Tearing Down the Wall of Sound (59 page)

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The extravagant Afro wig had now been replaced by a more conservative, blond-tinted and permed hairstyle.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 further 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.

Finally, the fact that only two of the eleven weapons found were actually registered in Spector's name would suggest there was no inconsistency in the murder weapon also not being registered in his name. Indeed, Spector's habit of buying firearms through unrecorded private-party transactions—as he did with Nino Tempo—showed that he was actually more likely to own weapons that, technically, were not registered to him. Fidler, it seemed, did not go all the way to accepting this argument. He ruled that the only weapons that could come into evidence were those containing ammunition that matched the ammo found in the gun that killed Clarkson—i.e., the two Smith Wesson .38-caliber handguns found in the master bedroom.

Fidler also ruled that the state could use in evidence the pump-action shotgun, since it was the same type of weapon that Dorothy Melvin claimed she had been threatened with in 1993, which gave her story credibility.

In another setback for Spector, the judge also refused to grant the defense motion to rule as inadmissible the testimony of two previous incidents involving Spector and guns—the incident in 1972 when he had threatened a woman in the Daisy club on Rodeo Drive, and was arrested; and the incident in 1975 at the Beverly Hills Hotel when he had threatened a valet parking attendant.

The 1975 incident, Sortino argued, was “just the beginning of a long series of events” in which Spector “would resort to firearms-related violence against men and women if he doesn't get what he wants.”

The prosecution had already been barred from using these incidents in their case-in-chief, but having them as “admissible testimony” meant that if Spector tried to argue from the stand that he was a peaceable man who had always hated guns, they could be used to rebut his testimony.

Everything, it seemed, was now ready to go to trial—but with one hitch. Bruce Cutler was scheduled to appear in federal court on another case, defending two former NYPD detectives accused of being Mafia hitmen. Judge Fidler now set two alternative trial dates: the first, within ten days of January 30, 2006; or alternatively, if Cutler was unavailable, within thirty days of April 24.

         

Through the spring and early summer of 2005, relations between Spector and his personal assistant Michelle Blaine seemed to go from bad to worse. Blaine was seen at the castle less and less. “It was,” one friend says, “as if Rachelle was taking over.”

In September it became apparent just how bad things had become when Spector launched a lawsuit against Blaine, alleging that she had embezzled money from him. In his declaration to the court, Spector claimed that he had discovered that Blaine was making unauthorized withdrawals from his personal bank accounts, and that she had confessed to erroneously spending hundreds of thousands of dollars of his money, and promised to pay him back the “stolen money.” He further alleged that Blaine had gone to his accountant and secured a $425,000 loan from his pension plan without his knowledge and deposited the money into two limited-liability companies she controlled. All told, Spector stated, he believed that Blaine had embezzled “somewhere between $500,000 to $1 million from his various accounts.”

In March 2006 Blaine responded by launching a countersuit, alleging sexual harassment and wrongful termination and claiming more than $5 million in damages. Spector, she claimed, had given her $635,000 to buy a house, and the $425,000 was to be used to help finance a movie,
3:15,
“a noble and heartfelt story” about a teacher working with underprivileged children that Spector hoped would “rehabilitate his tarnished image.” He also wanted $102,000 of the $425,000 to buy an RV that could be used as “a mobile lounge and office” during the criminal trial.

Her suit also alleged that Spector had “constantly” asked her to have sex with him and had a habit of asking her to work around him when he was naked. On one occasion when the two were traveling to New York, she alleged, he had asked her to find him a prostitute, and on another he had invited her to join him and a prostitute in his hotel room. Blaine said she had declined. Most damagingly, she alleged that Spector had twice proposed marriage, in order to prevent her testifying against him in court. Blaine claimed that she had tried to leave Spector's employ, but he had persuaded her to stay by giving her the money to buy the house and offering an employment package that included a $72,000 salary, a $600 car allowance, a retirement plan and a $500,000 life insurance policy. Matters had finally soured, she claimed, when Rachelle Short convinced Spector that Blaine was stealing from him, and he had fired her after she had refused to promise not to talk to prosecutors about what he may have told her about the death of Lana Clarkson. In answering written questions for the suit, Spector said he did not kill Clarkson but invoked his right under the Fifth Amendment not to disclose whether he had discussed her death with Blaine. He also denied offering to marry Blaine or pay her money to keep her quiet.