Authorities said the route of the crime stretched from rural Lancaster County into Maryland after family members and an associate turned on the victim.
LANCASTER, Pa. — The case against Steven Scott Gaddis was told in court through a sequence of places: a house in East Drumore Township, a vehicle heading south, a bridge over Conowingo Creek and a Maryland bank where Matthew Whisman’s remains were found months later.
That map matters because it explains both the prosecution and the shock surrounding the case. Whisman was 25. Prosecutors said two of the men charged alongside Gaddis were his cousins, turning the killing into a story not only of alleged retaliation but of betrayal inside a familiar circle. Gaddis has now been sentenced to 43 to 100 years in prison after pleading guilty, but the two remaining defendants still face prosecution and the case continues to unfold.
The first setting was the residence on the 1100 block of Lancaster Pike. Authorities said Whisman arrived there on April 3, 2024. Court records cited by local outlets said Gaddis went through his phone and found a message showing Whisman had been cooperating with police in a Maryland shooting investigation. The room-by-room details that followed gave the case its harshest texture. Prosecutors said Whisman was taken into a bathroom and laundry area and beaten. Reporting on the court file said he was then made to shower. Later, according to those accounts, he was fed in the basement. It was there, local reporting said, that Gaddis asked him how he would feel if it were his last supper. In this version of the story, the house is where suspicion hardened into violence.
The second setting was the vehicle. Investigators said Gaddis, Jeremy Absher and Alexander Whisman forced Matthew Whisman inside and headed toward the Maryland line. The public record suggests the car was not just transportation but the place where control tightened. Absher told investigators that Gaddis said the injection would help what he was about to do not hurt. Alexander Whisman told investigators that Gaddis threatened to shoot those who refused to go along. Prosecutors said the fentanyl injection happened in the vehicle and killed Matthew Whisman before the trip ended. By the time the car reached the bridge, the state’s account had already moved past assault and kidnapping into homicide.
The third and fourth settings were the bridge and the creek. Troopers said Gaddis directed a stop at a bridge over Conowingo Creek and that he and Absher threw the body into the water. The remains were not found until Aug. 8, 2024, when authorities recovered human remains near Camp Shadow Brook in Cecil County, Maryland. DNA later identified them as Matthew Whisman’s. The distance between April and August gave the case a long silence in the middle, one broken only when Whisman’s mother reported in July that she had not heard from him. A family member then told police he had seen the men take Whisman away and believed something terrible had happened. That is how the geography of the case became part of the evidence.
The sentencing hearing pulled those places back into one courtroom. Prosecutors said Gaddis pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit third-degree murder, aggravated assault, kidnapping and intimidating a witness. Judge Thomas Sponaugle then imposed the 43 to 100 year sentence. First Deputy Assistant District Attorney Cody Wade read a statement from Whisman’s mother, who said there would always be a hole in the family. The district attorney’s office also said Gaddis admitted guilt in a separate Quarryville shooting case from the same month, though no one was hurt there. That added legal weight to the proceeding, but it was the path from house to bridge that defined the homicide case.
The open questions now belong to the remaining prosecutions. Jeremy Absher and Alexander Whisman have not been tried in the homicide case, and prosecutors have said those cases are still pending. Alexander Whisman, who was a juvenile at the time of the killing, has already been ordered to face the case in adult court. Public reporting has described statements by both co-defendants that place Gaddis at the center of the plot, but their own criminal responsibility remains for a judge or jury to sort out later. For now, the broad picture is settled only in part: prosecutors say a man was discovered to be helping police, his relatives and an associate turned on him, and one defendant has now been sentenced for a killing that ended across the state line.
The case remains rooted in those linked places and relationships. East Drumore Township is where Whisman was last seen, Conowingo Creek is where he was found, and Lancaster County court is where one defendant has now been punished while the rest of the case waits for its next stage.
Author note: Last updated April 19, 2026.