The Long And Winding Road

I think it was the fault of an overzealous prosecution that Phil Spector's first trial for the murder of actress Lana Clarkson ended in a hung jury, but the second trial ended the way it should have. In fact, the only way it could have by any reasonable criterion. Spector was convicted of second degree murder.

He could have been convicted of manslaughter. Although he might legitimately be accused of murder in the first degree, the evidence was just not there.

Not too cold, not too hot. Not too hard, not too soft. Just right.

Now, the man who once held Dee Dee Ramone at gun point in a recording studio, the man who once fired a bullet into the ceiling during the course of a John Lennon recording session, the man who has pulled guns on countless female companions, and the man who kept his wife and sons, whom he allegedly subjected to sexual abuse, prisoners in their own homes, might well spend the rest of his life in prison.

In the meantime, I have to wonder if all of this is really the tip of a very large iceberg. Spector strikes me as one of these kinds of guys who might well get his jollies off the sport of luring unsuspecting young boys and girls, as well as desperate adults, would-be singers and actresses down on their luck and looking for their first break, or a way out of the prostitution hell-hole into which they slid from an ill-advised foray into hard-core pornography, drug addicted and desperate.

I can picture him subjecting them to humiliating torture and the vilest forms of degradation until he finally took their lives. How many victims breathed their last behind Phil Spector's soundproofed walls?

Nor do I suspect that Phil Spector is the only man of means capable of such inhuman cruelty. He just seems to stand out as the most likely of perpetrators, for obvious reasons. There are multiple people who like the sense of power over the weak and helpless, and the thrill it brings them to hold the power of life-and-death over their hands. For one brief second, Phil Spector, in the case of Lana Clarkson, held such godlike power. It might well indeed by the first time he actually took it to this extent, but I am reasonably sure the thought crossed his deranged mind on numerous occasions. Whether he actually acted on them before the night he killed Clarkson, we'll probably never know.

It is nice to know that he will never do it again.