Baretta star 'killed wife after hitmen pulled out'

TV detective Robert Blake murdered his wife after two stuntmen he solicited refused to commit the crime, a California court was told.

The star of the Baretta TV series is accused of killing Bonny Lee Bakley, the 44-year-old mother of Blake’s daughter, Rosie, who was shot after they ate dinner at his favourite restaurant.

Opening the prosecution case in Los Angeles, Deputy District Attorney Shellie Samuels rapidly described the circumstantial case against the 71-year-old actor, including the allegation that he solicited the stuntmen.

“Unfortunately for the defendant, neither of the stuntmen that he contacted was willing to do the deed for him,” Samuels said.

“The defendant told one of them, Ronald ‘Duffy’ Hambleton, that if he, Duffy, wouldn’t do it, the defendant would have to do it himself, and the evidence will show you that that is exactly what he did.”

The prosecution claims Blake despised Bakley and did not want her to have contact with Rosie.

Blake had married Bakley after tests showed that Rosie was his daughter.

“This was not a marriage made in heaven,” Samuels told the jury.

Blake insists he left his wife sitting in his car while he went back into the restaurant. He said he went back to retrieve a gun he carried for protection and had left behind, then returned to the car and found her wounded.

Blake and Bakley dined at Vitello’s restaurant in Studio City on May 4, 2001, and left together around 9.30pm, walking to Blake’s car nearby. The murder weapon was found in a rubbish bin in front of the car, Samuels told the jury.

“Sometime between 9.30pm and 9.40pm on May 4, 2001, Bonny Lee Bakley was shot twice while sitting in the defendant’s car and she died shortly thereafter, at the hospital, of her wounds. The question we are here to address is, who shot and killed Bonny Lee Bakley?” Samuels said.

The murder weapon could not be linked to Blake. There were minimal traces of gunpowder residue on his clothes, not enough to show that he fired a gun.

The case came together when Hambleton and Gary McLarty, former stuntmen who had worked with Blake, came forward and said he tried to hire them to kill his wife. They were the prosecution’s star witnesses at a preliminary hearing last year.

However, the stuntmen have been shadowed by allegations of drug use and mental illness.

It was unclear whether defence lawyer Gerald Schwartzbach would be able in opening statements to present evidence to that effect.

Schwartzbach asked permission at a hearing on Friday to address evidence showing Hambleton had a history of using methamphetamines and that McLarty, who has mental health problems, had used cocaine for 20 years.