Kansas water director expected to plead innocent to assaulting his sister-in-law

? The state’s top water official is expected to plead innocent to charges he entered a sleeping woman’s home in May and raped her.

The Shawnee County District Attorney’s Office filed five felony charges Tuesday against Alan L. LeDoux, 55, who has served two governors and is well-known in Republican circles in northeast Kansas.

LeDoux, who lives near Holton, is director at the Kansas Water Office. Prosecutors say he entered the 47-year-old Topeka woman’s home early the morning of May 23. Wearing a ski mask, he then allegedly raped and sodomized her. Police said he bound the woman with tape and blindfolded her before taking her into a bathroom where he “cut her nightshirt off” and raped her.

Political colleagues, friends and co-workers said they couldn’t fathom the church-going civic leader committing the crimes.

LeDoux played host at a fund-raising event Sunday at his Jackson County farm for GOP gubernatorial candidate Tim Shallenburger.

“We’re shocked,” said Bob Murray, a spokesman for the Shallenburger campaign. “There was no indication at all” at the event that anything was wrong.

Topeka City Councilman Clark Duffy, who is assistant director at the Kansas Water Office, said the allegations were hard to believe.

“If you asked me to come up with a list of people I thought were capable of something like this  Al LeDoux’s name wouldn’t be on it,” Duffy said. “We’re all shocked.”

‘Not guilty’

Arrested Tuesday, LeDoux remains in the Shawnee County Jail, unable to post $500,000 bond.

“Our intent is to plead not guilty,” said Don Hoffman, a Topeka attorney representing LeDoux.

Hoffman filed papers Wednesday asking the court to reduce LeDoux’s bond.

“Five hundred thousand dollars  that’s an astronomical amount,” Hoffman said. He noted that LeDoux had “cooperated fully from the very beginning” and was not a flight risk.

Hoffman criticized Dist. Atty. Robert Hecht’s handling of the case, saying he’d sent Hecht a letter in June about the case. But Hecht, he said, did not respond.

Hoffman said LeDoux had offered to turn himself in rather go through the “public spectacle” of being arrested and jailed.

Hoffman chided Hecht’s office for issuing a press release that alerted the media to LeDoux’s arrest rather than taking a low-profile approach.

“They could have issued a summons,” Hoffman said. “He would have turned himself in.”

In a motion filed Wednesday, Hecht disputed Hoffman’s version of events, saying LeDoux “never gave an interview to law enforcement and no statement was made prior to his arrest.”

Hecht said his office had followed standard procedure.

In the motions filed for and against reducing LeDoux’s bond, both sides revealed the victim is related to LeDoux. The Journal-World confirmed the victim was LeDoux’s sister-in-law.

“Without getting into specifics, I would simply say that national statistics reflect that 80 percent of all sex offenses occur between family members and acquaintances,” Hecht said. “The other 20 percent are strangers.”

Asked whether his office could have charged LeDoux earlier, Hecht replied: “This investigation was thorough and involved a number of aspects that could not be completed any more rapidly.”

Contacted early Wednesday evening, LeDoux’s oldest son, Trent, who works at Kansas Republican Party headquarters in Topeka, declined to be interviewed. Still married, Al LeDoux and his wife have two sons, a daughter and a grandchild.

A native of Shawnee County, Al LeDoux served as a member of the Republican State Committee in the early 1990s, chairman of the Jackson County Republican Central Committee and later as vice chairman of the Jackson County Republican Party.

LeDoux served as chief legislative liaison for former Gov. Mike Hayden and later for Gov. Bill Graves, who appointed him director of the Kansas Water Office in 1995. The office administers water policy for the state.

In Jackson County, where LeDoux has been a civic and church leader, longtime acquaintance and former county prosecutor Micheal Ireland said the allegations were “bizarre.”

“I want to hear more before I start digesting this,” Ireland said. “Right now, it’s unbelievable.”

The Rev. Kelvin Heitman, primary pastor of Holton’s Evangelical United Methodist Church, learned of the charges late Tuesday from the media. He said LeDoux, a Sunday school teacher, was “an upstanding member of the church.”