Blake Tip Needed Endless Legwork

Ten days after Robert Blake’s wife was killed, a stunt man named Gary McLarty walked into the North Hollywood police station and said the actor had offered him $10,000 to kill her.

Two days later, police got a tip that another stunt man, Ronald Hambleton, had told a friend that he too had been offered money by Blake to kill the actor’s wife, Bonny Lee Bakley.

Despite those early leads, it took the Los Angeles Police Department’s elite Robbery-Homicide Division nearly a year to make arrests in the celebrity case. Blake and his bodyguard, Earle S. Caldwell, were taken into custody April 18 and have pleaded not guilty to murder charges.

Police and prosecutors have been extraordinarily tight-lipped about their investigation, which a former chief called one of the most extensive in LAPD history.

Earlier this month, Blake’s much-anticipated preliminary hearing, at which much of the evidence would have been made public, was delayed as the actor changed lawyers. As a result, the public so far has had little chance to assess the government’s case against Blake and Caldwell.

But an examination of hundreds of pages of documents in court files shows how the case was painstakingly assembled.

While investigating Bakley’s slaying, the team of detectives, led by Ronald Y. Ito, a veteran of the O.J. Simpson case, traveled to more than 20 states, interviewed more than 150 witnesses and collected more than 900 pieces of evidence.

The court records show how the detectives maneuvered Hambleton, who had vowed to tell the real story only on his deathbed, into making a statement that led to the only physical evidence linking Blake to the killing -- a prepaid phone card that Blake allegedly bought as a way to conceal calls he made to the would-be assassins.

Blake’s alleged assumption -- that calls on the phone card could not be traced to him -- was wrong. Records of the calls provided police the corroboration needed to bring a case against the 69-year-old actor. One month after detectives obtained the phone records, Blake was arrested. He has been in custody ever since.

No Witnesses

Blake’s defense argues that the evidence against him is weak, with or without the phone card records. There are no witnesses and there is no conclusive physical evidence -- the weapon, bullets, blood or gunshot residue -- linking Blake to Bakley’s shooting. The defense contends that the arrests, broadcast live on television, were politically motivated.

Shortly after the killing, Blake’s attorney gave police two steamer trunks full of tapes and documents that belonged to Bakley, suggesting they would find a motive for the crime there.

But in the end, police concluded, “No other viable suspects were found.”

Police contend Blake acted suspiciously at the scene of his wife’s death, which he was the first to report, on May 4, 2001. Blake said they had just eaten dinner at Vitello’s restaurant in Studio City.

Bakley, waiting in a car parked on the street, was shot in the right jaw and shoulder with an unregistered pistol, a vintage Walther P-38. Police found the gun the next day in a commercial trash bin that authorities had hauled away from the crime scene. The gun had been splashed with oil, making it impossible for police to recover any fingerprints linking a suspect to the weapon, court records show.

The first big break in the case came 10 days later when Ito and Det. Steven Eguchi received an urgent page from the North Hollywood police station: A man wanted to talk to them about the Bakley case. When the detectives arrived, McLarty told the detectives that a month before the murder Blake, whom he had worked with years earlier but had not seen in more than a decade, had asked to meet him. He said the two men met at Du-Par’s restaurant in Studio City, then drove together to Blake’s home, about a mile away.

There, Blake suggested that someone could sneak through the sliding glass doors in the rear apartment on his property, where Bakley lived, and “bump her off while she was asleep,” according to court documents. “How’s $10,000 sound?” Blake asked McLarty, according to the account of the conversation presented in the court file. McLarty, 61, told police he had declined.

According to the detectives, McLarty also mentioned that an old friend of his, Roy Harrison, had been the go-between who had set up the meeting with Blake. The next day, Ito and Eguchi called on Harrison at his home in West Hills.

Harrison, 67, told the detectives that he believed the meeting with McLarty had been about a book deal, according to a summary of his statement to police. The next time detectives tried to contact Harrison, they were told to call Arna H. Zlotnik, lawyer for Blake’s co-defendant, Caldwell, according to court documents.

