Robert Blake Arrested as Triggerman in Wife’s Killing

Actor Robert Blake and his bodyguard were arrested Thursday in the shooting death of Blake’s wife last May outside a restaurant in Studio City.

The 68-year-old actor, best known for his role as a detective in the television series “Baretta,” was in custody on suspicion of murder and could face the death penalty, police said. He had been questioned earlier about the slaying of Bonny Lee Bakley, but authorities Thursday said for the first time that he had been a suspect from the start.

The veteran actor was taken into custody around 6 p.m. by about a dozen Los Angeles police officers who surrounded the sprawling, ranch-style home where he lived in the exclusive gated community of Hidden Hills.

About the same time as Blake’s arrest, his bodyguard, Earle Caldwell, 46, was taken into custody in Burbank. Both men were taken to the Los Angeles Police Department’s downtown headquarters.

“The Bonny Lee Bakley case is solved,” Police Chief Bernard C. Parks said Thursday night.

“Robert Blake shot Bonny Bakley,” LAPD Capt. Jim Tatreau said. “The motive was Robert Blake’s contempt for Bonny Bakley and the marriage he felt was forced upon him.”

Parks said police expect the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office to charge Blake with one count of murder with the special circumstance of lying in wait and two counts of soliciting murder. Police said he solicited two people other than Caldwell. The chief said Caldwell will probably be charged with one count of conspiracy to commit murder.

Investigators said there is various physical evidence and significant circumstantial evidence, including statements, that point to Blake as the gunman.

The murder weapon was a World War II-era, German-made handgun that police found in a trash bin a few yards from the crime scene, police said. The .38-caliber pistol that Blake said he was carrying that night was not used, Tatreau said.

The arrests came after an 11-month investigation that took detectives to more than 20 states. The district attorney’s office said decisions on what charges will be filed against the two men will be made Monday.

Attorney Cary W. Goldstein, who represents Bakley’s sister, mother and children, said Thursday that the family was gratified at the arrests.

“The family has stated all along that Robert and Earle were the individuals they believe responsible for Bonny’s death,” Goldstein said.

Through his attorney, Harland W. Braun, Blake has repeatedly maintained his innocence.

“I believe that the real killer is out there,” Braun said Thursday night.

The attorney said he has not seen the evidence against his client, but “I assume they are not going to issue an arrest warrant for Robert Blake without having something.”

Bakley, 44, was shot once in the head May 4 as she sat in the couple’s car a block from Vitello’s, a Studio City restaurant where she and Blake had just finished dinner.

Blake told police that he had left her in the car and returned to the restaurant to retrieve his .38-caliber handgun, which apparently had slipped from his waistband. Blake, who is licensed to carry the weapon, told police he carried it because Bakley feared for her safety.

Blake said he walked back to his car to find his wife slumped in the passenger seat, mortally wounded. He ran across the street to the home of film director Sean Stanek and begged him to call 911. Blake also went back to the restaurant in search of a doctor. Bakley died at the scene.

LAPD officers had interviewed Blake and searched his Studio City home at least twice since the shooting. During the searches, officers confiscated several items, including two 9-millimeter pistols, more than 100 rounds of ammunition and some credit card receipts.

Police also kept track of Blake’s whereabouts. After the slaying, he moved to the Hidden Hills home of his adult daughter, who has been helping to care for the young daughter he had with Bakley.

In the 11 months since the slaying, Braun has questioned whether Bakley’s criminal activity and unorthodox dating service could have resulted in enemies who wanted her dead.

Bakley had been convicted of identity fraud. Braun gave investigators three trunks, four suitcases and several boxes containing copies of letters, videotapes and nude photographs of Bakley that she allegedly sent to lonely men--sometimes along with promises of sex--in exchange for cash, plane tickets and bus fare.

Goldstein accused Blake and his lawyer of trying to delay the arrest and suggesting that, in view of her lifestyle, Bakley’s fate was inevitable.

“Bashing Bonny is an attempt to precondition prospective jurors with the subtle implication that she had it coming,” Goldstein said in a recent interview.

Blake and Bakley met in 1998 at a now-defunct Burbank jazz club. Bakley gave birth to a daughter, Rose, in June 2000, and tests later confirmed that Blake was the father.

The couple married the following November at what was then the actor’s home in Studio City.

Bakley went to Arkansas after the wedding and didn’t return until March 2001, moving into a guest house the actor had built at the rear of his property.

The two apparently led mostly separate lives; their joint visit to the restaurant on Tujunga Avenue was an unusual public outing together.

Two days after the killing, Blake moved to the Hidden Hills house, where he lived with the adult daughter and his toddler.

Margerry Bakley, the dead woman’s sister, said recently that the last year has been devastating for her family, which has had to contend with the shock of the slaying and with media reports branding her sister as a grifter.

“It’s been really hard, and the only people that can identify with us are the people that have had a similar loss,” the sister said. “What hurts the most are the lies after the fact.”

Braun, Blake’s attorney, said police contacted him at 5:30 p.m. Thursday, requesting that he phone Blake and ask his client to cooperate by going to the front of the house. Braun said he made the call.

About 5:40 p.m. officers in unmarked vehicles rolled through the main entrance to the gated community and deployed around the home. Police said that, as requested, Blake was waiting for them at the open front door.

Forty minutes later, several of the officers, some wearing protective vests, led Blake from the home in handcuffs and placed him in the back of a white, unmarked car. Trailed by news helicopters, the car drove to the LAPD’s Parker Center headquarters.

Wearing a green “Snoopy” baseball cap and a white sweatshirt inscribed with the words, “I survived Jawbone Canyon,” Blake walked briskly into the police building, escorted by a detective. The canyon is north of Mojave, Calif., in the Sierra foothills.

Caldwell, who worked as a handyman and bodyguard for the couple, was trailed by unmarked police cars for almost 20 miles along Los Angeles-area freeways before the officers stopped his Jeep in Burbank.

Ordered out of the vehicle, Caldwell followed police orders to lie down on the pavement in a spread-eagle position before he was handcuffed and taken away.

Caldwell told The Times last year that he knew both Blake and Bakley well and had gone on a gambling trip to Arizona with them a few weeks before the shooting. Police said Thursday that Caldwell was believed to be “out of town” at the time Bakley was killed.

Braun said he believes there are several other possible suspects, including a man Bakley met through an adult magazine and an armed robber who worked that neighborhood in the weeks leading up to Bakley’s death. The lawyer also theorized that a hit man Bakley hired to kill Blake turned on her instead.

Blake, born Mickey Gubitosi in New Jersey, began his acting career as a child, starring in the “Our Gang” movies of the 1930s. His later film credits included the role of a young boy in the John Huston classic “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.”

In “Baretta,” a popular television series that ran from 1975 until 1978, Blake played a scrappy, streetwise cop who lived in a rundown hotel with his pet cockatoo, Fred.

After the show was canceled, Blake suffered through a bout with depression and alcohol abuse.

Script battles and personality clashes reportedly wearied producers, and major acting roles became increasingly infrequent.

In 1985, he made a television movie, “Father of Hell Town,” that turned into another series. By his own account, sleeping pills, junk food and a fear that he might kill himself drove him to quit the series after 16 episodes.

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Times staff writers Jean Guccione, Michael Krikorian, Laura Loh, Carol Chambers, Manuel Gamiz Jr., Kristina Sauerwein, Eric Sondheimer, Patricia Ward Biederman, Nita Lelyveld and Jessica Garrison contributed to this report.