Drifter Sentenced to Life Term for Murder : Crime: Sanford Fineman was killed in a robbery attempt by a man he once tried to help.

A transient who robbed and killed a 73-year-old man who befriended him pleaded guilty Wednesday to first-degree murder and was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

John Edward Welker, 30, admitted to a Torrance Superior Court judge that on Aug. 31 he shot Sanford Fineman twice in the head and took $400 in cash from the dying man’s pockets.

Welker entered the plea less than two weeks after the district attorney’s office decided to drop its initial plan to seek the death penalty. His defense attorney could not be reached for comment Wednesday.

Two men suspected of giving Welker the gun used during the robbery, and driving him away from the scene afterward, still face trial on murder charges for their roles in Fineman’s death, Deputy Dist. Atty. Ralph Shapiro said. Hector Cardenas and Kevin Kritz, both 25, are scheduled to appear for a pretrial hearing Monday.

Fineman, the manager of a Torrance auto-leasing firm, met Welker in May and told friends that he felt sorry for the drifter. Fineman put Welker up in a motel room for a few days and offered him an after-hours cleaning job at the leasing business.

Within a month, however, Fineman fired Welker for stealing from the store, co-workers said.

By then, however, Welker knew that Fineman made a habit of carrying the day’s cash receipts to the bank each evening. In a taped confession after the shooting, Welker said he, Cardenas and Kritz staked out Fineman’s car in a Del Amo Fashion Center parking lot on Aug. 31, waiting for him to make his nightly drive to the bank.

When Fineman got in the car, Welker jumped in the passenger side and forced Fineman to drive to a nearby Capitol Bank parking lot. Welker told police he demanded money, but that Fineman grabbed for the gun and it went off.

“The wounds were on the left side of (Fineman’s) head, so that does seem consistent with some kind of struggle,” Shapiro said. “But there were two shots, so that mitigates against his statement that this was some kind of an inadvertent thing.”

Police officers in a nearby parking lot heard the shots, saw a man run from Fineman’s car to a waiting car and gave chase, Shapiro said. Welker, who was covered with blood, was caught with Cardenas and Kritz less than a half a mile from the murder scene. The murder weapon was still in the car, Shapiro said.

Welker’s life prison term without possibility of parole was the stiffest penalty possible, Shapiro said.

“I think he realized the case was just about as solid a case as you can have without having Steven Spielberg there filming it,” Shapiro said. “This is an excellent disposition. There’s no appeal from this kind of plea.”