Nicholas Hughes was killed by Sylvia Plath, his envious mother

The term "paranoia" originates from the Greek meaning madness or disorder of the mind. It is a chronic psychosis that is characterised by systems of delusion that nevertheless leave the intellect functioning. Most typically, the paranoid personality suffers from delusions of persecution. Throughout Phil Spector's arrest and subsequent trials for murder, he has insisted on his innocence, claiming that Lana Clarkson committed suicide because her career was at rock bottom.

Spector then went a step further, expressing his fury that Clarkson had done this to him. A transcript of Spector's statement at the time of his arrest records him describing Clarkson as "a piece of shit. And I don't know what her fucking problem was, but she certainly had no right to come to my fucking castle, blow her fucking head and (indecipherable) a murder." During his trial, Spector was shown photographs of Clarkson's blasted head and looked off into the distance, absorbed in himself, without showing any feeling.

The prosecutor in Phil Spector's retrial described him as a "very dangerous man who had a history of playing Russian roulette with women". Five women who had dated Spector - going back to the 1970s – testified that he had pulled weapons on them when they had refused his advances. Ronnie Spector, Phil's first wife until 1972, claimed that he threatened to kill her if she ever left him. John Lennon and Leonard Cohen, both produced by Spector, also had guns drawn on them.

Spector imagined that he had been targeted, as a friend of John Lennon’s

Apparently obsessed with guns, Spector used them to get his way and to establish ultimate power over others. Several weeks before the actress Lana Clarkson's murder in 2003, Spector described himself in an interview as "relatively insane" with a history of emotional turmoil and a bipolar disorder. While his career soared in the music industry, Spector was well known as a bully, provoking his business partners to leave him. For the last 25 years, since Spector was injured badly in a car crash, he has been a recluse in his mansion in Alhambra, an unprepossessing suburb of LA. Over this time, Spector has become increasingly frail. In court he has been described as looking like a crumpled "ventriloquist's dummy". There is also some evidence to suggest that he may have become increasingly paranoid.

Signs of Spector's paranoia became most evident during the course of his first trial when, vehemently defending his innocence, he suggested to friends that the case itself was the culminating chapter of a conspiracy against him going back to the 1960s. Spector imagined that he had been targeted for attack as an icon of counter-culture and a friend of John Lennon's. He also likened himself to Dalton Trumbo, a screenwriter abandoned by his friends during the McCarthy hearings, and to Albert Einstein who had to flee Nazi Germany as a suspected Jew.

Of course, if anyone threatens a lot of people with guns, they are most likely – even justified – in having paranoid fantasies. However, it is also possible that Spector's fascination with guns and his bullying behaviour were by-products of a paranoid part of his personality. Spector's father had committed suicide when he was nine years old. This would most certainly have traumatised Spector and made him feel extremely anxious about his masculine identification with his father as well as his feelings towards other men. His seemingly constant need to compel women to have sexual relations with him – with his gun – and not to leave him suggests a highly insecure masculine identity and may mask homosexual feelings that Spector was never able to reconcile within himself.

In his mind, Spector is the man who is plotted against and hated due to other people's envy of his phallic abilities. He is the one with the gun that can decide life or death. This is not only a possible reversal of Spector's impotence in the face of his father's suicide but it may also be an identification or remnant of the father he idealised and wished to be like yet who failed him in death. Spector's inevitable anger with his father for killing himself could also contribute to his paranoid feelings. Spector's insistence that Clarkson killed herself and his rage at her for doing so may also in some way be his bid for the sympathy that he never received as a child.

The irony is that, if Spector had pleaded "relatively insane", he might well have received a softer sentence in a psychiatric institution that would have also been considerably shorter than his prison sentence he is now likely to face. ·