Inmate pleads guilty after 1,125 days in Polk County Jail

The Polk County Jail's longest-serving current inmate could spend at least 52 years in prison after pleading guilty Monday to second-degree murder and sex abuse.

Lavelle Lonelle McKinley, 45, has been held on a murder charge since his Jan. 16, 2013, arrest in the death of Cynthia Rouse two days earlier.

As part of his plea agreement, McKinley, an acquaintance of Rouse's husband who lived with the couple for a short time, admitted to sexually assaulting and strangling Rouse, Polk County Attorney John Sarcone said. Rouse's husband found her body in her apartment in the Drake Park neighborhood.

McKinley had been scheduled to go to trial Feb. 22 on a first-degree murder charge. Instead, the plea set his case toward a March 9 sentencing hearing. Sarcone said prosecutors will recommend that sentences on the two charges run consecutively to each other.

As of Wednesday, McKinley had spent 1,127 days in jail. The average stay for an inmate facing a felony charge in 2015 was 48 days, according to a statistical analysis released by the Polk County Sheriff's Office this month.

But McKinley's case was delayed because of an appeal heard by the Iowa Supreme Court that took nearly 20 months to resolve.

The court took the case after a district court judge ruled that McKinley's attorneys in the Des Moines Adult Public Defender's Office could not represent him because some co-workers in the office had represented three witnesses expected to testify against him.

McKinley appealed in an effort to keep his lawyers, and the court ultimately ruled in March 2015 that the public defenders had no conflicts of interest that would prevent them from keeping him as a client.

The cases involving witnesses against McKinley, including Rouse's husband, were all months or years old and completely unrelated to the murder charge, Justice Daryl Hecht wrote in the ruling.

Rouse was involved at Des Moines' Trinity United Methodist Church, bringing a vat of potato soup to a potluck dinner the day before she died, Rev. Barb Dinnen said in January 2013.

She joined the congregation after riding with church members to visit the man who'd later become her husband, Cheyenne Rouse, in prison. She was a mother of two adult children.

“She loved to draw, liked flowers, liked dressing up a little bit,” Dinnen told the Register after her death. “Her goal was, how can I help other people.”

In a short phone interview Wednesday, Dinnen said it was unfortunate that McKinley had to wait more than three years in jail for an outcome in his case.

"That just shows another injustice in our system," she said. "It's not right."

McKinley will be moved to a prison facility run by the Iowa Department of Corrections after his sentencing hearing, but will receive three years of credit for time he served in the jail, Sarcone said.