Iowa man accused of raping wife with Alzheimer's is acquitted

Rayhons denied ever having intercourse with Donna in the nursing home. When he was arrested, state prosecutors had no DNA evidence of rape and were relying partly on Rayhons’s allegedly telling a state investigator that he had had intercourse with Donna on the night in question.

Rayhons’s attorney, Joel Yunek, cautioned jurors in his closing arguments on Monday that their decision would be “debated, discussed, followed for years.” A guilty verdict, he said, could make marital partners fearful of visiting a spouse because of the possibility of being prosecuted.

Iowa Assistant Attorney General Susan Krisko discounted such concerns in her closing argument, telling jurors they needed only to decide whether a crime occurred. “This is not you saying every Alzheimer’s patient is going to be governed by this set of rules,” the Des Moines Register reported her saying. 

“This case is a reminder that it is important that we have nursing homes as safe places for people who cannot protect themselves,” said Katherine C. Pearson, who teaches and writes about elder law at the Penn State Dickinson School of Law and followed the Rayhons case. “But we also need to consider with this case whether nursing homes need to be a trap for the resident’s spouse, where even the most basic interactions in life, with loved ones, are subject to strict limits. Now it is probably up to policy makers and the public to decide how to avoid even the possibility of another such case.”

Rayhons was a widower for less than a year, and Donna a widow for six years, when they began to flirt while singing in a Catholic church choir in 2007. They married that December. Both their families embraced the union, and they appear to have had a loving courtship and marriage.

On May 15 of last year, the daughters met with Rayhons and nursing home staffers to discuss Donna’s care. They handed him a one-page document on which a local physician had written that Donna no longer had the mental capacity to consent to sex. “That’s not a problem,” Rayhons said on an audiotape of the meeting. The discussion of the topic lasted about one minute and the word “sex” was not uttered.

The alleged assault occurred eight days later. After Rayhons visited Donna in her room that evening, her roommate told nursing home staffers she had heard “sexual” sounds, although she saw nothing and later changed her statement to say she heard only whispering.

Prosecutors said Rayhons later admitted to a state investigator that he had  had intercourse with Donna. On the witness stand, an emotional Rayhons said he told the investigator things that were untrue because the investigator had upset him. “He had me completely out of my brain after he shouted at me,” Rayhons testified.

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