The People Vs. Robert Blake

Part I: Crime Scene

Saturday, May 5, 2001

Callout

At 12:30 A.M. Lieutenant Don Hartwell of the Los Angeles Police Department's Homicide Special Unit calls Detective Ron Ito, who groggily reaches for the phone near his bed.

"Good morning," Hartwell says. "We got a callout. The wife of that actor Robert Blake was killed in Studio City. The captain wants us to go out there and take the case."

"Is it a whodunit?"

"I don't know," Hartwell says, "but before you roll out there I want to make sure your plate's clean."

About an hour later they meet in the squad room at the North Hollywood Division station. Ito, who is Japanese American, is about five-foot-nine, compactly built and dressed in a muted green suit, white button-down shirt, red print tie and gleaming black oxfords. His hair is cut military-style, sheared on the sides and longer on top.

Hartwell is dressed in a manner few detectives can afford—a custom-made blue suit of the finest Italian wool, made-to-order creamy white Egyptian cotton shirt and shimmering silk tie. He spends all his vacations in Thailand and buys his clothes from a Bangkok tailor at a fraction of what they would cost in the United States. Hartwell is 59, the oldest man in the unit. Divorced, he lives in an apartment a few blocks from the beach and looks perpetually sunburned.

"The North Hollywood detectives have talked to Blake," Hartwell says. "Now he's in the interview room with his attorney."

"What's he need an attorney for?" Ito asks. "Is he a suspect?"

Detective Chuck Knolls joins Ito and Hartwell in the squad room and greets North Hollywood detective Martin Pinner and his supervisor, Mike Coffey, who were the first to be called out to the crime scene and have just interviewed Blake. Coffey tells them they spoke to Blake for about an hour while investigators questioned some residents near the murder scene. He then provides a précis of the case: On the night of Friday, May 4, Blake and his wife, Bonny Lee Bakley, had driven to Vitello's, an Italian restaurant in Studio City. But instead of parking at the restaurant, Blake parked a block and a half away on a dim street, beside a Dumpster.

Hearing this, Ito raises an eyebrow.

After dinner, when they returned to the car, Blake told Bakley he had left his .38 snub-nosed revolver—which he has a permit to carry—in the restaurant, on the seat in their booth. He jogged back to retrieve the gun. When he returned he found Bakley slumped in the car and noticed blood coming out of her nose and mouth.

A North Hollywood detective steps in to announce, "Blake's getting antsy."

Hartwell and Ito enter the interview room. They meet Blake, who wears jeans, a tight black T-shirt and black cowboy boots. His hair is shaggy and an unnatural shade of jet black, which gives his pale skin, stretched taut from a facelift, a ghostly pallor. He looks exhausted and a bit sheepish as he stares at the floor.

"I don't want to be 67 years old, but I am," he mutters, now standing in the hallway beside his lawyer. "I'm 67 fucking years old." He sounds disgusted. "I'm tired and just want to lie down."

Ito subtly scrutinizes Blake's hands, clothes and shoes, looking for specks of blood, but he finds nothing. He knows that the North Hollywood detectives have tested Blake's hands for gunshot residue, but the results are not yet available. Ito asks the lawyer whether he can question Blake. Not tonight, the lawyer answers, but maybe tomorrow morning.

Ito watches the lawyer and Blake saunter toward the door and thinks, This is not how a man whose wife has just been murdered acts. He did not seem distraught. He did not ask how his wife was killed. He did not show any curiosity about the case. He seemed more concerned about getting to bed than finding his wife's killer.

The detectives return to the conference table, where Coffey resumes his briefing. "She's from Tennessee and travels back and forth," he says. "I asked him when they got married, and he gave the phony crying with no tears. He loves to talk about how dirty she is."

Ito, who has investigated hundreds of murders, calmly delegates tasks and coordinates various aspects of the investigation. "I need someone to write a chain of custody on the gun, and let's see if the gun's loaded or if a round's been fired. Someone get gloves and check it out." He turns toward Hartwell and says, "Can you ask the coroner to hold all press? Refer all calls to the LAPD." Then he asks Coffey, "A casing was found inside the car?"

"Yeah," Coffey replies.

"Everything circumstantial is going against him," Ito says. "A few things are interesting. That story about coming back to the restaurant.... He has to have someone see him so he can say, 'I didn't shoot her.'"

After the briefing Ito and Steve Eguchi head to the crime scene. Ito is between partners but has been assisted recently by Eguchi, a member of Metro, the LAPD's elite tactical patrol unit. Ito and Eguchi, both Japanese American, have similar family backgrounds. Although Ito, at 47, is only three years older than Eguchi, he has become Eguchi's mentor. Eguchi joined the department in his mid-30s and has no detective experience. Ito has helped him plot his future and is teaching him the rudiments of homicide investigation.

At about four A.M. they arrive at the murder scene. Reporters, photographers and television cameramen have started gathering behind the yellow tape. Several patrol cars, overhead light bars pulsing, block off the street. Paramedics have already transported Bakley's body to a local hospital, where she was pronounced dead on arrival.

Ito and Eguchi study the area around the car, which is littered with a bloody towel and ribbons of bloody gauze left behind by the paramedics. Ito grips his flashlight like a patrol officer—knuckles up—raises it above his shoulder and illuminates the inside of the car. Both front windows are open.

Later Ito, homicide special detective Mike Whelan and Eguchi slip into the squad car. Eguchi starts the engine and flips on the heat while Ito slides in the cassette of Blake's interview with the North Hollywood detectives. The three sprawl on the seats and listen intently.

