four decades,” her attorneys said in a statement, promising to keep up their efforts to dismiss the charges and reunite Hemme with her family.

A spokesperson for Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey didn’t immediately respond to a text or email message seeking comment Saturday.

Hemme was shackled in leather wrist restraints and so heavily sedated that she “could not hold her head up straight” or “articulate anything beyond monosyllabic responses” when she was first questioned about the death of 31-year-old library worker Patricia Jeschke, according to her lawyers with the New York-based Innocence Project.

They alleged in a petition seeking her exoneration that authorities ignored Hemme’s “wildly contradictory” statements and suppressed evidence implicating Michael Holman, a then-police officer who tried to use the slain woman’s credit card.

The judge wrote that “no evidence whatsoever outside of Ms. Hemme’s unreliable statements connects her to the crime.”

“In contrast,” he added, “this Court finds that the evidence directly ties Holman to this crime and murder scene.”

It started on Nov. 13, 1980, when Jeschke missed work. Her worried mother climbed through a window at her apartment and discovered her daughter’s nude body on the floor, surrounded by blood. Her hands were tied behind her back with a telephone cord and a pair of pantyhose was wrapped around her throat. A knife was under her head.

The brutal killing grabbed headlines, with detectives working 12-hour days to solve it. But Hemme wasn’t on their radar until she showed up nearly two weeks later at the home of a nurse who once treated her, carrying a knife and refusing to leave.

Police found her in a closet, and took her back to St. Joseph’s Hospital, the latest in a string of hospitalizations that began when she started hearing voices at the age of 12.

She had been discharged from that very hospital the day before Jeschke’s body was found, showing up at her parents house later that night after hitchhiking more than 100 miles (160 kilometers) across the state.

The timing seemed suspicious to law enforcement. As the interrogations began, Hemme was being treated with antipsychotic drugs that had triggered involuntary muscle spasms. She complained that her eyes were rolling back in her head, the petition said.

Detectives noted that Hemme seemed “mentally confused” and not fully able to comprehend their questions.

“Each time the police extracted a statement from Ms. Hemme it changed dramatically from the last, often incorporating explanations of facts the police had just recently uncovered,” her attorneys wrote.

Eventually, she claimed to have watched a man named Joseph Wabski kill Jeschke.

Wabski, whom she met when they stayed in the state hospital’s detoxification unit at the same time, was charged with capital murder. But prosecutors quickly dropped the case upon learning he was at an alcohol treatment center in Topeka, Kansas, at the time.

Upon learning he couldn’t be the killer, Hemme cried and she said was the lone killer.

But police also were starting to look at another suspect — one of their own. About a month after the killing, Holman was arrested for falsely reporting that his pickup truck had been stolen and collecting an insurance payout. It was the same truck spotted near the crime scene, and the officer’s alibi that he spent the night with a woman at a nearby motel couldn’t be confirmed.

Furthermore, he had tried to use Jeschke’s credit card at a camera store in Kansas City, Missouri, on the same day her body was found. Holman, who ultimately was fired and died in 2015, said he found the card in a purse that had been discarded in a ditch.

During a search of Holman’s home, police found a pair of gold horseshoe-shaped earrings in a closet, along with jewelry stolen from another woman during a burglary earlier that year.

Jeschke’s father said he recognized the earrings as a pair he bought for his daughter. But then the four-day investigation into Holman ended abruptly, many of the details uncovered never given to Hemme’s attorneys.

Hemme, meanwhile, was growing desperate. She wrote to her parents on Christmas Day 1980, saying, “Even though I’m innocent, they want to put someone away, so they can say the case is solved.” She said she might as well change her plea to guilty.

“Just let it end,” she said. “I’m tired.”

And that is what she did the following spring, when she agreed to plead guilty to capital murder in exchange for the death penalty being taken off the table.

Even that was a challenge; the judge initially rejected her guilty plea because she couldn’t share enough details about what happened, saying: “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.”

Her attorney told her that her chance to not be sentenced to death was to get the judge to accept her guilty plea. After a recess and some coaching, she provided more information.

That plea later was thrown out on appeal. But she was convicted again in 1985 after a one-day trial in which jurors weren’t told of what her current attorneys describe as “grotesquely coercive” interrogations.

Larry Harman, who helped Hemme get her initial guilty plea thrown out and later became a judge, said in the petition that he believed she was innocent.

“The system,” he said, “failed her at every opportunity.”

___

Associated Press researcher Jennifer Farrar in New York contributed.

TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — A 170-year-old rivalry is flaring up as Kansas lawmakers try to snatch the Super Bowl champion Kansas City Chiefs away from Missouri even though economists long ago concluded subsidizing pro sports isn’t worth the cost.

