Nino Tempo, a musician who met Spector in 1960 and was a witness at his wedding to Rachelle, said the producer was surprised when a younger woman showed interest in him, and he came to rely on her.
"With the weight of the trial, no one could be on top of his game, and Rachelle has been there to support Phil with every aspect of his daily routine," Tempo said. "He needed her."
It was the thought of her husband trying to care for himself in prison that made her weep at the verdict, she said. "I didn't think he'd last a week. He's a real small and fragile man," she said.
Rachelle Short grew up in Beaver Falls, Pa., a Rust Belt town of 9,000 north of Pittsburgh.
She tried college and worked as a model, but after a few years, she decided to pursue a singing career in Los Angeles. She was waiting tables at Jerry's Famous Deli in 2003, when on an evening off, she and Spector crossed paths at Dan Tana's, the clubby West Hollywood Italian restaurant where he was a regular.
"I had no idea who he was," she recalled. Her musical tastes ran toward hard-core rock acts like Marilyn Manson, and she had never heard of the "Wall of Sound" style that brought Spector renown four decades before.
She said she was attracted to older men in general, and Spector's intelligence and humor in particular. He stood accused of murder, but she knew little about it. "I didn't watch TV because I wanted to be out accomplishing things," and after she got to know him she didn't care.
"That man couldn't hurt a fly," she said. They married three years later in the run-up to his first murder trial.
"I said, 'Oh, Chelle, are you sure?' I questioned her, but she said she was,' " said her mother, Karen Murdock.
During both trials -- the first ended in a hung jury -- five women testified that Spector had pulled guns on them when he was drunk. From her seat in the front row of the courtroom, Rachelle Spector listened to their testimony and dismissed them.
"I don't believe any of it," she said. In their time together, she said, Spector never became mean or displayed any weapons. (A prosecutor at both trials, Alan Jackson, said in response: "It's worth noting that once he was arrested and the house was searched every gun inside was seized.")
Married in foyer
She fully embraces the theory put forth by the defense and rejected by a jury that Clarkson took her own life as she sat in a chair in the entranceway of Spector's home.
