Morgan’s Violent Youth Foretold Trouble : Profile: Alleged killer displayed an explosive rage during his O.C. teen years, friends say.

When fellow students taunted him about being in special education, or cross-town sports rivals jeered or family squabbles turned ugly, the anger in young Eddie Morgan would build like the steam in a pressure cooker.

More often than not, Morgan would explode, his placid, boyish features twisting in rage, his fists, fired by a bodybuilder’s bulk, thudding in an almost cathartic frenzy.

As abruptly as it started, the storm of violence would end. In its wake, a jagged hole in his bedroom wall or a battered teen-ager’s face or, later, young girls bloodied and assaulted.

And there would be Morgan, charming and repentant, suddenly worried about the wreckage.

“You could see it in him,” said Brian Hoyt, Morgan’s high school special-education teacher. “He’d try to get out of it. A tear would come to his eye and he’d say, ‘I’m sorry. I’ll never do it again.’ Then, of course, he would.”

Today, Edward Patrick Morgan Jr., 28, sits in an isolation cell in Orange County Jail, charged with savagely beating to death a 23-year-old Huntington Beach woman outside an Orange nightclub and ripping apart her insides with some object police have yet to find. His case has raised questions about the criminal justice system’s treatment of serial rapists and angered some who say Morgan should never have been free to claim another victim.

In the preceding decade, Morgan’s fury had led him to sexually assault four women. Three times he was convicted, but his brief prison stays--never more than two years--did little to change his behavior.

Morgan’s is not a new story. Like others whose brutality landed them in the headlines, Morgan’s troubled future was foreshadowed in his high school years.

He was the shy one with the easy smile. Tow-headed, California handsome. Athletic. He was your son’s friend who came for dinner and spent the night.

But “Little Eddie” Morgan had a trip wire. Now his teen-aged bursts of violence seem prophetic--signals of a growing frustration that friends and neighbors say was born at home.

Interviews with dozens of Morgan’s high school and current friends, former teachers, coaches, neighbors and victims--as well as court documents, parole and police reports--detail a pattern of behavior that seemed to escalate unchecked by any friend or authority.

“If you don’t have a substantial way to break that pattern, it’ll just keep happening, and it doesn’t get any better,” said Mike Wellins, a licensed therapist and crisis intervention counselor who worked up a psychological profile of the Huntington Beach woman’s killer for the Orange Police Department before Morgan was arrested. “That behavior doesn’t just magically go away.”

Behind the thick plexiglass of a jail visitor’s booth last week, Morgan said he wasn’t “some mean basher that ripped some girl apart with my bare hands.”

While he didn’t deny the first two sexual assaults that sent him to prison, he insisted that the second two cases were unfounded, and said he wouldn’t blame his troubles on his home life.

“I have the most wonderful, caring parents anyone could have,” he said, cradling the jail phone between tightly handcuffed wrists. “Everyone’s trying to blame my parents for everything, and it’s not true. I’ve had good times and bad times like anyone else. Most parents would have given up on their kid a long time ago.”

But Morgan did not dispute his high-school friends’ accounts of almost daily violence at the Morgans’ spacious, two-story Madia Circle home in La Palma.

“No comment,” he said when asked about it.

His father denies it. “That’s not true,” said Edward Morgan Sr. “Talk to Ed. He’s trying to set the record straight.”

Morgan’s friends, a tightknit group known as the Bellhaven Boys after the street where many of them lived, recalled how they would often head to Morgan’s house after school for an afternoon of lifting weights or hanging out by the back-yard pool.

Inevitably, friends said, confrontations, often physical, would occur between Morgan and his parents, most often with his mother--something that both Morgan and his parents deny.

Bill Weatherill, a close friend who has known Morgan since junior high, said he never knew what a visit to the Morgan household would be like. “It was like you were always walking on eggshells.”

Despite the heated exchanges and the violence that Morgan displayed with others, “he never raised a hand toward his mother or father,” said Chris, a close friend who also has known Morgan since eighth grade and spoke on the condition that his name not be used.

Of Morgan’s pent-up fury, Chris said, “I think he saved it for everyone else.”

Neighbor Libby McElmurry recalls hearing Mrs. Morgan’s shouts ring out among the well-manicured homes in the cul-de-sac, then the roar of Eddie Morgan’s car speeding off.

But Morgan never complained to his friends. “It was like family business, and that’s it. In that house you never talked about anything that happened in the family,” Weatherill recalled.

Morgan’s parents, Diana, 49, and Edward Sr., 53, a retired Hoover Co. executive, now live in the Cleveland suburb of Strongsville, Ohio, and have declined to talk in detail about their son.

