The Peculiar Truth about the TV Star Murder Case

• May 4, 2001, Studio City, CA: Actor Robert Blake took his wife, Bonny Lee Bakley, to dinner at his favorite place, Vitello’s Restaurant on Tujunga Avenue. He ate a pasta dish named after him.

• After the meal, they walked to Blake’s ten-year-old Dodge car that was parked one and a half blocks away on a side street. Then Blake realized he had left his gun in the restaurant, so he walked back to Vitello’s to get it.

• When he returned to his parked vehicle, he found Bonny in the passenger seat critically injured from a gunshot wound to the head.

• The 67-year-old movie and TV star, famous for roles as both a killer and a cop, was later deemed the prime suspect in his wife’s murder. The subsequent investigation became a media sensation.

• Blake’s birth name was Michael ‘Mickey’ Gubitosi; born in 1933 in New Jersey. His Italian mother pushed him into vaudeville in infancy, and later they moved to Los Angeles. When their boy was cast in the popular Our Gang movies, they changed his name to Bobby Blake.

• He grew up in the movie business. Blake appeared with Humphrey Bogart in the film Treasure of the Sierra Madre and other classics.

• 1967: Blake’s star rose higher with his dramatic portrayal in the movie version of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood.

• From 1975-78, he starred on television as Baretta, a street-wise, undercover New York City cop with a pet cockatiel. He used the catchphrase ‘Don’t to the crime if you can’t do the time.’ Blake appeared often on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson.

• His first marriage to actress Sondra Kerr ended in 1983. Blake was alone for years after that.

• 1999: Adrift from show business and approaching age 70, Blake frequented a jazz club in Los Angeles. That was where he encountered Bonny Lee Bakley. The New Jersey girl was 23 years his junior when they met.

• At age 16, she dropped out of high school to pursue a modeling career. She had been married 9 times prior to meeting Blake. Bakley had a criminal record for drug possession and passing bad checks.

• Throughout the 1990s, she ran a ‘lonely hearts’ scheme in which she mailed nude photos of women, sometimes herself, to men willing to pay. One year prior to meeting Blake, she was arrested in Arkansas for possession of multiple driver’s licenses and Social Security cards that she illegally used as part of her mail-order business. Her operation was so profitable that she owned multiple homes, including one in Los Angeles.

• Friends claimed Bakley was starstruck and vowed to marry a celebrity. She chased after several famous men, including Gary Busey, and latched onto Marlon Brando’s son, Christian, while he was in prison. Brando had been convicted of manslaughter for the death of his half-sister’s boyfriend. Bakley turned her lonely hearts grift on him, too, so that when he was released in 1996, she was waiting for him.

• In 1999, Bakley began dating Robert Blake while she was still seeing Christian Brando. Then she became pregnant with what she believed was Brando’s child.

• She was mistaken. A paternity test proved that Blake was the father.

• Robert Blake offered to marry Bakley under the condition that if she ever wanted a divorce he would keep the child. They were wed on October 4, 2000.

• She and the baby lived on his property, but the married couple didn’t sleep together. Blake distrusted her. He hired a detective to check her background, something he probably should have done prior to their wedding, and discovered she was still conducting her fraudulent lonely hearts business.

• Their marriage lasted only seven months until she was killed.

• On the night of the murder, Blake ran to a stranger’s apartment door and begged for him to call 911. No eyewitnesses saw Blake return to Vitello’s to get his handgun, although he did run back to the restaurant after the shooting discovery to seek help.

• The murder weapon was found in a dumpster directly next to where the Dodge was parked. Fingerprints had been smeared off the pistol. Tests concluded, however, that it was the weapon that killed Bonny - not Blake’s gun.

• A year passed before Blake was arrested. Then he went to trial.

• Prosecutors called two witnesses to make their case. They were former stuntmen from the TV series Baretta. According to their testimony, Robert Blake solicited them to kill his wife. They showed a $25,000 bank withdrawal that they claimed Blake was going to offer for the job. The defense labeled them drug abusers.

• The jury spent nine days deliberating the case. Due to lack of evidence, they found Blake not guilty.

• Later that year, Bonny Bakely’s family filed a wrongful death civil suit, which Blake lost. He was ordered to pay $15 million. That bankrupted him.

• Robert Blake’s career was over, and his daughter stopped addressing him as her father.

• He died in 2023 at age 89 and proclaimed his innocence to the very end.