The Hollywood Grifter, the TV Cop, and the Murder No One Could Solve
Hollywood, May 4th, 2001. A warm night in Studio City. The kind of night where secrets fester under the glow of neon signs. Inside Vitello’s, a cozy Italian restaurant, actor Robert Blake—the tough-talking, streetwise cop from the 70s hit show Baretta—had just finished dinner with his wife, Bonny Lee Bakley.
It should have been a normal evening. A mundane end to another day in the City of Angels.
It wasn’t.
Minutes later, Bonny Lee Bakley would be dead. Shot twice in a parked car just a block and a half away from the restaurant. Her husband, Blake, claimed he found her bleeding after running back to the restaurant to retrieve a handgun he’d “accidentally” left behind. A handgun he carried for protection. Or so he said.
The story was messy. Convenient. Suspicious. It was the opening scene of a real-life noir film, a puzzle box of lies, scams, and celebrity obsession that would captivate and confuse the world for decades. The police thought they had their man. The public was sure of it. But the truth? The truth about who killed Bonny Lee Bakley is a ghost that still haunts the darkest corners of Hollywood.
Who Was Bonny Lee Bakley? The Grifter Queen of Tinseltown
To understand the murder, you have to understand the victim. And Bonny Lee Bakley was no ordinary victim. She was a force of nature. A predator. A woman who built a life on a foundation of fantasy and fraud.
She wasn’t just a scam artist. She was an architect of deception.
Long before she ever met Robert Blake, Bonny, born Leebonny, was perfecting her craft. It started small, with “lonely hearts” ads in the back of magazines. She would send provocative photos of herself (and sometimes other women) to lonely men, promising companionship and connection for a price. She operated a mail-order business that pulled in thousands, sending out nude pictures and soliciting money for “travel expenses” to meet clients she never intended to see.
Her operation was a factory of fantasy. She had multiple mailboxes, multiple aliases, and a singular, burning ambition: to get famous, or get rich from someone who was. She wasn’t just after any man with a wallet. She was hunting celebrities.
A Black Book of Broken Men
Her address book was a testament to her ambition. It read like a who’s who of a certain era. Names like Jerry Lee Lewis, Frankie Valli, Dean Martin, and Gary Busey were reportedly in her orbit. She wasn’t a groupie in the traditional sense; she was a collector. She collected phone numbers, stories, and connections, always looking for the next big score.
She told friends she was going to marry a movie star. It was her life’s mission. She left a trail of emotional and financial wreckage in her wake. Men who received nothing but empty promises. Families who watched their savings get siphoned away by a woman with a sweet voice and a heart of ice. She took men for hundreds of thousands of dollars, always moving on before the consequences could catch up.
Until they did.
The Tangled Web: Blake, Brando, and a Baby
Bonny’s two biggest catches came at roughly the same time, creating a volatile triangle that would ultimately explode. On one side was Robert Blake, the aging TV star with a reputation for being difficult and a lonely past. On the other was Christian Brando, the troubled son of Hollywood royalty, Marlon Brando. Christian was a man haunted by his own dark history, having already served time for the manslaughter of his half-sister’s boyfriend.
Bonny was seeing both men. And soon, she was pregnant.
Initially, she was certain the child was Brando’s. She even named the baby girl Christian Shannon Brando. She was obsessed with the Brando legacy. But Robert Blake, ever the skeptic, demanded a paternity test. The results were a bombshell. The baby, later renamed Rose, was his.
Blake was trapped. He reportedly despised Bonny, seeing her for the grifter she was. He was a man who valued his privacy and his tough-guy image, and now he was tethered to a woman who represented everything he disdained. Yet, friends said he felt a deep responsibility to the child. Against his better judgment, he married Bonny Lee Bakley in November 2000.
She moved into a small guest house behind his main property. Not exactly a fairytale romance. It was a hostage situation disguised as a marriage. And it would last less than six months.
The Night of the Murder: A Story Full of Holes
Let’s go back to that night. May 4th, 2001.
Blake and Bakley ate at Vitello’s, his favorite spot. He was a regular. After dinner, they walked to their car, parked on a dark side street. This is where Blake’s story begins, and where the questions pile up.
According to Blake, he realized he’d left his .38 caliber Smith & Wesson revolver in the booth at the restaurant. He told Bonny to wait in the car while he went back to get it. He claims he went back, retrieved the gun, and returned to the car to find his wife shot, gasping for air. He ran to a nearby house for help, but it was too late. Bonny Lee Bakley was gone.
The immediate problem? The gun Blake claimed he left in the restaurant was not the murder weapon. The gun that killed Bonny, a vintage 9mm Walther P38, was found in a dumpster nearby. It was covered in an oily substance, making fingerprints impossible to lift. Two guns. One convenient alibi. The police smelled a setup from a mile away.
