LOS ANGELES -- The man accused of killing Vicki Morgan, mistress to late presidential adviser Alfred Bloomingdale, suffered severe mental problems all his adult life, but was not psychotic just before and after the 1983 killing, a psychiatrist testified Tuesday.
Marvin Pancoast, a 34-year-old former talent agency clerk, has pleaded innocent and innocent by reason of insanity to the first-degree murder.
His psychiatric records from 1970-83, based on a string of voluntarily and involuntary mental hospital admissions, revealed he has at various times been diagnosed as manic depressive, a borderline personality disorder, and psychotic depression.
Dr. William Vicary, a defense witness, testified Tuesday that Pancoast also suffered from a masochistic personality, a disorder in which the individual 'derives pleasure from pain and humiliation,' and which could manifest itself in his blaming himself for other people's crimes.
Defense attorneys have tried to argue that Pancoast did not kill Miss Morgan, who was beaten to death last July in the North Hollywood condominium they shared, even though he confessed to police.
Someone else killed Miss Morgan, they contend, because she possessed videotapes of government officials at sex parties.
Superior Court Judge David Horowitz ruled on Monday that testimony about the videotapes was irrelevant and would not be allowed in court.
Vicary testified that Pancoast was not psychotic in October 1983, three months after the killing, and psychiatrists at St. John's Hospital reported that he was not psychotic two months before the killing.
'So immediately before July 7, 1983, and immediately after July 7, 1983, the diagnosis of Mr. Pancoast was one of non-psychosis? Is that correct?' prosecutor Stanley Weisberg asked.
'Yes. It is,' Vicary said.
Weisberg, pursuing his line of questioning, asked Vicary what would account for earlier diagnoses declaring Pancoast to be psychotic.
'If someone's hospitalized in an institution, there is an incentive to put down the most serious thing he could be suffering from because you feel the need to justify the great cost of the patient being here each day,' Vicary said.
'Is it your view that the earlier diagnoses ... were incorrect?' Weisberg asked.
'I think they were overly broad and overly conclusive,' Vicary said. 'It was a well-intentioned therapeutic mistake.'
Defense attorney Charles Mathews said outside the courtroom that he has not decided whether Pancoast will testify.
'I believe he is legally innocent,' Mathews said, 'but if we put him up there (on the stand), I'm not sure what he would say' because of his daily fluctuation in his mental state and because he is under medication.
