Prosecutors said Matthew Whisman was beaten, injected with fentanyl and thrown from a bridge after the defendant learned he had been talking to police.

LANCASTER, Pa. — A Chester County man has been sentenced to 43 to 100 years in state prison for his role in the 2024 killing of Matthew Whisman, a 25-year-old Lancaster County man prosecutors said was targeted after cooperating with investigators in a Maryland shooting case.

Steven Scott Gaddis, 28, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit third-degree murder, aggravated assault, kidnapping and intimidating a witness. The sentence closes one part of a case that stretched from a missing-person report in July 2024 to the discovery of Whisman’s remains in Maryland and murder charges filed that October. Two other defendants, Jeremy Absher and Alexander Whisman, still face prosecution.

Prosecutors said the killing began on April 3, 2024, inside a residence in the 1100 block of Lancaster Pike in East Drumore Township. Authorities said Gaddis looked through Matthew Whisman’s phone and found messages showing he had been communicating with police about a shooting in Rising Sun, Maryland, in which Gaddis was a suspect. Investigators said Gaddis, joined by Absher and Alexander Whisman, confronted the victim, beat him inside the house and then forced him into a vehicle. Court records described a chilling pause before the drive south. According to those records, Gaddis asked, “How would you feel if it’s your last supper?” Later, prosecutors said, fentanyl was injected into Matthew Whisman inside the vehicle and he died before his body was thrown from a bridge over Conowingo Creek.

The case did not come to light all at once. Pennsylvania State Police began investigating after Whisman’s mother reported in early July 2024 that she had not seen or heard from her son since April. Troopers then interviewed Whisman’s brother, who said he had been at the Lancaster Pike home that day and saw Gaddis, Absher and Alexander Whisman take Matthew Whisman to a car before returning without him. The brother told investigators he believed something “horrible” had happened. In August, human remains were recovered along Conowingo Creek in Cecil County, Maryland. Authorities later said DNA testing matched the remains to Whisman. Maryland officials said the remains were found near Camp Shadow Brook, giving the Pennsylvania investigation a second crime scene across state lines.

The sentencing hearing also put the family’s loss into the court record. First Deputy Assistant District Attorney Cody Wade read a statement from Whisman’s mother, who said, “There will always be a hole in our family.” That line explained why the case drew attention far beyond the guilty plea itself. Prosecutors described not only the killing but the effort to erase its traces. Court records cited by local outlets said Whisman was forced to shower after the beating. Investigators also said people involved left phones behind before part of the attack, a detail authorities treated as evidence of planning. The victim and two of the defendants were related, with prosecutors identifying Alexander Whisman as Matthew Whisman’s cousin and saying Absher was also part of the victim’s family circle. That family link turned the case into one of betrayal as much as homicide.

Gaddis was sentenced just days before he had been scheduled to go to trial on the homicide related counts. Prosecutors also said he pleaded guilty in a separate Quarryville case involving gunfire into a residence on Meadow Lane in April 2024. In that case, the district attorney’s office said three juveniles were inside the home but were not hurt. Investigators tied Gaddis to that shooting through a rental car crash, video and cellphone data, and a handgun recovered from the vehicle, according to the district attorney’s office. Those admissions did not change the core fact driving the homicide sentence: prosecutors said Whisman was killed because he had provided information to law enforcement. As of April 19, 2026, the cases against Absher and Alexander Whisman remained pending.

The details that remain most striking are also the plainest ones. A missing man was last seen leaving a house in rural Lancaster County. Months later, his remains were found on the bank of a Maryland creek. The person now sentenced in the case was not accused of a split-second act but of a sequence that prosecutors said moved from discovery, to beating, to transport, to injection, to disposal of a body. Whisman’s mother, in the statement read to the court, wrote that Gaddis had stolen the family’s chance to grow old with her son and to heal from earlier distance. The sentence does not end the wider case, but it fixes one defendant’s punishment in a record that now spans two states, multiple interviews and a homicide investigation that began with silence at home.

Gaddis’s case now stands at an uneven midpoint: he has been sentenced, while the prosecutions of Jeremy Absher and Alexander Whisman are still ahead, keeping the full court process active more than two years after Matthew Whisman was killed.

Author note: Last updated April 19, 2026.