by Mick Brown
Spector made no comment on the grand jury testimony. But Bruce Cutler described it to this reporter as “very deceptive, one-sided and biased. Putting this poison in the public domain is for one purpose and one purpose only: to try and paint Phil in a negative light and to influence a potential jury pool. It’s inherently unfair.”
Everything the defense’s own forensic experts had found, Cutler went on, was consistent with a self-inflicted gunshot wound. “I don’t want to get into the drugs and the liquor in the lady’s system. I don’t want to get into the gunplay. I don’t want to get into the fact that Phil’s fingerprints are not on that gun, and that gun was not registered to him and that’s not his gun. Where is the motive for this crime? There is none.”
Spector’s “so-called confession,” Cutler told me, was “not true.” De Souza was “not facile” in the English language, and there had been no confession to the police officer Beatrice Rodriguez.
“It’s another lie, Mick. How would you like it if somebody died in your house and you were famous and twelve to fifteen policemen came in and beat the shit out of you and then made up stories about what you did and didn’t say?”
Was he saying the police had made it up?
“I’m saying there is no memorialized evidence of this. It’s unfounded and untrue.” Spector, he said, maintained his innocence. “He didn’t kill the woman.” And the case would go to trial “unless [the judge] dismisses it for prosecutorial misconduct and some of the shenanigans they’ve pulled. And we’re going to win.”
Later that same month, on January 31, 2005, Donna Clarkson, Lana’s mother, filed a civil lawsuit against Spector, alleging wrongful death, negligence and battery against her daughter, and seeking “punitive and exemplary damages according to proof.” It was necessary to file the suit, the Clarkson family’s lawyer Roderick Lindblom explained, before February 3, 2005, based on California’s two-year statute of limitations for wrongful-death actions. The suit would not be heard until after the criminal trial.
In the midst of his legal tribulations, Spector had acquired the most improbable of new companions—a girlfriend forty years his junior. According to her website, Rachelle Short—or Chelle as she liked to be known—was a “lead singer/songwriter/trombone player” who had worked with various artists, including Savage Garden and Slim Jim Phantom of the Stray Cats, as well as performing at televised NASCAR and NHRA events. Not mentioned on her website was an uncredited part in a Joel Schumacher film, Tigerland, and a spell working as the downtown L.A. sales representative for the ABB label company (“Ordering labels…as easy as applying one!”). Photographs of Short showed a pert, pretty blonde—some bore a distinct resemblance to Lana Clarkson. According to a lawsuit later launched by Michelle Blaine, his personal assistant, Short had originally been employed by Spector as Blaine’s assistant; however, it seems that Spector and Short quickly formed a relationship. The mood between Blaine and Short grew progressively strained.
In March 2005 Spector threw a party at the Dolce Vita restaurant in Beverly Hills to announce his engagement to Rachelle. Among the forty or so guests were old friends including Nino Tempo, Don Randi and Dan and David Kessel, as well as a healthy sprinkling of new friends—Spector’s numerous lawyers and their wives.
Within a few months of the engagement, Michelle Blaine had left Spector’s employ. It would be another piece in what was already an increasingly complicated jigsaw.
At the same time, Spector again went on the offensive, giving an interview to BBC TV, as part of a tabloid documentary series entitled Secret Hollywood. In the interview, conducted in a Los Angeles hotel, Spector spent almost an hour talking about his music and his career, all clearly designed to boost his pedigree in advance of the case. The BBC, however, chose to broadcast only the three or four minutes during which he spoke of the killing.
Describing his arrest, Spector was at his most self-righteously indignant. “They behaved like cowboys,” he said. “I had no weapon. I’m five foot five. They came in with weapons drawn. There wasn’t one of them under six foot tall. There was not a medic to be seen…
“They Tasered me with 50,000 volts of electricity…the police manual says you never do that to a subject unless he is violent or uncontrollable…
“A tragedy happened, but it could have happened in anybody’s house. It’s not for me to explain why. She. Took. Her. Life. It’s only for me to explain that I had nothing to do with it. And I didn’t.
