After Hollywood publicist Ronni Chasen was shot five times on the way home from the Burlesque premiere, it seemed unlikely they’d catch the killer.  But then when a suspect committed suicide while police searched his apartment a few weeks later, it seemed like an open and shot case (get it? You can even use that one, NY Post).  Now that more details about the dead man are coming to light, his involvement in the murder seems less certain.  For one thing, the suicide weapon and the murder weapon were two different guns, and since the guy was known to live in a squalid, $625-a-month hellbox, it’s hard to believe he could afford two.

Officers approached [Harold Martin] Smith after someone phoned a tip into the TV show “America’s Most Wanted.”
At least one resident of the apartment building from which he was being evicted told reporters that Smith had bragged about the killing, though others thought he had mental issues and could not have carried out the homicide.
He had a long criminal history and carrying a gun could have landed him back in prison. [AP]

Let’s just say you were the guy who killed the publicist, and you knew of this crazy guy who owned a gun illegally and might kill himself to avoid going back to prison.  Say you called the cops and told them he’d been bragging about the murders, they showed up to search him, and he killed himself.  Pretty brilliant cover up, no?  Maybe the autoerotic asphyxiation ninjas are real.

And now that I think about it, “Harold Smith” sounds like the fakest name ever.

(One way or another, the Sheik would have what she was having)

An international press junket for Katherine Heigl’s The Ugly Truth at the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills had to be moved after a bomb threat emptied the building.

So what did Sony execs do? Shepherd all the junketeers including the movie stars and the Hollywood Foreign Press Association from the green median on Burton Way across the street to the nearby restaurant Il Cielo — and set up the junket there until the hotel gave the all-clear signal. As my source emailed, “Publicists never give up.” [DHD]

Meanwhile, terrorists are lazy, apparently.  The people who made The Ugly Truth and a room full of publicists?  Talk about a missed recruiting opportunity.  Deliver that bomb via a white guy with dreadlocks listening to techno in his car and trust me, the whole world would ululate as one.