MONTICELLO – A Monticello man will spend the next 25 years in state prison for killing his girlfriend of two years, setting her body on fire, then dismembering it and hiding it the woods. The two argued before the murder.

Lars Ryder, 23, was also sentenced to five years of parole for killing Elizabeth Mucci, 31, of Monticello and Hankins at the apartment they shared on Fraser Road in the Town of Thompson on April 26, 2011.

Ryder had pled guilty to felony manslaughter for the homicide admitting that he acted under an extreme emotional disturbance at the time of Mucci’s death.

After Ryder killed Mucci, he took her body into the woods and tried to burn it. After that did not succeed, he returned to the woods the next day and dismembered it in an effort to hide it. Police searched a wide area and recovered one of the victim’s legs where Ryder had said he put it.

No cause of death was ever forensically established.

“While no sentence will replace the loss of this young woman to her family, who grieve her loss, the 25 year state prison sentence is consistent with justice and all the facts discovered by the police investigation,” Sullivan County District Attorney James Farrell said.  

Mucci’s family, who knew Ryder and his family for almost 30 years, were in agreement with the plea and that was “a significant factor in both my office and the court agreeing to the 25 year state prison sentenced in this case,” the DA said.