Phil Spector: Five Decades Of Crazy

The testimony in the Phil Spector case took an unforeseen break today, as defence attorney Bruce “Murder on Their Minds” Cutler has fallen ill. (In other news, high stress and hopelessness have been proven to wreak havoc on the immune system.) While we wait for the next disturbing chapter to play out on the witness stand, Radar Online provides a handy chronological compendium of half a century’s worth of Phil Spector’s patented brand of violent, gun-brandishing batshit insanity. It makes for stunning reading, beginning with a possibly formative 1958 incident in which the producer was urinated on by four pranksters in a public toilet, continuing to his days of fatherhood in the 1970s, when he’d allegedly lock his sons in their rooms, occasionally allowing them out so he could blindfold them and subject them to humiliating sex acts. Here’s an entry about former wife Ronnie Spector née Bennett, the lead singer of The Ronettes:

1968 – Mrs. Spector later describes having been a virtual prisoner in the producer’s mansion, around which he is said to have built walls in order to keep his significant other significantly trapped. He is also purported to lead his mother-in-law to his basement where he keeps a glass coffin, telling her that if his wife ever leaves him he will kill her and exhibit her corpse there á la Snow White.