Judge Robert Lynn was right to accept Eric Windhurst's guilty plea in the 1985 killing of Daniel Paquette. Reasonable people can disagree about whether the negotiated sentence, 15 to 36 years, appropriately punishes Windhurst. What matters more is that he is going to prison and Paquette's death has been called what it was: murder.

With his guilty plea yesterday, Windhurst, of Hopkinton, admitted that as a 17-year-old he went to Hooksett, took aim from a distance and, as Paquette worked in his yard, fired the single gunshot that killed him. Windhurst had denied his involvement at the time and for 20 years lived with the secret of what had happened.

Also living with the secret was Paquette's then-15-year-old stepdaughter, Melanie. Only two years ago, she recanted her previous claim that she and Windhurst had been elsewhere at the time of the shooting, disclosing that she was with Windhurst when he fired the shot. She has agreed to plead guilty to a felony charge of misleading authorities and may face several years in prison herself.

How many others shared the secret is one of the questions unlikely to be answered now that Windhurst will not go to trial. Friends or family members who stayed silent or counseled deception are left, like Windhurst, to ponder whether a prompt confession might have landed him in juvenile court or otherwise led to a more lenient punishment.

Certainly the passage of time added to the shock when Windhurst was charged with the crime last fall. He remained in Hopkinton, leading an upstanding life, and could have cut a sympathetic figure in court.

In preparing for a trial, Windhurst's lawyers asserted that Paquette had sexually abused his stepdaughter, suggesting that Windhurst had acted to protect her. Judge Lynn was not inclined to allow Windhurst to make a formal claim of self-defense, but that's not to say some jurors wouldn't have come to view Windhurst's action as justifiable.

No matter how much Paquette may have once terrorized his stepdaughter - an allegation that was never tested in court -Lynn would have been wise to rule a self-defense claim out of bounds. Melanie Paquette did not face imminent danger, and Windhurst acted deliberately, not out of exigency. Still, Lynn's rulings would have been tested by appeals. The plea deal eliminates such uncertainty, making it a smart choice for the state's prosecutors.

More troubling was an 11th-hour claim by those prosecutors that Windhurst was driven by a history of sexual abuse in his own family. This claim was not only untested in court, but indeed too old to be tested because of a statute of limitations. That Windhurst's plea quickly followed, though not surprising, doesn't trivialize the decision to make public an allegation that will now just linger, neither substantiated nor refuted.

Twenty-one years later, even Windhurst may not know what tortured thoughts and horrible illogic swirled inside his head the day he decided to kill a man he had never met. At this point it really doesn't matter. What he did was wrong, and no longer will he escape the consequence.

Monitor editorial