'Sex-Ring' Investigation Reveals 'Field Of Screams' Haunted House Ties

LAKE ELSINORE, CA — Bloodcurdling screams echoing through the night air, a glimpse of mutilated corpses amid flickers of flashing light, and creepy clowns with chainsaws — for years, thousands of Southwest Riverside County residents bought tickets to be scared senseless at the Lake Elsinore Field of Screams Haunted Stadium.

The name behind that haunted house success was the “Bloodshed Brothers,” twin brothers from Murrieta who knew how to make nightmares come to life.

But the true horror took place behind the scenes of the annual haunts, according to court filings by Riverside County prosecutors and sheriff’s investigators. One of the haunted house creative company’s owners and two former workers have already been convicted for crimes against children. One worker faces a prison sentence of 215 years to life after pleading guilty Thursday to sexually assaulting multiple minors.

The Defendants

Fourteen girls, three women and a transgender adult were victimized in a “sex ring” perpetrated by former Bloodshed Brothers employee Morgan Delos Fowler, 33, the sheriff’s department and prosecutors contend in court filings. A longtime haunted house actor for the Bloodshed Brothers and Lake Elsinore resident, Fowler accepted a plea deal Thursday and pleaded guilty to 18 charges. He was originally charged with 57 felony counts, including violent sex crimes involving 18 victims — most of them underage.

Fowler sat in shackles, head down, leg shaking as he admitted to the charges against him Thursday in Southwest Justice Center courtroom S310 in Murrieta.

In the back row of the courtroom sat the woman who first turned him in to Riverside County Sheriff's Department investigators.

Known as “Jane Doe” on the criminal complaint against Fowler, she was a 17-year-old Great Oak High School student when Fowler first assaulted her.

“I want to remain nameless, as I am just one of so many of his victims,” she told Patch after Thursday's hearing. “Now there will be light shining on what he has done.”

Though she was a teen when she met Fowler, Jane Doe is now 23, an honors college graduate with a psychology degree. She helped organize the many victims and was the driving force that encouraged them to speak to investigators.

She will have her chance to read her victim impact statement at Fowler's sentencing set for July 21.

Fowler's original charges included seven counts of raping minors; nine additional counts of rape; forcible sodomy and oral copulation of minors; committing sexual assault by means of force likely to produce great bodily injury; sodomy by means of force, violence, duress, menace, and fear of immediate and unlawful bodily injury to that person and another person along with special circumstances; and one special circumstances charge including the use of a firearm and knife in the commission of rape.

Fowler was initially arrested in August of 2019 at his home in the 19000 block of White Birch Court as “part of a sex-ring investigation that involved multiple minors,” according to an arrest warrant for 34-year-old Zachary David Ball, one of the twin siblings who founded the Bloodshed Brothers.

In February 2020, investigators' call for additional victims of Fowler led to an anonymous tip tying Zachary Ball to the investigation, according to Ball’s arrest warrant. Ball later admitted he had a sexual relationship with a victim that began when she was 16-years-old and he was 24, his arrest warrant states.

“Zachary admitted to exchanging nude and sexually provocative photos with her. Zachary knew the victim’s age and admitted they worked together,” the arrest warrant states.

After reaching an April deal with prosecutors, in which he pleaded guilty to one count of oral copulation with a person under 18 years old that occurred in 2011, all other charges against Ball were dropped. No additional victims have come forward against him.

Ball was sentenced to 180 days in jail, 178 of them to be served in a work-release program. He also faces two years of probation and will be added to the sex offender registry. He will not be able to work in any position where minors are present, according to Riverside Superior Court records.

As the sheriff’s department searched for any additional victims of Fowler, at least one other former Bloodshed Brothers actor was questioned regarding crimes that occurred on November 1, 2017, according to court documents. An unnamed 31-year-old Menifee woman, who came forward as a victim of Fowler's, was later convicted for her role in abusing at least one minor. She was convicted on two counts of willful child cruelty. She is set for sentencing in July, according to Riverside Superior Court records. Patch is withholding her name because she is also considered a sex-crime victim.

