Man Burdened by Guilt Gets 1 Year in Killing : Courts: Judge says defendant’s conscience has punished him enough for burning man to death in 1976.

A Riverside County man who confessed to a 1976 murder will receive the unusually light sentence of one year in jail because his conscience has punished him for 17 years, a Ventura County judge said Wednesday.

“The more I think about this, the less ridiculous it seems,” Superior Court Judge Charles W. Campbell Jr. said in announcing that Richard Maytorena, 46, would receive the jail term as part of his probation.

The judge noted that police were not aware that a murder had been committed until Maytorena surprised them with his confession in February.

“If there ever was a case where a person should be considered for probation for committing second-degree murder, this case is it,” Campbell said.

The sentence will become official at a hearing next week. With time off for good conduct, Maytorena could be released as early as September for killing an Oxnard man in a bar fight.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Peter D. Kossoris said the case warranted a state prison term.

Maytorena, in a letter to the court, said he would accept whatever sentence is imposed.

“Words cannot express the sorrow I have caused so many people,” he wrote. “I know I have done the right thing by coming forward.”

Maytorena, a plumber, pleaded guilty last month to murdering Claude W. Bloomquist II, a 24-year-old body shop worker who died of smoke inhalation after his car burned on an Oxnard street July 16, 1976.

Investigators concluded that the fire and death were accidental.

The case was reopened in February after Maytorena walked into a Riverside County sheriff’s station in Moreno Valley and confessed to killing Bloomquist.

Maytorena told investigators that he and Bloomquist were drinking at an Oxnard bar and got into a fight outside. Bloomquist fell during the scuffle and hit his head. Unable to find a pulse, Maytorena assumed that the man was dead and placed him in the front seat of the car, according to Maytorena’s statement to investigators.

He said he poured lighter fluid on the front seat of the car and set it on fire to destroy evidence of what he thought was a murder.

After he confessed, investigators told Maytorena that Bloomquist was alive after the fight but had died during the fire.

In his letter to the court, Maytorena said he had tried to forget the incident. The burden of his guilt was made heavier because he could not tell anyone what he had done, said Maytorena, who is divorced and has two grown children.

“I take full responsibility for what happened,” he said. “There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t go over what happened. . . . The guilt was more than I could handle.”