Dying gasp may have spattered blood on Spector

ACTRESS Lana Clarkson may have breathed out blood that spattered on Phil Spector’s jacket with her dying gasp, a forensic pathologist told the music producer’s murder trial.

But Dr Werner Spitz said that would not change his opinion that Clarkson, 40, pulled the trigger.

Asked by the prosecutor how far a final gasp of blood might travel, Spitz said: “Just imagine yourself coughing, terminally expelling the last gasp. How far would that go? Two feet, three feet.”

But he objected to the prosecutor referring to “all the spray” landing on Spector’s jacket after the actress was shot through the mouth.

“When you say all, it sounds like you have a bucket full of stuff,” Spitz said. “He has 18 spots and some are where he wiped something.”

The cross-examination of Spitz by Deputy District Attorney Alan Jackson was the most caustic and lengthy of any confrontation with an expert so far in the Los Angeles trial.

Jackson returned several times to the theme that Spitz was being paid £2,500 a day by the defence and might not be giving an unbiased assessment of the evidence.

Spector, the 67-year-old music producer, is accused of murdering Clarkson, on February 3 2003, after she went home with him from her job as a nightclub hostess.

She was best known for her 1985 role in the cult film Barbarian Queen.

The defence says a depressed Clarkson killed herself and Spector was too far away to have pulled the trigger of the gun that went off in her mouth.