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<\/a> <\/p>\nIn this series, Christopher Goffard revisits old crimes in Los Angeles and beyond, from the famous to the forgotten, the consequential to the obscure, diving into archives and the memories of those who were there.<\/p>\n
\u201cI invented that terrible, tough, mean Baretta character to keep people away from me,\u201d he said. \u201cI didn\u2019t want no love to come in.\u201d<\/p>\n
He dropped in and out of show business, and his occasional reemergence was cause for a profile. In 1993, he starred in the CBS thriller \u201cJudgment Day: The John List Story,\u201d based on the true story of an accountant who had murdered his family. <\/p>\n
\u201cThere were times when I could have done such terrible things that I could make John List look like Donald Duck,\u201d he told a Times reporter, adding, \u201cYou know, I have never met a murderer in my life. That\u2019s because there ain\u2019t any. There are people who crossed the line. Some of us don\u2019t cross the line.\u201d <\/p>\n
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Bonny Lee Bakley, Blake\u2019s second wife, was a small-time scam artist. Defense attorneys vilified her as a \u201cstar stalker.\u201d <\/p>\n
(DMV)<\/p>\n
By the time he met Bonny Lee Bakley at a Burbank jazz club in 1998, he was divorced, with grown children, and \u201cvery much a loner\u201d who \u201cdidn\u2019t have much of a life,\u201d he later recalled. <\/p>\n
He shot pool now and then at the Playboy Mansion, collected guns, dyed his white hair jet-black and trundled out anecdotes of Old Hollywood over three-hour lunches. He called his home the Mata Hari Ranch.<\/p>\n
His last film role had been as the sinister Mystery Man, with a vampire pallor and no eyebrows, in David Lynch\u2019s dreamlike 1997 thriller \u201cLost Highway.\u201d <\/p>\n
Bakley was 23 years younger than Blake, a small-time hustler who sold dirty photos of herself to old men and ran a lonely hearts scam. She had a criminal record for mail fraud. She sought out celebrities to seduce, once aiming for Elvis. In Blake, she found a lonely D-lister.<\/p>\n
The night they met, they had sex in the back seat of his car even before they could get to her room at the Holiday Inn. She ran an asset check. He had $8 million. <\/p>\n
He saw the promise of someone who would service him sexually and disappear. \u201cThere aren\u2019t many women who will simply just sleep with you and get back on the bus, if you know what I mean,\u201d he said. \u201cWith Bonny, pathetically, a part of me required that \u2014 that \u2018help me make it through the night and I\u2019ll see you later.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Now they had an infant daughter, Rosie. A DNA test proved his paternity, and he married Bakley in a small ceremony. He complained that she had trapped him. But he had come to love the baby, and he allowed his new wife to stay in his guest house.<\/p>\n
On the night he took her to Vitello\u2019s, Blake parked his Dodge Stealth a block and a half away, in the shadows behind a huge commercial garbage bin \u2014 a fact that detectives would find suspicious. Blake was a familiar presence at the restaurant, whose menu featured a $12.95 fusilli dish named after him. <\/p>\n
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Robert Blake at Vitello\u2019s in 2005, after jurors in his civil case visited the Studio City restaurant. His wife was shot to death down the block. <\/p>\n
(Mike Meadows \/ Associated Press)<\/p>\n
He had been married to Bakley, 44, for half a year. They took a corner booth. By Blake\u2019s account, they finished dinner and were walking back to his car when he realized he had left his .38 Special Smith & Wesson at the restaurant (he carried it to protect her, he said). He doubled back to retrieve the handgun, he claimed, and returned to find her in the passenger seat, bleeding from the head.<\/p>\n
A man who lived in the neighborhood, Sean Stanek, would recall a pale, \u201cwhacked-out\u201d Blake pounding on his door and screaming, \u201cYou\u2019ve gotta help me!\u201d <\/p>\n
Stanek hurried to the car and found Bakley choking on her blood, with a bullet wound in her face. Witnesses would note the oddness of Blake\u2019s behavior, saying he sat on the curb while others stayed with Bakley as she died.<\/p>\n
She was buried at Forest Lawn near Griffith Park. Blake held their 11-month old daughter by the graveside. Bakley\u2019s family boycotted it as a staged PR event. They did not buy his story.<\/p>\n
Detectives quickly determined that Blake\u2019s handgun was not the murder weapon, which turned out to be a Walther P38 9-millimeter pistol that had been dumped in the big commercial trash bin. Blake had gunpowder residue on his body, which he explained by saying he\u2019d been at target practice.<\/p>\n
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<\/p>\n
Blake\u2019s defense attorney, M. Gerald Schwartzbach, left, marks the position of the trash bin where the murder weapon was found. <\/p>\n
(Kevork Djansezian \/ Associated Press)<\/p>\n
The big break came 10 days after the slaying, when a veteran Hollywood stuntman, Gary McLarty, whose industry nickname was \u201cWhiz Kid,\u201d limped into the LAPD\u2019s North Hollywood station.<\/p>\n
