(Bloomberg Business) — A defiant, emotional and sometimes confused Henry Rayhons—the 78-year-old retired farmer accused of raping his wife, who suffered from dementia—told a jury he did not have sex with Donna Lou Rayhons in a Garner, Iowa, nursing home almost one year ago.
"I did not have intercourse in that particular setting," he said in response to one of the first questions from his attorney, Joel Yunek.
"Ever?" Yunek said.
"No," Rayhons replied.
Rayhons, who also served as an Iowa state legislator until last year, is charged with felony sexual assault of his late wife at the Concord Care Center in Garner, a town of 3,100 people in northern Iowa, on May 23, 2014, and faces up to 10 years in prison if convicted. He has pleaded not guilty. There is no evidence that he forced his wife to have sex or that she asked that he not touch her.
The Iowa attorney general's office says Rayhons had intercourse with Donna when she lacked the mental capacity to consent because she had Alzheimer's disease. She died Aug. 8, four days short of her 79th birthday, of complications from the disease. One week later, Rayhons was arrested.
To convict him, the jury in the Hancock County courthouse, about nine blocks from the nursing home, must determine that a sex act occurred in Room 12 North and must find that Donna's dementia prevented her from being able to say yes or no to sex.
The case has offered a rare look into a complex and thinly explored dilemma, first detailed by Bloomberg News. The conflict will arise with increasing frequency as the 65-and-over population expands and the number of people with dementia grows: Can a person with dementia say yes to sex? Many legal experts and experts on the elderly have said the Rayhons case may be the first of its kind in the U.S.
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.
"We just loved to be together," Rayhons testified, breaking down in tears for one of 10 times during three and a half hours of testimony. He wore a charcoal suit that Donna had bought him. "I treated her like a queen. She treated me like a king. I loved her very much. I miss her every day."
Donna was diagnosed with possible early-onset Alzheimer's disease in 2009. Her condition began to worsen markedly in early 2014, according to court documents and testimony. Rayhons clashed with two of Donna's daughters over her care. She was placed in the Concord Care facility in March 2014.
On May 15, the daughters sat down with Henry and some 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 played in court.
The alleged sexual act occurred eight days later. After Rayhons visited Donna in her room that evening, her roommate told nursing home staffers she had heard "sexual" sounds, state prosecutors allege. Prosecutors say Rayhons later admitted to a state investigator that he had intercourse with his wife on that night.
