House where Phil Spector killed Lana Clarkson

On the night of February 3, 2003 — the same date, forty-four years later, that Buddy Holly died in a plane crash — record producer Phil Spector brought actress and model Lana Clarkson home to his mansion at 1700 Grand View Drive in Alhambra after she finished her shift at the House of Blues on Sunset Strip. Some time in the early hours of the morning, a gunshot was fired in the foyer of the house, and Clarkson was found dead with a bullet wound to her mouth. Spector told his driver, 'I think I killed somebody.' He was convicted of second-degree murder in 2009 and sentenced to 19 years to life in prison. He died of COVID-19 in January 2021 while incarcerated.

Spector had purchased the 28-room castle-like estate — known as the Pyrenees Castle, built in 1925 in a romanticised European style — in 1998 for $1.1 million. It sat on approximately 2.7 acres of hillside land in Alhambra, a city in Los Angeles County. The property had the gothic grandeur that suited Spector's self-mythology: he was the man who invented the Wall of Sound, who produced the Beatles and the Righteous Brothers and Ike and Tina Turner, who had become one of the most powerful and feared figures in the music industry, and who had spent decades becoming increasingly reclusive, erratic, and dangerous.

The Pyrenees Castle sold in 2021 for approximately $3.3 million after being listed at $5.5 million. The new owners have made changes to the property. The address sits in a quiet residential area of Alhambra, and the castle's distinctive turrets are visible from the surrounding streets — an incongruous piece of European fantasy in suburban Los Angeles, now permanently associated with one of the most notorious crimes in music industry history.