The Murder of Bonnie Lee Bakley
On May 4, 2001, Bonnie Lee Bakley — wife of actor Robert Blake — was shot dead while sitting in a restaurant parking lot on Ventura Boulevard in Studio City, California. Blake claimed he had briefly returned to the restaurant to retrieve a gun he had left at the table; when he came back, he found his wife shot in the passenger seat of their car. The killing immediately triggered suspicion about Blake: the couple's marriage had been turbulent, Bakley had a history of scamming older men through correspondence schemes, and it emerged that Blake had been trying to arrange her murder, allegedly approaching two stuntmen about killing her.
Los Angeles police arrested Blake in April 2002 and charged him with murder and solicitation of murder. The two stuntmen, Ronald "Duffy" Hambleton and Gary McLarty, testified that Blake had approached each of them separately asking them to kill Bakley, offering money in exchange. Blake denied this and insisted he had returned to the restaurant for the gun — a legally registered weapon he claimed to carry for protection — not as an alibi maneuver. The celebrity murder trial attracted intense media coverage, invoking inevitable comparisons to the O.J. Simpson case seven years earlier.
In March 2005, the jury acquitted Blake of all criminal charges, finding the prosecution's evidence — primarily the stuntmen's testimony — insufficiently corroborated. The verdict shocked prosecutors and observers who had expected conviction. However, in a civil lawsuit brought by Bakley's children in 2005, a different jury found Blake liable for her wrongful death and awarded $30 million in damages, later reduced to $15 million on appeal. The divergence between criminal acquittal and civil liability mirrored the Simpson case exactly.
Blake subsequently lived in relative obscurity, giving occasional interviews in which he maintained his innocence. He died of heart disease in March 2023 at age eighty-nine. The murder weapon was never found and the case was never officially closed. Bonnie Lee Bakley's killing remains an open investigation, and the contradiction between Blake's criminal acquittal and civil liability verdict — the question of what actually happened in that parking lot — remains unresolved.