Did a successful actor murder his wife in cold blood?
The Murder of Bonny Lee Bakley
On May 4, 2001, Robert Blake took his wife, Bonny Lee Bakley, to an Italian restaurant for dinner. After dinner, Blake left his wife in the car and returned to the restaurant for a moment. The car was parked about a block from the restaurant, near a construction site. While Blake was in the restaurant, Bakley was fatally shot in the head. Once the police responded to the scene, Blake claimed that he had returned to the restaurant to collect a pistol he had left inside. He also asserted that he had not been present when the shooting took place. The gun Blake claimed to have left in the restaurant was later found and determined by police not to be the murder weapon. Yet a little under a year later, Robert Blake was arrested and charged with one count of murder with special circumstances after a man named Ronald Hambleton agreed to testify that Blake tried to form a murder-for-hire scheme that would end Bakley's life. Hambleton alleged that Blake had approached him to kill Bakley for a sum of money. Robert Blake pled "not guilty" on charges that could give him the death penalty if found guilty.
The Trial of Robert Blake
Blake's trial began on December 20, 2004, the prosecution focused their case on proving that Robert and Bonny's marriage was failing, and Robert wanted to free himself from it by killing her. The defense based their case on claims that Robert was a victim of fabricated and circumstantial evidence that fully couldn't be linked to him. The crux of the prosecution's argument was the testimony of Ronald Hambleton. But one thing that the prosecution failed to produce was substantial forensic proof that linked Robert Blake to the weapon used to kill Bonny Lee Bakley. The lack of this evidence proved to be instrumental in the outcome of the trial because, on March 16, 2005, Blake was found not guilty of murder and not guilty of one of the two counts of solicitation of murder. The other count was dropped after it was revealed that the jury was deadlocked 11–1 in favor of an acquittal. Los Angeles District Attorney Stephen Cooley called Blake "a miserable human being" and the jurors "incredibly stupid" to fall for the defense's claims and allow Blake to get off the charges. While Blake got out of any criminal charges, he did lose a civil suit that cost him $30 million. A few years after the trial, Robert Blake filed for bankruptcy after falling $3 million in debt.