Morgue

by Dr. Vincent DiMaio

  “Excuse me, ma’am, you can’t come in here,” she said before her supervisor pulled her aside and whispered that was no woman, but the multimillionaire, multi-platinum music producer Phil Spector, who was a big tipper. Treat him like gold, the bouncer said, like he was fucking Dan Aykroyd.

  Red-faced, Clarkson immediately escorted Spector and his date to the best open table.

  Despite the embarrassing moment at the door, Spector was smitten again. At closing time, around two a.m., when his waitress-date ordered only water, he called for his driver to take her home. He ordered a Bacardi 151, straight up, while he flirted with another cocktail waitress and kept an eye on Clarkson, who cruised through the room, tidying things, pulling out chairs for customers, snatching empty glasses off tables, making small talk.

  “She won’t stay still,” he observed to his new waitress about Clarkson. “She’s like fucking Charlie Chaplin.”

  Maybe because she needed this job. At forty, Clarkson was an actress who hadn’t had any good roles in too long. Six feet tall and still gorgeous, she stood out in this Hollywood crowd, especially after last call. She’d been somebody once, at least in B-movie cult circles, for her starring role in Roger Corman’s Barbarian Queen, but that was nearly twenty years ago. She’d broken both wrists in an accident a few years before, the roles mostly dried up, and she grew depressed. She contented herself with the occasional commercial and the fawning fans at little comic-cons. At the moment, she worked for nine bucks an hour just to pay the $1,200-a-month rent on her 454-square-foot bungalow in Venice Beach and for a few expensive personal habits like fashionable clothes and prescription painkillers. If she lived on the edge, it was the far edge.

  Spector invited his waitress to come home with him, and she made up a story about an early appointment the next morning. He needed somebody else to go back to his empty castle with him, so he invited Clarkson over to his table for a drink. She cleared it with her boss—conversation was allowed, but no drinking—and sat down with the odd little man after her shift ended.

  Spector asked her if she wanted to see his castle. She did, of course, but she couldn’t risk losing her job by getting too cozy with a customer. Instead, she asked him for a ride to her car. So he left another extravagant tip, $450 on a $13.50 tab, and called his driver.

  At the employee parking garage, standing outside his limo, Spector continued to beg Clarkson, like a child. Just one drink! Let’s go to the castle! Finally she relented and climbed back into the Mercedes. A little abashed, she told Adriano she was just going for one drink, but Spector barked at her, “Don’t talk to the driver! Don’t talk to the driver!”

  On the half-hour drive back to Spector’s opulent mansion, called Pyrenees Castle—literally a thirty-three-room turreted castle and wooded estate built in the 1920s amid the winding streets of Alhambra, an otherwise humdrum LA suburb—they petted, giggled, and watched an old Jimmy Cagney movie, Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye, in the back of the limo.

  Around three a.m., Spector and Clarkson went inside while Adriano parked near the fountain and settled in until he had to take Clarkson home. It might be a while.

  Two hours later, about five a.m., Adriano heard a pop. Not an explosion or loud bang. Just a muffled pop. He got out of the car and looked around. Seeing nothing, he got back in the car.

  In a moment, Spector opened the mansion’s back door, and Adriano got out, ready to take Miss Clarkson home. He saw his boss wore the same clothes but had a stunned look on his face—and a revolver in his hand.

  “I think I killed somebody,” Spector said.

  Behind Spector, Adriano could see a woman’s legs splayed out. When he looked closer, he saw Clarkson slumped in a chair, her long legs stretched out in front of her. Blood spattered her face and ran down her front.

  “What happened?” Adriano asked, stupefied.

  Spector shrugged and said nothing.

  Adriano freaked. He ran back to the car and drove to the main gate, where he fumbled with his cellphone in the glow of the dashboard. He didn’t know the address or Spector’s number or anything. His fingers trembled as he punched buttons. His first call was to Spector’s secretary, whose number was programmed into the phone. When she didn’t answer, he left a message and dialed 911.

  At 5:02 a.m., the police dispatcher picked up and asked why he was calling.

  “I think my boss killed somebody.”

  Why did he think there’d been a killing? the dispatcher asked.