On the tape Blake sounds like the detective he played in Baretta, cursing and infusing his speech with an East Coast tough-guy inflection even though he moved from New Jersey to California when he was five.

"Who would want to do anything like this?" Coffey asks Blake.

Blake sighs.

"You know a lot more about her than we do," Coffey says with a hint of impatience.

Blake tells a confusing story about a man from New Jersey named John—Blake does not know his last name—who he says tried to kill Bakley two years ago. "He tried to crash both of them. He said they were going to commit suicide or something." But Blake cannot provide any details.

"Can you fill us in on what happened tonight?" asks Coffey. "What were your activities tonight?"

Blake is silent for about 10 seconds and finally says, "We went to the restaurant. We parked.... And things were going really good. We were talking about bringing Holly—her daughter—out here. And when I sit down, the gun, which I don't always carry—but with her I carry the fuckin' gun...usually I just leave it in a car or leave it at home...I took it out and put it on the seat, under my sweatshirt." Blake says he keeps the gun in a small holster and has owned it since he starred in Baretta in the mid-1970s.

"So you had the gun on the seat under your sweatshirt. Then what?" Coffey asks.

"I picked up my sweatshirt to leave. Then we got to the car, and I realized I'd left the gun there. And I was afraid I was going to lose my license or that somebody would find it and it would be a bad scene."

Ito yawns and turns to Whelan and Eguchi. "The gun's an alibi."

Bakley's Last Moments

The detectives spend the rest of the night listening to Blake's taped statement. In it he details Bonny Lee Bakley's 20-year history of mail fraud and cons, how she bilked lonely men out of small sums of money through seductive personal ads with pornographic photos. Blake says his wife, 44, had made numerous enemies and was fearful and in hiding. Her criminal past is not disputed. One of her friends later describes her to investigators as a "mail-order whore." The detectives finish listening to the tape, then make their way to Blake's car to study the bloodstained passenger seat where Bakley was killed.

"There was no contact wound, so it's hard to figure the scenario," Whelan tells Ito and Eguchi. "If the entry wound was on the right side of her head, how does the casing get in the front seat of the car? Since casings kick out to the right, you'd expect it to be here," he says, pointing to the curb. "But maybe the doctor was wrong. Maybe it was an exit wound."

Detective Chuck Knolls joins them. He points to the passenger-seat headrest. "This is a weird one. Why isn't there any blood here?"

"Another strange thing," Ito says, "is none of the neighbors heard any shots."

"Maybe she was shot somewhere else," Knolls speculates. "Maybe she was tossed in the car and someone drove her here."

More homicide special detectives arrive at the crime scene and start knocking on doors and interviewing neighbors. Eguchi waits for the Dumpster to be moved so he can sift through the rubble. Knolls drives to St. Joseph's hospital in Burbank to examine Bakley's body before Sunday's autopsy.

In the hospital morgue an orderly opens a stainless steel cold-storage vault, rolls out a gurney and unzips a white body bag. Before examining Bakley's body, Knolls tucks his tie inside his shirt so it will not pick up bloodstains—the reflex of a veteran homicide detective. Bakley is still wearing the cervical collar and blue plastic breathing tube that the paramedics inserted before they transported her to the hospital. Knolls leans over and studies the perfectly round circle on her right shoulder—an obvious entry wound. Her hair is stringy and matted and her face and ears so bloody that Knolls cannot locate the head wound. He shines his flashlight on the right side of her face and finally locates what appears to be an entry wound in front of her earlobe. To be sure, a technician posts Bakley's head X-ray on an illuminated viewing box. Knolls studies the X-ray, frowns and shakes his head. The X-ray reveals that the bullet entered on the left side of Bakley's head—a small white circle—and then exited from the right side—a wider, jagged pattern. Knolls can identify the exit wound on the X-ray because bullets, especially hollow points, mushroom after the initial impact.

Knolls is troubled because this contradicts the findings of the coroner's criminalist. He crouches and studies the wounds from several angles. Finally he sees the problem: The technician has posted the X-ray backward. When he flips it around, the X-ray clearly shows the entry wound on the right side of Bakley's face.

As Knolls drives away from the hospital he flips on his cell phone, calls his wife and asks her to give his son a message: "Robert Blake is ruining my weekend. I'm not going to be able to make the UCLA volleyball game."

Knolls returns to the North Hollywood station and spots Eguchi in the squad room.

"We found the gun," Eguchi says.

Knolls flashes him a skeptical look.

"I'm serious."

"If you're bullshitting me, I'll beat your ass."

The pistol is a Walther P-38 semiautomatic, a German World War II relic. It is slick with oil, so fingerprints are unlikely.

Knolls claps Eguchi on the shoulder. "Good thing we went through that Dumpster."

More detectives have been summoned to the crime scene; they canvass the neighborhood in the harsh glare of a hot May morning and attempt to find witnesses or at least locate someone who heard a gunshot. Because there are so many neighbors and this is such a high-profile case, investigators from both Homicide I and Homicide II are called out.

Detective Robert Bub is preparing to interview the only resident who talked to Blake that night. The man, who is in his mid-30s and wears jeans, a T-shirt and a baseball cap, appears dazed as he leads Bub to the breakfast-room table. He tells the detective he is a film director.

"First thing I'm going to do is have you run through the story for me real quick, as to what you heard," Bub says.

"I was at my back computer, in my bathrobe, and I heard ding-dong, ding-dong, ding-dong, like crazy. Knocking and ringing.... I open the door, and the first thing I hear is"—he imitates Blake's panicked cries—"'You got to help me! You got to help me! She's bloody and she's beaten! Oh my god.'"