The Kansas Legislature’s top leaders endorsed helping the Chiefs and professional baseball’s Kansas City Royals finance new stadiums in Kansas ahead of a special session set to convene Tuesday. The plan would authorize state bonds for stadium construction and pay them off with revenues from sports betting, the Kansas Lottery and new tax dollars generated in and around the new venues.

The states’ border runs through the metropolitan area of about 2.3 million people, and the teams would move only about 25 miles (40 kilometers) west.

Decades of research have concluded a pro sports franchise doesn’t boost a local economy much, if any, because it mostly captures existing spending from other places in the same community. But for Kansas officials, spending would at least leave Missouri and come to Kansas, and one-upping Missouri has its own allure.

“I’ve wanted to see the Chiefs in Kansas my whole life, but I hope we can do it in a way that is enriching for these communities, rather than creating additional burdens for them,” said Kansas state Rep. Jason Probst, a Democrat from central Kansas.

The rivalry between Kansas and Missouri can be traced as far back as the lead-up to the Civil War, before Kansas was even a state. People from Missouri came from the east, hoping in vain to create another slave state like their own. Both sides looted, burned and killed across the border.

There also was a century-long sports rivalry between the University of Kansas and University of Missouri. And for years the two states burned through hundreds of millions of dollars to lure businesses to one side of the border or the other in the Kansas City area in the pursuit of jobs. They called an uneasy truce in 2019.

Missouri officials are pledging to be equally aggressive to keep the Royals and Chiefs, and not only because they view them as economic assets.

“They’re sources of great pride,” said Missouri state Rep. John Patterson, a suburban Kansas City Republican expected to be the next state House speaker.

Kansas legislators see the Chiefs and Royals in play because voters on the Missouri side refused in April to extend a local sales tax for the upkeep of their side-by-side stadiums. They also argue that failing to take action risks having one or both teams leave the Kansas City area, though economists are skeptical that the threat is real.

While the lease for the two teams’ stadium complex runs through January 2031, Kansas officials argue the teams must make decisions soon for new or renovated stadiums to be ready by then. They also are promising the Chiefs a stadium with a dome or retractable roof that can host Super Bowls, college basketball Final Fours and huge, indoor concerts.

“You’ve got this asset and all the businesses that move there as a result, or are created there,” said Kansas state Rep. Sean Tarwater, a Republican from the edge of his state’s Kansas City suburbs and a leader of the relocation effort. “You’ll get commerce out of that area every day.”

Roughly 60% of the area’s population lives in Missouri, but the Kansas side is growing more quickly.

Despite the legislative push in Kansas, Missouri lawmakers aren’t rushing to propose alternatives. Republican Missouri Gov. Mike Parson told reporters Thursday that his state is “not just going to roll over” but also said, “We’re just in the first quarter” of the contest.

Both states hold primary elections on Aug. 3, with most legislative seats on the ballot this year. The April vote in Missouri on the local stadium tax suggested subsidizing pro sports teams could be a political loser in that state, particularly with the conservative-leaning electorate in GOP primaries.

“In Missouri, the Republican Party used to be led by a business wing that might be in favor of this sort of thing, but in the Trump era, that’s not the case,” said David Kimball, a University of Missouri-St. Louis political science professor. “The more conservative, the more Trump-oriented wing, they’re not big supporters of spending taxpayer money on much of anything.”

Kansas Republicans face pressure on the right to avoid having the state pick economic winners and losers. For Probst, the Democrat, the concern is using government “to make rich people richer,” meaning team owners.

Economists have studied pro sports teams and subsidies for stadiums since at least the 1980s. J.C. Bradbury, an economics and finance professor from Kennesaw State University in Georgia, said studies show subsidizing stadiums is “a terrible channel for economic growth.”

While supporters of the Kansas effort have cited a report indicating large, positive economic implications, Bradbury said “phony” reports are a staple of stadium campaigns.

“Stadiums are poor public investment, and I would say it’s a near unanimous consensus,” said Bradbury, who has reviewed studies and done them himself.

Yet more than 30 lobbyists have registered to push for a stadium-financing plan from Kansas lawmakers, and the Kansas Chamber of Commerce’s CEO has called this a “once in a lifetime opportunity” to attract the Chiefs.

The Chiefs not only have won three Super Bowl titles in five years, but they have an especially strong fanbase that has expanded because of tight end Travis Kelce’s romance with pop star Taylor Swift.

The National Football League is attractive to host cities because franchises are valued in the billions and wealthy owners and celebrity players command a media spotlight, said Judith Grant Long, an associate professor of sports management and urban planning at the University of Michigan and a director of its center on sports venues.

“All of these come together in a potent brew for politicians, civic officials and local business interests hoping to capitalize on its influence,” she said.

___

Associated Press writer Summer Ballentine in Columbia, Missouri, contributed to this story.