He played an iconic cop on TV. Did Robert Blake get away with murder? 11%
By Christopher Goffard18%
7/30/2026, 3:00:00 AM
BS Summary: This article contains 35 faulty reasoning types, including Appeal to Emotion, Self-Serving Bias, and Anecdotal, with Negativity Bias as the most egregious example at 13.7% saturation with 336 hits. Analysis detected 2,453 faulty-reasoning hits from 2,453 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 26.5% and a BS Rank of 11% (20,109 of 22,361 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 89.90% of the article peer group.
On the night of his new wife's murder, Robert Blake took her to dinner at Vitello’s Italian Restaurant in Studio City.
It was a place where diners squinted at fading celebrity glossies on the wall and said, “Isn’t that the guy who—?”
By May 2001, the 67-year-old actor was becoming one of those hard-to-place faces.
People who watched television in the 1970s had seen a lot of him.
He’d been a regular on "Hollywood Squares," a frequent guest on "The Tonight Show," and — most influentially — one of the decade’s coolest make-believe cops.
As plainclothes detective Tony Baretta, he swaggered through four gritty seasons in muscle shirts and a newsboy cap, with a snappy street patter and a pet cockatoo.
It won him an Emmy in 1975.
Blake later claimed to despise the job as a waste of the serious talent he should have used in film.
His most acclaimed performance had been in the 1967 adaptation of "In Cold Blood."
With unsettling realism, he played Perry Smith, a rootless misfit from an alcoholic home who participated in the robbery-turned-murder of the Clutters, a Kansas farm family.
“I thought Mr.
Clutter was a very nice gentleman,” Blake says in the film.
“I thought so right up to the time I cut his throat.”
Blake portrayed Smith as a man doomed from the start.
In a memoir, he wrote of how intensely he identified with the character: “Perry and I were intertwined like vines over the same grave.”
But the actor never found an equal role, partly because his talent was married to a deep self-destructive streak.
His public persona was a volcanic, semicrazy tough guy who said just what he thought and hated the Hollywood game.
He spoke of his love-starved childhood, of a mother who never touched him and a dad who locked him in closets.
“I would stop on the freeway with a baseball bat and start screaming and yelling at somebody over nothing, and I never understood it,” he told an interviewer in the early 1990s.
“I spent my whole life not knowing why I did crazy things.”
He was born Mickey Gubitosi in New Jersey and had grown up on movie sets, appearing regularly in the "Our Gang" shorts at age 5 and later in scores of films.
But he behaved as if he’d spent a childhood surviving hardscrabble East Coast streets and was scornful of bourgeois diction.
He loved to talk like the men he played.
“I invented that terrible, tough, mean Baretta character to keep people away from me,” he said.
“I didn’t want no love to come in.”
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 "Judgment Day: The John List Story," based on the true story of an accountant who had murdered his family.
“There were times when I could have done such terrible things that I could make John List look like Donald Duck,” he told a Times reporter, adding, "You know, I have never met a murderer in my life.
That's because there ain't any.
There are people who crossed the line.
Some of us don't cross the line."
By the time he met Bonny Lee Bakley at a Burbank jazz club in 1998, he was divorced, with grown children, and "very much a loner" who "didn't have much of a life," he later recalled.
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.
His last film role had been as the sinister Mystery Man, with a vampire pallor and no eyebrows, in David Lynch's dreamlike 1997 thriller "Lost Highway."
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.
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.
He saw the promise of someone who would service him sexually and disappear.
“There aren’t many women who will simply just sleep with you and get back on the bus, if you know what I mean," he said.
"With Bonny, pathetically, a part of me required that — that ‘help me make it through the night and I’ll see you later.’”
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.
On the night he took her to Vitello's, Blake parked his Dodge Stealth a block and a half away, in the shadows behind a huge commercial garbage bin — 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.
He had been married to Bakley, 44, for half a year.
They took a corner booth.
By Blake’s 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.
A man who lived in the neighborhood, Sean Stanek, would recall a pale, “whacked-out” Blake pounding on his door and screaming, "You've gotta help me!"
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’s behavior, saying he sat on the curb while others stayed with Bakley as she died.
She was buried at Forest Lawn near Griffith Park.
Blake held their 11-month old daughter by the graveside.
Bakley's family boycotted it as a staged PR event.
They did not buy his story.
Detectives quickly determined that Blake’s 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’d been at target practice.