  “Because he have a lady on the … on the floor,” Adriano explained in his agitated, halting English, “and he have a gun in … in his hand.”

  * * *

  Police found Clarkson’s corpse slouched in a fake Louis XIV chair near the back door. Her legs were sprawled out in front of her, with her left arm at her side and her right draped over the chair’s arm. Her leopard-print handbag was still slung on her right shoulder, its straps twisted around the chair’s arm. Blood and other matter had spilled from her mouth and nose and cascaded down the front of her little black dress.

  On the floor under her left calf was a bloody .38-caliber, six-shot Colt Cobra revolver, with five live rounds and one spent cartridge under the hammer. Blood had congealed on its wooden grips, trigger guard, barrel—in fact all over … but it appeared to have been wiped clean. A bit of Clarkson’s front tooth—actually a cap—had lodged in the gun’s front sight, and other tooth fragments were scattered on the floor.

  Within arm’s reach beside her was an ornate bureau, its top drawer open. Inside was a holster that fit the Colt Cobra.

  On a matching chair nearby was Spector’s leather briefcase, which contained, among other things, a three-pack of Viagra in which only one pill remained.

  Soft, romantic music was still playing in the background. The adjoining living room was lit only by candles on the fireplace mantel. A Picasso hung on one wall, a drawing by John Lennon on the other. An almost-empty bottle of tequila and a brandy snifter with some kind of liquor in it sat on the coffee table.

  In a nearby bathroom, cops found another brandy snifter and a pair of false eyelashes atop the toilet tank. On the floor, they found a cotton diaper soaked with blood and water.

  In the master bedroom upstairs, a detective found Spector’s white jacket, with a couple of small bloodstains and flecked with almost invisible blood specks, crumpled on the closet floor.

  A deputy coroner from Los Angeles County arrived around five-thirty p.m., more than twelve hours after the shooting. Flies had already laid eggs in one of the dead woman’s ears and in the clotted mess on her chest.

  A dead actress. Shot in the mouth. In the wee hours. At a super-celebrity’s mansion.

  Lawyers and reporters would be crawling all over this one, so there was no room for error at autopsy. But the coroner’s office had plenty of experience with these kinds of high-profile cases and knew the drill.

  The next morning, Deputy Coroner Dr. Louis Pena performed the autopsy. Lana Clarkson died from a single gunshot wound to her head and neck. A copper-jacketed .38-caliber bullet entered through her mouth, gouged the top of her tongue, ripped through the back of her throat, completely tore her spinal cord from her brain stem, and lodged in the base of her skull.

  The instantaneous disconnection of her spinal cord from her brain meant Clarkson could do nothing at the moment of impact except die. Her heart stopped beating, she stopped breathing, every nerve went dead, every muscle went limp. Her brain lived long enough to consume whatever oxygen it contained, but she wasn’t likely conscious.

  The bullet traveled straight back and slightly upward. The revolver’s recoil shattered her two front incisor teeth, both recently capped. Dr. Pena found a bruise on the left side of Clarkson’s tongue not caused by the bullet but possibly by the barrel being forced into her mouth. He found other bruises on her hands, wrist, and forearm consistent with a struggle.

  She had enough alcohol in her system to make her drunk, plus traces of the powerful painkiller hydrocodone and ant
ihistamines. Her purse contained a number of prescription and nonprescription drugs, including cold medicine and medication for herpes.

  The crime scene yielded more evidence, although it was as confounding as it was lurid.

  On the floor, police found a cracked acrylic nail from her right thumb.

  Criminalists found a mixture of Spector’s and Clarkson’s DNA all over the place: on the pair of false eyelashes in the bathroom, on the brandy snifters, on the mansion’s back doorknob and latch, and in the blood they swabbed from both of Clarkson’s wrists.

  Clarkson’s blood was on the stairway banister and the diaper found in the second-floor bathroom, although it had been diluted with water in some spots. The mist-like spatter and bloodstains on the jacket’s left cuff, left elbow, pocket, outside right-front panel, and inside the left-front panel were Clarkson’s, too, but they weren’t massive.

  Criminalists found Spector’s DNA on Clarkson’s left nipple but not in her vagina. They also found Clarkson’s DNA on Spector’s scrotum, suggesting she had performed oral sex on him. They found none of Spector’s DNA under her fingernails.

