After six months, 77 witnesses, and enough transcribed testimony to the fill the Library of Congress - not to mention the 600 pieces of meticulously catalogued crime scene evidence - you would have thought that we would know more by now about Phil Spector, and the act of madness that resulted in his trial on a single charge of second-degree murder.

But we know nothing: or at least as close to nothing as makes no difference.

And after last night’s collapse of the 67-year-old music producer’s trial, with the jury declaring after 42 hours of deliberations over 12 days that they were unable to reach a verdict, it is hard to see how that will ever change. Never will we get a clear glimpse through the mist of blood that fell over ‘Pyrenees Castle’ - Spector’s gothic mansion in the Los Angeles suburb of Alhambra - between the hours of 3am and 5am on February 3, 2003, when a failed B-movie actress called Lana Clarkson died of a point-black gunshot wound to the face.

Over the course of the 191 days that have elapsed since the jury of 9 men and 3 women were selected, Spector - the man who still earns millions from his ‘Wall of Sound’ recordings; who taunted, out-drank and scared John Lennon; who promised to bury his ex-wife alive in a glass coffin if she ever slept with Keith Richards - said nothing. Not a note, not a peep - not a single doo-wap-a-diddy-doo-doo. Spector’s extraordinary pre-trial claim to Esquire magazine that Clarkson “kissed the gun” remains his most expansive comment on the shooting to date. Those words suggest he considers Clarkson’s death not just tragic, but somehow erotic: part of a private, fantastical sex-game. They bring to mind Spector’s 1962 single He Hit Me (It Felt Like A Kiss), which, much to the maestro’s surprise, failed to catch on with the public. His next effort was more successful: Be My Baby, which opens with the line: “The night we met I knew I needed you so/And if I had the chance I’d never let you go.”

In the end, of course, Spector did offer two other words about Clarkson’s death: ‘not guilty’. Nevertheless, no detailed explanation was ever offered as to how a cocktail waitress from the House of Blues could arrive at his home alive, and leave a few hours later in a black bag with no teeth and a bullet-hole in her face. Neither were any details offered by Spector’s defence team.

Spector’s celebrity defence team did what celebrity defence teams do - they offered vague theories, dark suggestions, but nothing that could ever be deemed worthy of the term ‘explanation’. Clarkson was a drunk and a failed actress, the defence insinuated. She was depressed; she was too old to get acting parts (she was 41); she had written about killing herself in her diary; she was taking prescription drugs; she had been told where Spector’s gun was kept. Some of this was true: before her death, Clarkson had been so desperate for money and for work that she had fabricated letters of praise for her awful Lana Unleashed showreel from TV executives (the showreel was shown to jurors - by the defence).

“You’ve done it, kid!” read one of references, under the fake letterhead of Marc Hirschfeld, a senior casting executive at NBC. “I would never say that,” Hirshfeld later shrugged to the jury.

The obvious conclusion, said the defence, was that Clarkson had chosen Pyrenees Castle as the venue for a Hollywood noir suicide. And yet this theory always had the sound of mobster logic: the accidental plunge into the vat of concrete; the tragic mishap with the bath of acid and the baseball bat.

But it appealed to the jury’s imagination. The claim that she had been given a new acting gig days only before her death was quickly forgotten when it was suggested that she had been left in tears by a rebuff from the Transformers director Michael Bay at a Hollywood Hills party. At times, it was as though the jury was being read the screenplay for a David Lynch movie: Mulholland Drive 2, perhaps. The death of Clarkson was presented by the defence as a tragic mystery, a whydidshedoit. All the while, Spector - perhaps the only eye-witness - sat there and said nothing. Beside him was his unlikely wife, the 27-year-old singer/actress Rachelle Spector, whose topless portrait once appeared in Playboy magazine.

All the defence ever needed was one juror; one person whose definition of ‘reasonable doubt’ was more scientific than another’s; one person who didn’t feel all that sorry for the alleged victim.

Which was precisely what happened: except the defence didn’t get one juror, they got two - or, at least, this is what analysts have surmised from the 10:2 deadlock result. The prosecution said they would go for a retrial, but given the cost of mounting another trial, Spector’s lack of a criminal record, and the heavy reliance of circumstantial evidence, a plea-deal seems more likely, perhaps avoiding prison time. Also likely is a wrongful death lawsuit by Clarkson’s family in civil court for tens of millions of dollars in damages.

It was, in many ways, an extraordinary trial: six months of highly-technical testimony, amid closed-door accusations of stolen crime scene evidence and other defence skullduggery (all of it denied). The jurors received gruesome lessons on gunshot dentistry, blood-spatter patterns, explosives residue, and a hundred other terms straight out of an episode of CSI: Miami, only without the plot and the snappy dialogue. The prosecution must have wept themselves to sleep at night. Here was a man, famous the world over for drunken gunplay, and there wasn’t a living single witness to declare that, yes, Spector shoved the gun down Clarkson’s throat and, yes, he pulled the trigger. The best witness they ever had was a driver who heard Spector ‘confess’ to his crime ( “I think I killed someone”). But there was a problem with this driver: when he called 911, the operator couldn’t understand why he was wailing hysterically about a ‘Seal Inspector’. With a Brazilian accent, ‘Phil Spector’ sounds a lot like ‘Seal Inspector’. The defence team threw up their arms. “I think I killed someone”; “I think someone was killed”. How could anyone trust this man?

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