LOS ANGELES — It's been nearly two decades since Lana Clarkson, the statuesque sword-wielding star of "Barbarian Queen" and other action films by Roger Corman, was murdered by songwriter and music producer Phil Spector at his sprawling faux French chateau in Alhambra known as the Pyrenees Castle.
For most of that time — even as Spector's defense team portrayed Lana, a striking 40-year-old, as an over-the-hill B-movie actress so despondent about her career prospects that she took her own life in a stranger's foyer — her grieving mother, Donna Clarkson, kept her silence.
"They would manipulate the truth," Clarkson, who sat through two agonizing trials before Spector was ultimately convicted in 2009, told the Los Angeles Times. "It was so hard not to raise my hand during the trials and just say, 'Excuse me, may I clarify this?' Because I knew the things that they were saying were not true. I wanted to set the story straight."
