Indiana man to serve 25 years in prison after DNA links him to 2008 San Jose rape

SAN JOSE — An Indiana man has agreed to a 25-year prison sentence after he pleaded guilty to sneaking into a San Jose assisted living complex and raping a 61-year-old woman in 2008, following a cold-case investigation that matched his DNA to the crime scene.

James Aaron Whisenand, 45, reached a plea agreement in August with the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s Office, and is scheduled for sentencing Thursday.

Whisenand was arrested in September 2024 in the small Indiana town of Brazil, where he moved following a November 2023 no-contest plea and conviction for misdemeanor sexual battery in Crescent City. After he submitted a DNA sample as a condition of his related sex offender registration, investigators from the San Jose Police Department and DA’s Office linked him to forensic evidence from the 2008 attack.

“Years and distance do not matter,” Santa Clara County District Attorney Jeff Rosen said in a statement Tuesday. “I just wish I could have told her that we got him.”

Authorities said Whisenand had lived with his wife on Meridian Avenue in San Jose on Jan. 6, 2008, when, two blocks away at an assisted living complex on Saint Elizabeth Drive, police were alerted to a report that a man wearing a ski mask entered a first-floor apartment and assaulted a woman inside.

The intruder climbed in through a window around 2 a.m., punched the 61-year-old victim in the face, breaking her nose, then choked and repeatedly sexually assaulted her.

Because of her injuries and the overnight hour, the woman was unable to identify her attacker. She died from natural causes in 2011.

In September 2024, after South Bay investigators authenticated the DNA match, Whisenand was summoned to the police station in Brazil on the guise that he needed to complete forms for his sex-offender registration in his new city of residence. He was arrested and extradited back to the Bay Area.

In his August plea, Whisenand admitted to felony charges encompassing rape, sodomy and sexual penetration by force, and sentencing enhancements for inflicting great bodily injury and for targeting an especially vulnerable victim.