Vicki Morgan (b. August 9, 1952 in Colorado Springs, Colorado – July 7, 1983 in Los Angeles, CA) was a model and a high-profile murder victim.
Contents |
Born Victoria Lynn Morgan, Morgan was a girl who went to Hollywood in search of fame. She found work as an usher at Grauman's Chinese Theater and it was there that the teenager met 54-year-old Reagan-financier Alfred S. Bloomingdale, a married multi-millionaire from the famous New York City department store family.
Morgan soon became Bloomingdale's mistress. Her social circle would include politicians, businessmen, and the wealthy superannuated playboy Bernie Cornfeld. On Bloomingdale's dime, Morgan lived a lavish lifestyle that lasted until 1982 when he was diagnosed with terminal cancer. With Bloomingdale on his deathbed and his usual flow of funds to the now 30-year-old Morgan no longer coming, her financial situation quickly turned desperate. To protect herself, she hired the famous Hollywood palimony attorney Marvin Mitchelson to file a multi-million dollar lawsuit for financial compensation as his mistress. The pre-trial media coverage of the initial complaint revealed details of the couple's sexual relationship that grabbed headlines nationwide, causing considerable embarrassment amongst the Washington D.C. elite. However, when Morgan learned that Mitchelson had dinner and a meeting at the White House with Nancy and Ronald Reagan, she lost trust in Mitchelson, firing him and hiring attorney Joel Steinberg in his place. Morgan was left without income. Later court documents and news stories revealed that after she began selling off the jewelry and the expensive car purchased for her by Bloomingdale, Morgan was preparing to write a tell-all book which was reportedly going to name a number of wealthy and powerful politicians and businessmen who had participated in her sadistic sex rituals.
Morgan moved from her expensive Los Angeles apartment to a more modest San Fernando Valley condominium, renting a room to a 32-year-old acquaintance named Marvin Pancoast. Three weeks later, Pancoast walked into a police station and confessed to murdering Morgan. Investigators found Morgan dead, apparently beaten to death with a baseball bat. Pancoast was sentenced to 26 years to life and died in 1991 in Chino, California, while undergoing treatment for AIDS-related illness.[1]
There have been many conspiracy theories as to why she was murdered. Pancoast's explanation — that he was tired of hearing Vicki Morgan complain that she was tired and worried — scarcely seems a motive for a brutal bludgeon murder; Pancoast had no history of violent behavior. After Morgan's death, publisher Larry Flynt offered to purchase copies of video tapes showing a number of high-ranking people in the Reagan administration in sexual trysts from Beverly Hills attorney Robert Steinberg. Steinberg later failed to produce the videos claiming they had been stolen from him. In a television interview for KNBC filmed after his incarceration, Pancoast (dying of AIDS) recanted his confession, but station management aired only a portion of Pancoast's denial of guilt, feeling his explanation was too explosive.
The Vicki Morgan story received considerable print coverage and in 1985 author Gordon Basichis wrote Beautiful Bad Girl: The Vicki Morgan Story. In 1990, Dominick Dunne, the prominent Vanity Fair journalist, author of several books about crimes involving the rich and famous and someone whose own 22-year-old daughter Dominique had been murdered, came out with a fictional portrayal of Vicki Morgan in his book, An Inconvenient Woman.