The man, reenacting the encounter, says incredulously, "Robert Blake? Robert?"

"'Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's me.'"

The man again imitates Blake's breathless manner: "'She's bloody! She's bloody! My wife is bloody! They beat her up! She's been beaten!'"

"And I'm like, 'Where is she? What do you mean?'"

"He goes, 'She's in the car.'"

The man says he ran to the bedroom and called 911; the dispatcher told him to grab a towel and apply pressure to the wound. He rushed outside to the car, carrying the towel. Blake headed back to the restaurant.

"I found that odd," the man says. "Like, why isn't he going with me to help her?"

The man describes how he tried to stanch the bleeding. "All I see is (continued on page 137) Robert Blake (continued from page 64) blood coming out her nose, like a lot. It wasn't completely runny and didn't look completely fresh. It was mucousy already.... She was totally catatonic. I looked into her eyes. They were all over the place. No focus. No anything."

When Blake returned, the man says, he tried to console him. After the paramedics arrived, Blake began crying.

"What I found odd," the man says in a confidential tone, "was there were no tears. I'm a director, so I'm looking at him as an actor.... It's really weird to see someone go"—the man acts out heart-wrenching sobs—"and nothing is coming out. I don't know if it's shock that shuts it off. I have no clue."

Part II: Investigation

Monday, May 7, 2001

Murder Weapon

The squad room is thrumming with activity. Captain Jim Tatreau, the commander of Robbery-Homicide, wants an update on the case, so he calls a meeting in his office. Ito, Eguchi and Hartwell, along with four other Homicide II detectives drafted to help with the Bakley investigation—Knolls, Brian McCartin, Whelan and Whelan's partner, Jim Gollaz—assemble around the conference table. The mood in the room is uncharacteristically tense and subdued, with little of the usual humor and razzing. The supervisors and detectives knew this murder would attract some attention, but because the victim was an aging grifter and Blake was best known for a television show canceled more than 20 years ago, they had not anticipated the firestorm of publicity. Now the specter of the O.J. Simpson debacle hovers over this investigation.

Ito opens the meeting by telling the detectives that Sunday's autopsy revealed that either shot could have been the fatal one. "The one in the shoulder severed the carotid artery, lodged in the aorta and caused severe internal bleeding." The trajectory of the shots was almost level, with a slightly upward tilt. "This means the shooter was crouching," Ito says. "He was using the Dumpster for cover. Since she allowed the shooter to get so close, she probably knew him."

The coroner removed a slug from the aorta, "with stria visible, so it's good for comparison," Ito says. He is still waiting for Ballistics to confirm that the Walther was the murder weapon. "There was no stippling, so the head shot wasn't a contact wound. But since the casing was in the car, she was probably shot at pretty close range. No defense wounds on her hands."

Ito then delivers the bad news: LAPD technicians could not lift a single print from the gun. "Not even a smudge," he says. "And we keep trying to run the gun different ways. Nothing. We figure it's unregistered."

Eguchi drives to the Firearms Analysis Unit, housed in a weathered single-story structure about five miles north of downtown. He clutches the Walther in a large manila envelope. Ito explains to a supervisor that the gun was found in the Dumpster and asks, "Does a Walther eject like a Beretta?"

The supervisor shakes his head: A Walther is the rare semiautomatic pistol that ejects casings to the left.

Ito now knows how one of the casings ended up inside the car. The shooter was crouching beside the car, slightly behind Bakley, when he shot her in the head. The casing flew into the open window.

All the detectives on the Bakley case now meet in Tatreau's office, including Robert Bub, who has just been assigned the job of clue coordinator. He will sift through all the tips and phone calls and grade them in order of importance. Then a civilian employee will enter them in the computer.

"I got a call at home from Firearms last night at 11," Ito says, opening the meeting. Everyone looks up immediately. "They made the coroner's bullet to the Walther." He pauses as the detectives nod appreciatively. "So we have the murder weapon."

"Any news on the ejector marks?" Hartwell asks.

"We're still waiting," Ito says. "What do we have on tracing the gun?"

"A manufacturer does not have to report sales on guns made before 1968," Whelan says.

"Let's see if there's a way to trace guns brought over here from Germany after the war," Ito says.

Whelan reports the findings of an LAPD blood-splatter expert: "The crime lab determined she was shot right there at that location"—not shot, dumped in the car and then driven to the street near Vitello's. "She was most likely shot in the shoulder first. And when she was leaning over the console she was shot the second time. There were a few specks of blood on the driver's seat. They would have smeared if someone had sat in the seat after she was killed. The blood splatters have what's called a directional tail, so we can determine where the shot came from."

Motive

On Tuesday afternoon, four days after the murder, Bakley's sister, Margerry, arrives at the squad room door accompanied by a tabloid reporter who has paid for her exclusive story. Margerry, four years younger than her sister, is heavyset and pasty-faced and wears black stretch pants, a coral-colored T-shirt and brown leather sandals. Ito and Eguchi are busy examining the evidence, so Whelan and Gollaz escort her to an interview room—without the tabloid reporter. Margerry recounts the night Bonny met Blake and her occasional visits back to Los Angeles.

"Every time they had sex, he'd call her afterward, worried about her being pregnant. He'd say, 'You've got to be pregnant. I'm Italian. We have very strong sperm.'"

Sometimes they would have sex in the car. But even when they had sex at Blake's house, Margerry says, he would not allow Bakley to spend the night or even to sleep in his bed. "She had to talk about it," Margerry says. "She was so elated. Some of the conversations were for six or seven hours. I'd fall asleep or hang up."