Haunted Stadium Beginnings

Field of Screams at the Lake Elsinore Diamond Stadium began in 2009 as an idea for off-season use at the city-owned facility that was — and still is — managed and operated by the Lake Elsinore Storm LP (Storm Baseball), a minor league team associated with the San Diego Padres.

Advertised across the region by the stadium’s Storm Events personnel, the annual haunt grew into a Southwest Riverside County draw for patrons and workers alike. Organizers regularly asked high school volunteers to act and participate in the production.

In 2011, Storm Events hired local haunt enthusiasts, the Bloodshed Brothers, as creative directors for Field of Screams, where they worked until the summer of 2016. Together with special effects companies, the Bloodshed Brothers group dreamed up progressively horrifying mazes and rooms year after year.

All the events were considered “no-touch” between actors and guests.

The Bloodshed Brothers Make Their Mark In Southwest Riverside County

Identical twin brothers Zachary and Jeromy Ball grew up in Southwest Riverside County. What began in their front yard as a Halloween haunted house evolved into large-scale events and a successful YouTube channel. From 2008 to 2010, the brothers showcased their “Hyde Street Massacre” at their home in Murrieta, lauded by YouTube reviewers for its attention to detail, scale and Victorian-era touches. Haunting.com called it “awe-inspiring.”

The attention and their increasing social media following in the haunted house community led the Bloodshed Brothers to become the creative force behind the Field of Screams Haunted Stadium. Their mazes began inside the stadium's concourses, then expanded through the years onto the field. The popular event and public outreach on social media drew about 150 teenage haunt-enthusiasts — some as young as 14 to 15 years old — to volunteer as ghoulish actors. In 2013, the brothers called out for more volunteer help as they planned a more-extensive Field of Screams production with Horseman Hotel, Uncle Chuckle’s Fun House, Maniac Manor, Tomb of Terror and Hillbilly Hell.

High school students helped fuel the weeks-long haunt. Costume and makeup artists transformed the youths and a handful of adult actors into evil clowns and butchered victims ready to frighten the life out of visitors. It was a fun option for local students to accumulate community service hours required for high school graduation.

By 2015, the brothers launched their most extensive display at the stadium, including Holiday of Horrors, House of Nightmares, Roadkill Cafe and the addition of Alien Invasion, a multiplayer game involving laser tag and aliens.

According to a news release from the event, 2015 was the biggest and most complicated show yet. That was also the last year the twin brothers produced the Field of Screams Haunted Stadium with Storm Events. The event continued until 2019 under different creative companies. But the brothers still produced haunts and summer scares elsewhere, including the Perris Train Museum’s “Train of Terror,” as well as two events held at Temecula’s Galway Downs: “Hyde Street Massacre” and “Temecula Terror.” Their last event was held during the 2021 Halloween season.

Since the investigation began, all Bloodshed Brothers social media accounts on Facebook, Instagram and YouTube have been set to private or deleted. No charges have been filed against Jeromy Ball.

Galway Downs property owner Ken Smith told Patch that Temecula Terror is not on the 2022 calendar.

According to current Storm Events spokesperson Justin Pickard, there are no plans to host a Field of Screams Haunted Stadium in 2022. Neither stadium officials nor the city of Lake Elsinore provided further comment.

Volunteer Turned Victim

Madison Estrada was just 14 years old when she set foot inside Field of Screams as a volunteer in 2010, she said. A freshman at Murrieta Mesa High School, she started earning community service hours doing something she loved: acting as a character inside the haunted house. That year, she fell in love with the makeup, scaring the visitors and finding her people within the haunted house community.

Estrada, now 26, shared her story with Patch, detailing her work as a volunteer for the Bloodshed Brothers at Field of Screams for five years. The Lake Elsinore resident also gave her account of how she believes she was sexually exploited by Zachary Ball, and how she helped investigators build a case against him.

Estrada was stretching her wings into young adulthood when she returned to volunteer in 2011 and met Zachary Ball for the first time, she told Patch. She was 15. He was 24, according to his arrest warrant.

