An Indiana man pleaded guilty to raping a 61-year-old San Jose woman in her apartment in 2008, a cold case prosecutors said was solved years later through DNA evidence.

James Whisenand, 45, agreed to a 25-year prison term under a plea deal, the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s Office said Tuesday. He is scheduled to be sentenced Thursday at 9 a.m. in Santa Clara County Superior Court in San Jose.

Prosecutors said they learned in 2024 that DNA collected at the crime scene matched Whisenand, who was living in Indiana and had been required to register as a sex offender after a 2023 misdemeanor sexual battery conviction.

Whisenand entered the woman’s first-floor apartment on Saint Elizabeth Drive on Jan. 6, 2008, wearing a ski mask, prosecutors said. He punched her in the face, breaking her nose, choked her and then sexually assaulted her multiple times, according to the district attorney’s office.

In a Mercury News story from the time, the woman, who was not identified, told the newspaper that she was struggling to deal with the rape.

“This is not a cold,” she told the newspaper. “I’ve had my soul ripped out. I lost my dignity.”

DNA evidence was uploaded to the national CODIS database in 2008, but no suspect was identified at the time. The woman died of natural causes in 2011, without knowing who attacked her.

It wasn’t until August 2024 that investigators with the district attorney’s Cold Case Unit and San Jose and Crescent City police confirmed the DNA match, prosecutors said.

Whisenand was arrested the following month in Indiana with help from state and local authorities and the U.S. Marshals Service. Prosecutors said he was living in Brazil, Indiana. Court records show he lived with his then-wife on Meridian Avenue in San Jose at the time of the assault, two blocks from the woman’s apartment.

District Attorney Jeff Rosen said he wished he could have told the victim that her attacker had been caught.

“Years and distance do not matter,” Rosen said in a statement. “This office will never stop seeking justice for the people who have been hurt in our community. I just wish I could have told her that we got him. I wish she was here with us today.”

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This article originally published at Indiana man pleads guilty in San Jose rape cold-case solved with DNA evidence.