LOS ANGELES -- Marvin Pancoast was legally sane last year when he murdered Vicki Morgan, longtime mistress of presidential confidant Alfred Bloomingdale, a jury ruled Tuesday.
The same 10-woman, two-man jury that convicted Pancoast, 34, of first-degree murder of Miss Morgan deliberated four days before reaching its decision on his mental state at the time of crime.
Pancoast, a former talent agency clerk with a history of mental problems, faces up to 26 years to life when sentenced by Superior Court Judge David Horowitz. If the panel had found him insane, he would have been sent to a state mental hospital for an indeterminate term.
The jury started its deliberations last Thursday after two weeks of conflicting testimony from a battery of psychiatrists about Pancoast's mental state before he beat Miss Morgan to death with her son's baseball bat in the North Hollywood condominium on July 7, 1983. Miss Morgan was 30 when she was killed.
The jury convicted Pancoast July 5 after only six hours of deliberations. He had confessed to police and reporters after the slaying that he killed Miss Morgan because she treated him like a 'slave boy.'
Pancoast pleaded innocent and innocent by reason of insanity to the charges. His attorneys argued during the trial that Miss Morgan was killed because she had possession of the so-called sextapes showing government officials as sex parties.
During the sanity phase, defense attorney Arthur Barens maintained his client was insane at the time of the bludgeoning, saying Pancoast was a man 'without adjustment on any level of life' and a 'total failure as a human being.'
Prosecutor Stanley Weisberg discounted testimony from two defense psychiatrists who labeled Pancoast as a paranoid schizophrenic suffering from delusions and hallucinations, and insisted Pancoast's confessions were evidence of a rational mind.
'There is no evidence he was ever anything but sane when he committed the crime. He was sane before, he was sane after and he was sane during,' Weisberg said.
Miss Morgancreated a sensation in 1982 when she filed a multimillion palimony suit against Bloomingdale shorty before he died of cancer. A judge later dismissed major portions of the suit, saying she was no more than a prostitute.
