Trouble Never Stayed Away Long in Life of Accused Killer : Crime: The case of Edward Morgan--convicted three times of sexual assaults--has raised questions about the treatment of serial assailants.

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, there would be 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, 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 an 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 never should have been free to claim another victim.

In the past decade, Morgan was accused four times of sexual assault. 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--his troubled future was foreshadowed in his high school years. He was the shy one with the easy smile. Towheaded, California handsome. Athletic.

But “little Eddie” Morgan had a tripwire. Now his teen-age 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 classmates, current friends, former teachers, coaches, neighbors and victims, as well as court documents and 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, Morgan said he wasn’t “some mean basher that ripped some girl apart with my bare hands.”

While he did not deny the first two sexual assaults that sent him to prison, he insisted that the accusations of the second two were unfounded. And he said he would not 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.”

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,” his father said. “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 school, 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 showed with others, “he never raised a hand toward his mother or father,” said Chris, a close friend who has known Morgan since eighth grade and spoke on the condition that his last 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 his mother’s shouts ring out among the well-kept 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 vacuum 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 had moved the family to Maryland when Morgan was 2, to Georgia when he was 8 and to California when he was about 13.

Morgan remembered that 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.

Even before junior high school, 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 first few 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.

On campus, the muscular Morgan was known for having a hair trigger. Often shy, Morgan says that he seldom initiated the violence. But if provoked, his friends said, he joined in with a fury and mindlessness that frightened more than one in his circle.

After one senseless fistfight with a stranger, Morgan told a friend that 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.’ ”

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 that 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.

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

Then after a football game on Oct. 15, 1983--after the relationship had ended--Morgan appeared 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 that it was Morgan, did not press charges at the time.

After high school, the Bellhaven Boys began to scatter. Many said they distanced themselves from Morgan, suspecting that 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.

Just past midnight, he persuaded a 16-year-old 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.”

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.

When Morgan was paroled 21 months later, the couple moved to New York, where his family had relocated.

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 the Cleveland area. 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 started a job as an apartment complex handyman and moved up to superintendent for another complex. The couple had a baby named Ashley.

But once again, Morgan’s rage apparently 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 a fourth rape, Morgan could have received a sentence of 12 years. Lisa took the baby and returned to Ohio.

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

“I don’t know what’s wrong with these girls,” Morgan said. “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.

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

This time, police say, he took a life. On May 20, they 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 whom 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, Morgan screamed: “Shoot me! Shoot me! 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.”