There's nothing like the sight of a revolver covered in four-year-old dried blood to sharply remind you that the Phil Spector murder trial is a murder trial and not just an excuse to mock a tiny old man with a range of bewildering haircuts.
And that's what everyone in court for the continuing Phil Spector murder trial discovered yesterday, when the snub-nosed .38 Special that fired the shot that killed Lana Clarkson was shown to the jury, along with several other guns that police found in Phil Spector's home following her death. This gun display effectively means that the prosecution in the Phil Spector murder trial is moving into a new, hyper-serious stage where claims that Phil Spector murdered Lana Clarkson will be repeatedly drilled into the jury. Since that means wisecracks about lesbian haircuts are going to look severely misjudged from now on, we can't pretend that we're not a little upset by this.
There's such a wealth of information to be got through during the Phil Spector murder trial that no part of it ever really stays the same for very long. Well, apart from the bit with the women who said that Phil Spector pulled guns on them – we never thought that bit would bloody end – but aside from that the trial has flitted between missing fingernails and dubious handbag placement and foreign drivers and ghosts of dead actresses with gunshot wounds for faces with hardly a moment's notice.
But now it's time to get serious – the prosecution yesterday brought in the gun that Phil Spector allegedly murdered Lana Clarkson with, along with two other revolvers and a shotgun also found in Phil Spector's house. Still caked in Clarkson's dried blood, it was revealed that the alleged murder weapon hadn't been registered. The LA Times reports:
Los Angeles County Sheriff's Det. Mark Lillienfeld, who supervised the investigation of Spector's Alhambra home for 30 hours after the shooting, said the gun matched a holster in a drawer that was about five feet from Clarkson's body, and its ammunition was the same as those that were found in two other revolvers in the house. Prosecutors allege that Spector, 67, shot Clarkson, then wiped blood off the gun in an attempt to clean up the murder scene.
As well as showing everyone the gun that killed Lana Clarkson, the prosecution was also taken on an imaginary tour of Phil Spector's home – a home containing 14 working telephones and a mobile phone, all of which the prosecution claim that Spector could have picked up to call for help after seeing Lana Clarkson kill herself in front of his tiny stunted body, instead of picking up the gun and staggering out to his driver covered in blood in order to tell him he thought he'd killed someone.
No doubt Phil Spector's defence will carefully pick apart all of the findings that this evidence has apparently thrown up to rebalance the case once again. Until then, though, Phil Spector must be thanking his lucky stars that nobody handed him the shotgun in court – because if that happened everyone would have realised that Phil Spector really does look like Elmer Fudd and he'd have been jailed for life instantly.
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