Simpson himself had offered up ironic advice to Blake months earlier via the syndicated TV show Extra!: Don’t take a polygraph test and don’t smear your dead wife, but above all, don’t turn on the television set. “I know that watching TV is only going to frustrate him,” Simpson explained, adding, “As far as I’m concerned, this man is innocent until a jury comes back and calls him guilty.”

Against the eerie aerial shot of the open-doored white sedan yawning in front of the Blakes’ manicured $1.4 million home, the linking of Blake to O.J. became irresistible to commentators, tele-attorneys, and news anchors alike.

“Now some of you, perhaps even most of you, are whispering to yourselves, ‘O.J.,’” said CNN’s Aaron Brown. “Yes, I hear that too. How this plays out over time, how media crazy we all go on this, what lessons we learned or didn’t are for another day. This is a well-known person and a case with lots of little twists and turns.”

Though acquitted in a sensational televised eight-month trial in 1995, Simpson had been subsequently found responsible for the death of his wife, Nicole, and her young friend Ron Goldman during a nontelevised civil trial, and while Simpson remained officially not guilty, the prevailing belief from coast to coast was that the ex-NFL running back, comic co-star of the Naked Gun film trilogy and airport broad jumper from countless Hertz Rent-a-Car TV commercials had literally gotten away with murder.

And now pundits wondered out loud: Was history about to repeat itself?

ABC News interrupted its broadcast just before six o’clock, Pacific Daylight Time, with a sky video of a handcuffed Blake in a green ball cap, dark trousers and clean white sweatshirt that declared I SURVIVED MALIBU CANYON across its back. He was passive—even friendly. As Harland Braun later explained, his client had spoken frequently over the months with detectives investigating Bonny’s death, and was fully prepared if this day ever came.

After Blake climbed into the rear of the waiting white sedan, all four doors finally slammed shut and the car drove off slowly through the pleasant suburban streets of Hidden Hills—hidden, appropriately enough, at the westernmost end of the sprawling San Fernando Valley. The car picked up speed as it ducked out a side gate, far away from the security checkpoint, where the news crew encampment was quickly dismantling. Few were fast enough to catch up to the unmarked police vehicle as it neared the Ventura Freeway and headed into rush-hour traffic, but copters never lost sight of the white sedan, prompting TV’s talking heads to comment again on the similarity to another media chase back in June 1994. O.J. Simpson had made a freeway run for the Mexican border, riding in a white Bronco that was also trailed by news copters, as well as more than a dozen police cars. Simpson finally made a U-turn and headed home to Brentwood, where he was taken into custody without further incident.

Unlike Blake, Simpson alone was charged with murdering his wife. According to police, Robert Blake had an accomplice. At the same time detectives were arresting a dark, diminutive and defiant Blake in Hidden Hills, another cadre of cops arrived at an apartment in Burbank, where Blake’s burly forty-six-year-old chauffeur and bodyguard lived. Earle Caldwell, the subservient handyman who had been at Blake’s side since he married Bonny eighteen months earlier, was charged with conspiring with Blake to kill her. A half head taller and more than half a hundred pounds heavier than Blake, Caldwell held his head high, but put up no resistance to police. His wraparound sunglasses and a black T-shirt with SEZ WHO? emblazoned over the heart pretty much said it all. In addition to arresting Caldwell, detectives hauled boxes, a shotgun and two gun cases out of his second-floor apartment.

As night fell over Los Angeles, the cars containing Blake and Caldwell both pulled up at the booking entrance at the rear of Parker Center. Blake faced a small army of men and women armed with boom mikes, Minicams, notepads and floodlights. As a star of film and television for most of his life, the one-time TV icon of the hit cop series Baretta was accustomed to media tumult, but this time there was no red carpet waiting, and the rude questions tossed at him could in no way be construed as celebrity softballs.

“What are you being charged with?”

“Mr. Blake, did the arrest come as a surprise?”

“Did you do it, Bob? Did you kill your wife?”

Robert Blake said nothing, keeping his blank eyes focused straight ahead and maintaining the self-imposed silence he’d kept since the day he buried Bonny Bakley ten months earlier.

Her May 25, 2001 funeral at Forest Lawn Cemetery had been Blake’s last public appearance. It was an odder quirk of fate that the unscrupulous celebrity-stalking Bonny Bakley finally wound up there. A shrewd groupie who had spent a lifetime trying to wedge herself into the Hollywood milieu now had a permanent berth on the artificially green hillside opposite the Hollywood sign and within sight of Warner Brothers, Disney and Universal studios. In his terse eulogy, however, Blake never once mentioned the irony to the cameras.

“It was [Bonny’s] will, her conviction, not mine, her dedication that brought Rosie into this world,” Blake pronounced solemnly over his dead wife’s grave, dramatically removing a white rose from the spray atop her casket. Cradling Rose in the crook of her arm, Delinah also plucked a flower off the casket and handed it to the toddler.

After that, Robert Blake never spoke publicly about Bonny or anything else again, and that didn’t change now that he had been arrested for her murder.

He kept his head bowed and continued walking, flanked by Ron Ito and Brian Tyndall, two LAPD detectives who had been investigating the case. For months they too had maintained their silence. Enduring speculation from both Harland Braun and a jaded L.A. news corps that the May 4, 2001, murder of Bonny Lee Bakley might never be solved, neither cop uttered a single substantive word about the case. During the early days of the investigation, the media flooded their offices in the elite Robbery Homicide division up on Parker Center’s third floor with calls wanting to know the status of the case. After a couple months had passed, the flood became a trickle. Summer gave way to fall, and fall to winter, but the detectives’ answer to the media was always the same: “The case remains under investigation.”

Indeed, the killing of Bonny Lee Bakley, forty-four-year-old groupie-cum-wife of actor Robert Blake, had evolved into the most expensive and, arguably, the most extensive investigation in LAPD history. Of the 584 murders committed in the nation’s second largest city during 2001, over half had gone unsolved, and police officials all the way to Chief Bernard Parks’ office were painfully aware that the murder of Bonny Bakley had been among those that officially remained a mystery. Though Bonny’s famous husband had been the obvious suspect from the start, the police had turned up no witnesses, no forensic evidence and no immediate clues that would fix the blame on Robert Blake beyond a reasonable doubt.

Indeed, the actor had behaved like a stricken and bereaved husband. While Bonny lay dying in an ambulance headed toward nearby St. Joseph’s Hospital, Blake alternately wept and vomited into the gutter half a block from the murder scene.

Get our eeriest tales and best book deals delivered straight to your inbox.

Follow Us

More from

Corporate

© 2020 OPEN ROAD MEDIA