ALFRED – A state prosecutor is recommending a 45-year prison sentence for a New Hampshire man convicted of killing his former fiancee.

Jason Twardus of Rochester was convicted last year of strangling 30-year-old nursing student Kelly Gorham of Alfred in 2007 and burying her body on his father’s land in northern New Hampshire.

Twardus is slated to be sentenced Tuesday by Justice G. Arthur Brennan at York County Superior Court. His bid for a new trial was rejected last month.

Gorham and Twardus lived together for two years before she broke off their engagement. She disappeared in August 2007. Her body was found a month later in a shallow grave on Twardus’ father’s property in Stewartstown.

In his sentencing memorandum submitted last week, Deputy Attorney General William Stokes wrote that Twardus never showed any remorse.

“On the contrary, he has maintained that he is the victim of a massive frame-up perpetrated against him by others, and in the process of maintaining that defense, smeared Kelly Gorham’s name and reputation,” Stokes wrote.

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Stokes told the Journal Tribune on Friday that the basic sentence should reflect that Gorham was the victim of domestic violence “literally at the hands of her former fiance.” The minimum sentence for a murder conviction in Maine is 25 years; the maximum is life in prison.

Stokes wrote that Twardus was willing to let Gorham’s family suffer the pain of not knowing what happened to her.

“Losing a child and a sibling to violence is nightmarish, but the torture the Gorham family was forced to endure for three weeks in August 2007 defies description,” he wrote. “While law enforcement worked feverishly to find Kelly Gorham, the defendant did nothing to help and continued to mislead the police at every opportunity.”

Defense lawyer Daniel Lilley had suggested that Gorham’s landlord or another man who struck up a romance with her the week before she vanished could have committed the crime.

In the bid for a new trial, Lilley said police didn’t pursue evidence that might have cast doubt on Twardus’ guilt. Lilley said a pretrial caseworker told a detective that a man who was in jail told her where Gorham’s body was nearly two weeks before police found it in that spot.

 


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