“All I want to do is to express my sorrow for the family of the girl,” said Edward Morgan Sr. “I hope my son didn’t do it.”

Morgan’s family arrived in La Palma in 1977. A native of Cleveland, Morgan’s father moved the family to Maryland when Morgan was 2, to Georgia when he was 8 and to California when he was about 13.

Morgan remembers it was tough, bouncing around the country.

“You meet friends. You get close to people and then you had to leave and go to another school,” he said.

At first, Morgan’s new friends in California thought he came from a poor family.

“He would have the (crummiest) shoes and the (crummiest) clothes and he never had any money. Then I went to his house, and it was beautiful,” his friend Chris remembered.

Even before junior high, Morgan was obsessed with pumping up the muscles on his now 5-foot-8-inch, 200-pound frame.

“It was just something I liked to do,” said Morgan, lamenting that he had lost 3 inches from his 21-inch biceps during his three weeks in jail. For a while, he said, he dreamed of being a professional bodybuilder but never liked the look of muscular legs.

During his sophomore year at John F. Kennedy High School, he joined the wrestling team, achieving a small degree of success, said his coach, George Peterman.

By his senior year, Morgan’s massive upper body dwarfed those of his taller wrestling teammates. “They never were dedicated enough,” Morgan remembered.

Around campus, the burly Morgan was known for having a hair trigger. If you were going to get into a fight, Eddie was someone to have along, his friends said.

Often shy, Morgan said he seldom initiated the violence himself. But if provoked, his friends said, he joined in with a fury and mindlessness that frightened more than one in his circle.

“He would definitely get crazed,” Weatherill said. “I think that’s what happened with the girls he raped. When he was fighting it was like that too. He was a survivor, and he would do anything to win.”

Following one senseless fistfight with a stranger, Morgan told one friend he “felt better afterward.”

“Alcohol provoked him,” remembered Brian Folsom, Morgan’s best high school chum. “He’d yell (at police officers,) ‘Take off your guns. Take off your badges, and I’ll whup your butts.”

After exploding in a rage, Morgan would return to normal almost immediately, sometimes acting as though nothing much had happened.

But Morgan said his muscular build gave him a bum reputation.

“I think a lot of people looked at my size and stereotyped me as being a bully,” he said. “If you walked the streets in a miniskirt and a blouse that showed your chest, people would think you were a whore.”

Despite the violence of the attacks, few of Morgan’s friends remember being concerned enough to intervene.

“He could go off, but 90% of the time, he was the nicest guy in the world,” Weatherill said.

But friends said Morgan was sensitive about landing in special education courses.

“We got special attention, and we got special tutors,” Morgan said. “Then again there’s other times you wish you were in a normal class with normal friends.”

Morgan, a C-minus student, was placed in special education because of difficulties he had with math and written language, said Hoyt, who taught Morgan and headed the special-education department his senior year.

“That’s why he became a tough guy, so people couldn’t make fun of him,” Folsom said.

Morgan was in trouble at least every other week. He was once caught urinating on the gymnasium wall, Hoyt said.

“If there was a fight at a football game, it seemed like Eddie was always in the middle of it,” Hoyt said. Confronted, Morgan usually denied it.

“I could almost see him playing a game,” Hoyt recalled. “ ‘Look, I got caught. What can I do to get out of this?’ ”

“He could be very polite and soft-spoken, and on the other hand he could burst out with a physical or verbal attack,” remembered Hoyt, now a teacher in Park City, Utah. “I keep racking my brain, ‘What could I have done?’ ”

Like the rest of the Bellhaven Boys, Morgan had his eye on the girls. But Weatherill said the girls they met often reacted strangely to his friend.

“We’d meet girls at the beach or something, and Eddie would go off with one of them,” Weatherill remembered. Then “the girls would come back, and they’d be mad or something. I’d ask Eddie what went wrong and he’d say, ‘Nothing.’ ”

For about nine months in his senior year, everything seemed fine. Morgan, handsome with wavy, light brown hair, had a girlfriend, a pretty blond cheerleader he appeared to cherish.

Then following a football game on Oct. 15, 1983--after the relationship had ended--Morgan showed up at his ex-girlfriend’s window asking to come inside. According to court records, the girl said no. A short while later, a man in a ski mask burst into her home and dragged her outside, splitting her lip with a punch and raping her.

After the girl returned to the house, Morgan came running back to the residence wearing different clothes, saying he had seen a suspicious car drive away, court records show.

Morgan called Weatherill from the girl’s house. “Someone raped (the girl) and they think it was me,” he said. But the girl, uncertain it was Morgan, didn’t press charges at the time.