Margerry then tells the detectives about Christian Brando. "She had a better relationship with him than with Blake. He was nice," she says earnestly, "for a murderer."

"Nicer than most murderers?" Whelan asks dryly.

Margerry looks flustered. "I don't know how to put it."

"Let's talk about the baby," Whelan says.

Bakley timed her visits to Los Angeles for when she was ovulating, and to enhance her chances she took the fertility drug Clomid, Margerry says.

"Why'd she want to get pregnant?" Gollaz asks.

"She wanted to marry him, and she knew she couldn't get him unless she got pregnant. She read an article on how to take a tampon, put cellophane on it, insert it afterward and stand on your head so the sperm won't come out." Margerry holds her palms together as if praying.

"Did she try this for a while or did it work the first time?" Gollaz asks.

Margerry smiles. "I think it worked the first time."

Blake was enraged at the news of her pregnancy, according to Margerry, and asked Bakley to have an abortion. When he realized she would not terminate the pregnancy he cut off contact with her. Back home in Little Rock, Arkansas, where she was on parole for possession of stolen identity and credit cards, Bakley gave birth to a baby girl on June 2, 2000; she sent pictures of the child to Blake, who took a paternity test that proved he had fathered the child.

In September 2000 Bakley flew out to L.A. with the baby and met Blake along with, according to court records, a former employee of the actor who posed as a nanny. While Bakley was there, Blake managed to separate her from the child. He then paid a private investigator to contact Bakley's probation officer in Arkansas, where, he hoped, she would be placed under house arrest for parole violation. She reportedly filed a complaint accusing Blake of kidnapping. Then, in October, Blake inexplicably agreed to marriage and moved Bakley into the guesthouse behind his home. According to Margerry, however, he kept up his threats about her betrayal. "She was saying all the time, 'He's going to kill me, he's going to kill me.'"

The Bodyguard

Thursday is the first morning the detectives do not meet in Tatreau's office: He is too busy negotiating with Blake's attorney, Harland Braun. In Blake's guesthouse, Bakley had left numerous boxes of letters from her male correspondents; Braun plans to turn them over to the LAPD. He has told reporters that many of these men had a motive to kill Bakley and are potential suspects because she ripped them off.

A few hours later, in the early evening, Earle Caldwell, whom friends described as Blake's bodyguard and handyman, stops by the squad room. Ito believes Caldwell may be a key to the case.

Fortuitously, a friend of Bakley's has just called the station with a tip about Caldwell: Bakley had confided, the friend says, that after a trip with Blake to Arizona they visited Sequoia National Park, and she suspected that Caldwell was supposed to kill her but that he was so nervous he became sick and could not pull the trigger.

Ito had attempted to interview Caldwell the day before, but he refused, saying he wanted a lawyer with him. Today he is accompanied by one, paid for by Blake. Caldwell, unshaved and balding, is about six feet tall, slender and fit, yet he does not have the physical presence of a bodyguard.

When Bakley lived in the guesthouse, Caldwell says, she and Blake "were lovey-dovey."

"Don't you think that's odd when they were sleeping in separate residences?" Ito asks sarcastically, but Caldwell does not respond.

When Bakley visited, Caldwell says, he served as her bodyguard. He noticed that she was constantly looking over her shoulder as if she feared someone was following her. Bakley was afraid of an old boyfriend from New Jersey. Caldwell says, "His attitude was, 'If I can't have you, no one can.'"

Caldwell then recounts a story similar to the one Blake had told North Hollywood detectives about a man they called Buzzcut, who appeared to be staking out the house. At the end of the interview Ito asks Caldwell who he thinks would want to kill Bakley. Caldwell says he believes Blake was actually the target of the hit and Bakley was killed by accident. Bakley had the motive, Caldwell says, because she would benefit financially.

But Bakley had signed a prenuptial agreement, so Ito knows she would not have inherited Blake's estate. Barely disguising his irritation, Ito asks Caldwell if he will take a polygraph exam. He refuses, saying he does not trust the results.

At about nine P.M. Ito returns to the squad room, coughing and scowling. Knolls pulls up a chair next to him. "Well, Ron, where do we stand?"

"Blake did it, man," Ito says. He tells Knolls he had been perplexed because he didn't know why a 67-year-old man would want custody of a baby. But through interviews with Blake's acquaintances, Ito recently learned that the actor's daughter, who is in her mid-30s, is childless. During the past year, ever since Blake's private investigators hustled Bakley to the airport, she has been caring for the baby at her Hidden Hills home.

"So how're we going to prove he did it?" Knolls asks.

"I want to find someone who Blake told that he did it," Ito says.

"We're not going to find that," Knolls says.

"It's still early on," Ito says. "Someone may surface."

Earlier, at a coffee shop meeting, a detective asks Eguchi about the gun he found in the Dumpster.

"Looks like an antique German gun," Eguchi says. "No markings."

"Wouldn't it be great if the gun was a Beretta?" Ito says.

Although the Walther was unregistered, another detective says, "If there's some way to connect Blake to it, he's through."

Part III: A Break in the case Enter the Stuntmen

The investigation continues. A warrant is executed, and about a dozen detectives search Blake's home and property. The actor's living room is cluttered with dirty clothes and baby toys, with a leather saddle in one corner and a stroller in another. Other rooms suggest a man trapped between adolescence and old age, with shelves and cabinets filled with toy soldiers, vintage Lone Ranger comic books, BB guns, cowboy memorabilia and Native American relics. With the evidence carted off, the detectives continue to interview family and friends of the victim, including her brother, Joey.

