LOS ANGELES -- Vicki Morgan, who exposed her long affair with department store heir and presidential confidant Alfred Bloomingdale in an $11 million palimony suit, was beaten to death with a baseball bat by her male roommate as she slept Thursday, police said.
Detectives said the couple fought about money and were moving out of their North Hollywood condminium Thursday to separate residences - one year after Miss Morgan, 30, shocked Beverly Hills society and the White House and with her suit against the late millionaire, a close friend of Ronald Reagan and a member of his 'kitchen cabinet.'
Marvin Pancoast, 33, who shared the rented three-bedroom, $1,000-a-month condominium with Miss Morgan for only three weeks, was booked for murder after he turned himself into police about 3:20 a.m. PDT, Lt. Dan Cooke said.
Miss Morgan's attorney, Michael Dave, said Pancoast and Miss Morgan, who had known each other since 1979, 'were definitely not lovers,' but the lawyer refused to characterize their relationship.
Cooke said Pancoast entered the North Hollywood division station and asked to see someone in homicide. Asked if he were a witness to a crime, Pancoast replied, ''No. I just killed someone.''
Miss Morgan's partially clad body was found in her blood-soaked bed with a fractured skull. A wooden baseball bat was lying nearby. Cooke said Pancoast told officers he waited for Miss Morgan to go to sleep and then beat her with the bat.
'He gave indications they were having financial difficulties,' Cooke said. 'They had been arguing over a lot of things involving money.'
Miss Morgan's 14-year-old son, Todd, lived with his mother but was spending the night at his grandmother's house at the time of the killing, Cooke said.
Dave described her as a 'very tragic figure. She wanted very much to have peace and love and she never found it in her life.'
Dave said Miss Morgan was supporting herself by selling gifts from Bloomingdale, including a Mercedes Benz, but the money was exhausted.
'She was not just in financial trouble,' he said. 'She was destitute.'
Pancoast was a :lerk at the William Morris Agency, the world's largest talent agency, for about 18 months and left the job last January, said Roger Davis, executive vice president of the firm.
Miss Morgan, who did some part-time modeling and had minor parts in several movies during her 12-year affair with Bloomingdale, had not worked since she filed the suit July 8, 1982, Cooke said.
Bloomingdale died last Aug. 23 at age 66, but Miss Morgan continued to press her suit against his estate and widow Betsy Bloomingdale, one of Nancy Reagan's closest friends and a frequent White House guest. Miss Morgan said the affair ended last year when Mrs. Bloomingdale discovered her ailing husband had been giving his mistress up to $18,000 a month.
'I'm shocked,' said attorney Marvin Mitchelson, who represented Miss Morgan until she fired him last September.
'I can tell you one thing,' the lawyer said in a telephone interview from London, 'she took a lot of secrets with her to the grave.'
Miss Morgan, who claimed she worked for a short while in Reagan campaign headquarters in Los Angeles, testified in a sworn deposition filed last September that Bloomingdale often shared 'secret and delicate' details of White House inner workings with her.
Mitchelson also said Miss Morgan has told him that she had 'several meetings' at the William Morris Agency concerning the book and movie rights to her life.
'I don't know anything about that,' Davis said angrily when asked if the agency was negotiating with Miss Morgan.
In her palimony suit, Miss Morgan sought financial support for the rest of her life from the estate of the Diners Club founder based on alleged promises. Attorneys for the estate never denied the affair, but argued the millionaire's mistress was, in effect, a prostitute.
Superior Court Judge Christian Markey agreed and threw out the palimony portions of the suit last September, ruling that Miss Morgan was a 'well paid mistress.' He allowed her, however, to pursue actions seeking financial support on the basis of written contracts.
In other depositions, Miss Morgan described Bloomingdale as a sadistic 'Jekyll and Hyde' whose strange bedroom behavior scared her to death. She claimed she acted as a therapist to help him overcome his Marquis de Sade complex, a tendency to derive sexual gratification from inflicting pain on others.
Miss Morgan said she met Bloomingdale at a popular Sunset Strip restaurant in 1969 when she was only 17. She married twice during their affair and had one child.
