PLYMOUTH — A rejected lover who set ablaze his former girlfriend and then jumped on her — going up in flames himself — told a state trooper he thought they would die together.

Barry Winters, 61, confided to Trooper Sherry Vestal that he and Evelyn Spodnik, 57, had broken up just days before he doused her with gasoline as she slept on June 29, 2011. In court records unsealed this week, Winters described how he spent three days plotting “the most violent act possible and that is taking someone else's life and trying to take mine too.”

Spodnik, a Holderness Central reading teacher, died July 1, but not before Winters told her he was sorry as the two were being treated at Speare Memorial Hospital. Winters, who was facing first-degree murder charges, died last weekend from complications related to self-inflicted burns.

A transcribed account of Winters' conversation with a Lakes Region dispatcher is included in the affidavit filed by New Hampshire State Police Detective Sgt. Sheldon Belanger.

“Yes, um the rejection was very painful and it was a rejection of magnitude because I had put 100 percent into the relationship whereas in most relationships I only put in 50 percent. (Inaudible) and meant everything to me ... and therefore when it didn't work out, I had nothing to fall back on...,” White told the dispatcher.

The court documents unsealed in 2nd Circuit Court, Plymouth, indicate Winters was a teacher at Black River High School in Ludlow, Vt.

He had been living at Spodnik's Wentworth home for several months before their breakup and was paying $750 a month in child support for his 14-year-old son.

The court records indicate Winters told the dispatcher he “poured gas all over her thinking that would get rid of her, and suffocate both of us...” He started the blaze with a candle, then tried to hold Spodnik down.

Spodnik was able to run from her burning house at 284 Rowentown Road to the nearby home of Wentworth Police Chief Kevin Kay about 2 a.m. June 29. She told Kay she awoke from a sound sleep thinking someone had splashed water on her.

She told Brian Clark of the Warren-Wentworth ambulance service that Winters had “lit her on fire and jumped on top of her,” the affidavit reads.

She was transported to a Boston hospital and died two days later. Winters was in a Boston hospital being treated for his burns until Dec. 27. He was being held in Grafton County Jail on first-degree murder charges and was awaiting indictment.

Last Friday, Winters had a “medical condition” which required his transport to a local hospital, where he died 24 hours later, the Attorney General's office said.

According to the court documents, Winters told Trooper Vestal that he was a science teacher and thought he and Spodnik would both suffocate to death when he set the blaze.

When the trooper asked if there was anything else he wanted to say, Winters said that he was “guilty” and would have to live with that, hoping his life was “going to be shorter than it is, not because of pain, physical pain, but because of the emotional pain.”