On the same day the detectives talked to Harrison, a man was telling San Bernardino authorities that he, too, had information on the Bakley murder. According to a police summary of his statement, the man, a handyman from the high desert, told detectives that Blake had offered his boss, Hambleton, $100,000 to kill Bakley. Blake feared their daughter would “wind up as a porn star,” the summary recounts.

McLarty, too, had mentioned Hambleton’s name, telling detectives that, in their conversation, Blake had asked about him. That tip put police close to closing the case. If two people, Hambleton and McLarty, both said they had been solicited by Blake, the case, though circumstantial, would be compelling.

But Hambleton told police he wouldn’t talk. He would be a “dead duck for being a snitch,” he told the detectives, according to the court file. Detectives went back a month later with a search warrant. Again, Hambleton refused to talk. He would make a full statement on his deathbed, and not before, he told them.

Detectives were making slow progress. Joe Bakley, Bonny Bakley’s brother, later told police that Blake on three occasions had offered him $5,000 to “eliminate” someone but had never specified whom.

William Welch, a retired LAPD detective and private investigator who had worked for Blake, told detectives that Blake had talked to him about killing Bakley in October 1999, a few weeks after the couple met at a Burbank jazz club and she became pregnant.

Investigators spent the next several months crisscrossing the country, checking out leads. A Los Angeles detective even met with police in New Jersey to review the criminal file of a real-life murderer that Blake played in the 1993 made-for-television movie, “Judgment Day: The John List Story.” List was convicted, after spending 18 years on the lam, in the 1971 murders of his wife, mother and three teenage children.

But detectives felt that Hambleton held the key to their case. Late last year, Ito and his colleague Brian Tyndall returned to Hambleton and handed him a subpoena ordering him to appear before a grand jury. He might prefer talking to prosecutors directly, they suggested.

The next day, the detectives returned to Hambleton’s home in Lucerne Valley with Deputy Dist. Atty. Gregory A. Dohi. After months of evasion, Hambleton finally talked -- providing what police believe is the blueprint of the crime.

According to a summary of his statement to police, Hambleton said Blake had driven him through the alley behind Vitello’s restaurant and along nearby streets on March 11, 2001, pointing out possible places where Bakley could be killed. Blake suggested that Hambleton could approach Bakley on foot as she sat in a car alongside a road and kill her, according to court documents.

Her remains could be taken to a desert location and buried, Blake allegedly told him.

A Mundane Detail

The account was intriguing, but the key moment in the interview came with a mundane detail: Hambleton, 66, informed detectives that he had urged Blake to buy a phone card “to avoid leaving any record of any future phone conversations.” He said Blake had called him on the day of the murder, seeking assurance that calls made with the card could not be traced.

If they could trace and verify the purchase of the card, and then records of its use, the detectives knew, they would have something they urgently had been seeking -- physical evidence to corroborate the stunt men’s stories.

Although Hambleton told detectives that he had watched Blake buy the phone card, he could not recall the exact date it had been purchased or the location of the convenience store where it had been sold. He told detectives that he recalled a 7-Eleven store near a Unocal station where Blake had bought gas after lunch.

Blake’s credit card records showed transactions at Art’s Delicatessen and a nearby Unocal station on March 11, 2001. Tyndall contacted a security officer at 7-Eleven who reported that just three phone cards had been sold that day at that location. He provided the access and PIN numbers for the cards and the times they had been sold.

The detective subpoenaed the phone records from AT&T; Corp. but was told they had the wrong access number. Phone company officials refused to comply without a new subpoena.

After correcting the error, on March 15, 2002, detectives received five pages via fax of every phone call made with the card. The records reportedly confirmed that Blake made 126 calls between March 12, 2001, and May 5, 2001, from his home using the phone card. Fifty-six of the calls were made to Hambleton’s home and three to McLarty’s home.

By April 18, police had enough evidence to secure a warrant for the arrests of Blake and Caldwell. They were taken into custody that evening and booked at Parker Center.

On the drive downtown from Blake’s home in the gated San Fernando Valley community of Hidden Hills, Blake told detectives, “I’ve been waiting one year for this.”