LOS ANGELES -- The Vicki Morgan sex tapes controversy and allegations of Reagan administration officials at orgies will surface again if Marvin Pancoast has to testify at his trial for killing Miss Morgan, a defense attorney said.
Defense attorneys, who will continue arguing pre-trial motions Monday, said Pancoast, 34, told them he had seen the tapes, which allegedly show Miss Morgan having sex with her longtime lover, Alfred Bloomingdale, the late department store heir and an adviser and friend to President Reagan.
'If our client testifies (at his pending murder trial), he will say that he saw one month prior to Vicki Morgan's death videotapes depicting some unusual sexual activity,' Charles Mathews, one of Pancoast's two attorneys, told Superior Court Judge David Horowitz.
Mathews added, however, that 'those tapes have never been found.'
Reports of the purported sex tapes first surfaced in the wake of Miss Morgan's bludgeoning death last July. Attorney Robert K. Steinberg, who briefly counseled Pancoast, claimed he had viewed them, then said they had been stolen.
The district attorney's office did not believe Steinberg's theft claim and charged him with falsely reporting a theft. Prosecutors argued before a county grand jury that the tapes did not exist and had never been seen publicly.
Hustler magazine publisher Larry Flynt further fueled the controversy when he claimed to have copies of the tapes.
Mathews told reporters outside court last week that Pancoast, who has a history of mental problems, also claims that 'high government officials' shown on the videotapes visited Miss Morgan in the North Hollywood condominium where she was killed 'about one month before her death.'
The attorneys said Pancoast told him which officials were on the tape, but the attorney refused to pass on the names to reporters. He said they will be revealed if his client decides to testify at his murder trial.
The name of one official -- Presidential counselor and Attorney General nominee Edwin Meese -- did surface during the pre-trial motions, however.
Court documents revealed that Mathews and co-counsel Arthur Barens had subpoened several agencies including the FBI for any documents or tapes showing Bloomingdale, Miss Morgan, Meese or other White House or government officials at alleged sex parties.
The attorneys did not say why Meese was named specifically. Meese's attorney denounced the request as'outrageous.'
Mathews also said the FBI, in response to its subpoena, had revealed that Bloomingdale, a onetime member of President Reagan's 'kitchen cabinet,' had once been investigated by Los Angeles Police for ties to prostitution.
Pancoast's attorneys said the subpoened documents and videotapes were needed to prove that Pancoast was innocent 'and that others had a motive to want to kill Vicki Morgan.'
Pancoast has pleaded innocent and innocent by reason of insanity to charges he beat Miss Morgan, 30, to death with a baseball bat.
The pre-trial hearing is to determine the admissibility of five allegedly incriminating statements Pancoast made to police officers, a jailer and a newspaper reporter.
In one of the statements, a taped confession played at the hearing, Pancoast claimed hours after the late-night slaying that Miss Morgan wanted to die because she was about to evicted from her condominium, and said he was tired of being treated like 'her little slave boy.'
