PORTLAND – For the past 13 years, Sarah Perry said she feels as though she has been serving a life sentence; every time she’s tried thinking about her mother, she could only recall details of her grisly murder.

“All I can think about is … rape and being stabbed in the head,” she told a judge Thursday.

Shortly after Perry’s statement, a judge sentenced Michael Hutchinson, 32, of Bridgton to life in prison with no chance of release for the 1994 slaying of 30-year-old Crystal Perry.

His attorney said appeals of the conviction and sentence are planned.

Outside the Cumberland County Courthouse, 25-year-old Sarah Perry said she hoped finally to start putting those horrific images behind her and get on with her life.

She said she hopes to feel less ashamed for not having saved her mother from the brutal murder and for fumbling with the telephone after finding her mother on the floor with more than 50 stab wounds covering her head, she said.

Sarah Perry was 12 years old and had been asleep in her bedroom at their Bridgton home on Route 93 when she awoke to hear her mother’s repeated shouts of, “No.” She knows now it was Hutchinson who had forced the cries from her mother during a sexual assault that night. And she knows now it was Hutchinson who went to the kitchen to silence Crystal Perry from ever being able to identify him by stabbing her, she said.

Perry said she hadn’t planned to speak until minutes before addressing Justice Thomas Warren – and Hutchinson – in Courtroom No. 8 Thursday morning.

She talked about how her mother’s murder had altered her reality ever since that night when she ran barefoot in the dark and rain, banging on neighbors’ doors in hopes somebody would let her in to call police.

But more troubling than all those things, she said she’s never been able to honor her mother’s memory by recalling their many good times together. Every time she’d start to think of her, images from the murder scene and the brutal reality of that night would always block the way.

“It’s so hard to get past the terror and ugliness of it,” she said. “That is my life sentence.”

Justice Warren considered the emotionally stunting effect the murder had on Sarah Perry when he calculated the number of years Hutchinson should serve, Warren said Thursday.

He also considered Hutchinson’s five convictions dating back to 1999, including a felony count of criminal threatening with a dangerous weapon.

He even sentenced Hutchinson to an additional 15 months in prison, to be served while he spends life behind bars, for violating probation on that felony.

Hutchinson never took responsibility for his crime and showed no remorse, Warren said. Those also are aggravating factors.

What elevated the crime to the level warranting a life sentence were two factors, Warren said Thursday.

The crime showed “extreme cruelty” and included a sexual assault, he said.

While he didn’t believe Hutchinson had planned the “savage” murder, Warren called the stabbing “butchery” and noted that Perry was apparently alive during the attack.

Hutchinson, a mason who lived a mile and a half from Perry’s home, was arrested last year when his DNA matched samples of semen and blood stored from the crime scene 12 years earlier. Police had never considered him as a suspect in the case because the two had never been publicly acquainted.

Assistant Attorney General Lisa Marchese said that made the slaying all the more frightening and highlighted the need to lock up Hutchinson for the rest of his life.

“He just went in there randomly and committed such a heinous crime,” she said. “How could we ever be guaranteed that he would be safe to be out on the streets again?”

Hutchinson’s attorney, Robert Andrews, had argued for 40 years and said said he and his client were “very disappointed” with the life sentence. He said appeals of the this year’s conviction and sentence are planned.

Hutchinson, wearing a dark suit and shackles at the ankles, had Andrews give the judge a letter he penned, saying only, “I believe the letter should be sufficient.”

According to Andrews, Hutchinson’s letter told the judge that he was sorry he had done nothing to ease the suffering of Perry’s family. He said he is getting help for substance abuse and maintains his innocence.

At his trial, Hutchinson said he and Perry had consensual sex the night of her murder and later an unknown intruder stabbed her and knocked him unconscious. He fled and told no one because he was ashamed for not having saved Perry from her true attacker and had been fearful that he could be next.

Two of Crystal Perry’s sisters and a brother spoke at the sentencing, urging Justice Warren to impose a life sentence.

Perry was the baby of 10 children, they said. Their mother, whose health declined following Perry’s murder, died a week before Hutchinson was arrested.

“Michael Hutchinson has put a hole so huge in this family that it can never be filled,” said Gwen Fontenault, who lives in New Hampshire. “I just want you to know I will never forgive you for what you have done.”

Another sister, Glenice Russo, said she wished Maine had a death penalty law. Looking directly at Hutchinson, she said: “May God show you no mercy.”

Sarah Perry said she planned to go home to North Carolina where she works at a university. For her, Maine has been “tainted,”coming to symbolize a dark and terrible time.

“I really didn’t want to think of it as home. I just wanted to think of myself as a nomad,” she said.

Now, she said she hopes “to reconnect with it as home.”