Morgue (28 page)

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.

Does that all prove Lana Clarkson shot herself? No, but when considered with physical evidence, homicide might not be the only explanation.

Clarkson was a foot taller, thirty pounds heavier, and infinitely fitter than the sixty-five-year-old Spector. She could have easily overpowered him if she tried. There are two explanations for why she didn't: She was intimidated into submission by having a gun drawn on her, or she was never accosted.

There was no damage on Clarkson's lips, tongue, or teeth that suggested a gun was forced into her mouth. Is it natural to assume she would have voluntarily opened her mouth to an assailant with a gun?

The presence of gunshot residue on both of Clarkson's hands but not on Spector's suggests she was holding the gun when it fired, not Spector. Even if Spector had washed his hands, traces of GSR would still be present on his skin and clothing, but only two tiny particles were found on his clothing. They could have been transferred by the air, by his handcuffs, or in the police car.

The barrel of the snub-nosed Colt was about two inches into Clarkson's mouth. When it fired, a violent burst of 1,400-degree gases exited the muzzle with a force of about 5,000 pounds per square inch. In an instant, it filled her mouth, bubbled out the cheeks, and escaped along the paths of least resistance. Some went out through the nasal passages, doing damage along the way; the rest blew
backward,
out of the mouth, carrying a turbulent cloud of blood spray, gunshot residue, gases, pulverized flesh, teeth, and other biological material called back-spatter.

In this case, the blast blew Clarkson's blood and a piece of her front tooth more than ten feet onto a banister in front of her. The shoulder and sleeves of her jacket, plus the backs of her hands, were coated with back-spatter.

So it stands to reasons that anyone standing within four to six feet of the victim would be splashed with a giant grisly wave of bloody material. If Spector had been standing close enough to put the gun in her mouth—the edge of his sleeve would have been only a few inches away—he would have been coated in back-spatter, especially that sleeve.

There was none. A single droplet of blood on the sleeve and the tiny bits of spray on his clothing could be explained by simply being in the little foyer at the moment of the shot, and by contact with her blood in the frantic aftermath. If he tried to administer first aid or touched her in any way, blood would have been transferred. He might have washed his hands, but he didn't wash his jacket or clothing.

So there was no physical evidence to prove that Spector was holding the gun when it fired.

But there was evidence that Clarkson was holding the revolver with both hands when it fired. The resulting cloud of GSR and back-spatter was all over her hands. It appeared that she pulled the trigger with her left thumb, and the recoil broke her acrylic nail.

Unbeknownst to me, my forensic colleagues Baden, Spitz, and Lee had all looked at the evidence and reached similar conclusions.

Those facts (and a lack of objective evidence to the contrary) led me to think that suicide was not just a distinct possibility, but the kind of reasonable alternative that should be argued before a jury.

A tortured genius worth more than $100 million, Phil Spector had no real peers, for better or worse, but this was now a question for a jury to decide.

*   *   *

More than four years after Lana Clarkson died in Phil Spector's castle, his second-degree murder trial began.

On April 25, 2007, in Los Angeles Superior Court, deputy district attorney Alan Jackson got straight to the point in his opening statement to the jury: “The evidence is going to paint a picture of a man who on February 3, 2003, put a loaded pistol in Lana Clarkson's mouth—inside her mouth—and shot her to death.”

He promised to paint a chilling portrait of Spector as a man “who, when he's confronted with the right circumstances, when he's confronted with the right situations, turns sinister and deadly.”

The jury would hear from a parade of four women who had survived Spector's gun-waving rages. “Lana Clarkson,” he said, “was simply the last in a very long line of women who have been victimized by Phil Spector.”

And finally, they'd hear from the driver, Adriano DeSouza, who'd recount the horror of that night and Spector's own damning admission:
“I think I killed somebody.”

A frail-looking Spector watched from the defense table, placid, sometimes cupping his face in his hands. On the first day of the trial, he wore a blond pageboy wig, a beige suit, and a purple shirt open at the collar, but as the trial wore on, his fashion and wigs would grow wilder. He also had married (in the very foyer where Clarkson died) a twenty-six-year-old aspiring singer who worked as his personal assistant and who sat every day of the trial in the front row of the gallery behind him. When they arrived in court and left together every day, they were escorted by three very large black bodyguards.