Columbia, Mo. ? A young man who already pleaded guilty in the killing of a Missouri journalist testified Monday that the robbery and attack were the idea of a friend, who ended up strangling the man.

Kent Heitholt, sports editor of the Columbia Daily Tribune, was slain in the newspaper parking lot early on the morning of Nov. 1, 2001.

Heitholt, a Lawrence native, was the son of former Kansas University basketball player Bill Heitholt, who played on the Jayhawks’ 1952 NCAA championship team.

Kent Heitholt was born in Lawrence while his father was attending KU. After his death, a fund was set up in his honor at Lawrence’s Boys and Girls Club.

Charles T. Erickson, 21, who pleaded guilty last November to second-degree murder, detailed in court how he began the night snorting cocaine and drinking beer. He later met Ryan Ferguson, now age 20, and they went to a nightclub and continued drinking.

The two thought they were out of money and Ferguson suggested they rob someone and handed Erickson a metal tire tool, Erickson testified.

While walking toward downtown Columbia, they saw a man about to get into his car in the newspaper parking lot, he said.

“I crept up behind him and he started to turn and that’s when I hit him, and I kept on hitting him,” Erickson said, later demonstrating for jurors with his hands how he hit Heitholt as the sports editor tried to defend himself and fell to the ground.

He said he felt remorse and dropped the tire tool after Heitholt fell flat. That’s when he saw Ferguson standing over the victim.

“He was down there and he had a belt and he had his foot on his back and he was pulling up with the belt. … He was strangling the victim,” Erickson said while being questioned by Boone County prosecutor Kevin Crane.

Erickson said he pulled Ferguson off Heitholt and told people coming out of the newspaper that a man needed help. Then the two ran, he said. They eventually went back to the nightclub, where Ferguson found a $20 bill in his wallet and bought more drinks.

“He was just looking at me and he’s kind of smiling and he says ‘We just did that for nothing; I had this all the time,”‘ Erickson said, adding that later Ferguson said he had always wanted to kill someone.

Erickson said he repressed his memory of the crime and began recalling bits of it only when he saw a newspaper article on the anniversary of the crime. He said he confronted Ferguson at a New Year’s party in 2004 and Ferguson initially denied anything happened. But Ferguson eventually threatened to kill him if he told anyone about the crime, Erickson said.

The two men were arrested in March 2004 after witnesses told police Erickson had talked about the crime.

When they were first arrested, Erickson told police he wasn’t sure if he committed the crime or if it was a dream. Erickson said Monday that he is now 100 percent certain that Ferguson killed Heitholt.

He testified that he recalled more and more details as he came to accept the fact that he had committed the crime.

“Deep down, I knew that I done it, I just was too much of a coward to take responsibility,” he said.

In opening statements earlier Monday, Crane said Heitholt was killed with his own belt. He acknowledged that Erickson did not initially recall his involvement in Heitholt’s death, but remembered later and pleaded guilty on condition that he testify at Ferguson’s trial in return for a sentence of 25 years in prison.

Ferguson, charged with first-degree murder, could face up to life in prison if convicted.

Crane also acknowledged that there was no physical evidence linking the two young men to the crime and that items stolen from Heitholt have never been recovered. But he said Erickson’s testimony is credible, noting that although some details of his account have wavered, the core has remained the same.

“The evidence will be that Chuck Erickson had no uncertainty about the essence of this murder – that he beat the victim and the defendant strangled him,” Crane told jurors.

Defense attorney Charles Rogers, of Kansas City, did not dispute the circumstances of Heitholt’s death but contended police and prosecutors had charged the wrong man. He said fingerprints and a hair found at the scene matched neither Ferguson nor Erickson. And, he said, a trail of blood and a route followed by police dogs led in the direction opposite from the one Erickson told police he and Ferguson fled from the murder.

The jury of nine men and three women, selected in eastern Missouri, is being sequestered in Columbia during the trial, which is expected to last a week.