Phil Spector’s wife has called for a fresh appeal over his murder conviction of actress Lana Clarkson.
The move comes after Rachelle Spector saw the new David Marnet HBO dramatisation of the case. She believes some of the forensics evidence presented in the film, Phil Spector, will help her prove her husband, played by Al Pacino in the TV movie, did not pull the trigger of the gun which killed Clarkson at his Alhambra, California mansion in 2003.
She told Entertainment Tonight: “They (viewers) can clearly see by the lack of any blood on his white jacket that he wasn’t even near her when the shot was fired. There is absolutely no way he was even close to her when the shot was fired.”
In the film, which was screened in the US on Sunday (March 24), Spector’s attorney Linda Kenney Baden, portrayed by Dame Helen Mirren, suggests the producer would have had to be at least 10 feet (three meters) away from the pistol – and therefore he couldn’t have pulled the trigger. She also hints that Clarkson accidentally shot herself while playing with one of Spector’s guns. Following the screening Rachelle Spector added: “People are walking away thinking he was railroaded and is an innocent man.”
He was convicted of second-degree murder in 2009, and subsequently sentenced to 19 years to life in prison. He has appealed on a number of occasions but failed on every attempt.
Friends of Clarkson, recently protested outside a screening of HBO’s dramatisation of the event. Clarkson’s former publicist Edward Lozzi says he has seen the film and claims the narrative focuses too strongly on Spector’s defence and the suggestion that he is, in fact, innocent, with Clarkson taking her own life.