For all the Phil Spector murder trial shenanigans, nobody has really tried to explain why Phil Spector allegedly shot Lana Clarkson in the mouth, although that's because most people assumed that she laughed at his hair and he got angry.
Not so, says the case's lead investigator Detective Mark Lillienfeld. Lillienfeld is convinced that Lana Clarkson's death was sexually motivated, thanks to subtle clues at the crime scene like the dress that Lana Clarkson was wearing, the false eyelashes left on the candlelit fireside next to the brandy snifters and the fact that Phil Spector had a two-thirds empty packet of Viagra in his suitcase. That's just what we needed – as if the mental image of a tiny man in a lesbian wig shooting a woman in the mouth wasn't disturbing enough, now we have to deal with the mental image of a tiny man in a lesbian wig shooting a woman in the mouth with a medically-assisted hard-on. Lovely.
When you're as rich, well-known and influential as Phil Spector, seduction techniques tend to be pretty crude. You just don't need to try wooing a girl for months with mildly flirtatious emails, all the while beating yourself up that you're too shy to actually talk to her. No, instead Phil Spector seemed to rely upon the old-fashioned gunpoint rape-attempt technique. It's a strategy that probably seemed to work just fine until a woman died of a gunshot wound to the head at his house and the first week of the ensuing murder trial was full of women claiming that Phil Spector pulled guns on them. Now? Maybe it was a little heavy-handed in retrospect.
After interrogating a driver who claims to have heard Phil Spector confess the murder and a coroner who also claims that Phil Spector did it, now it's the turn of the prosecution to try and paint a picture of what was going on in Phil Spector's head at the time of Lana Clarkson's death. We already know that Phil Spector was acting strangely before the death, and we also know that he kept around a dozen guns in his house, but this is the first time that sex has ever been raised as a potential factor.
Yesterday Detective Mark Lillienfeld, the chief investigator in the Phil Spector murder case, took to the stand to describe the apparent sexual motivation behind Lana Clarkson's death. Forbes reports his testimony:
"The home was dark. There were candles lit on the fireplace. There was alcohol out in front of the fireplace on a coffee table," he said. Someone had left a nearly empty brandy snifter in the bathroom, along with a pair of false eyelashes, he added. "Miss Clarkson, the way she was dressed, the person that she was, the person that the defendant was – all those facts in my mind played into a sexually motivated murder, and the Viagra was a piece of evidence that would perhaps prove later on to be important."
However, under cross-examination from Phil Spector's defence team, Lillienfeld stated that he had no evidence to suggest that Phil Spector had taken any Viagra that night, nor were there any "tears or rips" that would signify a rape situation.
However, the sexually-motivated death line might just work as a positive for Phil Spector. His defence team has been busy trying to paint Lana Clarkson as a depressed loony who saw ghosts, and Phil Spector himself said that Clarkson died while "eating the gun with her dancing" which sounds a bit sexual, although we're not sure why. So maybe these new sexual undertones will help Spector escape punishment for Clarkson's death, leaving Phil Spector free to explore less extreme ways of getting girls to like him. Like, say, only threatening them with non-projectile weapons like knives and rolling pins in the future. Could work.
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