HOULTON — Matthew Wilson, the Monticello man who raped and murdered his 11-year-old daughter in October 1993, was sentenced to life in prison Wednesday in Aroostook County Superior Court in Houlton.

“Even if released at age 60 or 70, you’d be a danger to society, to women and young children,” said Justice Paul T. Pierson, in passing sentence.

Wilson, 34, already pleaded guilty to the murder in September in Aroostook County Superior Court in Caribou.

At that time, Assistant Attorney General Thomas Goodwin said that Wilson had bound his daughter Jennifer’s hands and mouth with duct tape, electrical tape, leather and plastic wire ties. She then was choked to death with a dog choker collar.

Wilson originally had claimed that he tied his daughter to a tree in a gravel pit on Oct. 5, 1993, to punish her for acting unruly. He went to get some gasoline for his car and when he came back, she was dead, he said.

Her body was found two days later buried beneath some brush next to an abandoned railroad bed about a half mile from her home.

“Jennifer died as a result of a hard force to pull that chain around her neck from the back,” Goodwin said Wednesday. “This was not a question of disciplining her so she wouldn’t escape, but of rape and murder.”

He said that the girl had been raped both vaginally and anally and then was “elaborately, almost ritually, bound.”

He added that Wilson had been sentenced in 1981 in South Carolina for a similar crime that had “striking parallels; almost eerie parallels.”

The victim in that incident also had been threatened with death, but managed to escape.

Wilson was sentenced to 20 years in prison, but was released in 1992, just over a year before he killed his daughter. That fact was not lost on Pierson, who said the short time between Wilson’s release and the murder demonstrated that there was “little or no likelihood of rehabilitation.”

The sentencing began on an emotional note when Cynthia Hall, Wilson’s ex-wife, asked Pierson to sentence Wilson to the maximum sentence possible.

“He’s taken away from us a loving, precious little girl,” she said sobbing. “What he did to her was very violent. I live each night with nightmares of what she must have gone through. If we had the death penalty, I’d beg that you kill him. I hope there’s somebody out there who can make him suffer the way he made my daughter suffer and then I hope he rots in hell,” she said.

Rubbing his hands together and crying, Wilson also addressed Pierson before the sentence was announced.

“I know there’s a lot of pain and sorrow and hurt in people,” he said. “I feel it every day myself. If I could give my life to bring back my daughter, I would. She deserves to live and I don’t. I’m truly sorry.”

In seeking a life sentence, Goodwin cited the fact that Jennifer’s death was the result of an extremely cruel act.

Wilson’s attorney, Hal Stewart II of Presque Isle, sought an unspecified lesser sentence noting that Wilson “does feel terribly for what he did and is so ashamed that he can’t talk about it.”

He said that the fact that Wilson had pleaded guilty to the crime and, also had had an abusive childhood, were other mitigating circumstances.