Morgue (27 page)

His choice was excruciating: Continue to insist on his innocence, as he'd done since suspicious cops first talked to him … or “confess” to killing the child who once called him “Dad,” avoid the risk of a life in prison, end four years of angry litigation and recrimination in the papers, maybe even walk free within months to start a new life.

Kevin took the deal. On November 4, 2013, he was sent to Nevada's Warm Springs Correctional Center, a medium-security prison in Carson City.

At this writing, he was still there.

His dream of being a cop is gone. No dream has yet replaced it.

Kevin has never seen his son Jaiden, much less held him. And as it stands now, he will probably never see him until the boy is a man who can make his own decisions. If there is ever a relationship between them, it will start too late.

“My plan is to be the best dad I can ever be to my kids,” Kevin wrote from prison in 2015. “I forever-long have been wishing for that day.”

At those times when I think forensic science might not yet be perfect, I am always reminded that neither is justice.

 

‹ EIGHT ›

Death, Justice, and Celebrity

In a civilized society, we tend to idealize or build up myths about people and their behavior … and what constitutes civilization. We like to think that famous people have exceeded the ordinary in some important way, that they have achieved some higher plane of civilization and are somehow pulling us forward with them. But civilization is an extremely thin veneer. There's no difference between us and the people two thousand or four thousand years ago. We just make more laws, have keener tools, and conceal our violence with more class and finesse.

ALHAMBRA, CALIFORNIA. MONDAY, FEBRUARY 3, 2003.

Some time after sunset, Phil Spector—the music mogul, the puny genius, the onetime wunderkind who now wore wigs to conceal his baldness and high-heeled shoes to conceal his shortness—walked out of his lonely Jazz Age mansion to find someone, anyone, in the hollow light of another indifferent Los Angeles Sunday night.

Spector hated being alone, not just in his empty castle on the hill. In his life, too. He sometimes raged at being left alone, and he'd go to profound lengths to keep people in his orbit. In his sixty-five years, he'd amassed a fortune by producing a soundtrack for two generations, from the Righteous Brothers to the Beatles to the Ramones. His “Wall of Sound” made him famous and kept many people close. He was a Rock & Roll Hall of Famer. He partied with Jagger, Dylan, Bono, Springsteen, Lennon, Cher, and all the rest. His power and his money attracted many more, although he had no friends, no confidants. Oh, there'd been a couple of wives and many lovers, even a few children. But none ever stayed.

His chauffeured black Mercedes, with a little red devil air freshener hanging from the rearview mirror and vanity plates that purred “I
♥
PHIL,” waited at the foot of his splendid back terrace, on the piazza by the fountain. Adriano, a computer scientist in his native Brazil but a limo driver in LA, opened a rear door for his boss, who wore a cool rock-star mane and a white ladies' dinner jacket over white slacks and a white shirt, part Gatsby, part Gollum.

Adriano drove Spector to Studio City to pick up an old friend for a long dinner, nothing romantic, at The Grill on the Alley in Beverly Hills. It worried his date when he ordered a couple of daiquiris before dinner, partly because he'd been on the wagon for most of the past ten years, and partly because she knew he took a complex cocktail of mood-altering prescription drugs to regulate his bipolar disorder, seizures, and insomnia, but she didn't say anything. She didn't say anything either as he flirted with their waitress. That was Phil, always seeking new satellites to draw into his orbit.

After a few hours, Adriano and Spector dropped his friend back at her house, then sped back to The Grill around eleven p.m. to pick up the waitress for a night on the town. They went to a nightclub called Trader Vic's, where Spector drank 150-proof tequila and more daiquiris, then on to Dan Tana's for more drinking at his usual table near the back. After one-thirty a.m., Spector left a five-hundred-dollar tip on a fifty-five-dollar tab, and they decamped in Spector's limo to another nearby club, the House of Blues on Sunset Boulevard.

A drunken Spector and his star-struck waitress headed right up to the Foundation Room, where all the Hollywood celebrities partied, away from the little people. But hostess Lana Clarkson, a tall, strikingly beautiful blonde who'd been working at the House of Blues only a month, stopped him at the door.

