LOS ANGELES — A forensic pathologist hired by Phil Spector's defense insisted Thursday that the music legend's well-documented history of threatening women with guns did not change his opinion that actress Lana Clarkson killed herself.

During an intense two-hour cross-examination, Dr. Werner Spitz maintained that none of the evidence prosecutors assembled against Spector — including the fact that Lana Clarkson was shot with his gun and a chauffeur's claim that the famed producer said, "I think I killed somebody" immediately after the shooting — affected his finding that she died by her own hand.

"None of these items change my opinion or are even able to somewhat sway my opinion," he said.

After listening to a prosecutor detail four incidents in which Spector menaced women with guns, Spitz said, "What occurred 10 or 12 or 15 years earlier has little, if anything, to do with what happened on that day ... in the presence of the scientific findings which require no other interpretation."

The pathologist said his conclusion was based on physical evidence from the Feb. 3, 2003, shooting, including an absence of blood, tissue and gunpowder on Spector's pants and shoes. He said that if the producer fired the .38-caliber weapon, such material would have been present.

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Spitz, the second forensic pathologist to testify for the defense at Spector's murder trial, conceded that small droplets of blood on the producer's evening jacket were likely spatter from the gunshot blast. But, he said, Spector could have been standing up to 6 feet away.

Deputy District Attorney Alan Jackson ridiculed this claim, saying the distance required blood spatter to change course in midair and then "decide" to strike only Spector's jacket and not anything surrounding it. He noted that blood spatter on Clarkson, who died in a chair in Spector's foyer, only extended to the hem of her dress.

"Mr. Spector was so unlucky that he happened to be standing in the one spot 6 feet away that every single impact spatter hit him, and nothing hit the ground in front of him, the carpet, nothing," Jackson said incredulously.

"When you say all of that, it sounds like you have a bucket full of (blood)," replied Spitz. He joked that the questions reminded him of the "magic bullet" theory in one of his previous cases, the Kennedy assassination.