Jury finds former nurse guilty of raping patient

A Spokane County jury took less than two hours to convict a former Eastern State Hospital nurse of a second-degree rape that was recorded in a wad of gum.

Guylin Michael Johnston, 44, was guilty of second-degree rape of a suicidal woman he was assigned to protect, the jury ruled Friday.

Johnston faces a minimum of 61/2 to 81/2 years in prison when Superior Court Judge Neal Rielly sentences him Dec. 21. A state parole board will decide whether Johnston can safely be released after he serves his minimum term. The board could keep him locked up for life.

Evidence of Johnston’s June 2004 crime in a hospital laundry room was preserved in the victim’s gum as though it were a prehistoric insect in a chunk of amber.

Genetic testing found, to a certainty of one in 26 million, that Johnston’s semen was mixed with the 30-year-old woman’s saliva in the tissue-wrapped wad of gum found in her pocket. She said she spat out the gum after Johnston assaulted her.

It wouldn’t have mattered if she had consented. Because she was mentally ill and Johnston had control over her, any sex between them would have been illegal.

Were it not for the gum, it was likely no one would have believed the victim, Deputy Prosecutor John Love told jurors.

Indeed, another jury apparently didn’t believe her last February in Johnston’s first trial on the rape charge. Despite the DNA evidence, the first jury couldn’t reach a decision on the rape charge, and it acquitted Johnston of indecent liberties for allegedly groping the woman after compelling her to give him oral sex.

Johnston’s defense then – and again this week – depended in part on inconsistencies and apparent inaccuracies in the accounts of the crime that the mentally ill woman gave over a period of months. Some of the discrepancies were major, such as claiming to have put her gum in a paper towel instead of the tissue it was found in, defense attorney Rob Cossey told jurors.

But the core of Johnston’s defense was a conspiracy theory that even Cossey acknowledged was “far out.”

One of Johnston’s co-workers, psychiatric security attendant Jacqueline K. Hughes, testified at his first trial that she had sex with Johnston to collect his semen so another co-worker, mental health technician Mike W. Evans, could use it to frame Johnston.

Hughes, 50, testified this week that the story was a lie invented by Johnston. “He knew that he had to have a reason for the semen to be there, so he asked me to say that Mike asked me to get it for him,” Hughes testified Wednesday.

Cossey argued that Hughes told the truth at the first trial and lied this time.

The conspiracy theory exploited the Washington State Patrol’s decision not to investigate a sandwich bag wadded in a paper towel that hospital custodians found under a dryer in the laundry 31/2 weeks after the rape was reported. The custodians thought the baggie contained semen.

What the theory couldn’t explain, Love told jurors, is why the victim would have agreed to help Evans frame Johnston and doggedly stick to the story.

“As odd as it sounds, strange things happen in life,” Cossey told jurors.

No one called Evans to testify at Johnston’s first trial, and Cossey succeeded in preventing Evans from telling jurors this week that there was no conspiracy. But Rielly ruled Evans could at least tell jurors that he wouldn’t have committed a crime to harm Johnston, a longtime friend with whom he had fallen out.

Johnston faces trial Nov. 14 on one count of intimidating a witness and one count of bribing a witness. He is accused of using a combination of cash and coercion to get Hughes to lie for him.

Hughes has not been charged. She remains employed at the state mental hospital in Medical Lake.