On a spring afternoon in 2005, Robert Blake stood in a Los Angeles courtroom while a jury foreman read the verdict. The 71-year-old actor, once a swashbuckling television detective admired by millions, now appeared as a spectral white-haired murder defendant. Moments later, Blake collapsed into sobs of relief. Not guilty.
The scene capped one of the most bizarre celebrity trials in Hollywood history, and it was just one chapter in a life marked by extraordinary fame, devastating scandal, and public torment. Blake was born Michael James Gubitosi in Nutley, New Jersey, on September 18, 1933. His parents were a vaudeville song-and-dance duo who put their three children onstage almost as soon as they could walk. By age two, little Mickey was performing in the family act, billed as one of the Three Little Hillbillies, in Depression-era roadhouses.
When people threw money, he later recalled, he found love. In 1938, the family moved to Los Angeles, and at age five, Mickey and his siblings wandered into an MGM casting office, charming the staff with an impromptu routine. By 1939, he had landed a role in Hal Roach’s Our Gang comedy shorts, known to audiences as the Little Rascals. For five years, his cherubic face appeared in dozens of films, and the studio had him adopt his character’s name, crediting him as Bobby Blake on screen.
Yet behind the cameras, his childhood was a nightmare. Blake later described both parents as insane and claimed his alcoholic father was brutally cruel. He said he was frequently beaten, locked in a closet, forced to eat off the floor, and sexually abused. At age ten, he was expelled from school for fighting.
At fourteen, he ran away from home. His father died by suicide in 1956, and Blake pointedly did not attend the funeral. Despite the trauma, his talent kept opening doors. As a child and teenager, he played Little Beaver in twenty-two Red Ryder Western films, appeared as a young John Garfield in Humoresque, and sold Humphrey Bogart a crucial lottery ticket in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre in 1948.
After a stint in the army, he returned to acting with new intensity under the name Robert Blake. In 1967 came his breakthrough: the role of real-life killer Perry Smith in In Cold Blood, Richard Brooks’s stark adaptation of Truman Capote’s bestseller. At thirty-three, Blake was still relatively unknown. The film changed that overnight.
Critics hailed his chillingly authentic performance as the sensitive yet psychopathic drifter who slaughters a Kansas farm family. Many expected an Oscar nomination, though none came. For Blake, the role was career-defining but harrowing. He later admitted that playing a murderer dredged up his own demons, and after the film he fell into a deep depression and needed psychiatric help.
He could not work for two years. By 1969, Blake had emerged from that hiatus and taken on other challenging roles, including a Paiute Indian on the run in Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here and a motorcycle cop in Electra Glide in Blue. In 1975, he landed the role that made him a household name: undercover New York detective Tony Baretta in the ABC series Baretta. With his trademark T-shirt, flat cap, and cockatoo on his shoulder, Baretta became one of the era’s most memorable television characters.
The show ran from 1975 to 1978, and Blake won the Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series in 1975, plus a Golden Globe the following year. Yet the fiery intensity that made him a star was also creating chaos. Baretta’s set was racked by tensions fueled by its temperamental lead. Blake demanded realism and perfection and was not shy about berating writers, directors, and co-stars.
In one infamous incident in 1982, after hosting Saturday Night Live, he reportedly crumpled a sketch he disliked and hurled it into a cast member’s face, earning a lifetime ban from the show. Blake also admitted publicly that during those years he struggled with serious substance abuse. By the end of Baretta, he later said, he was pretty messed up. After the series ended in 1978, Blake stepped back from acting.
His comeback attempts in feature films failed to catch fire. His personal life was spiraling as well. After more than twenty years of marriage, he and his wife Sandra separated in 1982 and divorced the following year. In 1985, he created and starred in the NBC series Hell Town, playing an ex-gang-member-turned-priest.
The show lasted only thirteen episodes. Blake quit after suffering what he described as a complete nervous breakdown. He later told reporters that during that period he came terrifyingly close to suicide. He walked away from the industry and spent the next seven years in therapy, trying to confront a lifetime of accumulated pain.
In 1993, at nearly sixty, Blake made an unlikely comeback in Judgment Day: The John List Story, playing the soft-spoken accountant who murdered his family and vanished for eighteen years. The performance won him a second Emmy. Critics praised the return, but the role carried an eerie irony: Blake was being lauded for embodying a murderer, an unsettling foreshadowing of events to come. In 1999, Blake met Bonnie Lee Bakley at a jazz club.