Why would he leave her alone in a dark, unfamiliar neighborhood? Why did he park so far from the restaurant? And the biggest question of all: if he didn’t do it, who was lying in wait in the shadows for that perfect, five-minute window of opportunity?
The Trial of “Baretta”: Hollywood on the Stand
Nearly a year later, Robert Blake was arrested and charged with his wife’s murder. The trial was a media circus, a spectacle that peeled back the rotten layers of Hollywood life.
The prosecution’s case hinged on two key witnesses. Two retired Hollywood stuntmen, Ronald “Duffy” Hambleton and Gary McLarty. Both men claimed that Blake had tried to hire them to “snuff” or “pop” his wife. Their stories were sensational. They painted a picture of a desperate man plotting a cold-blooded murder, asking them about “untraceable” guns and the best way to make someone disappear.
But on the stand, their credibility crumbled. Both men had histories of drug abuse and mental health issues. Their testimony was inconsistent, filled with bizarre details that made them sound less like reliable witnesses and more like characters from a B-movie. Blake’s defense team, led by the charismatic Gerry Spence, tore them to shreds.
Spence argued that the prosecution had no murder weapon, no DNA, no fingerprints, no blood evidence, and no credible witnesses. All they had was a man who made a bad choice in a wife. A man who was the victim of a masterful con artist. They painted Bonny as a dangerous woman with a legion of enemies. Any one of them, they argued, could have pulled the trigger.
In March 2005, the jury agreed. Robert Blake was acquitted of murder. The courtroom gasped. But the story wasn’t over.
Guilty in Civil Court
Bakley’s children filed a wrongful death lawsuit against Blake. In a civil trial, the standard of proof is much lower. Not “beyond a reasonable doubt,” but a “preponderance of the evidence”—meaning, is it more likely than not that he was responsible? This time, a different jury found that he was. Blake was ordered to pay $30 million, a verdict that would bankrupt him and seal his fate in the court of public opinion.
Acquitted of the crime, but held responsible for the death. A legal paradox that left everyone wondering what really happened.
A Universe of Suspects: The Little Black Book of Doom
If Robert Blake didn’t pull the trigger or hire someone to do it, who did? The list of potential suspects is staggering. Bonny’s past was a minefield of enraged, humiliated, and defrauded men. Any one of them could have had a motive.
The Brando Shadow
Christian Brando remains a compelling figure in the mystery. He and Bonny had a tumultuous relationship, evidenced by cassette tapes Bonny secretly recorded. On them, Brando sounds angry, paranoid, and threatening. He was known to have a violent temper. Was he enraged by the paternity drama? Did he feel used and humiliated by Bonny? Some internet theorists believe Brando, or someone connected to him, could have been involved, silencing the woman who had brought so much chaos into his life. His early death in 2008 from pneumonia means we’ll never hear his full story.
The Rock ‘n’ Roll Connection: Jerry Lee Lewis
Another celebrity caught in Bonny’s web was the rock and roll legend Jerry Lee Lewis. Bonny had a child with another man whom she named “Jerry Lee.” She allegedly harassed the musician and his wife, making threats. Could the “Killer,” a man with his own notoriously violent past, have had a hand in silencing a persistent tormentor? It’s a stretch, but in a case this strange, nothing is off the table.
The John Does: A Legion of Scammed Men
This is perhaps the most terrifying—and plausible—theory of all. Bonny didn’t just scam a few celebrities. She scammed hundreds, possibly thousands, of ordinary men. These weren’t Hollywood players; they were truckers, farmers, and lonely veterans who sent her their life savings. What if one of them, financially and emotionally ruined, decided to exact revenge? What if one of her many victims tracked her all the way to Los Angeles, waited for the right moment, and delivered his own brand of justice in that dark alley?
This phantom suspect is the perfect fall guy for Blake’s defense, but also a chilling possibility. He would have no connection to Blake, no obvious motive for the police to follow. Just a ghost from Bonny’s past, come to collect a debt in blood.
The Aftermath and the Cold, Hard Truth
The murder of Bonny Lee Bakley destroyed Robert Blake. He lost his career, his fortune, and his reputation. He lived out his remaining years as a recluse, giving occasional bizarre interviews where he maintained his innocence with a rambling, sometimes incoherent rage. He died in March 2023, taking whatever secrets he held to his grave.
The case is officially closed. But it is far from solved. The truth remains buried under decades of lies, speculation, and Hollywood smoke and mirrors.
Did a famous TV cop get away with murder? Was it a calculated hit, planned with a stuntman’s precision? Or was it something else entirely? A crime of passion from a jilted lover? Or the final, desperate act of a man she’d ruined years before?
There is one person that knows what happened that night. The killer that stopped Bonny from destroying any more lives. And until that person talks, the ghost of Bonny Lee Bakley will continue to wander the backstreets of Hollywood, a permanent fixture in the town’s pantheon of unsolved mysteries.
Originally posted 2016-02-18 12:28:41. Republished by Blog Post Promoter
