LEWISTON — Three months after she was arrested on the turnpike with $25,000 worth of crack cocaine, a Lewiston woman has been ordered to serve 10 years in a state prison.

Tanya Cahill, 27, was sentenced in Cumberland County Superior Court in Portland after pleading guilty to a trafficking charge, police said. No part of the sentence was suspended, meaning Cahill will not be eligible for release until August 2021 at the earliest.

The sentence was imposed after court officials considered Cahill’s long criminal history, which includes convictions for burglaries and numerous assaults, some of them stemming from a home invasion in Lewiston five years ago. Cahill has also served time for aggravated assault after beating a man over the head with a baseball bat.

During an interview with the Sun Journal in the spring of 2012, Cahill described the horrors of drug addiction while serving time at the Maine Correctional Center in Windham. At the time of the interview, Cahill was getting ready to be released from the prison where she had been sentenced on charges of burglary and assault.

“I want something better for myself,” Cahill told the reporter. “I used to be a strong woman and I lost that somewhere and I need to find it. It’s there somewhere and I need to find it.”

But police said that once she was free, Cahill returned to her former lifestyle. In early August of this year, she was inside a car with 29-year-old William Murchison, also of Lewiston, when the vehicle was stopped by Maine State Police.

Police stopped the car on the Maine Turnpike, near the Gray exit, because agents from the Maine Drug Enforcement Agency had advised them that the pair was bringing drugs from Boston into Lewiston.

Police searched the car and discovered nine ounces of crack cocaine with an estimated street value of $25,000, according to the MDEA. Both Murchison and Cahill were taken to the Cumberland County Jail in Portland, charged with aggravated trafficking in crack.

Cahill ultimately admitted her role. The case against Murchison is still pending.

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