Forensics expert Werner Spitz, who has said that police investigating the death of Lana Clarkson were so convinced it was murder from the word go that they failed to see that all the evidence actually pointed to a self-inflicted shooting, came under stiff cross-examination from prosecution lawyer Alan Jackson yesterday, he being keen, of course, to show that the reason the prosecution have pursued a homicide case from day one is because it was, in fact, homicide.
Spitz is one of the experts being presented by Phil Spector's defence team in a bid to convince the jury that, as Spector claims, Lana Clarkson shot herself. The prosecution, of course, claim Spector pulled the trigger.
Spitz did concede that when, on Wednesday, he said all the evidence pointed to "suicide", he should have been more careful with his terminology - that is to say that he couldn't be sure of Clarkson's intentions, but he was sure she shot herself (ie it may be, as has been suggested earlier in the case, that Clarkson did not intend to kill herself, but that she pulled the trigger by accident - what some might called "accidental suicide"). Spitz told the court: "My opinion as rendered was correct... [but] I would not say she committed suicide. I would say she shot herself".
But elsewhere in Jackson's long drawn out questioning of Spitz the expert stood his ground - that the blood spatters on Spector's jacket did not mean he was necessarily within 2-3 feet of Clarkson as the gun went off, as the prosecution claim. And at one point Spitz took issue with Jackson's referring to the blood spatter in question as "all the spray", remarking: "When you say 'all', it sounds like you have a bucket full of stuff. He has 18 spots and some are where he wiped something".
Jackson repeatedly returned to the fact that Spitz is being paid by the defence for his forensics work, and is therefore ultimately being employed by Spector himself, a fact Jackson hopes might make the jury question the expert's reliability as an independent witness. At one point, acknowledging his questioning was going on a bit, the lawyer joked: "Well, this is another 5,000 dollars for you", to which Spitz replied: "Mr Jackson. I've got plenty of money. The only thing I don't have is time".
The case continues.
Meanwhile, one of our Californian readers would like to point out that when we refer to Spector's "Beverly Hills" mansion we are wrong because the legendary producer's home is in Alhambra, which as anyone who has ever been to California (ie not me) will tell you, is 45 minutes away from Beverly Hills. So it's a bit like me referring to his "Hampstead home" if he actually lived in Chiswick. Consider our geographical slip up corrected! Though "Beverly hills castle" sounds much more dramatic than "Alhambra residence".