In Cold Blood, Part 2

By Howard Chua-Eoan Sunday, May 13, 2001
    • "Do not speak ill of the dead" is an ancient axiom. But there were few good words said of Bonny Lee Bakley, 44, after she was shot in the head in a car outside Vitello's Italian restaurant in Studio City, Calif. Gold digger. Star stalker. Con artist. Grifter. Those were the polite descriptions. Bakley was the mother of two girls born out of wedlock: a seven-year-old who she claimed was fathered by rock-'n'-roll legend Jerry Lee Lewis (paternity was never substantiated), and an 11-month-old she said had been sired by Marlon Brando's troubled son Christian (who served five years in prison for killing his half-sister's lover). Tests showed that the younger girl's father was Robert Blake, 67, former child star (Our Gang), movie actor (In Cold Blood) and TV cop (Baretta). Bakley married Blake last November. On the night of May 4, it was Blake who ran breathlessly into Vitello's, where he was a regular (a spinach and pasta dish is named for him) and where he had just had dinner with Bakley. He asked for a drink of water and told the waiters he'd found Bakley slumped over in the passenger seat of his black Dodge Stealth. He first asked them to call 911 and then said, "It's been done." He had made the call from a nearby house.

    Though comparisons are being drawn, the Blake-Bakley case is not quite the O.J. Simpson saga. The glamour quotient is low, and no high-speed white Ford Bronco chase has hypnotized the nation. Last week the police were only calling Blake a witness, though they have not ruled him out as a suspect. They dusted him for gunpowder traces the night of the crime and found none. Still, there is some incredulity at the split-second timing of events in the tale he tells.

    According to Blake, he and Bakley had walked back to the car after dinner when he recalled that he had left his licensed handgun on a seat in Vitello's. He said he rushed back to retrieve the weapon, which he carried because Bakley said she was being stalked. When he got back to the car, he found her shot and gasping for air. Blake ran for help, first to a nearby house and then to the restaurant. However, while Restivo and his employees at Vitello's remember seeing Blake rush in for help, they do not recall his doubling back for the gun. During a five-hour interrogation the night of the crime, Blake declined a polygraph test, contending he was too distraught. Marcia Clark, who prosecuted Simpson and is now host of the syndicated courtroom show Power of Attorney, says that only celebrity is protecting Blake from arrest. Says Clark: "When I'm going to dinner, I tend to leave my AK-47 at home."

    The police have searched Blake's home twice, taking away two 9-mm handguns and more than 100 rounds of ammunition from his collection. At the insistence of Harland Braun, the criminal lawyer retained by Blake after the murder, the police have also carted away three steamer trunks, five boxes and six suitcases of Bakley's documents, photos and recordings. "She was a pack rat," said Braun. "She kept every document involved with her." The documents, he says, will help identify Bakley's enemies and perhaps pinpoint a suspect from the countless scams she worked, including trying to pass hundreds of thousands of dollars in bad checks, claiming affairs with celebs and perpetrating a lonely hearts con game. An excerpt from one of her "Dear single guy" notes: "Honey, please hurry and send me at least $75 or even a plane ticket...If you can't afford this please send me a Christmas gift and a $10 or $20 bill to help me out. I'll send you some nude shots of me, of course..." It was a form letter.

    Blake met Bakley at a Los Angeles nightclub in 1999. Braun said that his client had done the honorable thing by marrying her. "It was a situation where he had not intentionally created a child and felt an obligation toward his daughter." Blake had a prenuptial agreement drawn up saying Bakley should not get into any more trouble with the law, but it was never signed. Bakley lived in a guest house behind Blake's ramshackle home in Studio City, but even so she was rarely around. A nanny cared for her baby, Rose Lenore Sophia, who lived in Blake's part of the compound. Braun said that Blake's bodyguard had seen a mysterious man outside the residence not long before the murder.

    Bakley's defenders are few and mostly kin (or lawyers they have hired). Her half brother Peter Carlyon of Memphis, Tenn., says that Bakley had phoned to say she was afraid of Blake and that if she ended up dead he would be to blame. But sympathy has emerged from the L.A.P.D. Responding to Braun's lurid tales, police spokesman Lieut. Horace Frank said, "It's kind of unfair. Here's a person who's been murdered, and now they start painting her as a bad person." He added, "The focus of the investigation is not on her past. We have to focus on one thing: Who killed her?"