A Hollywood Mystery

A famous Actor is accused of murder. A victim with a sleazy past. A media circus and a Hollywood mystery worthy of an Agatha Cristie novel. In a nutshell that was the story of the Robert case. A case that left everyone wondering who killed Bonnie Lee Bakely and started the saying that if you kill your wife in Hollywood you don't have to go to jail you only have to pay a fine. And between Robert Blake and OJ Simpson there seems to be some truth to the saying. This case had it all and illustrates the sordid side of celebrity.

On a Friday evening in Studio City California Robert Blake and his wife of two months Bonnie Lee Bakely head to his favorite restaurant, Vitellos. The customers there are mainly show business people. He has his favorite there named after him, Fusilli Minestra alla Robert Blake. Blake parks a block and a half from the restaurant. They stroll to Vitellos and walk in where everyone knows him as he has been coming there for over twenty years. They take a booth and he introduces them as his new wife. After dinner at around 9:30 PM they say goodnight. Then movie director Sean Stanek hears some commotion and his doorbell ringing.

When he opens the door he hears there is Robert Blake in an absolute panic. As Stanek calls 911 Blake explains that his wife has been beaten and needs an ambulance. There is mass confusion and hysteria. Sean Stanek had heard some rumors about Blake that he had a temper and the first thing he thought was that he beat his wife up and was now freaking out about it. The 911 operator asks if Bonnie is conscience and Stanek asks Robert to which he replies no. They then ask if she is breathing and again he asks Blake to which he replies he doesn't know. The 911 operator says someone is on the way. Blake then pulls Stanek outside towards the car.

Blake then takes off and Stanec asks him where he is going and Blake replies he is going to get help. Blake goes back to Vitellos and asks if there is a Doctor there and in the next breath asks someone to call the police. Meanwhile Stanek tends to Blake's wounded wife. He tries to illicit some sort of response from her and there was nothing. He asks her to squeeze his hand and still nothing. He says she was gurgling and the back of her head was completely drenched in blood. It is far worse than Stanek expected. He saw a bullet hole right in her right cheek. As the paramedics arrive the drama only intensifies. Stanek goes over to comfort Blake and he is sitting on the curb after throwing up.

Several witnesses at the scene would later say that although Blake was shaking violently and crying in a guttural voice it seemed like an act to them. Stanec says he didn't see a single tear on the actor's face. When the North Hollywood Detectives arrive on scene the called Hollywood special which is part of Robbery/Homicide. The camera's are rolling as police question the frazzled actor. Blake, who has a license to carry permit, explains that he had taken his revolver to the restaurant with him but had taken it out of his waistband and had inadvertently forgot it at the restaurant. He remembered it when he and Bonnie got to the car and went back to the restaurant to get it. That's when Bonnie was murdered.

The Detective asks him if he has the weapon on him and Blake hands the weapon over. It is a Smith and Wesson 38 special. From the start there seems to be only one suspect in there sights. Police fan out from the crime scene and search for evidence. After all when a spouse is killed nine out of ten times it is the other spouse who is responsible. Although it had been years since Robert Blake had been in the limelight, Robert Blake was about to go center stage in the performance of his life. Hours after the murder of Robert Blake's wife Bonnie Lee Bakely Detectives are still struggling to piece together what happened on that dark Studio City Street. They knew that it was going to be a pretty time intensive case because an Actor's wife.

They have a woman shot twice at close range and they have her husband carrying a gun. The common assumption is that if a woman is killed and she is not raped or robbed it's either the husband or boyfriend. Blake does have a history of domestic violence against his first wife. Suspicion only mounts when his clothing comes back from the lab with gunshot residue all over it. By the time of Bonnie's funeral a few weeks later public sentiment is squarely against the former TV Star. Every leading news show was covering the case. The fascination with Bonnie's murder was unexplainable but it was massive. Robert arranged for her to be buried at Forrest Lawn Cemetery but the family declined as they didn't want her buried next to the man they thought had killed her.

Blake attends the funeral holding Rosie, the infant Daughter he had with Bonnie. But the question remained: Why would Robert Blake want to kill his new wife? While a search for hard evidence continues on the streets of Studio City the Detectives look into the couples marriage. From what they learned of the relationship it appeared he had motive. It was a sham marriage. They didn't even sleep together and Blake was making fun of her to his friends. Robert didn't want the existence of the relationship to be public and to that end the marriage was confidential. Bonnie made it clear that she wanted to be married to a star. She was, in fact, a huge celebrity wanna be. She wanted to be a part of Hollywood. She had even gone so far as to claim she had had a baby by Jerry Lee Lewis.