While interviewing Joey about Blake, Ito checks his pager, which is buzzing. Mike Coffey, the detective supervisor for North Hollywood Homicide, says, "We've got a guy here who says he was solicited by Blake to kill his wife."

Coffey waits in an interview room with a man named Gary McLarty, who called the station with the revelation that Blake had asked him to kill Bakley. McLarty is a retired stuntman who first met Blake when he worked on the Baretta set roughly 30 years ago. At 61, stocky and weather-beaten, he still looks fit enough to perform stunt work.

Coffey walks out into the hallway, greets the detectives and quickly briefs them. Then Ito and Eguchi join McLarty in the interview room and introduce themselves.

"We're from RHD—downtown," Ito tells McLarty. "We stole this case from Mike Coffey. The reason we did is we have a little more time to work on one case. More manpower."

"Well, I'm a little late in revealing this, but I got so many personal problems," McLarty says sheepishly. He tells the detectives about a messy divorce and difficulties with some property he owns. "It finally got to the point where...I didn't want to lead you guys on a wrong trail, and this could tighten things up for you. I thought I better come in and reveal this thing."

"I'm glad you did," Ito says in a reassuring tone.

"That woman didn't deserve what she got," McLarty says.

"No one does," Ito says.

"With Robert, he knew I'd killed a guy a while back...so he figured because of that, and I got off and everything and he, you know——," McLarty sputters. He speaks in staccato bursts and sometimes breaks off in midsentence when he loses his train of thought. He briefly tells the detectives about the incident. The victim was an ex-convict who had raped a family friend; McLarty says he shot him in self-defense.

Until recently, the last time he had seen Blake was more than 20 years ago when they worked together on a movie called Coast to Coast. Then about six weeks ago a mutual acquaintance, a retired stuntman in his late 60s whom everyone called Snuffy, asked McLarty to meet Blake for lunch at Du-Par's restaurant in Studio City.

"Did he say why?" Ito asks.

"I figured it was a stunt job, a movie job," McLarty says.

"What happened when you met?"

"We just bullshitted, a little small talk. Then he started talking about this gal that he wanted something done with. I thought——," he says, stopping abruptly. "Hmm."

"Did he specify who this girl was?"

"He said it was this girl he met at a party and fucked one night and got pregnant. It turned out it was his kid. She was bilking him out of a lot of money. To be able to keep the kid there he was giving her a couple thousand a month. That's why he wanted to get her bumped off, I guess."

The Golden Moment

Detectives always pray for that one golden phone call that will provide the critical break in a case. Ito and Eguchi, who attempt to remain poker-faced and conceal their excitement, realize they have just received that call.

McLarty tells the cops that at the restaurant he and Blake "just met and had some small talk about movies. I thought he wanted me to do a stunt-coordinating job or double or something, but it turned out he wanted me to kill his wife." McLarty sounds incredulous.

"How'd he say he wanted you to do that?" Ito asks.

"I really can't tell you word-for-word. I just know that in the conversation that's what it finally boiled down to."

"At the restaurant did he mention something about killing his wife?"

"No. I think he wanted to get me to the house and show me what a bad person she was.... Oh, man," he says breathlessly, "like reality was overwhelming, to say the least."

McLarty tells them that after bringing him to the back house, Blake took him inside and showed him stacks of the letters Bakley had sent to lonely men across the country.

Ito again asks him to recall exactly how Blake proposed he kill Bakley.

"He showed me where she slept and insinuated someone could sneak in here at night, slide open the door and sneak up there and pop her."

"Did he say 'pop her'?"

"Something to that effect."

The afternoon of the meeting, McLarty tells detectives, Blake then drove him back to the restaurant where his car was parked and said, "You want to call me?"

"You call me," McLarty told Blake. Then he asked, "And what are you really talking about anyway, moneywise?"

"How does $10,000 sound?" Blake replied.

About a week later, Blake called McLarty, who told him, "I don't want to have anything to do with this thing at all."

"Why?" Blake asked.

"Well, number one, I don't want to do anything like that. And the other one is your notoriety."

Blake abruptly ended the conversation.

When McLarty heard on the news that Bakley had been killed, he knew he should have contacted police earlier. "But I let it go and I let it go and I let it go. Finally I said, 'I can't let it go any further.'"

"Did he ever come out with the exact words of him wanting you to kill his wife?" Ito asks.

"More like...'You walk over and pop her.'"

"That's what he said?"

"Yes."

After the interview, as the detectives head back downtown, Eguchi and Ito exchange a high five. "We have to do a lot of work to check out his story, to confirm what he's saying," says Ito. "But there's no doubt that this is a big break."

The next day, in the early evening, as Ito and Eguchi type up witness statements, detectives Rich Haro and Adrian Soler call from the desert to describe their interview with a handyman who has information about the Bakley murder. A few days after the murder, a stuntman named Ronald Hambleton confided to the handyman that Blake had asked him to kill Bakley. Hambleton told the handyman, who once worked for him, that he had met Blake at Du-Par's about a month before the murder. Later Blake drove Hambleton back to his house and offered him $100,000 to kill Bakley, the handyman said.

Haro and Soler then interviewed Hambleton, who acknowledged that Snuffy had contacted him and set up a meeting with Blake at Du-Par's about a month ago. But he said the meeting was about a movie project, and he denied that Blake had ever mentioned the murder.

In the morning the detectives and Hartwell meet with Haro and Soler in the captain's office to hear more about the interviews. "Both the informant and Hambleton say the same thing about the meeting at Du-Par's and how it was arranged," Soler says. "The only discrepancy is regarding the solicitation by Blake."

"You have a good feeling about this informant?" Ito asks.