“This prosecution is bogus. I mean, it has to be because of who I am. It has to be because I live in a castle. It has to be a frame-up, because it’s not based on real evidence. I had nothing to do with her death, and three coroners have stated that. Case closed. Move on. You know, forget Phil Spector. Forget the castle. Forget rock and roll. Forget all that.”
Even some of Spector’s friends were shocked at his attitude toward Clarkson’s death, his apparent absence of sympathy for Clarkson or her bereaved family. The death of Lana Clarkson had become first and foremost another example of the ongoing persecution of Phil Spector, further confirmation of his own martyrdom. It was Phil’s Lenny Bruce moment.
On May 23, 2005, Spector was back in court again for a hearing on a prosecution motion to admit into the trial evidence from women claiming he had pulled guns on them in the past. Again Spector was having to deal with the allegations made by the prosecution witnesses without the opportunity at that stage of cross-examining them or giving his account of the incidents. This included the testimony from Dorothy Melvin and Stephanie Jennings that had already been part of the grand jury proceedings, as well as additional testimony from two women, Dianne Ogden and Melissa Grosvenor.
Spector walked into the courtroom to a ripple of disbelieving laughter. For previous hearings, Spector had erred on the side of conservatism, invariably appearing in a suit and forsaking the shoulder-length Louis Quinze wig for less ostentatious models. But for this most crucial of appearances, he had chosen to wear a new concoction—a permed, blond Afro, which towered nine inches above his head, and which, with his tinted glasses, lent him the appearance of a surrealist comedy turn. Taking his seat in the court, Spector seemed indifferent to the amusement his appearance had caused.
In the new evidence, Dianne Ogden stated that she had first met Spector in 1982 and dated him sporadically over the years until 1987, when she became one of his paid assistants. The following year, she claimed, she returned to his Pasadena home after a dinner date. Spector had been drinking. At 2:00 a.m. Ogden said she wanted to leave. Spector, she alleged, began to scream profanities at her, locked the door and then pointed a handgun at her face, touching the muzzle to her skin. “Afraid for her life,” Ogden agreed to spend the night with Spector. When he woke up next morning, she claimed, he acted as if nothing had happened, and she said nothing about the incident to him.
Two weeks later, she claimed, she organized a dinner party at Spector’s house for Allen Klein and a number of other guests. Afterward, as she prepared to leave, Spector became angry and came after her with what she described as an Uzi-type assault rifle, chasing her to her car, before she was able to make good her escape. She never returned to Spector’s home again.
Melissa Grosvenor stated that she had met Spector in New York in 1991 at a party and subsequently flown to see him in Los Angeles, booking in to a hotel. After dinner they returned to Spector’s home, but when Grosvenor tried to leave, Spector pointed a gun at her head and began to yell and swear at her. Terrified, Grosvenor remained sitting in her chair as Spector hovered over her with the gun. She eventually cried herself to sleep. She was woken next morning by Spector tapping her leg and asking if she wanted to go for breakfast. Grosvenor agreed, believing it was her chance to get out of the house. He later dropped her back at her hotel. She returned to New York and never saw him again.
American law usually prohibits prosecutors from introducing evidence of “prior bad acts” to show that a defendant had a propensity for committing a crime. But such evidence can
be allowed to demonstrate a pattern of conduct. In court, Douglas Sortino argued that Spector had used guns to intimidate people “again and again and again,” and that the evidence would demonstrate “the absence of accident or mistake” in the killing of Clarkson.
Bruce Cutler countered by disparaging the four women as “gold diggers” and “toadies” who had taken advantage of “one of the greatest music icons in the last fifty years,” and described the prosecution as “desperate” and guilty of “character assassination.”
But Judge Larry Fidler was apparently unmoved by Cutler’s argument. The evidence from Melvin, Jennings, Grosvenor and Ogden, he said, went “to the People’s theory of the case” that Spector shot Clarkson in anger when she wanted to leave his mansion. However, Fidler rejected six other incidents, including the two misdemeanor convictions on gun charges from the 1970s; the claim by Deborah Strand that Spector had held the barrel of a gun against her cheek at a party in 1999, and an account of the 1977 incident when Spector had allegedly pulled a gun on Leonard Cohen (“Leonard, I love you…”) in the studio.
