Bonny Lee Bakley

Case background and investigation

Bonny Lee Bakley was 44 years old when she was fatally shot on the evening of May 4, 2001, in the Studio City area of Los Angeles. According to accounts summarized by Biography and ABC News, she had eaten dinner with her husband, the actor Robert Blake, at Vitello's, an Italian restaurant he frequented, and was sitting in the passenger seat of his car on a nearby side street when she was shot. She died of her injuries.

Bakley was born on June 7, 1956, in New Jersey. Biography reports that she met Blake in 1999 and that the couple married in November 2000, after the birth of their daughter, Rose. The marriage was less than six months old at the time of the shooting, according to CBS News.

Blake told investigators that he had walked back to the restaurant to retrieve a handgun he had left behind and found his wife wounded when he returned to the car. That gun was not the murder weapon. CBS News reported that the weapon used in the killing was an old pistol recovered from a trash bin near the scene, and that it could not be traced to Blake. The same report noted that there were no eyewitnesses and that no blood or DNA evidence tied him to the shooting.

Blake was arrested on April 18, 2002, according to Biography, and charged with murder and with soliciting others to commit murder. He spent months in jail before trial. The prosecution relied heavily on two former stuntmen who testified that Blake had asked them to kill his wife; the defense challenged their credibility, citing histories of drug use. On March 16, 2005, a Los Angeles jury acquitted Blake of murder and of one solicitation count. Jurors deadlocked 11-1 in favor of acquittal on the second solicitation count, which the judge then dismissed.

Bakley's children pursued a wrongful-death suit. In November 2005 a civil jury, applying the lower standard of proof used in civil cases, found Blake liable for her death and awarded $30 million. An appeals court later cut the award in half, according to published accounts, and NPR reported that the judgment pushed Blake into bankruptcy. Blake consistently denied killing his wife.

Blake died of heart disease on March 9, 2023, at age 89, his family said. No other person has been charged in connection with Bakley's death, and the criminal case ended without a conviction. Published accounts continue to describe the killing as officially unsolved.