"Yes," Soler says, "especially after hearing what McLarty said."

Ito shakes Soler's and Haro's hands and says, "That's good shit."

"The timeline's perfect," Hartwell says.

Part IV: Prosecution this is Hollywood

The investigation now picks up steam. Detectives Knolls and McCartin spend four days on the East Coast and in the South, interviewing Bakley's friends and family. They collect stories of threats and intrigue. After being briefed, Ito and Eguchi head to the Mojave Desert to check out the story of stuntman Hambleton, who denies the informant's tale that Blake had asked him to kill his wife.

The deputy district attorney assigned to the Blake case is Greg Dohi, who is half Japanese, which inspires more kidding by the other detectives. Late in the morning of Tuesday, May 25, Dohi stops by to confer with Ito and Eguchi. Ito stands up, gives him a mock bow and grunts, "Dohi-san."

Exactly one month after the Bakley murder Ito and Eguchi greet a new partner, Detective Brian Tyndall. Tyndall is 53 and with his shaved head looks like an Irish Telly Savalas. Almost three years ago he was working in RHD's bank robbery section when he was assigned to an LAPD task force investigating the Rampart scandal. Ito, who had just learned that the task force was breaking up, asked Tatreau if Tyndall could be assigned to the Blake case. Ito knows that Eguchi, who recently passed the detective exam, will eventually be shipped out to another division.

A few days later, on an overcast June morning, Ito, Tyndall and Eguchi, along with Hartwell and Tatreau, walk a few blocks to the Criminal Court Building, take the elevator to the 18th floor and meet with several lawyers from the district attorney's office in their conference room. Ito details the investigation, from the night Blake and Bakley met to her pregnancy and their custody battle to her murder and to the interviews with the retired stuntmen.

After a few of the deputy DAs and their supervisors pepper him with questions, Ito says, "You know what's interesting? During his interview with the North Hollywood detectives Blake never asks what happened to her—did she get shot, stabbed, beat with a baseball bat or whatever."

Ito explains that he believes Blake shot Bakley, coated the gun with oil to eliminate fingerprints and then tossed it in the Dumpster. He is still trying to trace the provenance of the gun.

The prosecutor asks Ito whether he thinks a hit man Blake hired could have shot Bakley and dumped the gun.

"That's kind of Hollywood," Ito says.

"This is Hollywood," the prosecutor retorts. Everyone laughs.

Ito shakes his head and says, "A third party wouldn't dump it."

"Why not?" the prosecutor asks.

"I've been working murders 18 years, and I've never seen a contract killer dump a gun at the scene."

Another prosecutor says the McLarty solicitation is a break but that the key to the case is persuading Hambleton to talk.

Ito mentions that Hambleton is facing a misdemeanor weapons charge in San Bernardino County for brandishing a rifle at sheriff's deputies at the edge of his property.

"A misdemeanor's not much leverage," a prosecutor says.

When the meeting concludes they walk back to Parker Center, and Hartwell tells Ito, "What remains from the meeting is how much still needs to be done."

Ito adds a number of items to his to-do list, including interviewing the nanny, checking to see whether Blake usually parks in the lot at Vitello's, interviewing other stuntmen, reinterviewing Snuffy and Hambleton, obtaining Hambleton's phone records, checking on whether any of Blake's acquaintances recognize the murder weapon and attempting to determine why no neighbors heard the shots.

Ito is discouraged. Although he has built the framework, there is still much work to do before the investigation is complete. An avid golfer, he has not been able to play since Bakley's murder. Every weekend he has either worked or been too tired to drive to the golf course. Usually in June the days are long enough so that he can play 18 holes before dark. Now, he complains to Eguchi, he does not know when he will swing his clubs again.

Ito, Eguchi and Tyndall spend the next few weeks attempting to track down a dozen stuntmen who once worked with Blake. Most of them know one another, and the detectives soon gain insight, they believe, into why Blake contacted McLarty and Hambleton. Each man has had trouble with the law, is in financial trouble or is seriously ill. Ito, armed with this information, attempts to reinterview Snuffy, who was Blake's contact for the stuntmen, but is rebuffed.

A few days later the detectives brief Deputy District Attorney Dohi, who has been spending more and more time in the squad room conferring with the detectives. They meet in one of the small windowless interview rooms, which is sweltering. During frigid winter mornings the air conditioner in the squad room often blasts cold air. Now on a hot June afternoon heat emanates from the vents. Ito tugs on his collar and says, "Let's cut to the chase. Blake either fired a gun or was in an area where a gun was fired."

"So we have GSR particles?" Dohi asks.

Ito nods and tells him gunshot residue was found on Blake's clothing. And Ito recently received a positive result from the GSR test on Blake's hands—but, he explains, the criminalist hedged a bit, writing in his report that "if Mr. Blake is in the environment of firearms, i.e. handles firearms on a regular basis, then these results could be the result of contact."

Frowning and crossing his arms, Ito tells Dohi that the detective in charge of Blake's clothes left them boxed up in the trunk of his car all night instead of booking them into evidence that evening.

They are all aware of how a defense attorney can spin this information into a massive web of police conspiracy. "Uh-oh," Dohi says. "Any guns in the trunk?"

"I don't think so," Ito says.

"We're going to need a statement from him about what he keeps in the trunk and have the area checked for GSR."

"We'll swab the area," Ito says.

Dohi shakes his head and says weakly, "It is what it is."

But as Ito tells Dohi more about his interviews with the stuntmen, the attorney's mood brightens. Even with the clothing in the detective's trunk, Dohi says, the GSR results are good news.

