LOS ANGELES -- Two former police officers accused of acting out a $20,000 murder contract may have made incriminating statements in jail to the convicted killer of model Vicki Morgan, prosecutors said.
Defense attorneys said Tuesday that Deputy District Attorney Robert Jorgensen intends to call Marvin Pancoast, 34, as a witness in the scheduled Jan. 7 preliminary hearing of former Los Angeles Police officers Richard Ford, 44, and Robert Von Villas, 39.
Pancoast is now serving a 26-year-to-life state prison term for the July 1983 baseball bat slaying of Morgan, 30, mistress to the late presidential confidant Alfred Bloomingdale. He was found guilty of first-degree murder last July.
Ford and Von Villas are charged with taking $20,000 from a third defendant, Janie Elmira Ogilvie, to kill her husband, Thomas Weed, 52, who vanished from his San Fernando Valley apartment in February 1983 and has never been found.
Ogilvie recently pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and conspiracy in the case and agreed to testify against Ford and Von Villas, who were active police officers at the time of the murder contract and have since resigned.
A fourth defendant, Joyce Aleta Reynolds, 47, is also charged in the murder of Weed.
If convicted of the charges, Ford, Von Villas and Reynolds could face a possible death penalty.
Defense attorney Richard Lasting, who represents Ford, said it is unclear why Jorgensen wants to call Pancoast to the witness stand, but defense lawyer Earl Hanson, who represents Ogilvie, said 'one or both of these two officers apparently made (incriminating) statements to him (Pancoast).'
Lasting said Pancoast was interviewed at Chino state prison on Sept. 27 and Sept. 28 by a district attorney's investigator, but the transcripts of the tape recorded sessions Lasting received have some deleted parts.
Lasting asked Municipal Court Judge Nancy Brown to scheduled a Dec. 11 hearing to ask prosecutors to provide the defense the deleted portions.
Attorney Arthur Barens, who represented Pancoast in his recent murder trial, said he knew nothing about the alleged incriminating statements, but did say that Ford and Pancoast were cellmates in the high security section of the county jail.
Ford and Von Villas are charged in a separate case in an aborted plot to kill a nude dancer from the Granada Hills area in July 1983 to collect a $100,000 life insurance policy. They are also charged in that case with robbery in the November 1983 holdup of more than $100,000 in cash and gems from a Northridge jeweler.
