Background: The Des Moines County Correctional Center in Burlington, Iowa (Google Maps). Inset: Audrey Engler (Des Moines County Jail).
A woman in Iowa will spend years inside a prison cell for letting an elderly woman she was caring for rot in her own filth before she died.
Audrey Engler has been sentenced to serve not more than 10 years in the Iowa Correctional Institution for Women, according to Des Moines County court records reviewed by Law&Crime. She has been given credit for time served in jail.
The 25-year-old Engler pleaded guilty in February to intentional dependent adult abuse resulting in serious injury. She had been charged and placed in the Des Moines County Correctional Center in Burlington, Iowa, in December 2025.
Months before, on July 21, 2025, the woman”s mattress caught fire, and she was hospitalized and then moved into hospice care, according to a criminal complaint. The woman paid in-home care company Vibrance Homecare to look after her, and Engler was assigned to the case.
The older woman paid for the rent and bills in the apartment, and, according to the woman’s case manager, the woman asked the manager to purchase clothing items for her “because all her money was going to Engler.”
On Aug. 14, 2025, the woman died, and the following day, the Burlington Police Department began to investigate the circumstances surrounding her death. Investigators learned that the woman had not been receiving her medicine while living with her assigned caregiver.
Furthermore, while a nurse was originally coming by frequently to deal with the woman’s pain, Engler encouraged the nurse to reduce her visits because she said the patient was “adequately” being taken care of, the complaint states.
As it turned out, this was not the case.
The home was in a general state of disarray, with “stuff all over the ground” so that “a person couldn’t find a place to sit or stand,” authorities said. The woman had “burns on her back, had ulcers on her buttocks, bed sores, a full catheter bag,” and at one point was “sitting in feces.”
Also troubling was that the woman appeared to be getting “skinnier and skinnier,” according to the complaint. She would communicate with Engler via text when she needed something, but detectives reviewed their message history and found multiple occurrences in which Engler “wouldn’t respond for hours.”
When investigators spoke with Engler, she admitted that she only moved the woman “one time a day,” per the complaint. She also conceded that she “could have taken care of the dependent adult better and could have checked on her more and could have had more compassion for her.”
In addition to being sentenced to serve prison time, Engler must pay a fine of $1,500, though the court agreed to suspend the fine “[b]ased upon a review of the Defendant’s financial circumstances.”
