Suspect in O.C. Slaying Captured : Manhunt: Paroled rapist Edward Morgan, wanted in the weekend slaying of a woman he reportedly met in a nightclub, is caught in Northern California.

A paroled rapist suspected of savagely beating to death a 23-year-old Huntington Beach woman he met in an Orange County nightclub last week was tracked down Monday in this small Northern California town and taken into custody after begging deputies to shoot him.

Edward Patrick Morgan Jr., 28, an unemployed ex-convict who has served prison time for three rapes, became the object of a statewide manhunt after abandoning his apartment in Orange and sending word to local authorities that he would not return to prison without a fight.

“Shoot me! Shoot me!” Morgan screamed as he turned on Plumas County sheriff’s deputies who had caught up with him after a lengthy foot chase. “I didn’t do it,” he said before he was subdued with a spray of Mace and handcuffed.

Morgan’s arrest brought a sense of relief to the dead woman’s family but raised concerns over the handling of his case by the Orange County district attorney’s office. Although Morgan had already been convicted of three rapes, the district attorney’s office declined to prosecute him when he was arrested in connection with a fourth rape in Huntington Beach last year.

Instead, Morgan’s parole on an earlier rape conviction was revoked, and he was returned to prison for a maximum one-year term before being paroled again. If he had been convicted again, he probably would have faced a 12-year prison sentence.

State Sen. Marian Bergeson (R-Newport Beach), who has authored “one-strike” legislation that would put first-time violent sex offenders away for 25 years to life, said: “This is precisely the reason why a bill such as (this) is needed. These are the predators that have no business being released after committing that kind of brutality.”

Morgan had been named the prime suspect in the beating death of Leanora Annette Wong, 23, whose battered body was found near a nightclub in Orange where the two had met Thursday night. A wall near where her body was found was almost completely covered with her blood.

While police searched throughout Southern California over the weekend, Morgan apparently fled to the tiny town of Quincy, about 180 miles north of Sacramento, where a former girlfriend, as well as an ex-cellmate from Folsom State Prison, have been living.

Because Orange police had found postcards in Morgan’s apartment from the former girlfriend, Sonya Marvin, 22, asking Morgan to visit her, authorities in Plumas County were alerted Saturday that Morgan might be in their area.

Sheriff’s deputies kept watch over Marvin’s home, as well as that of Travis Burhop, the 21-year-old former cellmate recently released from Folsom.

On Monday morning, deputies stopped a car they had seen leaving Martin’s house, thinking that Morgan might be inside. They found only his former cellmate and his ex-girlfriend’s father.

A half-hour later, at noon, authorities who had been surreptitiously watching Martin’s home saw Morgan leave through the front door. When they approached, he ran.

Three patrol cars chased the running ex-convict for a quarter-mile, until he raced through an apartment complex, scaled an eight-foot, chain-link fence topped with barbed wire and slid under a grader on property owned by the state Department of Forestry.

When deputies ordered him out at gunpoint, Morgan put his hands halfway up in the air and screamed for them to shoot. As he advanced toward the deputies, they sprayed him with Mace and handcuffed him. Because he has not yet been charged with Wong’s death, he was technically taken into custody for violating his parole on a 1991 statutory rape conviction.

Sonya Marvin and Burhop were arrested on suspicion of harboring a criminal and being accessories to a crime. Marvin was being held in lieu of $100,000 bail, and Burhop was being held without bail, according to Plumas County Assistant Sheriff Rodney DeCrona.

“We’re elated that we could take this predator off the street,” said Lt. Timm Browne of the Orange Police Department. “The public should be happy.”

Orange police officers were to travel to Quincy today and are expected to bring Morgan back to Orange County as quickly as possible, Browne said.

The statewide manhunt for Morgan began Saturday, hours after Wong was found dead of head, neck and pelvis injuries. Witnesses said Wong left the Australian Beach Restaurant and Nightclub with a “bodybuilder type,” who was identified as Morgan by someone who called Orange police on Friday.

The 5-foot-8, 200-pound Morgan, who bears a tattoo saying “Eddie, one life, one love” across his chest and used to hang out at Huntington Beach Pier, worked out with weights in prison, authorities said.

Wong and a girlfriend who accompanied her to the nightclub Thursday night had an agreement that neither would leave the bar without the other. Just before 3 a.m. Friday, the friend found that Wong’s white Toyota Tercel was still in the parking lot, but Wong was nowhere to be found. The following morning, security guards found Wong’s body behind a concrete enclosure in a parking lot across the street from the nightclub.

Wong, a 1993 graduate of UC Riverside, worked as an assistant manager at a Foot Locker store in Westminster and was two months shy of being promoted to store manager, her father said. A shy young woman who loved to play tennis, Wong usually was the designated driver when groups went out to party because she didn’t drink alcohol.

Wong’s family has been inundated with calls from relatives, friends and the press, said an aunt who would not give her name.

“We’re definitely pleased that he’s been caught,” the aunt said. “But frankly, we’re just exhausted after all this.”

A memorial service for Wong is set for Wednesday in Riverside.

After Wong’s killing was reported in the news media, police received an anonymous tip naming Morgan as a suspect. At 1:20 a.m. Saturday, a SWAT team descended on Morgan’s apartment in Orange but found that he wasn’t there. Armed with a search warrant, they entered the apartment at 8 a.m., and while they were there Morgan phoned his apartment and was told by police they wanted him to surrender for questioning within an hour. A friend called back sometime later and relayed a message from Morgan that he would not return to prison peacefully.

Morgan was convicted of two rapes, one by force and the other involving unlawful sex with a minor, in December, 1984. For those convictions, he was sentenced to 3 years and 8 months behind bars. After his release, he was charged with another statutory rape in 1990, and in February of 1991 was sentenced to the minimum prison term of 16 months on that charge, although he could have received four years.

Orange County Judge John J. Ryan sentenced Morgan to an additional year in prison as an enhancement for the earlier forcible rape conviction, but then ordered the “punishment stricken” on that count, according to court records.

It was while he was on parole from that 1990 rape that Huntington Beach police arrested him for allegedly handcuffing a woman to a tree, assaulting and raping her.

The district attorney’s office declined to prosecute him for that 1993 incident, but Huntington Beach police informed state parole officials, who revoked his parole and returned him to state prison in Chino. He was later transferred to Folsom prison and spent a year in custody before being released two months ago.

Morgan was born in Ohio, and came to Orange County at age 12. He graduated from John F. Kennedy High School in La Palma in 1983, and was on the school’s wrestling team for three years. In his senior year, varsity wrestling Coach George Peterman commended Morgan in the yearbook for having placed in a major tournament.

Morgan’s 1991 probation report said he was married, and court records show that he and his former wife, Jacqueline, were divorced after he was sent to prison a second time.

Dave Moller, managing editor of Feather Publishing, where Sonya Marvin worked, said: “We’re all in shock, because she’s a real good kid. . . . It looks like to us (that she) got involved with the wrong person, innocently.”

Times staff writers Jodi Wilgoren, Lynn Franey, Rene Lynch, Lee Romney, Eric Bailey and Brian Ray Ballou contributed to this report.

* MEMORIES HAUNT VICTIM: Woman is tormented by reports of new attack. A20