Pizzas galore!

Then again, Spector was also covered in blood: and he was holding a gun - a gun that did not belong to Clarkson, but which he kept in his own home.

Still, what do such details matter in a multimillion dollar Hollywood trial?

Spector’s ex-girlfriends were a prosecution highlight: the old stories of jealousy, gunplay and rage. All of which amounted to just that: ex-girlfriends’ stories - familiar to anyone who had picked up Rolling Stone in the past thirty years. Still, the climax of the testimony - six answering machine messages left by Spector in 1993 for an ex-girlfriend he had just allegdly chased down his driveway with a pistol - was genuinely frightening. “I expect a return call, but careful what you say to me,” Spector could be heard saying. “Nothing you say to me is worth your life.”

Will the jurors suffer any psychological damage as result of this trial? If they do, it will be more likely a result of starring at the defendant for six months than starring at that blown-up image of Clarkson slumped in her chair, bag still in her shoulder, as if she was ready to get up and leave. Spector was easily the more ghoulish, the more terrifying sight. Take, for example, the hair. Spector might have pleaded not-guilty, but at 9am every morning, for six months, his hair seemed to make a separate case for the insanity defence. For a while it seemed as though there were two people on trial: the man, and his wig. To make matters worse, Spector kept applying some kind of pale cupcake batter his face. He didn’t so much look tired - he looked as though he hadn’t been to bed since 1964.

On one memorable occasional, Spector appeared to have recently plugged himself into the electricity grid: his hair seemed to be trying to escape from his face, trying to get far away as possible from its owner and his lifestyle of castles and guns and Monday mornings spent drinking and picking-up depressive cocktail waitresses on Sunset Boulevard. But for the most part Spector just looked sad and ridiculous.

And that is what remains the most striking thing about the Phil Spector case: he is still the only person on Earth who understands what happened on that cold, bloody morning of February 3.

Then again, perhaps he doesn’t. Perhaps, after so many years of lunacy, he is as much of a stranger to himself as he is to his adopted sons, whom he allegedly isolated and abused when they were children. One of them, Louis, actually turned up to the trial. His mother is Veronica “Ronnie” Bennett, former lead singer of The Ronettes - Spector’s ex-wife, the one who was ‘kidnapped’ in her own home and shown the glass coffin. Louis hadn’t seen his father for years.

Will he popping over to Pyrenees Castle now that a mistrial has been called?

We can only wonder.

Six months ago, there was some expectation in the press corps that the Spector trial might at least produce some dark humour. But the laughs never came. In fact, the trial quickly became a sideshow - a news-in-brief to the lead items about Paris Hilton and the iPhone. That’s the thing about madness: it gets repetitive quickly. Repetitive, and sad. Spector had once been a punchline in the ‘most bizarre’ lists: the frazzle-haired has-been who romped around his mansion in complete darkness, wearing only a batman suit; the 5’5” nerd who was once accosted and urinated on by a street gang, inspiring a life-long obsession with bodyguards and guns.

But in the end, there was no irony; no rock-‘n’rock swagger. Only silence and madness. And a picture of a woman from below the knees, her shoes black and shiny and studded with rhinestones, which glittered in the flash of the forensic photographer.

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