After high school, the Bellhaven Boys began to scatter. Many said they distanced themselves from Morgan, suspecting he really had raped his ex-girlfriend.

Morgan fell in with another crowd and saw little of his old cronies until a party in Buena Park brought them together Oct. 21, 1984, about a year and a half after graduation.

Folsom remembered Morgan flirting that night with a pretty 16-year-old brunette, laughing and pulling her onto his lap. “I think they were like hooking up, you know how you do at parties,” Folsom said.

But when he saw his old friends, Morgan, then 19, turned cool.

“I saw that darkness in him, like a cloud,” Folsom remembered. “We weren’t friends anymore, and it was like he was hurt. He was . . . real cold-like.”

Sometime after, Folsom and his friends left.

Just past midnight, Morgan persuaded the girl to take a walk with him, steering her to the darkness between two houses. When the girl objected, Morgan dragged her there, court records show.

When she continued to struggle, Morgan yanked off her pants and slammed her head and face against the pavement while he raped her, records show.

The woman, now 26, remembers that Morgan “seemed like a very nice man. He turned almost into another person within seconds.”

Folsom remembers thinking that the girl had probably triggered Morgan’s rage by rebuffing him. “I figured she just said no and that was one more rejection.”

After his arrest, Morgan’s ex-girlfriend came forward. Convicted of both sex crimes, Morgan went to prison on Jan. 16, 1985. While in prison, he married Jacqueline Helleis, a woman he had met at a party in Orange County, and had “One life. One love. Jacqueline” tattooed across his chest.

When Morgan was paroled 21 months later, the couple moved to New York, where his family had relocated. Morgan took classes at a technical school and landed a job as a repairman for Mercury Savings & Loan.

The couple moved back to Huntington Beach, and for a short time everything seemed stable. But in October, 1990, just days after Helleis filed for divorce, another 16-year-old accused Morgan of rape.

Orange County prosecutors charged Morgan with two counts of rape but dropped the more serious charge of violent rape, which could have gotten him 10 years in prison, after Morgan agreed to plead guilty to the lesser charge of sex with a minor. He was sentenced to the minimum term of 16 months.

When he got out, Morgan said, he headed back to serve his parole near his family in Strongsville. He got a job, a new Toyota MR2 and a new girlfriend.

“I had a good life,” Morgan recalled. Then Ohio, which had allowed him to stay on 30-day passes, denied him additional stays.

He and his girlfriend, Lisa, moved back to Fullerton where he got a job working first as an apartment complex handyman, then moving up to superintendent for another complex. The couple had a baby named Ashley.

Weatherill remembered talking to Morgan around this time. “He said he wasn’t getting in trouble anymore. But he just seemed to get worse and worse. Every time he went to prison it seemed like he got worse.”

“He wanted to get married,” said Chris, who invited the couple to spend Christmas, 1992, with his family. “He loved that little girl. She was a jewel to him.”

But once again, Morgan’s rage overtook him. A fourth woman reported to Huntington Beach police that Morgan had raped her. Prosecutors, citing inconsistencies in the woman’s statements to police, declined to press charges again him, allowing the parole board to revoke his parole and send him back to prison for 12 months. If convicted of the fourth rape, Morgan could have received a sentence of 12 years.

Lisa took the baby and fled back to Ohio.

“It’s hard to say what was wrong with him,” Chris said. “I know Jackie and Lisa. I talked with both of them, and he never laid a hand on them.”

Morgan said the second two women who accused him of rape “are loony tunes.”

“Those last two girls are total lies,” Morgan said. “I don’t know what’s wrong with these girls. It was consensual.

“Any girl can cry rape,” he said. “If they don’t like you, they could claim it.”

But the girl’s testimony convinced the parole board to return him to prison for a year.

On March 23, Morgan was released from a California prison for the third time in a decade. He had a new girlfriend, Sonya Marvin, the sister of his cellmate’s fiance.

“We were going to get married,” Morgan said. “She’s the sweetest girl I ever met in my life.”

But less than two months later, Morgan was on the run again.

This time, police say, he took a life. On May 20, police say, Morgan sweet-talked Leanora Annette Wong, 23, into a parking lot across the street from the Australian Beach Club in Orange and then killed and mutilated her.

With the help of an Ontario woman he had known less than a week, Morgan fled to Marvin’s home in Quincy, a small town in Northern California.

Chased down by Plumas County sheriff’s deputies for the murder of Wong, Morgan screamed, “Shoot me! Shoot me!” and then uttered the strange plea, “I didn’t do it.”

Explains Morgan: “I just knew . . . I was going to have to come back here and face a murder trial. I didn’t want to hassle with it.”