Her only goal in life it seemed was to land a famous man. And Robert Blake had been famous since he was six years old. He started his career back with the Our Gang Comedies. He was a Hollywood kid and one of the original Little Rascals. He was the sole supporter of his family and was resented by his Father who made less money than the boy actor did. He claimed that he was the victim of substantial physical and mental abuse from his parents. He said that his Father would lock him in a closet and that his Mother didn't protect him in any way. Over the next several decades Blake developed into a serious actor. He gave a truly inspired performance in Truman Capote's masterpiece In Cold Blood. Being cast in that role by famed Director Richard Brooks and endorsed by Capote was the highpoint of Blake's career and probably of his life.

He used to always say that we all make choices and he made the right ones but he could understand how someone could make the choice to kill. One of his best friends was Natalie Wood who had known him since they had been child actors together. She would loyally invite him over to party with her when most others would not. The role he was most famous for was as Tony Baretta the cop show where he always had a cockatoo on his shoulder. That TV series took his career to new heights and earned him an Emmy. Like the character Baretta who was always emotionally on edge, Blake had a reputation for being unpredictable and as often as not, not knowing where to draw the line. He used to appear on Johnny Carson and say some pretty outrageous things. He always played a tough street guy as if to say "screw with me at your own risk" but the writer and director of Baretta never really thought that was him.

How ironic that a tough guy like Robert Blake would fall prey to a celebrity hunter like Bonnie Bakely. The Mother of four lived in Arkansas but she regularly come to LA, take a room at the Holiday Inn near Universal Studios to be near where the action was. Bonnie Lee Bakely found her man in 1999 when she went to a birthday party for Chuck McCann, who was an actor friend of Robert Blake's, at an LA Jazz club. She met Blake and they seemed to hit it off and in fact had sex that night in his car while it was parked in the parking lot of the Jazz club. No one said anything bad about Blake since it takes two to Tango. Tom Mesereau, Blake's Attorney says if you look at her goal to track down a celebrity one could assume she got pregnant on purpose to force Blake to marry her. Robert Blake was incensed at this.

Bakely had told Robert Blake that she was on the pill. Around that time Bakely began secretly recording phone messages between the two of them. On the recordings you can hear Blake say that she is nothing but a rotting stinking dirty liar and that she deliberately got pregnant to force him to marry her. He also says that she wanted Robert Blake's child for whatever weird twisted reason and that was all on her and she would have to live with that. He did try to pay her off but she would have none of it, she wanted a famous husband period. When she gave birth back in Arkansas she listed the Father on the birth certificate as Marlon Brando's son Cristian, whom she had been dating when she met Blake. According to friends, Blake's Paternal instincts kicked when after Rosie was born and he fell in love with the little girl.

It wasn't clear who the father really was for a while after the child was born because Bonnie was two timing both of them. A DNA test was finally conducted to see who the Father really was and it of course turned out to be Robert Blake. Investigator find that Blake was determined to save Rosie from a woman he considered to be dishonest and conniving. When Bakely was living in Little Rock Arkansas when she was picked up for breaking her probation by flying out to California. She was in trouble with the law for credit card fraud and social security cards that were in different names in her possession. Blake had Bonnie fly out to LA under the guise of a reconciliation. When she got there he convinced his personal assistant to play with Rosie while they go to lunch. A few of Blake's friends show up and say to her that she is breaking her probation.

In other words Blake wanted his Daughter but not Bonnie. Blake's scheme works but only briefly. Her probation officer allows her to go back and get the baby. In fact, Robert Blake would have been guilty of parental kidnapping, which she filed with the LAPD had his plan worked. There was nothing Blake could do, he was trapped. If he wanted to save Rosie and be a part of her life, and have Bonnie drop the kidnapping charges against him, he would have to marry Bonnie. So she moved into Blake's guest house but according to her friends she never felt comfortable there. She believed that she was being set up to be murdered and she believed that Robert Blake was the one who was going to do it. She made it clear that even if she was murdered she would then be remembered as a celebrity.

The police make it no secret that they believe Robert Blake is the killer and the public agrees. Robert Blake and his team go public with the idea that the police and the public have rushed to judgement. Everyone wanted Blake to be guilty because it was shaping up to be OJ II and everyone knows what that debacle did to the television ratings. But in fact there was nothing there to support the idea that Robert had shot this woman, absolutely nothing. Three days after the murder and with the public ready to hang Robert Blake police make a press conference announcing that they have found the gun that killed Bonnie and it isn't Blake's. The Bonnie Lee Bakely murder mystery was becoming pretty good TV. Just when you thought you knew the real story, surprise the plot would make a left turn.

