True Crime Vault: Robert Blake

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Speaker 2 Welcome to the True Crime Vault, home to 2020's most chilling stories.

Speaker 5 Robert, are you innocent?

Speaker 6 Of course I'm innocent.

Speaker 7 So you think I'm a monster too?

Speaker 8 Bipolar? I would tripolar, I would quad polar.

Speaker 11 Who the hell knows what kind of polar I was?

Speaker 13 I said, Chief, who was the shooter? And he said, without missing a beat, Robert Blake.

Speaker 14 Would you welcome Robert Blake?

Speaker 15 And the winner is Robert Bray Bletta.

Speaker 16 Let the good times roll.

Speaker 18 New wife, dare I say washed-up movie star, carrying a a gun on the same night.

Speaker 20 The wife is dead, and he had a gun. He must have done it.
Wife of actor Robert Blake. Wife of actor Robert Blake, Bonnie Lee Bakeley.

Speaker 22 She was a professional con artist.

Speaker 18 Basically, robbing lonely men of their money with the promise of romance and sex.

Speaker 24 Rando allegedly said someone ought to put a bullet through that bitch's head.

Speaker 25 Many people think that he's still in jail, that he was convicted.

Speaker 26 I'm still here.

Speaker 26 You bastards.

Speaker 27 There's a witness in this case who thinks he knows who the killer killer really is.

Speaker 26 Smoke that!

Speaker 26 Let me tell you about Hollywood.

Speaker 26 When something bad has to happen,

Speaker 28 like a husband or a wife has to be eliminated, or

Speaker 26 an executive has to be eliminated and believe me, show business, there's a lot of strange things that happen.

Speaker 26 But the way they happen is like

Speaker 26 I would talk to

Speaker 26 my

Speaker 7 lawyer.

Speaker 26 Now that's confidential. He talks to somebody else, who talks to somebody else, who talks to somebody else.
And then the word comes back to me.

Speaker 26 Robert, get out of here with your family. That's all you have to do.

Speaker 10 And somehow or other,

Speaker 26 something happens. And nobody can trace it back to anybody.
That's what Hollywood is about. That's what high-end stuff is about.

Speaker 26 That's why millionaires never get arrested for anything. Millionaires don't commit crimes.

Speaker 6 Things happen.

Speaker 18 So it's Los Angeles, 2001. There's no Twitter, there's no Netflix, there's no Facebook, there's no real internet for that matter.

Speaker 20 George W.

Speaker 18 Bush is the president. It's before 9-11 and it's a couple of years after the OJ trial, so things are kind of going along the culture rather quietly.

Speaker 25 And that's when the Robert Blake murder case happens.

Speaker 29 The wife of actor Robert Blake was killed Friday as she sat in the couple's car.

Speaker 30 The victim, Blake's wife of less than a year, Lee Bonnie Bakely, was killed by a gunshot wound to the head last Friday night.

Speaker 32 After Robert Blake, star of the 1970s TV series Beretta, finds himself in the middle of a real-life mystery.

Speaker 25 It was a big, big story in a very slow news month.

Speaker 17 Here we go.

Speaker 34 It's a OJ.

Speaker 18 Echoing in every mind were two letters, OJ.

Speaker 13 It was huge, monumental. This was a true Hollywood story.

Speaker 35 In Los Angeles today, police have acknowledged that the actor Robert Blake is considered a possible suspect in the murder of his wife.

Speaker 29 It sounds like a made-for-TV murder mystery, but this who done it is all too real.

Speaker 17 Who was Robert Blake?

Speaker 31 Robert Blake was a star.

Speaker 17 He had been a child star. He had had a successful series called Beretta.

Speaker 36 This is someone who had been famous for decades. So many generations of people knew him.

Speaker 25 The public found out almost immediately that Blake and his wife did not have an ordinary marriage and that she was a lifelong con artist.

Speaker 20 He was a figure that Hollywood was familiar with. She was like a figure out of a Raymond Chandler novel.
She was a woman with a past, like somebody out of a film noir from the 1930s or 40s.

Speaker 18 The circumstances surrounding the shooting of his wife were unusual.

Speaker 39 Mr. Blake and Ms.
Bakeley went to Mr. Blake's favorite restaurant for a meal.

Speaker 40 They were chatting, laughing, nothing seemed out of the ordinary.