Outside the courtroom, Spector made a brief statement to waiting reporters, veering into the third person: “Mr. Spector never pulled a gun on any of these women.” His denial was submerged in the tide of media ribaldry about what quickly became known as “the Wall of Hair.” On his talk show that evening, Jay Leno commented that Spector “looks like he already got the electric chair.” The erstwhile Tycoon of Teen, the greatest record producer ever in rock and roll, had now become a figure of ridicule.
A month later, at the annual awards presentation at the Songwriters Hall of Fame in New York, Spector’s greatest creation, “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’,” was awarded the ultimate accolade of the Towering Song Award. Bill Medley received the award. Spector was not in the audience.
Having failed to exclude the evidence of “prior bad acts” from the prosecution case, Bruce Cutler now set about attempting to suppress perhaps the most potentially damaging evidence against Spector—his alleged admission to police officer Beatrice Rodriguez that “I didn’t mean to shoot her. It was an accident.”
Cutler claimed that police had violated Miranda rights by not cautioning Spector, and that he had made his statements when he was intoxicated, suffering from lack of sleep, and experiencing symptoms of prescription-drug withdrawal.
Spector was back in court on October 27 to hear the judge’s ruling, accompanied by a retinue of bodyguards and Rachelle, clutching his arm, according to one witness, “like Phil was gonna fall off his shoes.”
The extravagant Afro wig had now been replaced by a more conservative, blond-tinted and permed hairstyle. Furthermore, it appeared from pictures that in the five months since his last appearance Spector had undergone plastic surgery, his sagging face now tightened to resemble a mask.
In court, Cutler sought to undermine Rodriguez’s statement as “only the bare recollection of a woman doing her job with all this chaos and danger and violence around her.” What Spector had most likely said, Cutler went on, was “I didn’t shoot her. It was an accident.”
Cutler claimed that police had “crashed” through Spector’s home “like storm troopers,” attacked him, hog-tied him, Tasered him and “figuratively punched him around until he said something.”
Furthermore, he argued, at the time of his arrest Spector was suffering from withdrawal symptoms from seven prescription drugs, “which could include hallucinations, forgetfulness, serious fatigue, and/or slurring.”
These medications were Neurontin, Topamax, Prozac, Loxitane, Klonopin, Prevacid and tetracycline. Put simply: Neurontin controls seizures and manages pain; Topamax prevents migraines; Prozac and Loxitane are both antidepressants; Klonopin is also used to control seizures, and to relieve anxiety; Prevacid treats excessive stomach acid, and tetracycline is an antibiotic.
“I am informed and believe,” Cutler went on, “that once the defendant was taken into custody at his home, his requests for this medication were either refused or ignored by Alhambra police officers.”
But Judge Fidler was unimpressed by Cutler’s arguments. Spector, he argued, “was treated a lot better than most people.” He ruled that all of the statements that Spector made to authorities on the night of the murder were admissible because they were voluntarily offered and he did not need to be read his “Miranda rights” because he was never interrogated.
Fidler also granted a prosecutor’s motion to rule inadmissible Spector’s statements to officers Gilliam and Pineda on the morning of his arrest, in which he’d claimed that Clarkson had killed herself. These were self-serving hearsay, the prosecution argued, and the judge seemed to agree. “They did nothing to encourage him to talk. They did nothing to get him to talk.”
The implication of this ruling was to make it impossible for anyone other than Spector himself to say that Clarkson had taken her own life, and Spector would have to say it from the witness stand—not necessarily a place his lawyers might advise him to be. At the same time, Cutler also tried to suppress the admission of crucial police evidence about the other firearms found at the castle, restricting it simply to the gun that had killed Lana Clarkson. The existence of the other weapons, Cutler argued, was irrelevant and would be used by the prosecution only to show that Spector was “the type of person who surrounds himself with guns.”
According to the DA’s submission, police had found thirteen firearms in Spector’s home, in addition to the murder weapon, although two—an air pistol and a blank gun—were dropped from evidence.
