A Lancaster County judge last week sentenced a Chester County man to 43 to 100 years in state prison for murdering an East Drumore Township man who had been cooperating with investigators looking into a non-fatal shooting and separately for firing a gun into a Quarryville Borough residence.

Judge Thomas Sponaugle handed down the sentence to Steven Scott Gaddis, of Pocopson Township, on Friday. Gaddis had pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit third-degree murder, aggravated assault, intimidating a witness and kidnapping, just days before he was slated to go to trial for those offenses.

Gaddis, 28, assaulted and kidnapped Matthew Scott Whisman, then injected him with a lethal dose of fentanyl the night of April 3, 2024. Whisman, 25, was at the time cooperating with a police investigation into a shooting in Maryland months earlier in which Gaddis was a suspect.

First Deputy Assistant District Attorney Cody Wade, who prosecuted the case alongside Assistant District Attorney Samantha Frost, read a statement written by Whisman’s mother in which she told Gaddis that he “stole the opportunity to grow old together, to reconnect after the awful chasm you and your accomplices had put between them.”

“There will always be a hole in our family,” Whisman’s mother wrote.

After Gaddis learned that Whisman had been communicating with police he, along with Whisman’s cousins Alexander Whisman, 19, and Jeremy Absher, 26, assaulted him inside a residence in the 1100 block of Lancaster Pike in East Drumore Township. The three then forced Matthew Whisman into a vehicle where they injected him with the drugs, killing him.

Matthew Whisman’s remains were found months later near a hiking trail in Cecil County, Maryland after Gaddis and Absher had thrown his body off a bridge.

Prosecution is pending against Absher and Whisman. They are presumed innocent until proven guilty.

Separately, Gaddis also pleaded guilty to aggravated assault and other offenses for firing a gun into a residence in the 200 block of Meadow Lane in Quarryville in April 2024. Three juveniles were inside the residence at the time but were uninjured.

Police arrived at the scene to find multiple bullet holes in the residence, one of which had struck the front door.

Investigators learned of Gaddis’ involvement when, in a recorded phone call from Lancaster County Prison, Absher stated that he knew Gaddis was the perpetrator. Gaddis later crashed a rental car that matched the description an eyewitness gave to police of a suspicious vehicle they spotted near the victims’ residence just moments before the shooting.

Videos and other data extracted from Gaddis’ cellphone, which was recovered from the vehicle, indicated that he was near the victims’ residence in the vehicle and armed with a handgun at the time of the shooting. Police also recovered a handgun from the rental vehicle.

Quarryville Borough Police Det. Robert Burns and Pennsylvania State Police Trooper Amos Glick filed the charges.