The big break came 10 days after the slaying, when a veteran Hollywood stuntman, Gary McLarty, whose industry nickname was “Whiz Kid,” limped into the LAPD’s North Hollywood station.
He said he worked with Blake in the old days on "Baretta" but hadn't 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.
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 "pop" her.
By the stuntman's account, Blake took him to the Mata Hari Ranch and suggested he might slip into Bakley's guest house and "bump her off while she was asleep" for $10,000.
McLarty said he refused.
Retired LAPD detective Ron Ito, the lead investigator on the case, told The Times that McLarty’s 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.
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’s.
He, too, said no.
“I think [Blake] used these people knowing they had some history,” Ito said.
“And if they do tell the police or anybody else, they may not be believable because of their past life.”
Detectives came to believe that Blake pulled the trigger himself, after unsuccessfully approaching five people to do it for him.
In the media, Blake’s lawyers skillfully demonized Bakley as a "star stalker" 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's troubled son, Christian Brando, who once told her that “somebody’s gonna put a bullet in you.”
“For an entire year, we heard about how awful she was,” said Allison Weiner, a journalist who covered the case.
“It’s 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.”
Despite what people say in jury selection about their ability to remain fair, Weiner said, “Nobody in the town lives in a vacuum.
She was unsympathetic, which is probably a mild word for it.”
It took 11 months for the LAPD to charge Blake with his wife’s murder.
Cops had been to 20 states and interviewed more than 150 people.
No small part was eliminating suspects who might want Bakley dead.
“No other case in the Department’s history has required such extensive travel,” the LAPD wrote.
Blake’s motive, authorities said, was to win custody of his daughter from a woman whose lifestyle he found abhorrent.
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’s acquittal for double homicide, but for prosecutors and detectives, the humiliation was fresh.
So was skepticism that a celebrity, even at Blake's modest level, might be convicted of first-degree murder in Los Angeles.
(Detectives thought of the Blake case as a kind of “Off-Broadway O.J.,” according to Miles Corwin, a journalist embedded with the LAPD’s robbery-homicide unit at the time.)
The trial lasted 12 weeks.
Prosecutors called 74 witnesses, but no one could put the murder weapon in Blake’s hand.
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.
“I thought they were both so full of it, it was unbelievable,” 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.
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.
“My whole life is a blessing, for all the times I should have been dead or not even born.”
He said he was broke.
“Right now, I couldn’t buy spats for a hummingbird.”
He said he wanted to do “a little cowboyin,’” explaining, “Cowboying 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.”
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.
He was on "Larry King Live" two months later, deriding his detractors.
“There’s a whole litter of lunatics out there, pig-face bags of rat guts that are telling all kinds of lies,” he said.
“And the media’s soaking it up.”
What about Rosie, now 4?
Blake's grown daughter was raising her.
“I get to have all the gravy, but I don’t have to get up at 3 in the morning,” he said.
Eric Dubin, a young attorney representing Bakley’s 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’s motive that they acquiesced to the harsh portrayal of the victim.
“They traded a motive for a victim,” Dubin recently told The Times.
“I would do press conferences, and the questions were always the same.
‘Isn’t Bonny garbage?’
I would always just respond by saying she was a mother of four that didn’t deserve to be shot in the head.”
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.
His peculiar patter was in full swing.
Death was “the wrong end of the dirt” and jail “the cement box.”
He testified that when he came upon his dying wife, he had remarked, “Wake up, toots.”
He clearly hated Dubin, calling him “Junior,” “Chief” and “Sonny.”
At one point, as Dubin recounts in his memoir "The Star Chamber," Blake said, “Don’t get cute with me, Chief. ...
I know a lot about you, and what I don’t know, I can lie about.”
At another point, Blake grew overtly threatening.
“If some people don’t 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.”
Bubba was “a textbook Blake word,” Dubin said.
“He literally talked like Baretta.”
Apart from his disastrous testimony, Blake could not produce the three Vitello’s employees who, he claimed, saw him return to the restaurant to retrieve his gun while someone else shot his wife.
Blake’s attorney depicted Bakley as a neglectful mother, a writer of antisemitic letters and a scam artist sunk in “pornography, prostitution and fraud.”
But jurors found he “intentionally caused” her death and gave Bakley’s children $30 million, which a judge later cut in half.
Part of it went into a fund for Rosie, one of the named plaintiffs.
Blake died of heart disease at age 89, in 2023.
“If 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, ‘Yeah, I did it,’” Dubin said.
“He saw it as, ‘This little girl can’t be raised by Bonny Lee Bakley.’”
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