If you're an actress who died of a gunshot wound under mysterious circumstances, the last thing you'd want would be for people to find the diary where you explained how you were visited by the ghost of an actress who shot herself in the head.
But last week that's what Phil Spector's defence team said it had, and promptly asked the judge if it could use the diary as evidence to prove that Lana Clarkson committed suicide instead of getting shot in the face by Phil Spector. However, now the judge has read the diary for himself, it turns out that Lana Clarkson didn't see a vision of an actress who died the exact same way she did, but she saw a shadow move across a window or something instead. And, since the shadow wasn't tiny, didn't have a lesbian haircut and didn't produce River Deep Mountain High, the judge has decided that it can't be used as evidence.
Ever since the Phil Spector murder trial jury secretly suspected that Spector murdered Lana Clarkson, plus all those women said Phil Spector waved guns in front of them, plus claims that Phil Spector's driver heard Phil Spector confess the murder, plus a coroner said that Phil Spector probably did it, Phil Spector's defence team has been working overtime to try and find new ways to convince everyone that Phil Spector is innocent. It hasn't been entirely successful.
There was a blood spatter pattern that proved Spector was six feet away from Lana Clarkson when she had the gun in her mouth, but that came from the forensic scientist who probably nicks fingernails. Aside from that, the defence has the fact that Phil Spector is quite short and nothing else. So the discovery of Lana Clarkson's crazy diaries where she apparently claimed to be visited by the ghost of an actress who committed suicide in her head with a gun was a bit of a coup. They proved that Lana was depressed and ready to commit suicide and it'd all come out as soon as the judge read them and approved them to be used as evidence.
He didn't. The San Francisco Chronicle reports:
After reading the document during the weekend, he returned to court with a stern expression and said that what he found in the manuscript was so different from the defense characterizations that he checked to see if he had the right document. He read aloud the passage about the dead actress, which showed Clarkson had found the account in a book about the history of Hollywood. And rather than visions, there was a description of seeing shadows pass a window.
However, the judge did allow letters and emails by Lana Clarkson describing herself as 'at the end of her rope' to be used to cross examine coroner Louis Pena's belief that Clarkson was ultimately a happy person, although Pena maintained that Lana Clarkson did not commit suicide.
It's a blow for Phil Spector's defence team, which was hoping that the ghost angle would fly with the judge since its star witness was set to be the reanimated corpse of Bobby Hatfield from The Righteous Brothers, who'd claim that he'd seen Lana Clarkson in heaven and she said she'd done it to herself and that she was sorry to have caused such a fuss before bursting into a toe-tapping rendition of You've Lost That Lovin' Feeling to cheer everyone up. Now that the diaries have been cast aside, the chances of that happening have been greatly reduced.
Read more:
Spector Jury hears Clarkson Letters – San Francisco Chronicle
Mithaearon says
I still say its time for Spector’s defence team to play the Chewbacca defense, perhaps they are saving it for when they really need it?