The police find the gun that killed Bonnie Bakely one day after her murder. At the bottom of a dumpster near the parking lot of Vitellos they find a Walther 9mm semi automatic pistol, the same caliber that killed Bonnie. Whoever had fired the weapon had covered it with oil so as to hide any fingerprints. The police try unsuccessfully to tie the murder weapon to Mr. Blake. Police search Robert Blake's house and take boxes of evidence but strangely only take Blake's records leaving all of Bonnie's records there for defense investigators to discover. The collect over twenty boxes of her contraband, for lack of a better term, complete with letters, files and documents. These files gave the defense a whole other story of who Bonnie Bakely was and it wasn't a pretty picture.

She was a grifter and a con woman who ran a lot of scams and had this amazing at home business that revolved around conning wealthy older men. As investigators dug into her past the dirtier things got. It is generally felt that most people would have disliked her as much as Blake apparently did. She put ads of herself in salacious poses in the backs of men's magazines and newspapers around the country and advertise this sexy woman barely clothed and convince men to write her letters. Pretty soon she would be writing them back or making phone calls to them developing relationships. Next she would start asking the men for money or to be put into their will and she would send them more pictures. For close to 20 years Bonnie had systematically bilked thousands of dollars in cash and money from unsuspecting men. Some she only took for twenty dollars but others for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Bonnie Lee Bakely was a completely amoral person. The defense found that she had been married 16 times none of which lasted. There were some suspicious situations where some of the men she married died pretty quickly after the marriage and then she would inherent their wealth. As the police are building their case against Blake and the media tries him in the court of public opinion, the defense puts the spotlight on Bonnie. To that end they distribute her criminal history to the press. If you knew the lifestyle of Bonnie Lee Bakely you had to assume there were a plethora of people out there who wanted revenge against her. This was a woman who led the kind of life must have had a ton of enemies out there who would be willing to kill her. This tactic of trashing the victim before the body is even cold infuriates Bonnie's family.

In her records that the defense has collected one message from Cristian Brando stands out. Cristian was the very handsome son of screen Legend Marlon Brando who was in prison for several years after agreeing to plead guilty to manslaughter for shooting the Father of his sister's baby who pushed her while she was pregnant. The message said basically said that if she kept up this lifestyle someone would eventually put a bullet in her head although he wouldn't be the one to do it. Apparently she took the warning seriously. In the last weeks of her life she actually believed that one of these men was going to kill her. Blake claims that shortly after she moved in a strange man had started casing his property. He was nicknamed buzzcut because of his haircut and on at least one occasion Robert went out to confront the man who took off as soon as Robert got near the car.

The defense investigated the whole issue and determined that buzzcut, whoever he was, was in fact trying to find Bonnie lee Bakely. Blake's private investigators try to locate this buzzcut fellow or any other suspect for that matter but they come up short. Neither their investigation nor the LAPD's seems to be going anywhere. For almost a year the case remained in limbo. But then, as in any good cop show, a surprise witness came to the rescue of the LAPD, or so they thought. Gary McLardy was a stuntman who had known Robert Blake for over 30 years and says he can't keep quiet any longer. He claims that Robert Blake took him to lunch and asked him to kill his wife. He says he shows McLardy pictures of Bonnie and explains that she was scamming him and that is what she is going to turn his Daughter into if she isn't stopped. He says Blake used terms like pop and snuff but he says he knew what Blake was talking about.

He further says that Blake tells him that he will leave the screen door open for him and he want McLardy to go inside and whack her. He said he told Blake that the woman never really did anything to him and that the two never really talked about it again. But McLardy isn't the only stunt man with a story to tell. Another stuntman associate of Blake's, Ronald Duffy Hambleton, recounts a similar story. He says Blake also asked him to kill his wife to the point where Duffy was concerned about him talking too loudly. He also says that he and Blake discussed several ways for the job to be done one of which was the dinner scenario where Robert would forget his gun and go back to the restaurant and that is when he could kill her. Whenever you are dealing with a high profile case all sorts of wackos come out of the woodwork trying to interject themselves into the drama. But these stuntmen seemed like the real deal and everyone knew that their testimony would be key in convicting Blake.

