Woman Jailed for Killing Dad Seeks Clemency

May 30 -- When police in St. John, Mo. began questioning 18-year-old Stacey Lannert hours after her father's death, she was not even a suspect. But when Det. Tom Schulte gently asked whether there had been abuse in the family, Lannert broke down, soon confessing that it was she who fired the shots that killed her father.

Lannert recounted a litany of sexual abuses she said she had suffered at her father's hands for years. The detective believed her, and his last words to her that day were a promise: "I'll be there for you."

But the prosecutor assigned to Lannert's case didn't buy her story, and when it came time to charge her, he brought the most serious charge he could: murder in the first degree.

Although some of the jurors believed Lannert's account, they felt their hands were tied by the law. In some states, if a jury believed the abuse occurred, Lannert could have claimed self-defense even though her father was passed out drunk when she shot him. But under Missouri law, she could not because she wasn't in actual danger at the moment she pulled the trigger.

After a week-long trial, the jury convicted Lannert of first-degree murder, which in Missouri carries a mandatory sentence of life without the possibility of parole.

The shooting was in 1990, and Lannert has spent the last 12 years in prison. Schulte never doubted her story, and now he is making good on his promise: for the first time in his 30-year career as a police officer, he is asking the governor to grant clemency.

"I told her I'd be there. It took me a while to get there, but I'm here," Schulte told Primetime. Lannert's fate is now in the hands of Missouri Gov. Bob Holden.

Sisters Claim Years of Abuse

According to Lannert's account, her father, Thomas Lannert, started fondling her when she was just 8, and forcing her to give him oral sex and have intercourse by the time she was 9. Over the next nine years, she says, he raped her as often as three times a week.

Lannert's sister Christy, who was 15 at the time of the shooting, says she suffered a different kind of abuse from their father: violent beatings from when she was in the first grade, usually when he was drunk. She says she remembers being kicked down the stairs and waking up to find her father choking her, and that he started giving her alcohol when she was 12 and asking her to drink with him.