A man who perpetrated sexual assaults spanning more than a decade, targeting nearly 20 girls in Lake Elsinore and Wildomar, is slated to be sentenced Thursday to life in prison.
Morgan Delos Fowler, 32, of Lake Elsinore, pleaded guilty last month to 18 felony counts, including forcible rape of a minor, lewd acts on a child, sexual penetration of a child and forcible sodomy, along with sentence-enhancing allegations of targeting multiple victims in a sex crime. In exchange for his admissions, the Riverside County District Attorney’s Office dropped 39 related charges.
Fowler is due to be sentenced before Superior Court Judge Timothy Freer at the Southwest Justice Center in Murrieta.
The defendant is being held in lieu of $7 million bail at the Robert Presley Jail in Riverside.
According to a sheriff’s bail-setting affidavit filed shortly after Fowler’s arrest in August 2019, the defendant operated a “sex dungeon in his garage, with weapons throughout the house.”
“The suspect knows where all … victims live and had been physical with them, causing them to fear for their safety,” the document stated.
The investigation into Fowler’s offenses was prompted by an anonymous tip that he was distributing child pornography. Initially, deputies confirmed three girls had been assaulted by the defendant. However, in the ensuing months, detectives identified a total of 18 victims, all of them identified in court documents as Jane Does.
The criminal complaint states that Fowler assaulted victims in the bedroom of his home, at a comic book store and in his bathroom shower after one of the girls had used his pool.
The assaults occurred between 2007 and 2018, and the girls’ ages ranged from preteen to late teens, according to court papers.
It was unclear how Fowler met the victims and gained their trust.
Detectives served a search warrant at the defendant’s residence on White Birch Court. After finding evidence that corroborated the girls’ allegations, deputies arrested him without incident on Aug. 1, 2019, in the area of Arya and Clinton Keith roads in Wildomar.
He has no documented prior felony convictions.