He said he worked with Blake in the old days on \u201cBaretta\u201d but hadn\u2019t seen him in years, when out of nowhere the actor sought a meeting. The stuntman had a bad hip, his hearing was going, and he needed money. <\/p>\n
He was comfortable around guns and once shot a house guest to death in what he called self-defense. He thought Blake wanted him for bodyguard work. Instead, the stuntman said, Blake complained about how his wife was taking advantage of him. He wanted someone to \u201cpop\u201d her.<\/p>\n
By the stuntman\u2019s account, Blake took him to the Mata Hari Ranch and suggested he might slip into Bakley\u2019s guest house and \u201cbump her off while she was asleep\u201d for $10,000. McLarty said he refused. <\/p>\n
Retired LAPD detective Ron Ito, the lead investigator on the case, told The Times that McLarty\u2019s story checked out, detail after detail. He said Blake used a prepaid phone card to call McLarty but was careless enough to do it from his home landline. <\/p>\n
Another aging stuntman, Ronald Hambleton, a former meth user who had done jail time, also said that Blake asked him to shoot his wife, proposing numerous scenarios, including an ambush outside Vitello\u2019s. He, too, said no. <\/p>\n
\u201cI think [Blake] used these people knowing they had some history,\u201d Ito said. \u201cAnd if they do tell the police or anybody else, they may not be believable because of their past life.\u201d <\/p>\n
Detectives came to believe that Blake pulled the trigger himself, after unsuccessfully approaching five people to do it for him. <\/p>\n
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<\/p>\n
Blake with his attorney Thomas Mesereau Jr., at left, at Los Angeles Superior Court for a pretrial hearing in 2003. <\/p>\n
(Nick Ut \/ Associated Press)<\/p>\n
In the media, Blake\u2019s lawyers skillfully demonized Bakley as a \u201cstar stalker\u201d and a conscienceless scam artist who had fleeced men all over the country and made countless enemies, many of them possible killers. One of her lovers was Marlon Brando\u2019s troubled son, Christian Brando, who once told her that \u201csomebody\u2019s gonna put a bullet in you.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cFor an entire year, we heard about how awful she was,\u201d said Allison Weiner, a journalist who covered the case. \u201cIt\u2019s hard for a jury to convict when they feel no empathy for the victim. They dirtied up the victim and made her repugnant to the jury.\u201d<\/p>\n
Despite what people say in jury selection about their ability to remain fair, Weiner said, \u201cNobody in the town lives in a vacuum. She was unsympathetic, which is probably a mild word for it.\u201d<\/p>\n
It took 11 months for the LAPD to charge Blake with his wife\u2019s murder. Cops had been to 20 states and interviewed more than 150 people. No small part was eliminating suspects who might want Bakley dead. \u201cNo other case in the Department\u2019s history has required such extensive travel,\u201d the LAPD wrote.<\/p>\n
Blake\u2019s motive, authorities said, was to win custody of his daughter from a woman whose lifestyle he found abhorrent.<\/p>\n
The case unfolded in the long shadow of the O.J. Simpson debacle. By the time Blake went on trial, nearly a decade had passed since Simpson\u2019s acquittal for double homicide, but for prosecutors and detectives, the humiliation was fresh. So was skepticism that a celebrity, even at Blake\u2019s modest level, might be convicted of first-degree murder in Los Angeles. (Detectives thought of the Blake case as a kind of \u201cOff-Broadway O.J.,\u201d according to Miles Corwin, a journalist embedded with the LAPD\u2019s robbery-homicide unit at the time.)<\/p>\n
The trial lasted 12 weeks. Prosecutors called 74 witnesses, but no one could put the murder weapon in Blake\u2019s hand.<\/p>\n
![\"In](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/1785408992_739_.jpeg\")
<\/p>\n
Robert Blake and defense attorney M. Gerald Schwartzbach in Los Angeles Superior Court. <\/p>\n
(Associated Press)<\/p>\n
Defense attorneys depicted the two stuntmen as heavy drug users with a tenuous grasp on reality. McLarty was forced to admit that he had been hospitalized for a drug-induced breakdown and that his delusions included the fear that police were tunneling under his home.<\/p>\n
\u201cI thought they were both so full of it, it was unbelievable,\u201d a juror said afterward. While Blake had a few particles of gunshot residue on his body, a defense expert said he would have had much more on his hands if he had been the triggerman.<\/p>\n
In March 2005, Blake was acquitted. He stuck a cigarette in his mouth and walked outside to greet the media. He gave a rambling, joking victory speech. <\/p>\n
\u201cMy whole life is a blessing, for all the times I should have been dead or not even born.\u201d He said he was broke. \u201cRight now, I couldn\u2019t buy spats for a hummingbird.\u201d<\/p>\n
He said he wanted to do \u201ca little cowboyin,\u2019\u201d explaining, \u201cCowboying is getting in a motor home or a van or something like that and you just let the air blow in your hair and you wind up in some little bar in Arizona someplace.\u201d<\/p>\n
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<\/p>\n