The next afternoon the detectives, armed with a search warrant, stop by Earle Caldwell's apartment. Ito is not hopeful that he will find anything important, but Dohi urges him to make the attempt anyway.

The "Kill Bonny" List

Caldwell lives the life of the Hollywood fringe player. His studio is perched over a garage overlooking an alley in a modest Burbank neighborhood of nondescript apartment buildings. The detectives find $2,000 in cash inside, as well as two pistols and two shotguns. Caldwell tells them that he recently cashed his last paycheck and that he inherited the weapons from his father, who was a gunsmith. But then, from the bottom of a cup holder in Caldwell's car, beneath a few gas and food receipts, Eguchi pulls out a folded piece of yellow legal paper, torn in half, with a handwritten list: "2 shovels, small sledge, 25-auto, get blank gun ready, old rugs, duct tape—black, Draino [sic], pool acid, lye...." Eguchi also finds a World War II–era Mauser in a desiccated leather case in the car's center console. Caldwell claims this too was part of his father's collection.

The detectives are ecstatic. The list, they believe, implies that Caldwell intended to dispose of a body. And if he owns one vintage German pistol, maybe he was in possession of a Walther P-38, too.

In the morning Caldwell's attorney calls Ito and says that there is an innocent explanation for the list. Most of the items, which Caldwell never ended up purchasing, were for repairs at Blake's house; the lye was for the swimming pool.

After Ito hangs up, Tyndall says, "It looks to me like a 'Kill Bonny' list."

"I think we hit the jackpot," Eguchi agrees.

The next week Tyndall flies to the Bay Area, where Caldwell's wife lives (they are apparently separated). He confirms that Caldwell and his wife spent the evening of Bakley's murder with another couple.

The detectives are still attempting to determine why no neighbors heard the gunshot. They confer with a firearms expert at an LAPD gun range, who suggests several possibilities. Because the tip of the slug is somewhat flat and crimped at the edges, someone might have removed it with a "bullet-puller," he says, dumped out half the gunpowder and pounded the tip back on. The noise from the shot would have been muffled significantly. A simple handmade silencer, he tells the detectives, can also significantly cut the decibel level. Demonstrating, he cuts the top off a plastic water bottle and tapes it to the muzzle of a pistol. He aims toward a target surrounded by countless brass shell casings that glitter in the sunshine. When he fires, the sound is merely a dull thud.

On Friday afternoon, two days after the Fourth of July, Ito, Eguchi and Tyndall drive to the Hollywood Hills to interview Cody Blackwell, the woman who says she posed as Blake's nanny when Bakley was duped into handing over the baby. Blackwell has already sold her story to a tabloid, so the detectives have a general sense of her role in the drama.

"Whatever's Necessary"

Blackwell lives in a small pink cottage, a rustic aerie grafted onto the side of a steep canyon overgrown with brush. The detectives have to climb more than 100 rickety wooden steps to reach her door. The morning is warm and unusually humid. July is typically hot and dry in Los Angeles—desert weather—but yesterday a muggy monsoon from northern Mexico, a wind-fed summer storm, blew into southern California, generating lightning and thundershowers.

When the detectives introduce themselves, Blackwell says, "I've been waiting for you guys to show up," and invites them inside. The cement floor is splashed with swirls of yellow, purple and blue paint, and plants hang from the ceiling. Beside her bed, yoga books and Indian statues are stacked on purple milk crates, and Native American drums, feathers and pictures of wolves line the walls. Blackwell, who is 60, has bright red hair and wears khaki shorts and a T-shirt. She sits on the side of her bed, her two enormous dogs—an Alaskan malamute and a wolf hybrid—growling at her feet. The detectives pull up chairs beside her.

She had once worked as Blake's personal assistant, she says, but had not talked to him for a while. In August he called, told her about his two-month-old baby, Rose, and said that the mother would be arriving in a week. He asked Blackwell if she would move into his house and temporarily play the role of nanny.

"I moved some stuff in...and he says, 'No. I want you to move your homey stuff in. Make it look like you've been living here.'"

Blackwell shopped with Blake, and he spent $900 on items for the baby, including a car seat, a stroller, diapers, bibs and toys. He then began vilifying Bakley. "She's the scum of the earth," he told Blackwell. "She's involved with drug dealers, racketeering, bikers and all these seedy people that rip people off. She's horrible. She's awful, and I can't stand her."

The way Bakley had duped Blake enraged him, she says. "He doesn't kiss anyone's ass. He's a total control freak. For him to have someone manipulate him must have sent him over the edge. Just up a tree. He said, 'I'll do whatever's necessary to get this baby.'"

Blake introduced her to a man he called Moose, who was wearing camouflage fatigues and combat boots. When she describes him, the detectives realize Moose is Caldwell.

Blake told Blackwell, "I want her to feel really secure with you watching the baby. We're going to tell her you're a nurse and your name is Nancy." She continues, "Then I started wondering. I said, 'Robert, this is really weird.'"

When he drove to the airport to pick up Bakley, Blackwell remained at the house and chatted with Moose, who told her, "I'm just here to make sure things don't get out of hand.... If things get wild and crazy I'm here to subdue her."

When Blake returned, Moose dropped to the ground, crawled to the toolshed and hid inside. Blackwell demonstrates by jumping off her bed and inching along the floor on her hands and knees. "I'm thinking, Oh my god! Oh my god! Then I saw her, and my mouth fell open. She didn't look exactly like I expected. Her hair was fried, like cotton candy. She was chubby, old. I was surprised. She didn't look like a woman he'd have a baby with. But she seemed nice."