“Excuse me, ma'am, you can't come in here,” she said before her supervisor pulled her aside and whispered that was no woman, but the multimillionaire, multi-platinum music producer Phil Spector, who was a big tipper.
Treat him like gold,
the bouncer said,
like he was fucking Dan Aykroyd.

Red-faced, Clarkson immediately escorted Spector and his date to the best open table.

Despite the embarrassing moment at the door, Spector was smitten again. At closing time, around two a.m., when his waitress-date ordered only water, he called for his driver to take her home. He ordered a Bacardi 151, straight up, while he flirted with another cocktail waitress and kept an eye on Clarkson, who cruised through the room, tidying things, pulling out chairs for customers, snatching empty glasses off tables, making small talk.

“She won't stay still,” he observed to his new waitress about Clarkson. “She's like fucking Charlie Chaplin.”

Maybe because she needed this job. At forty, Clarkson was an actress who hadn't had any good roles in too long. Six feet tall and still gorgeous, she stood out in this Hollywood crowd, especially after last call. She'd been somebody once, at least in B-movie cult circles, for her starring role in Roger Corman's
Barbarian Queen,
but that was nearly twenty years ago. She'd broken both wrists in an accident a few years before, the roles mostly dried up, and she grew depressed. She contented herself with the occasional commercial and the fawning fans at little comic-cons. At the moment, she worked for nine bucks an hour just to pay the $1,200-a-month rent on her 454-square-foot bungalow in Venice Beach and for a few expensive personal habits like fashionable clothes and prescription painkillers. If she lived on the edge, it was the far edge.

Spector invited his waitress to come home with him, and she made up a story about an early appointment the next morning. He needed somebody else to go back to his empty castle with him, so he invited Clarkson over to his table for a drink. She cleared it with her boss—conversation was allowed, but no drinking—and sat down with the odd little man after her shift ended.

Spector asked her if she wanted to see his castle. She did, of course, but she couldn't risk losing her job by getting too cozy with a customer. Instead, she asked him for a ride to her car. So he left another extravagant tip, $450 on a $13.50 tab, and called his driver.

At the employee parking garage, standing outside his limo, Spector continued to beg Clarkson, like a child.
Just one drink! Let's go to the castle!
Finally she relented and climbed back into the Mercedes. A little abashed, she told Adriano she was just going for one drink, but Spector barked at her, “Don't talk to the driver! Don't talk to the driver!”

On the half-hour drive back to Spector's opulent mansion, called Pyrenees Castle—literally a thirty-three-room turreted castle and wooded estate built in the 1920s amid the winding streets of Alhambra, an otherwise humdrum LA suburb—they petted, giggled, and watched an old Jimmy Cagney movie,
Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye,
in the back of the limo.

Around three a.m., Spector and Clarkson went inside while Adriano parked near the fountain and settled in until he had to take Clarkson home. It might be a while.

Two hours later, about five a.m., Adriano heard a pop. Not an explosion or loud bang. Just a muffled pop. He got out of the car and looked around. Seeing nothing, he got back in the car.

In a moment, Spector opened the mansion's back door, and Adriano got out, ready to take Miss Clarkson home. He saw his boss wore the same clothes but had a stunned look on his face—and a revolver in his hand.

“I think I killed somebody,” Spector said.

Behind Spector, Adriano could see a woman's legs splayed out. When he looked closer, he saw Clarkson slumped in a chair, her long legs stretched out in front of her. Blood spattered her face and ran down her front.

“What happened?” Adriano asked, stupefied.

Spector shrugged and said nothing.

Adriano freaked. He ran back to the car and drove to the main gate, where he fumbled with his cellphone in the glow of the dashboard. He didn't know the address or Spector's number or anything. His fingers trembled as he punched buttons. His first call was to Spector's secretary, whose number was programmed into the phone. When she didn't answer, he left a message and dialed 911.

At 5:02 a.m., the police dispatcher picked up and asked why he was calling.

“I think my boss killed somebody.”

Why did he think there'd been a killing? the dispatcher asked.

“Because he have a lady on the … on the floor,” Adriano explained in his agitated, halting English, “and he have a gun in … in his hand.”

