Thank goodness for Henry Lee – if he hadn't apparently pocketed a piece of evidence from Phil Spector's house, there's a chance that the Phil Spector murder trial would now be about actual murder instead of the really important subject: fingernails.
After hearing the testimonies of two witnesses, Judge Larry Paul Fidler has ruled that ubiquitous forensics celebrity Henry Lee did withhold a piece of fingernail-based evidence that he took from Phil Spector's mansion in the aftermath of Lana Clarkson's death. Although his punishment will not be large, this ruling may affect the future career of Henry Lee – who also worked on OJ Simpson's trial – because now celebrities will be bound to look for a different forensics expert the next time one of them goes crazy, violently murders a woman and wants it covered up. Or, alternatively, when one of them doesn't go crazy or murder anyone but is put on trial as a suspect for murder although they're eventually found to be innocent because they clearly didn't do it.
Up until now, the Phil Spector murder trial has been pretty straightforward. An elderly music producer with a haircut like a lesbian stands trial for the murder of Lana Clarkson, and the main points of the prosecution are that a) Phil Spector liked to wave guns about at women, occasionally using them for hitting, using them to attempt rape with them or dressing up like Elmer Fudd with them and b) Phil Spector told his driver that he killed someone right after Lana Clarkson died.
But Phil Spector's defence has trick up its sleeve too. Phil Spector's defence claims that a) Phil Spector is too short to be a murderer, b) that Phil Spector's driver speaks English so badly that his account of events isn't accurate and c) the blood-spatter pattern from the crime scene shows that Phil Spector must have been six feet away from Lana Clarkson when she died, effectively making him a witness but not a murderer.
The spatter test was conducted by Dr Henry Lee, which is a shame because a judge has just ruled that Henry Lee been withholding evidence picked up from the Phil Spector murder scene. The evidence-tampering hearing that took place a few weeks ago has now reached its conclusions, and it seems as if Henry Lee really did remove a piece of fingernail from the foyer of Phil Spector's mansion shortly after the death of Lana Clarkson as Sara Caplan, a former defence lawyer of Phil Spector's, had claimed. The LA Times reveals:
Lee said in court last week that Caplan might have seen him putting a cotton swab into a vial, and that he did not pick up a flat white object. A photograph he took at the crime scene showing an apparent white object on a wooden step in the house did not depict such an item, he said. Lee said the white image in the photograph was a cut in the wood… Prosecutor Alan Jackson projected a magnified shot of the white image in Lee's photograph, saying it clearly was not a cut. "Is he lying or is he incompetent? Either way, it's not the truth."
So now we'll never know how vital the missing fingernail was to the Phil Spector murder trial. Prosecutors say that it's a piece of Lana Clarkson's acrylic nail that was blown off when the show was fired, proving that she was attempting to stop Phil Spector shooting her. However, there's an equal chance that the fingernail either came from a pile of fingernails that Phil Spector climbed mountain-style to be tall enough to shoot Lana Clarkson, or that it's merely the fingernail of a lazy wigshop worker that dropped out of Phil Spector's bizarre hair by chance. Now nobody will really know for sure.
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