LOS ANGELES -- Marvin Pancoast, convicted of bludgeoning Vicki Morgan to death with a baseball bat as she slept, has a 15-year history of mental maladies from which he will never recover, a psychiatrist testified Monday.
'Mr. Pancoast has been psychotic and without sanity for 15 years,' said Dr. Irving A. Matzner, chief of staff for Camarillo State Hospital.
Matzner testified that Pancoast suffered from schizophrenia, paranoia and manic depression.
He was the first defense witness in the sanity phase of Pancoast's trial. The same 10-woman, two-man jury that convicted Pancoast of first-degree murder last Friday will decide his mental state at the time of the slaying.
Prosecutors contend Pancoast was legally sane when he murdered Miss Morgan, mistress of former presidential adviser Alfred Bloomingdale.
Since the killing, Matzner said, Pancoast apparently fooled some psychiatrists into believing he was sane because 'the terror of the deed that had taken place caused him to be in the best condition of reality he had been in for a while.'
'But of course,' Matzner said, 'it didn't last.'
He said Pancoast was too mentally ill to be responsible for what he had done.
Matzner said that as early as 1970 two UCLA psychiatrists found Pancoast 'capable of multiple mass murder and their grisly prediction eventually came partially true.'
Prosecutor Stanley Weisberg told jurors at the start of Monday's sanity hearing that Pancoast was sane when he killed Miss Morgan.
'Evidence will show Mr. Pancoast was sane -- legally -- at the time the crime took place,' Weisberg said.
He pointed out that Pancoast told several people he had killed someone and confessed the murder to police.
If found sane, Pancoast faces a maximum prison term of 26 years to life when sentenced by Superior Court Judge David Horowitz. If found insane, he would be sentenced to an indefinite period at a state mental hospital.
The sanity phase is required because Pancoast, 34, pleaded innocent by reason of insanity.
The most persuasive evidence against Pancoast was a taped confession he made to police the morning after the July 7, 1983, slaying. Defense attorneys described the confession as the ramblings of 'a crazy man.'
After the verdict, defense attorneys insisted that the wrong man was convicted and complained they were not allowed to present key evidence -- the so-called 'sex tapes' purportedly showing Miss Morgan and high government officials at orgies.
During the trial the defense tried to show that Miss Morgan, 30, was killed by someone trying to keep the tapes from being made public. Horowitz ruled that testimony about the tapes, the existence of which has never been proven, was not relevant to the murder case.
'The real killer of Vicki Morgan is still outside and the whole truth never got to the jury,' defense attorney Charles Mathews said.
Miss Morgan created a sensation in 1982 when she filed a multimillion dollar palimony suit against Bloomingdale, revealing details of their long-running relationship shortly before the department store heir died of cancer.
