GUILTY PA - Jillian Rohrbaugh, 26, murdered in her Whitehall home, 21 Oct 2015

On Thursday, Gordon Rohrbaugh admitted strangling the 26-year-old woman in the Whitehall Township apartment she shared with her mother and her young daughter.

Rohrbaugh's attorney said his client was at the end of a three-day bender with methamphetamine when Rohrbaugh killed his wife.

The 25-year-old Rohrbaugh, who lived in the 100 block of West Washington Street in Fleetwood in Berks County, pleaded guilty to third-degree murder and was sentenced to 20 to 40 years in prison as part of the plea.

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First Assistant District Attorney Steve Luksa said his office was faced with a number of potential defenses Rohrbaugh could use at trial. Besides being under the influence of drugs at the time of the crime, psychiatric evaluations revealed Rohrbaugh suffers from metal illness, although a diagnosis was not revealed by attorneys in the case.

While Luksa said Rohrbaugh's actions were "monstrous," all of those factors added up to running a risk at a jury trial of Rohrbaugh being convicted of involuntary manslaughter. With his lack of a prior criminal record, Rohrbaugh would potentially face less time in prison.

The third-degree murder plea deal with a maximum sentence "was the next best thing to life in prison," Luksa said.

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One by one on Thursday, the family of Jillian (Faustner) Rohrbaugh faced the man who strangled her to death and remembered the funny and loving young woman they were still mourning.

Stacey Faustner, Jillian's sister-in-law, said she fears Gordon Rohrbaugh getting out of prison and Nora seeing him on the street.

Or worse, a woman "might come to love him one day and face the same fate" as Jillian, Faustner said.

Jennifer Lentz, Jillian's oldest sister, said her sister's "torturous" murder eats at her every day.

"That is not a husband. That is a monster!" Lentz said as she spoke between sobs. "He didn't just kill Jillian that day. He killed a part of all of us that day."

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