*   *   *

Police found Clarkson's corpse slouched in a fake Louis XIV chair near the back door. Her legs were sprawled out in front of her, with her left arm at her side and her right draped over the chair's arm. Her leopard-print handbag was still slung on her right shoulder, its straps twisted around the chair's arm. Blood and other matter had spilled from her mouth and nose and cascaded down the front of her little black dress.

On the floor under her left calf was a bloody .38-caliber, six-shot Colt Cobra revolver, with five live rounds and one spent cartridge under the hammer. Blood had congealed on its wooden grips, trigger guard, barrel—in fact all over … but it appeared to have been wiped clean. A bit of Clarkson's front tooth—actually a cap—had lodged in the gun's front sight, and other tooth fragments were scattered on the floor.

Within arm's reach beside her was an ornate bureau, its top drawer open. Inside was a holster that fit the Colt Cobra.

On a matching chair nearby was Spector's leather briefcase, which contained, among other things, a three-pack of Viagra in which only one pill remained.

Soft, romantic music was still playing in the background. The adjoining living room was lit only by candles on the fireplace mantel. A Picasso hung on one wall, a drawing by John Lennon on the other. An almost-empty bottle of tequila and a brandy snifter with some kind of liquor in it sat on the coffee table.

In a nearby bathroom, cops found another brandy snifter and a pair of false eyelashes atop the toilet tank. On the floor, they found a cotton diaper soaked with blood and water.

In the master bedroom upstairs, a detective found Spector's white jacket, with a couple of small bloodstains and flecked with almost invisible blood specks, crumpled on the closet floor.

A deputy coroner from Los Angeles County arrived around five-thirty p.m., more than twelve hours after the shooting. Flies had already laid eggs in one of the dead woman's ears and in the clotted mess on her chest.

A dead actress. Shot in the mouth. In the wee hours. At a super-celebrity's mansion.

Lawyers and reporters would be crawling all over this one, so there was no room for error at autopsy. But the coroner's office had plenty of experience with these kinds of high-profile cases and knew the drill.

The next morning, Deputy Coroner Dr. Louis Pena performed the autopsy. Lana Clarkson died from a single gunshot wound to her head and neck. A copper-jacketed .38-caliber bullet entered through her mouth, gouged the top of her tongue, ripped through the back of her throat, completely tore her spinal cord from her brain stem, and lodged in the base of her skull.

The instantaneous disconnection of her spinal cord from her brain meant Clarkson could do nothing at the moment of impact except die. Her heart stopped beating, she stopped breathing, every nerve went dead, every muscle went limp. Her brain lived long enough to consume whatever oxygen it contained, but she wasn't likely conscious.

The bullet traveled straight back and slightly upward. The revolver's recoil shattered her two front incisor teeth, both recently capped. Dr. Pena found a bruise on the left side of Clarkson's tongue not caused by the bullet but possibly by the barrel being forced into her mouth. He found other bruises on her hands, wrist, and forearm consistent with a struggle.

She had enough alcohol in her system to make her drunk, plus traces of the powerful painkiller hydrocodone and antihistamines. Her purse contained a number of prescription and nonprescription drugs, including cold medicine and medication for herpes.

The crime scene yielded more evidence, although it was as confounding as it was lurid.

On the floor, police found a cracked acrylic nail from her right thumb.

Criminalists found a mixture of Spector's and Clarkson's DNA all over the place: on the pair of false eyelashes in the bathroom, on the brandy snifters, on the mansion's back doorknob and latch, and in the blood they swabbed from both of Clarkson's wrists.

Clarkson's blood was on the stairway banister and the diaper found in the second-floor bathroom, although it had been diluted with water in some spots. The mist-like spatter and bloodstains on the jacket's left cuff, left elbow, pocket, outside right-front panel, and inside the left-front panel were Clarkson's, too, but they weren't massive.

Criminalists found Spector's DNA on Clarkson's left nipple but not in her vagina. They also found Clarkson's DNA on Spector's scrotum, suggesting she had performed oral sex on him. They found none of Spector's DNA under her fingernails.