Author Testifies on Role in Blake Investigation

An author summoned by police after actor Robert Blake’s wife was killed testified Wednesday that he went to the crime scene with detectives but did not touch anything.

Four years ago, Miles Corwin was working on a book about police detectives when Bonny Lee Bakley, 44, was shot to death as she sat alone in Blake’s car near an Italian restaurant in Studio City, where they had just dined.

Blake, 71, star of the 1970s television show “Baretta,” was arrested a year later and charged with murder. Corwin, a former Los Angeles Times reporter, eventually incorporated the killing into his book “Homicide Special: A Year With the LAPD’s Elite Detective Unit.” The Los Angeles Police Department had given Corwin special access to its investigators while he researched the book.

The defense has portrayed Corwin’s presence at the scene as a major irregularity in the investigation and proof that police sought celebrity in the investigation and arrest of Blake.

In an unusual move, Corwin was called by prosecutors in the trial in Van Nuys in an attempt to minimize his importance to Blake’s defense.

“Did you perceive the Blake case to be any more important than any of the other cases?” asked Deputy Dist. Atty. Shellie Samuels.

“No,” Corwin replied.

He also said that because he was an experienced crime reporter, he knew enough not to touch anything at the scene.

Defense lawyer M. Gerald Schwartzbach tried in his cross-examination to paint Corwin as biased in favor of the police. He also argued that Corwin included the Bakley case because it would advance his career.

“Once you learned that Robert Blake’s wife had been murdered, you pretty well knew that you would include the investigation of that murder in your book?” Schwartzbach asked.

“No,” Corwin replied. “I knew I would pursue it, but I did not know it would be in my book.”

During a major portion of the cross-examination, Schwartzbach suggested that Det. Ron Ito, assigned to the Bakley investigation, had quickly made up his mind that Blake was guilty. Schwartzbach flipped from page to page in Corwin’s book, at one point citing a passage stating that just hours after the slaying, detectives considered Blake a suspect.

“To me, covering a lot of murders as a crime reporter, whenever a woman is killed, the husband is always the suspect first,” Corwin replied.

Blake’s lawyer also grilled Corwin as to why he had destroyed his notes, despite having signed an agreement promising that his work would be subject to subpoena. Corwin replied that he considered the document a standard agreement and believed the “work” that could be subpoenaed was his book.

At the end of Corwin’s testimony, the lawyer for the Bakley family, Eric Dubin, said the author’s appearance had done nothing to help Blake’s defense.

“The biggest point Mr. Schwartzbach made today was that the Miles Corwin issue has nothing to do with the murder of Bonny Lee Bakley, and frankly it never did,” he said.

At a hearing in October, a judge ruled that Corwin’s presence at a police search of Blake’s residence had violated the actor’s constitutional rights, but ruled against excluding evidence gathered at the crime scene.

In the afternoon, David Robert Renzi, a friend of Blake’s, testified that the actor was intent on keeping Bakley, a convicted criminal who at one time ran a mail-order porn business, away from their daughter, now 4.

“He was totally obsessed with the love of that child,” he said.