Acquitted of murder, Robert Blake cuts off his electronic ankle bracelet outside the Municipal Courthouse in Van Nuys.<\/p>\n
(Ric Francis \/ Associated Press)<\/p>\n
He had worn an electronic ankle monitor since his release on $1.5 million bail in 2003. Now, someone passed him wire cutters, and he sliced it off for his lawyer to hold up victoriously.<\/p>\n
He was on \u201cLarry King Live\u201d two months later, deriding his detractors. \u201cThere\u2019s a whole litter of lunatics out there, pig-face bags of rat guts that are telling all kinds of lies,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd the media\u2019s soaking it up.\u201d <\/p>\n
What about Rosie, now 4? Blake\u2019s grown daughter was raising her. <\/p>\n
\u201cI get to have all the gravy, but I don\u2019t have to get up at 3 in the morning,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Eric Dubin, a young attorney representing Bakley\u2019s four children in a civil suit against the actor, sat through the criminal trial and took careful notes. He wanted to avoid the mistakes he thought prosecutors had made, chief among them, in his view: They were so eager to show Blake\u2019s motive that they acquiesced to the harsh portrayal of the victim.<\/p>\n
![\"Robert](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/1785408995_505_.jpeg\")
<\/p>\n
Blake kisses attorney M. Gerald Schwartzbach, who raises the actor\u2019s discarded ankle monitor in victory. <\/p>\n
(Nick Ut \/ AP)<\/p>\n
\u201cThey traded a motive for a victim,\u201d Dubin recently told The Times. \u201cI would do press conferences, and the questions were always the same. \u2018Isn\u2019t Bonny garbage?\u2019 I would always just respond by saying she was a mother of four that didn\u2019t deserve to be shot in the head.\u201d<\/p>\n
At the civil trial in Burbank, just months after the criminal acquittal, Dubin grilled the 72-year-old actor on the stand for seven days. Blake was, by turns, crude, evasive, combative and menacing.<\/p>\n
His peculiar patter was in full swing. Death was \u201cthe wrong end of the dirt\u201d and jail \u201cthe cement box.\u201d He testified that when he came upon his dying wife, he had remarked, \u201cWake up, toots.\u201d<\/p>\n
He clearly hated Dubin, calling him \u201cJunior,\u201d \u201cChief\u201d and \u201cSonny.\u201d<\/p>\n
At one point, as Dubin recounts in his memoir \u201cThe Star Chamber,\u201d Blake said, \u201cDon\u2019t get cute with me, Chief. … I know a lot about you, and what I don\u2019t know, I can lie about.\u201d<\/p>\n
At another point, Blake grew overtly threatening. \u201cIf some people don\u2019t learn to behave themselves, I will enter their lives and teach them some manners. I will find them and become their personal bubba and no longer hold back.\u201d<\/p>\n
Bubba was \u201ca textbook Blake word,\u201d Dubin said. \u201cHe literally talked like Baretta.\u201d<\/p>\n
Apart from his disastrous testimony, Blake could not produce the three Vitello\u2019s employees who, he claimed, saw him return to the restaurant to retrieve his gun while someone else shot his wife.<\/p>\n
Blake\u2019s attorney depicted Bakley as a neglectful mother, a writer of antisemitic letters and a scam artist sunk in \u201cpornography, prostitution and fraud.\u201d <\/p>\n
But jurors found he \u201cintentionally caused\u201d her death and gave Bakley\u2019s children $30 million, which a judge later cut in half. Part of it went into a fund for Rosie, one of the named plaintiffs. <\/p>\n
Blake died of heart disease at age 89, in 2023.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you honestly would have the opportunity to talk to Robert Blake and ask him the question, and he had full immunity of all ramifications this world and the next, he would look you in the eye and say, \u2018Yeah, I did it,\u2019\u201d Dubin said. \u201cHe saw it as, \u2018This little girl can\u2019t be raised by Bonny Lee Bakley.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On the night of her murder, Robert Blake took his new wife to dinner at Vitello\u2019s Italian Restaurant…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":968871,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[5123],"tags":[389060,12934,1582,276,6517,52809,389063,2961,4530,224,5337,2089,9620,389062,6475,3546,389061,6620,248208,1628],"class_list":["post-968870","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-los-angeles","tag-bakley","tag-blake","tag-ca","tag-california","tag-case","tag-detective","tag-gary-mclarty","tag-la","tag-lapd","tag-los-angeles","tag-losangeles","tag-man","tag-murder","tag-new-wife","tag-night","tag-people","tag-stuntman","tag-time","tag-true-story","tag-year"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/117008572700780678","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/968870","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=968870"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/968870\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/968871"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=968870"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=968870"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=968870"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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