Hambleton tells police that he agreed to go along with Blake's plan but then realized that he couldn't go through with it. He also tells the police about Blake purchasing what he thinks is an untraceable, prepaid calling card at a local 7/11. Police go to the 7/11 and verify the purchase. Next they check phone records and verify that Blake had called both McLardy and Hambleton at a local pay phone using the calling card. The question then becomes why is Robert not calling these men on his regular phone or cell phone. And the only phone calls on the calling card are about 100 to Duffy and another 20 to McLardy and no one else. The evidence is damning but investigators know they will need more to guarantee a conviction. Duffy Hambleton offers up another tip. He says Blake had begun to withdraw large sums of cash from his bank which triggers a suspicious activity report with the bank. But whether he gave some of to the men he solicited to do the job no one really knows.

Blake's first wife, Sandra Kerr finally steps up and exposes a side oh the actor that police think and hope will be the final nail in Blake's coffin. She goes public and talks about Blake as a dangerous liar who on at least one occasion shot a gun at her. Circumstances that were eerily similar to what happened to Bonnie Lee Bakely. In April 2002 almost a year after Bonnie's death, Robert Blake is arrested. On that day the LAPD came right out and said they had solved the crime which was struck Blake's attorney, Tom Mesereau, as ludicrous. During his subsequent incarceration the 69 year old Blake turned into an old man. His hair was grey, he had lost a noticeable amount of weight, and his face was filled with wrinkles. After nearly a year in jail Blake appears at a preliminary hearing. His defense team doesn't pull any punches. The aggressive tactics work and Blake is released on $1,000,000 bail.

More than three years after the murder Robert Blake is going to trial. The prosecutor is up against the very best defense team money can buy. When you can afford to hire a team of attorneys and a team of investigators generally the odds shift to your favor. The prosecutor got right after Blake from the very beginning. But the whole scenario doesn't seem likely. In the short amount of time Blake had he would have had to kill Bonnie, soak the weapon in motor oil before throwing it in the dumpster, gotten all the oil off his hands and accomplish all of this before walking back to the restaurant. The defense not only strikes back with a vengeance but also manages to dismantle the state's star witnesses, Duffy Hambleton and Gary McLardy the stuntmen who said Blake had offered to pay them to kill Bonnie. It seems they had both abused cocaine and methamphetamines and McLardy had even done time on a drug charge.

He also admitted on the stand that he had a history of believing he was being watched and that he thought he could read peoples minds. With a background in gang cases, prosecutor Shelly Samuel's had won numerous convictions in a row but her snarling demeanor seemed to tick the Jury off. Some of them were even seen making faces at her behind her back. The prosecution' last hope is the gun shot residue found on Blake's clothes. But the defense is able to turn this against the prosecution. When someone has had a gun in their recent possession you are not supposed to do a gun shot residue test on that person as it proves nothing. As a concealed weapons permit owner and known to carry a gun wherever he went, which according to Blake was to protect Bonnie since he knew so many men were out to get her, gun shot residue would normally be all over his clothes and not just the ones he was wearing that night but all of his clothes.

Robert kept the majority of his guns, ten in all, in his drawers with his clothes so there would naturally be gun shot residue on his clothes. Robert Blake never testifies at his three month trial. After nine days of tension filled days of deliberation the Jury is ready with it's verdict. They find Robert Blake not guilty of the first degree murder of Bonnie Lee Bakely. At a news conference after the trial the defense team cuts off the monitoring bracelet and holds it high overhead in victory. But there was one last battle to be fought. Bonnie's family announced that they were filing civil charges against the actor for wrongful death. On September of 2005 Robert Blake's civil trial kicks off in Burbank California. Unlike a criminal trial the Jury only has to be 51% sure that the defendant is liable for the death to be found guilty. And unlike a criminal trial the defendant must take the stand.

Instead of the charming Robert Blake showing up as his old Baretta character Blake totally loses control. He was angry and would call the plaintiff's attorney, Eric Dugan, chief and a liar. He was on the stand for eight days. When asked finally if he killed Bonnie he lost all control and tries to come off the stand at the attorney but is stopped by four attorneys between him and Dugan. Needless to say Blake lost the law suit and Bonnie's family was awarded $30,000,000. The chances of ever collecting however are slim to none as Blake was broke after all his legal expenses and vowed to retire to Arizona to just rest out his days playing poker and hanging with some good old boys. It is ironic, however, that Bonnie finally achieved the fame she had always sought but only in death. As for Blake, he traded in celebrity for obscurity. So who killed Bonnie Lee Bakely? That's why this story is still a mystery.