Robert Blake was so driven by hatred of his wife, and so convinced of his own tough-guy image and acting ability, that he gave up seeking others to kill her and did it himself, a prosecutor said Wednesday in closing arguments at his murder trial.
Los Angeles Deputy District Attorney Shellie Samuels also said the former “Baretta” TV star was not on trial because of his celebrity, as his lawyer has suggested, but because of the compelling circumstantial evidence pointing to him as the man who shot Bonny Lee Bakley to death on May 4, 2001.
“The defendant is sitting there because of the evidence,” Samuels told jurors as Holly Gawron, Bakley’s grown daughter from a previous relationship, wept in the front row of the courtroom. “He’s not sitting there because he’s Robert Blake.”
Blake, 71, is charged with one count of murder and two counts of solicitation of murder, crimes that prosecutors say were motivated by his obsession to gain custody of his then-infant daughter, Rosie.
Prosecutors say that after failing to enlist others to kill Bakley, the actor carried out the murder himself, shooting his 44-year-old wife twice in his parked car near the restaurant where they had dined minutes earlier.
Blake has said his wife was the victim of her own checkered past -- gunned down by an unknown assailant who emerged from the shadows at the moment Blake left her alone to retrieve a handgun he carried for their protection but had forgotten back at the restaurant.
’TRICKED BY A SMALL-TIME GRIFTER’
Blake, who could be sentenced to life in prison without parole if convicted, appeared as he has through much of the trial, occasionally patting his silver hair and staring without expression toward the prosecutor and jury.
Samuels recapped the highlights from nearly three months of testimony. She dismissed as “red herrings” suggestions by defense lawyers that police detectives had focused on Blake, and overlooked a long line of other men Bakley had conned, because they wanted to gain notoriety and impress a book author who wrote about the case.
She said Blake was furious at Bakley when she got pregnant in 1999. “Blake talked like a tough guy, and liked to live out the part of Baretta and he was tricked by a small-time grifter. And he hated her for it,” the prosecutor said.
Samuels said Blake married Bakley in November 2000 to get her to drop a child abduction charge against him and to get her to sign a prenuptial contract that gave her only limited visitation rights with the baby.
She said two retired stuntmen who testified that Blake solicited them in March 2001 to kill Bakley had too much private information about Blake, and corroborated each others’ stories too closely, to have invented their accounts.
Defense witnesses testified that both men suffered from paranoid delusions due to lengthy histories of drug abuse.
In the end, Samuels said, Blake was not as adept at maintaining his composure as he had hoped.
She said the actor, apparently edgy on the night of the killing, threw up minutes before Bakley was shot. And witnesses recalled his pleas for help struck them as insincere.
“The defendant overestimated his acting abilities,” Samuels said. “He was screaming: ’My wife! My wife!’ I suggest to you ... this alibi would have worked a lot better for the defendant if he had the acting abilities he thought he did.”