Blake’s Lawyer Urges Jury Not to Believe Stuntmen

Robert Blake’s lawyer told jurors Thursday that they should discredit the testimony of two aging Hollywood stuntmen who said Blake asked them to kill his wife, because they are drug addicts who have lied to authorities.

The stuntmen acknowledge that they failed to tell police about Blake’s alleged solicitations to kill his 44-year-old wife until Bonny Lee Bakley was fatally shot May 4, 2001, near a Studio City restaurant where she and Blake had eaten dinner, the lawyer said.

During his daylong summation of the two-month trial, M. Gerald Schwartzbach also disputed the accounts of several prosecution witnesses that Blake had acted oddly the night his wife was killed, and denied that his client had been acting when he expressed grief at the scene.

“Was it acting? Was it real?” Schwartzbach asked. “It was real.”

Blake, 71, faces life in prison if convicted of killing Bakley. He is also charged with soliciting the stuntmen to kill her.

The prosecution had argued earlier that Blake despised his wife, and when he could not get anyone else to kill her, he fatally shot her himself. In her summation Wednesday, Deputy Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Shellie L. Samuels told jurors that Blake, an Emmy-winner, “overestimated his acting abilities.”

She said the killing had “freaked him out,” causing him to become physically ill.

Blake told police that he had returned to Vitello’s restaurant to retrieve a handgun he carried for Bakley’s protection. No one saw him return to get his gun, and Samuels said he never returned because the killing upset his plans to create the alibi.

Schwartzbach reminded jurors that stuntman Gary “Whiz Kid” McLarty testified that Blake never directly asked him to kill Bakley. He said the stuntman assumed what Blake wanted, and was wrong, the result of a “very disturbed, dysfunctional mind” from drug use.

McLarty “testified he was unclear in his mind what Mr. Blake was talking about,” Schwartzbach said of the stuntman, who testified about a drug-induced hallucination that police were tunneling under his home and satellites were monitoring him.

“I’m sure a lot of things were unclear in Mr. McLarty’s mind, using cocaine for 20 to 30 years,” Schwartzbach said.