{"id":502555,"date":"2026-10-20T20:06:23","date_gmt":"2026-10-20T20:06:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/502555\/"},"modified":"2026-10-20T20:06:23","modified_gmt":"2026-10-20T20:06:23","slug":"indiana-man-to-serve-25-years-in-prison-for-2008-san-jose-rape","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/502555\/","title":{"rendered":"Indiana man to serve 25 years in prison for 2008 San Jose rape"},"content":{"rendered":"

SAN JOSE \u2014 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<\/a>, following a cold-case investigation that matched his DNA to the crime scene<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"JamesJames Aaron Whisenand, shown on the left in a driver’s license photo from the 2000s, and, on the right, in a recent booking photo, was arrested Sept. 9, 2024 in connection with a 2008 attack and sexual assault of a women in an assisted living facility in San Jose. The case went unsolved for 16 years until his DNA sample collected after a 2023 sexual battery conviction was matched to crime scene forensic evidence, authorities say. (Santa Clara Co. District Attorney’s Office)\u00a0<\/p>\n

James Aaron Whisenand, 45, reached a plea agreement in August with the Santa Clara County District Attorney\u2019s Office, and is scheduled for sentencing Thursday.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s Office linked him to forensic evidence from the 2008 attack.<\/p>\n

\u201cYears and distance do not matter,\u201d Santa Clara County District Attorney Jeff Rosen said in a statement Tuesday. \u201cI just wish I could have told her that we got him.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Because of her injuries and the overnight hour, the woman was unable to identify her attacker<\/a>. She died from natural causes in 2011.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"SAN JOSE \u2014 An Indiana man has agreed to a 25-year prison sentence after he pleaded guilty to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":502556,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[48025,3622,7359,18366,7563,88,90,89,194564,12465],"class_list":["post-502555","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-san-jose","tag-conviction","tag-court","tag-district-attorney","tag-home-invasion","tag-rape","tag-san-jose","tag-san-jose-headlines","tag-san-jose-news","tag-whisenand","tag-willow-glen"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/502555","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=502555"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/502555\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/502556"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=502555"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=502555"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=502555"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}