LOS ANGELES -- The jury that convicted Marvin Pancoast of killing Vicki Morgan, longtime mistress to department store heir Alfred Bloomingdale, prayed for the killer after deciding he was sane at the time of the murder.
Pancoast, 34, broke down and sobbed as the decision was announced Tuesday in the courtroom of Superior Court Judge David Horowitz, who scheduled sentencing Aug. 31.
The decision means Pancoast will go to prison, possibly for life, rather than being sent to a mental hospital from which he could have been released in as little as 90 days if found to have regained his sanity.
Forewoman Theda Band said the jurors held hands and prayed after their decision in the sanity phase of Pancoast's trial. They had deliberated four days.
'We wished (ourselves) well and we wished Marvin Pancoast well,' she said. 'We got to know Marvin Pancoast better than if we had known him all his life.
'Everyone felt he was legally sane during the crime, before and after.'
Prosecutor Stanley Weisberg said he was not surprised at the verdict 'because the evidence established that Marvin Pancoast was legally sane, knew right from wrong, at the time of the crime.'
Pancoast, a former talent agency clerk who has been diagnosed as a hopeless schizophrenic, could be sentenced to up to 26 years to life.
'I am shocked that any jury could find Marvin Pancoast leagally sane considering his long history of mental illness that continues to this day,' said defense attorney Arthur Barens.
The jury began deliberations last Thursday after two weeks of conflicting testimony from psychiatrists about Pancoast's mental state before he beat Miss Morgan, 30, to death with her son's baseball bat in the condominium they shared on July 7, 1983.
The jury convicted Pancoast of first-degree murder July 5 after only six hours of deliberations. He had confessed to police and reporters that he killed Miss Morgan because she treated him like a 'slave boy.'
Pancoast pleaded innocent and innocent by reason of insanity, and his attorneys argued during the trial that Miss Morgan was killed because she had the so-called sextapes showing government officials as orgies.
Miss Morgan created a sensation in 1982 when she filed a multimillion palimony suit against Bloomingdale, a confidant of President Reagan. A judge later dismissed major portions of the suit, saying she was no more than a prostitute.
