Jurors tour Spector’s Alhambra mansion

The jury in the Phil Spector murder trial toured the music producer’s Alhambra home Thursday, with four jurors trying to re-create the aftermath of actress Lana Clarkson’s shooting death there four years ago.

Twelve panel members and six alternate jurors walked through the expansive hilltop mansion, which dominates a modest middle-class neighborhood.

Spector, casually dressed in a long-sleeve blue T-shirt, sweat pants and sandals, welcomed them to his Pyrenees Castle, as a sign outside identified the house.

For months, jurors have heard descriptions of the property and seen photographs. This was the first, and only, scheduled visit by the panel to the site.

Dozens of local police and sheriff’s deputies mobilized to keep the news media and spectators away as Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Larry Paul Fidler, lawyers and other court personnel watched.

Neighbors were annoyed by helicopters buzzing overhead and by barricades set up on surrounding streets to divert traffic to provide security.

“It sure disrupts things early in the morning,” said Monique Choi, a resident taking a morning walk.

Longtime resident Robert Miranda said he was given no notice of the road closures.

“That’s the least they could have done,” he said as he drove around a dozen television vans.

The tour signaled a winding down of the trial, which began April 25. Next week, jurors will return to the courtroom to hear what is expected to be the final witness for the prosecution, a woman who has said Spector threatened her at gunpoint. Four other women have also testified to similar threatening acts by Spector.

Prosecutors allege Spector, 67, a legendary producer who worked with Ike and Tina Turner, the Beatles and the Righteous Brothers, shot Clarkson when she tried to leave his home Feb. 3, 2003. The defense argues the 40-year-old actress took her own life.

During the tour, several jurors sat in a car parked in the courtyard, where Spector’s driver was parked when the fatal shot was fired. The chauffeur, Adriano DeSouza, testified that Spector emerged from the mansion holding a handgun and said, “I think I killed somebody.”

The defense attacked the chauffeur’s statements, contending that Spector’s voice could have been drowned out or distorted by the noise from a nearby fountain. The defense also suggested DeSouza had the doors and windows closed when Spector spoke to him. DeSouza testified that he got out of the car when he saw Spector.

Jurors submitted 10 questions to Fidler, including a request to sit in the car with the doors closed and the air conditioning on. Fidler denied that request, saying the car, a Ford Crown Victoria, may have a different air-conditioning system than the one in Spector’s Mercedes-Benz.

Every room that jurors toured contained enlarged photos of the area they were viewing so the panel could match up the images presented during testimony with the crime scene. There were also several bloody photographs of Clarkson’s body slumped in the mansion’s foyer.

Four jurors sat in the chair in the foyer, trying to assume the same position Clarkson was found in the night she died. Clarkson was shot through the mouth. The chair was said to be a replica of the one in which she died.

Jurors saw little evidence of Spector’s storied career in the music business other than a poster on a living room wall with John Lennon’s name and coffee table books about Elvis Presley and his Graceland mansion. One of the books was about the songwriters who wrote for Presley.

Jurors asked to see the room where Spector’s blood-spattered jacket, which he was wearing the night of Clarkson’s death, was found. They were told that area was off limits.

Panel members also requested a reenactment of the fatal gunshot, asking if someone could close the doors and set off a loud noise inside while they waited outside. They also asked if someone could stand in the doorway and speak in a normal voice. After conferring with the lawyers, the judge rejected both requests.

After touring the home for a little more than an hour, the jurors returned to the downtown Los Angeles courthouse. During a brief discussion with lawyers before the jurors filed in, Fidler denied that he had allowed Spector’s defense team to choose the reporter who joined the jury tour.

After the defense objected to any reporters accompanying jurors, Fidler ruled that only one media representative could attend. The judge said he later agreed to ask defense attorneys about the possibility of adding another journalist but in the end decided to stick with the single reporter elected by the trial press corps, Linda Deutsch of the Associated Press.

On Wednesday, a court spokesman said that Spector’s lawyers had objected to allowing additional reporters from The Times and from Court TV, saying their reportage had “not been favorable.” Several journalists had complained that the defense was dictating coverage of a public trial.

The Spector defense “is not making the ruling,” Fidler said. “The ruling had already been made.”

john.spano@latimes.com