“For myself, (the haunted house) was an escape,” she said. “Zach was my boss at Field of Screams Haunted Stadium and went out of his way to befriend me, a 15-year-old child, and he would frequently make inappropriate remarks about my looks and how I was ‘such a catch.’ He waited until I was the ripe age of 16 before pursuing a sexual relationship with me. He would always remark how ‘mature I was for my age’ and ‘how I wasn’t like the other girls.’”

As she became more enmeshed in the Bloodshed Brothers annual event, she moved further from those she loved and trusted due to being “sexually groomed by him,” she said. Each year, she would join in on the Lake Elsinore haunt, her parents unaware of what was happening behind the scenes.

“He met me at an incredibly vulnerable part of my childhood and completely used it to his advantage to break me down and mold me into an object that suited his sick fantasies,” Estrada wrote in her victim statement, which she read at Ball’s sentencing. "Before I met him, I was a virgin and had never even thought about trying sex or alcohol. At the time, I dearly valued abstinence from both as a result of my religious upbringing.”

The pair went public with their relationship as Estrada turned 18 as if it were “brand new, and nobody was the wiser,” she said.

At age 20, Estrada “began coming to her senses regarding statutory rape and the sick reasons our relationship existed in the first place,” she said in court.

It was when Estrada’s little sister turned 16 — the same age she was when she and Ball began dating — that Estrada finally realized what Ball had stolen from her. That’s when she ended their four-year relationship.

Friendships, with people she met along the way, such as Danielle Hall, were pivotal to her trusting others again.

Estrada entered therapy, began healing from prolonged bulimia and began mending relationships with her family, she said.

But it wasn’t until 2019, upon Fowler’s arrest, that she learned of the search by the sheriff’s department for other possible victims. She said that that struck her to the core, bringing back all of the memories.

Estrada described her first meeting with Fowler when he arrived at the Field of Screams Haunted Stadium in 2012 as a visitor.

“It was the year we did the haunted orphanage,” she said. “I was dressed as a dead schoolgirl. Morgan made a gross comment about my skirt, then picked me up and threw me over his shoulder, carrying me through the maze and smacking me on the butt. I went to management and told them what the tall guy with the long hair did. They said they would take care of it.”

The next weekend, he was working at the haunt, she said.

“They hired him, and Morgan was just there, their best buddy from day one. They worked together for years,” she said. “He became a third 'Bloodshed Brother.'”

Facing Her Fears

Though one of just the many alleged victims tied to law enforcement’s “sex-ring” investigation, Estrada was the first to have her day in court. On the day of Ball’s sentencing, the two briefly came face to face as she read her victim impact statement.

“He was staring at the floor, avoiding my eyes, completely,” she said, adding that as she read the pages of her story, she found power in every word.

“They say you are as sick as your secrets, and you have kept me very, very sick for a very long time,” her statement read. “Today, I tear back the veil that shrouds a life that only you and I knew about. That veil involves a story of coercion, manipulation, and statutory rape. I knew he would frequently tell horribly graphic and sexually explicit stories about me to his friends, as though having sex with a minor was something worthy of praise. I was and still am deeply humiliated.”

To the court, Estrada described the end of their relationship: “I realized that he never actually loved me. He only loved giving in to his sick urges and was in fact the exact type of person my mother always warned me about.”

For Estrada, her journey is ongoing. She hopes to get back to her roots, developing haunts for women, by women, in what can be a safe space for fun scares.

“I loved haunted houses before him and after him. He did not take that from me,” she said.

Estrada hopes that by coming forward, others will find the strength to tell their own stories.

“Little girls don’t stay little forever. They return as grown women to hold you to account for the damage you’ve done. I hope that strikes fear into the hearts of you and any other man in our beloved haunted house community that is guilty of the same predatory behavior,” Estrada read out loud to the court. “You did not win.”

The investigation is ongoing, according to the District Attorney's office.

Anyone with more information on the case should call the Lake Elsinore Sheriff's Department Investigator's line at 951-245-3300.