The .38-caliber Colt Cobra revolver that had killed Lana Clarkson was loaded with five live rounds and one discharged round under the hammer. Four of the live rounds, as well as the discharged one, were Smith Wesson .38 Special +P rounds—a relatively obscure, high-velocity .38 ammunition that had not been manufactured in more than ten years. The sixth round was a more common Speer .38 Special round.
In the master bedroom on the first floor, detectives found five guns. These included two Smith Wesson .38s, both loaded with the same unusual .38 Special +P rounds found in the murder weapon. Also found were a Browning 9 mm semi-automatic pistol; a Star .25-caliber semi-automatic pistol; and a High Standard 12-gauge pump-action shotgun.
In the same room, detectives also recovered a Ziploc bag containing eight live rounds of the same .38 Special +P ammunition found in the death gun, as well as an ammunition box containing other live rounds, including one live Speer .38 Special round and two live .38 Special +P rounds.
In an upstairs office, detectives found six more handguns: a .38-caliber Colt Army revolver; two .38-caliber Colt Detective Special revolvers, one loaded; a Smith Wesson .38-caliber revolver; and a High Standard .22-caliber revolver. Police also found some seventy rounds of live ammunition in a box and a plastic tub, including thirty-three Speer .38 Special rounds and two more .38 Special +P rounds.
Checking into the histories of the firearms, police discovered that two of the guns—the High Standard .22 revolver and the High Standard shotgun—had been purchased by Spector in 1967 and 1972 respectively. Five of the guns—the two Smith Wesson revolvers found in the office; one of the Colt Detective Special revolvers found in the office; a Smith and Wesson revolver found in the master bedroom and the Browning pistol found in the master bedroom—had been purchased by Spector’s old friend Nino Tempo. Tempo told investigators he had bought the guns in the 1970s and subsequently sold them to Spector. These private-party transactions had predated modern firearms-reporting laws and were not recorded.
The remaining five, including the weapon that had killed Lana Clarkson, had incomplete histories. The second Colt Detective Special found in the office had been purchased by a Dr. Brian Alpert from a pawnshop in Kentucky in August 1974, and there were no further records of ownership. The Colt Army revolver had been manufactured in 1920, and no further records existed. One of the Smith Wesson revolvers found in the master bedroom had been purchased by a Joseph Surgent in April 1975, and no fu
rther records existed; and the same was true of the Star .25-caliber pistol, which had last been logged as being shipped to a Texas gun dealer in 1965. The Colt Cobra that had killed Clarkson had been shipped from Colt to a Texas gun dealer in May 1971, and there were no further records of ownership after that.
Douglas Sortino argued that admission of all this evidence was crucial to the prosecution case. Spector had always maintained that the gun was not his and that he had no idea where Clarkson had gotten it from. That’s what he had told Officer Derek Gilliam while he was cooling off in the Alhambra police station on the morning of his arrest, and he repeated that assertion in his interview with Esquire magazine—“I don’t know where or how she got the gun.”
Establishing that Spector owned the murder weapon was “absolutely essential” to establishing homicide, Sortino argued. Once that had been proved, the jury, in order to conclude that Clarkson had killed herself, would have to believe that she had come unprepared to kill herself to a home she had never visited before, but for some reason decided to commit suicide, looked around for the means to do so, and just happened to find a loaded revolver nearby.
It was clear from all Spector’s statements, Sortino argued, that his defense would try to suggest that Clarkson had brought the Colt with her and then killed herself. To be successful, Spector need only raise reasonable doubt about the ownership of the gun. But the fact that there were eleven other firearms in the house, eight of them revolvers similar to the murder weapon; that three of them were loaded (like the murder weapon), and two with the same Smith Wesson .38 Special +P ammunition that made up five of the six rounds in the Cobra—all tended to suggest that the murder weapon belonged to Spector. The additional loose rounds of Smith Wesson .38 Special +P ammunition found upstairs, as well as the loose rounds of Speer .38 Special ammunition (the same ammunition as the sixth round in the Cobra), further reinforced the suggestion that the gun belonged to Spector, as did the fact that two of the guns found upstairs were housed in Hunter-brand holsters—the same company that manufactured the empty holster found in the bureau next to Clarkson, and that fit the murder weapon.