  Most fascinating—and befuddling: Only Clarkson’s DNA was found on the gun, and only her hands had gunshot residue, a lot of it. Spector’s hands and clothes were utterly free of any GSR, and except for the bloody specks and stains on the jacket, Spector had no foreign biological matter on his skin, hair, or clothes. Nobody’s fingerprints were found on the gun.

  That morning, cops recorded Spector calling Clarkson a “piece of shit.”

  “And I don’t know what her fucking problem was,” he said on tape, “but she certainly had no right to come to my fucking castle, blow her fucking head open.”

  Unconvinced investigators told Dr. Pena that Spector had fired the gun. They found no evidence Clarkson had ever been suicidal, and no suicide note was found. They believed Phil Spector shot Lana Clarkson while she sat on the faux antique chair, just as they had found her. Given the physical evidence Pena saw at autopsy, his opinion leaned toward homicide.

  Two weeks after the shooting, Lana Clarkson’s ashes were interred in Los Angeles’ Hollywood Forever Cemetery, among so many of the great stars she had admired. Some had more in common with her than she ever dreamed. Beyond the stars, by the lake, was Virginia Rappe, the ambitious starlet who died in 1921 after a drunken party with the highest paid actor of his day, comedian Fatty Arbuckle. Across the lawn was William Desmond Taylor, a famous film director who was murdered in his home in 1922 and launched a million headlines but never a single arrest. And in another crypt was mobster Bugsy Siegel, who died when he was shot in the face at a Beverly Hills mansion in 1947. Nobody was ever charged.

  Phil Spector was arrested the morning of Lana Clarkson’s death but released on a one-million-dollar bond as police and coroner continued their investigation. Spector immediately began building an expensive dream team of topflight lawyers like Robert Shapiro and forensic experts, while plotting his end run around the suspicious media to prove his innocence, even before he was formally charged. Privately, he railed against “friends” who weren’t publicly flocking to his defense. In strange videos from his castle, he claimed Clarkson had accidentally shot herself (“She kissed the gun,” he told Esquire) for reasons he didn’t know or care about.

  But investigators had been hearing a lot of stories about Spector and guns. He’d reportedly brandished pistols in the studio at various times with John Lennon, Debbie Harry, and other rock icons. But there were darker stories, from women he dated or employed, about a crazy-drunk Spector pulling a gun when they prepared to go. He’d just freak out and try to prevent them from leaving. This famous music magnate seemed to have a profound fear of being alone or abandoned.

  Homicide or suicide? It wasn’t an easy call for the Los Angeles County coroner’s office. The scientific evidence of murder was nonexistent; the final ruling rested more on the suggestion of sheriff’s investigators than forensic proof.

  Seven months after the shooting, LA county coroner Dr. Lakshmanan Sathyavagiswaran—just the latest in a long line of “coroners to the stars”—approved Dr. Pena’s conclusion that Clarkson’s death was officially a homicide (although he allowed for the possibility that she had shot herself). He later admitted that “intraoral” (in the mouth) gunshot wounds are almost always suicides. Or put another way, almost nobody shoots somebody else in the mouth.

  Two months later, the Los Angeles district attorney charged Phillip Harvey Spector with murder and promised to seek either a first- or second-degree murder conviction. (First-degree murder requires evidence of premeditation, while second-degree murder does not, but both carried a maximum sentence of life in prison.) Spector pleaded not guilty.

  In Los Angeles, however, celebrities seemed to have the magic Get Out of Jail Free card. The acquittals of O.J., Robert Blake, Michael Jackson, and so many other stars left a bad taste. Money, influence, and powerful friends had redefined justice in a city where entitlement, delusion, and egomania are celebrated virtues, not ugly quirks.

  A cynical public saw Phil Spector as a weird little man whose excesses and demons had turned him into a rich, raving, trembling troll who lived in a hilltop castle, surrounded by ostentation and paid companions, drunkenly looking down upon the peasants and prowling in the dark for fresh meat to feed his ego and obsessions. But he was rich and famous—and it was LA, after all—so the case against him wouldn’t be a slam dunk.

  From a thousand miles away, that’s what I thought, too.