Blake pulled Blackwell aside and said, "We're going to lunch. Moose is hiding. You take care of the baby." He then told Bakley, "It's okay. She's a nurse."

Fifteen minutes later Blake called Blackwell and said, "I want you to take the baby up to your house. Leave now!" She hugs one of her dogs and says, "That's when I started getting really scared. I didn't know what to do. I haven't been a mother in 30 or 40 years."

An hour later Blake called Blackwell at home and told her to meet him at a liquor store parking lot near his house. When she arrived she handed the baby to Blake, and he paid her $300. Blake rocked his daughter and whispered to her, "Well, kid, from here on out it's just you and me. Just the two of us." Blackwell tells the detectives, "I'm going, 'Oh my god! I've been involved in a kidnapping.' I'm freaking out." Blake then said to Blackwell, "Okay, you're coming with me." He instructed her to lie down in the back of the SUV and hold the baby while he drove. He stopped at a McDonald's in Calabasas and gave her $10 for a meal.

"I know he'd just bought his daughter a big house nearby. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to know why we were there. He was taking the baby to his daughter's," she says.

An hour later Blake returned without the baby and said that Bakley "is out of the state. I don't have to worry about her." As he drove Blackwell back to Studio City so she could pick up her car, he ranted about what he would do if Bakley's friends returned for the baby. "Just let those motherfuckers come to my house," he told Blackwell. "I'm ready for them. Let 'em come over the fence. I'll shoot 'em like dogs and let the birds pick their bones."

"I thought I was in a B movie," Blackwell says. Back at home she panicked.

"Oh my god," she says, "now I'm an accomplice to a kidnapping." She cries, dabs her eyes with a tissue and asks the detectives, "Am I going to be in trouble? Am I going to be arrested?"

Ito shakes his head and says softly, "No."

Ito shows her a photograph of Caldwell, and she shouts, "That's Moose!"

Later, as the detectives stand up to leave, Ito asks her, "Why didn't his daughter have kids?"

"He mentioned his daughter and her boyfriend were trying to have a baby but weren't having any luck. And he was implying if anything happened that's where Rosie would go."

As the detectives head back down the canyon through the mist, Ito says, "She's the first person to confirm the angle about the daughter."

Tyndall taps the murder book and says, "Blake's shit just got a whole bunch weaker."

Coda

After nearly a full year of LAPD investigation, Robert Blake and his bodyguard Earle Caldwell were arrested and then charged on April 22, 2002, Blake with one count of murder with special circumstances, two counts of solicitation of murder and one count of murder conspiracy, which was later dismissed. A single count of murder conspiracy was filed against Caldwell, a charge that was also dismissed. The criminal complaint, filed by prosecutors, said Blake "personally and intentionally" fired the handgun that killed Bakley. Blake and Caldwell pleaded not guilty. Blake was denied bail and was led to jail. Prosecutors dropped the proposed death penalty, seeking instead a maximum sentence of life without parole for Blake. On February 26, 2003, against legal advice, the actor told his side of the story to Barbara Walters on national television. The next day, during a preliminary hearing, stuntman Gary McLarty testified that Blake had offered him $10,000 to kill his wife, Bonny Lee Bakley. Ronald Hambleton, the reluctant second stuntman, later confirmed that Blake also asked him to help kill Bakley.

On October 31 Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Darlene Schempp turned down Blake's final appeal for dismissal of the murder charge and scheduled the trial for early 2004. On February 9, 2004 jury selection is scheduled to begin in the case of The People of the State of California v. Robert Blake.

Murder Was on the Menu

Four more dinner dates with death

• Umberto's Clam House

The joint: Eatery opened in February 1972 at 129 Mulberry Street by Umberto Robert lanniello, who saw a need for a late-night seafood restaurant in New York's Little Italy.

The deceased: Joseph "Crazy Joey" Gallo, who was dining with some friends in the wee hours of April 8, 1972 following an all-night birthday blowout. A gunman burst in and ventilated Gallo in short order. Gallo managed to stumble out of the restaurant but died in the street.

Last meal: Scungilli salad, currently $15.50.

• Second Avenue Deli

The joint: Kosher diner in New York's East Village. A 10-seat hole-in-the-wall in the 1950s, it now holds 150.

The deceased: Charismatic owner Abe Lebewohl, who was shot three times on March 4, 1996 while taking a $13,000 deposit to the NatWest bank six blocks away.

Last meal: Rendered chicken fat, also known as schmaltz. Used instead of butter in kosher cooking, schmaltz is a cornerstone of The 2nd Ave Deli Cookbook, which was published in 1999.

• Joe & Mary Italian-American Restaurant

The joint: Modest Italian cafe at 205 Knickerbocker Avenue in the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn, owned by Giuseppe "Joe" Turano. It later became Mr. Frank's, then a Chinese place called Kok Kei. It's now a boarded-up shell.

The deceased: Carmine "the Cigar" Galante, head of the Bonanno crime family, who may have been on the verge of becoming capo di tutti capi. He was shot on June 12, 1979.

Last meal: Red wine and salad, according to newspaper accounts.

• Mezzaluna

The joint: Brentwood, California branch of a chain of restaurants serving northern Italian fare, at 11750 San Vicente Boulevard, near a Starbucks where Ronald Goldman occasionally joined Nicole Brown Simpson. Closed since 1997.

The deceased: Simpson and Goldman, stabbed to death on June 12, 1994 in the front yard of her town house at 875 South Bundy, half a mile from the restaurant.

Last meal: Spinach and pasta, according to Simpson's autopsy. The coroner specified rigatoni; defense attorney Robert Shapiro claimed it was penne.