Bakley, forty-three, was a familiar figure on Hollywood’s fringes, known for romancing and often billing older celebrities. Blake knew of her reputation as a grifter but felt grateful for her attention. “She took me out of the stands and put me back in the arena,” he later said. In 2000, Bakley became pregnant.
She initially claimed the father was Christian Brando, son of Marlon Brando, but DNA tests proved Blake was the father. When baby Rose was born in June 2000, Blake was instantly devoted. He agreed to marry Bakley that November, though by most accounts the marriage was in name only, entered into for the sake of their daughter. They kept separate homes and separate lives.
Blake was well aware of his wife’s past, later calling her a con artist, but he insisted he bore her no ill will. “She gave me something to live for in Rose,” he said. On May 4, 2001, just months into the marriage, Blake took Bakley to dinner at Vitello’s Italian Eatery in Studio City. Around 9 p.
m. , after the meal, they walked to his car, parked on a dark side street. According to Blake, Bakley realized she had left her purse inside the restaurant. Blake volunteered to go back for it, and also to retrieve a handgun he said he had accidentally dropped in the booth.
When he returned, he found Bakley slumped in the passenger seat, shot in the head at close range. She was pronounced dead on arrival at the hospital, aged forty-four. From the outset, the circumstances were bizarre. Blake’s story sounded strange to investigators.
The gun he said he went to retrieve was found in the restaurant and was not the murder weapon. The actual weapon was found tossed in a dumpster nearby. There were no eyewitnesses and no physical evidence tying Blake to the shooting, and he had called 911 from a neighbor’s house, appearing distraught. At first, police did not charge him, noting Bakley had made many enemies through her years of cons and schemes.
The break came when two stuntmen, Gary McLarty and Ronald Duffy Hamilton, came forward with explosive allegations. They claimed that months before the murder, Blake had solicited them to kill Bakley. Their stories were far from ironclad, but to investigators they provided the missing link. On April 18, 2002, nearly a year after the murder, Blake was arrested and charged with killing his wife and with two counts of solicitation of murder.
His longtime bodyguard was also arrested as an alleged accomplice. The trial began in late 2004 and became a media spectacle. The prosecution portrayed Bakley as a loving mother who had found stability with Blake, killed when she became inconvenient. Their star witnesses were the two stuntmen.
The defense painted Bakley as the ultimate femme fatale, a career grifter who might have been killed by any number of disgruntled victims of her scams. They underscored the lack of forensic evidence: no gunshot residue, no blood, no witnesses placing Blake near the car at the moment of the shooting. They asked why a man planning to kill his wife would do it in such a public, risky manner with no plan for the aftermath. On March 16, 2005, after a grueling three-month trial and eight days of deliberation, the jury found Robert Blake not guilty of murder and not guilty of one count of solicitation.
They deadlocked on a second solicitation count, which the judge dismissed. In the courtroom, Blake dropped his head and sobbed. Bakley’s daughter wept in shock and anger, vowing to pursue justice in civil court. Outside, Blake told reporters he was broke and needed a job, then bent down and cut off the electronic ankle monitor he had worn under house arrest, holding it up for the cameras.
His legal troubles were not over. In November 2005, a civil jury found Blake liable for Bakley’s wrongful death, voting ten to two that he had intentionally caused her death and awarding thirty million dollars in damages to her children. Blake, who had spent his fortune on his defense, could not pay. He declared bankruptcy, and an appeals court later cut the damages in half.
The case was eventually settled confidentially for an undisclosed sum. Blake never acted again. No producer was willing to gamble on an aging actor so infamously tied to a murder case. In his later years, Blake lived in relative solitude, passing time with jazz music, guitar, poetry, and classic films.
His youngest daughter, Rose, was raised by Blake’s adult daughter Delina, and Blake did not see her at all during her childhood. It was not until 2019, when Rose was eighteen, that she reconnected with her biological father. Their reunion was quiet and reportedly cordial, but the distance was evident. Robert Blake died at his home in Los Angeles on March 9, 2023, at the age of eighty-nine.
The cause was heart disease. Obituaries dutifully recounted his early screen moments, the Our Gang days, In Cold Blood, Baretta, yet almost all gave equal or greater space to the sensational scandal that engulfed his later years. Once hailed among the finest actors of his generation, he became better known as the center of a real-life murder trial, a story more bizarre than any role he ever played.