  * * *

  One day my friend Linda Kenney Baden called. She was the wife of my old colleague Dr. Michael Baden, my father’s former chief deputy in the New York Medical Examiner’s Office and now one of America’s most familiar forensic pathologists. But this wasn’t a social call. Linda was a blue-chip defense lawyer, and she had joined the ever-changing team representing Phil Spector. He had fired Shapiro and hired the feisty Leslie Abramson, who had defended the Menendez brothers, but when Abramson abruptly resigned, Spector hired Bruce Cutler, the burly, bald Brooklyn brawler who defended mobster John Gotti.

  Linda needed a gunshot wound expert.

  Would I be interested in looking at some of the evidence against him? she asked. Just to see if there was anything that might help?

  To be honest, I didn’t have a good feeling about Spector. To me, he was peculiar, pompous, and perfectly capable of deadly gunplay. The case against him sounded plausible. I’d heard the strange stories about him, but I hadn’t seen the evidence. So I agreed to take a look.

  I wasn’t alone. Spector had already begun building one of the most powerful teams of forensic experts ever amassed for a criminal trial. I knew most of them: Baden; my old boss in Baltimore, Dr. Werner Spitz; blood spatter expert Dr. Henry Lee; forensic toxicologist Dr. Robert Middleberg; and several others. My rate is only four hundred dollars an hour, but a quick glance at Spector’s list of expert witnesses told me he’d probably spend half a million dollars before he ever got to trial.

  Spector was desperate to avoid a conviction, and the prosecution was equally desperate to nail him. The district attorney’s office had a long string of failures in high-profile celebrity prosecutions and wanted to break the streak. They would bring the entire weight of the state’s own experts against him, sparing no expense.

  I wasn’t sure I wanted to be involved. Celebrity cases are a pain. Such trials are too often about the celebrity—whether he or she is the defendant or a victim—instead of the physical evidence. Where once newspapermen and broadcasters were the only media watching, now bloggers, Tweeters, and all manner of self-appointed “citizen journalists” join the throng of “reporters,” all fighting for attention amid the clangor of our modern information wars. Court TV carries trials wall-to-wall. The Internet live-streams every minute. Every armchair criminalist posts an opinion based on little more training than binge-watching episodes of CSI. The end result is more carnival than court of law.

  But I had agreed to take
a look, and in a few days, a fat package arrived in the mail. It contained all the coroner’s reports and autopsy; crime scene photos; the results of various forensic tests, such as toxicology and ballistics; and police accounts. There was also part of Lana Clarkson’s rambling sixty-page memoir, detailing her childhood with an itinerant, single hippie mom, rock festivals and acid parties, and her years as a jet-setting, cocaine-snorting, B-movie hottie, but it stopped well short of her dismal final years. She was a sad, sympathetic figure. Hollywood is hard on women of a certain age, and in the eyes of casting agents, Lana Clarkson was past her expiration date.

  As I waded through hundreds of pages, questions bubbled up.

  I found no hard evidence that absolutely proved Spector innocent of the crime (or guilty, for that matter), but I could see a few cracks in an imperfect case against him. A lot of good forensic evidence was well collected, but it remained a largely circumstantial case. Maybe he was guilty as hell, but it wasn’t the sure thing prosecutors claimed it to be.

  For one, in my thirty-eight years as a medical examiner, I had seen hundreds of people shot in the mouth. All but three—99 percent—were suicides.

  Women don’t shoot themselves, some argued. In fact, shooting is the most common method of suicide among American women.

  But a beautiful actress, even if she was suicidal, never would have shot herself in the face. The largest forensic study of suicide ever undertaken found that about 15 percent of female suicides shot themselves in the mouth (although admittedly, the women’s beauty was not considered as a factor).

  She never attempted suicide before, never talked about it, and didn’t leave a note. Only about 8 percent of suicides previously attempted it, and only one in four leaves a note. Lana Clarkson didn’t expressly threaten suicide, that’s true, but it’s often an impulsive, desperate act that requires no warning, especially among those who use guns. Her medical and personal papers proved she had a history of depression that required powerful drug therapy. Booze and hydrocodone can actually contribute to depression. So her alcohol and drug use, coupled with a disappointing career and financial situation, could have complicated her despondency.