Early in May of 2001, a high-profile case in Hollywood, California would make headlines, and a well-known celebrity would be put on trial for the murder of his wife.
Bonny Lee Bakley was born into relative poverty in New Jersey, but from a young age, she was stubbornly determined to become rich, famous, or both. To that end, at the age of sixteen, she dropped out of high school and moved to New York City to pursue a career in acting and modeling. Though she apparently got a few small modeling gigs and some work as an extra, she would actually begin building her wealth in quite a different way: by swindling men.
Her first con, pulled off before she was twenty-one, was agreeing to marry a Greek immigrant who wanted to remain in the United States. The man, Evangelos Paulakis, paid her a substantial sum, and Bonny did marry him, but shortly after receiving the money, she had the marriage annulled and made herself scarce. Paulakis was subsequently deported.
Bonny then married again, apparently for love this time. The groom was her first cousin, Paul Gawron, and not only would the pair remain wed for five years, but they also had two children together, Glenn and Holly.
After this marriage ended in 1982, Bonny began a lucrative mail-order business, sending nude photos of herself and other women to men who replied to the ads she placed in various magazines. She also established several different identities with different post-office boxes, from which she ran a number of “lonely hearts” type scams, whereby she would publish ads in personals columns and solicit money from the men who replied to them, claiming the cash was for college tuition, rent, or similar purposes. She racked up quite an impressive haul through all of her business endeavors, enough to buy several houses, though she was arrested on numerous occasions for various fraud, pornography, and drug-related charges.
Despite all of the money she was raking in, though, Bonny still had dreams to be famous, or at least to be around famous people. According to everyone who knew her, Bonny was obsessed with celebrities, and through sheer determination—as well as the use of her ill-gotten funds and stolen credit cards—she was able to insinuate herself into friendships and relationships with some of them, though her list of potential targets—including boxer Sugar Ray Leonard, actor Robert DeNiro, and televangelist Jimmy Swaggart—was always longer than that of her actual connections.
In 1990, having become smitten with musician Jerry Lee Lewis, she moved to Memphis, Tennessee, and set about trying to meet him. She eventually did, and the two struck up a friendship, though it ended after Bonny became pregnant and claimed Lewis was the father. Once the little girl was born, Bonny even named her Jeri Lee Lewis, but a later paternity test revealed that Lewis had not fathered the child.
Eventually, Bonny made her way to Hollywood and started working her way into celebrity circles as well as she was able. She first approached Christian Brando, son of Marlon Brando; at the time, Christian was serving a prison sentence for manslaughter, having killed the boyfriend of his half-sister. Bonny began writing to Christian in prison, and upon his release in 1996, the couple began a relationship which lasted three years.
In 1999, though, Bonny Lee Bakley met Robert Blake at a jazz club, and began a relationship with him as well, even though she and Christian were supposedly still an item. Robert Blake, who had starred in the classic 1967 adaptation of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood but was probably best known for his star turn in the 1970s television show Baretta, had a long career in film and television, with his last major role as the unforgettable Mystery Man in David Lynch’s 1997 Lost Highway.
Not long after Bonny and Robert Blake began dating, Bonny got pregnant again, though she initially believed that the child was Christian Brando’s. When the baby, a girl, was born, Bonny named her Christian Shannon Brando, but after a paternity test determined that Robert Blake was actually the child’s father, the girl’s name was changed to Rose Lenore Sophia Blake, and Robert Blake agreed to marry Bonny Lee Bakley, albeit after she signed a prenuptial agreement.
But only six months after the wedding, everything came crashing down on one fateful, violent night. It was Friday, May 4th, 2001, and Robert Blake took his new wife to his favorite restaurant for dinner: Vitello’s, in Studio City, California. The pair ate a meal, and then left the establishment.
Bonny got into the passenger seat of the car, but before Blake climbed into the driver’s seat, he purportedly remembered that he had left his gun behind in the restaurant and went back inside to fetch it. According to his own statement, when he returned to the car, Bonny had been shot twice in the head, and was dying in the front seat of the vehicle. The passenger side window was rolled down. Blake ran to a neighboring business for help, but by the time police arrived, it was already too late.
Less than a year after the incident, Robert Blake was arrested and placed on trial for the murder of his wife. To authorities, the story he told about going back into the restaurant for his gun and returning to find his wife dead seemed just a little too convenient, and considering Bonny’s criminal and romantic history, it didn’t seem too farfetched to imagine that Blake—Bonny’s tenth husband—might want her dead. Blake’s bodyguard, Earle Caldwell, was also arrested and charged with conspiracy, as investigators theorized that the two men had planned the murder together.
There was a startling lack of physical evidence linking Blake to the crime, however. For one thing, the gun he had retrieved from the restaurant was not the same gun that had been used to kill Bonny Lee Bakley; the murder weapon, in fact, was a Walther P38 pistol which was found in a dumpster only about a block from the scene of the murder. Additionally, no gunpowder residue was found on Blake’s hands when police arrived.
Secondly, no witnesses had seen Blake kill his wife, and it seemed implausible that he would commit such a brazen act on a Friday evening in front of a busy restaurant where he was a regular customer.
In fact, the only evidence pointing to Blake’s guilt was the testimony of two stuntmen who claimed on the stand that Blake had attempted to hire them to kill Bonny. Blake’s defense team, however, pointed out that the stuntmen both had trouble with drugs and prior arrests for petty offenses, and also highlighted the fact that at least one of the stuntmen’s own relatives testified that although Blake had given the man money, it was not for killing Bonny, but for a completely different, and much less nefarious, purpose.
Ultimately, Robert Blake was acquitted of the murder of Bonny Lee Bakley, though a year later, he was found liable for her death in a civil trial brought by three of Bonny’s grown children. Blake was initially ordered to pay thirty million dollars in damages, though the sum was subsequently halved, and the case was later settled for an undisclosed amount. Blake filed for bankruptcy in 2006.
Though there are many who still believe that Robert Blake got away with murder, he has steadfastly maintained his innocence, and due to Bonny’s colorful past, it is not in the least bit outlandish to assume that someone else—perhaps one of the men she scammed, perhaps an associate of Christian Brando, perhaps a random criminal—pulled the trigger that night and ended Bonny’s troubled and chaotic life.
The case remains a notorious Hollywood murder mystery to the present day.
Crime Immemorial 