Speaker 39 They had walked down the street. She had gotten in the car.

Speaker 25 Then Blake realized he'd forgotten something in the restaurant, his gun.

Speaker 41 So he left his wife in the car and went back to Vitello's to pick up his handgun.

Speaker 13 And he came back and Bonnie was dying. She had been shot.

Speaker 25 Blake had run to a nearby house and asked a man to please call 911.

Speaker 42 Fire Perm XF4838, address an emergency.

Speaker 43 My name is Sean Stanick.

Speaker 34 I heard a loud banging on the door. I open the door and I see him.
And I go, Robert Blake?

Speaker 34 I was stunned. I had no idea what the hell was going on.
And he was just yelling, you got to help me. You got to help me.
He was manic.

Speaker 44 Is she conscious, Robert?

Speaker 7 No, she's not conscious.

Speaker 44 Is she breathing?

Speaker 42 Is she breathing?

Speaker 44 Yeah, they're coming. They're coming.

Speaker 42 Other gentlemen stood there to report it?

Speaker 42 It's Robert Blake's wife.

Speaker 18 New wife, a movie star. carrying a gun on the same night.

Speaker 18 You know, if you're a cop or a journalist, it stood to reason that both would try to figure out, did he have a motive and was he involved in her death?

Speaker 8 The police were very suspicious.

Speaker 40 Who forgets a gun in a restaurant?

Speaker 18 Blake said Bonnie, his wife, was afraid she was being followed.

Speaker 16 Blake has a concealed weapons permit and was carrying a weapon because his wife feared for her life.

Speaker 47 But the explanation for his gun just raised more questions.

Speaker 9 If he was worried about his wife's safety, why did he park a block and a half away on a dark street?

Speaker 49 That was something that did raise a red flag.

Speaker 25 Police suspected Blake from the very beginning.

Speaker 51 We have not ruled anyone out as a suspect in this case.

Speaker 25 They thought it highly likely that he had either shot his wife himself or hired someone to shoot her.

Speaker 26 That was worth $40 million.

Speaker 26 I would hire somebody to shoot my wife in a car. while I was out taking a pee or some bullshit thing like that.

Speaker 26 I've been in Hollywood all my life.

Speaker 18 This investigation lasted over a year. The police said it was the most extensive investigation in LAPD history.

Speaker 20 It seemed like he must have done it, right? The wife is dead, and he had a gun. He must have done it.

Speaker 10 Well, it wasn't that gun.

Speaker 18 The murder weapon was not the gun that Blake was carrying on the night of the killing, and they could not trace the gun that was used back to Blake.

Speaker 18 But two retired stunt men had come forward and said that Blake had tried to hire them to kill his wife. The police thought this would be enough to nail Blake.

Speaker 53 So this is Robert Blake under arrest.

Speaker 54 This is a bodyguard of Robert Blake's now being arrested here in the Burbank area.

Speaker 16 We're here today to announce that the Bonnie Lee Bakely case is solved.

Speaker 31 He was booked on two counts of soliciting murder and murder with special circumstances.

Speaker 40 In California, if you're charged with homicide with special circumstances, potentially you're not going to get bail.

Speaker 40 I think the LADA's office would prefer that a high-profile client be in custody than be out arguing, pleading his case in public.

Speaker 1 We return to the top story, the arrest of actor Robert Blake. Well, he'll be put in isolation and authorities say that's standard operating procedure for high-profile arrests.

Speaker 20 When we had celebrities in jail, we had to keep them out of the general population for their safety and for the safety of the other inmates.

Speaker 17 Everybody wants to be a star.

Speaker 55 And all it would take is one inmate to think, hey, if I beat that celebrity up, I'll be in the National Enquirer or some other publication. And we couldn't take that chance.

Speaker 25 Months went by. Blake is behind bars, and he really wants to talk to the press.
He's an actor. He figures he can sway public opinion, but his lawyers wouldn't let him do it.

Speaker 52 Robert's too volatile. He might have said something that could have hurt him or maybe misinterpreted.

Speaker 45 For some reason that I don't understand, he feels that he wants to talk to America.

Speaker 25 Blake kept trying to set up an interview while he was in jail awaiting trial.

Speaker 52 I ended my relationship when he made a deal behind my back to go on a television interview. I thought that was just a breach of trust, so I said,

Speaker 52 you better get yourself another lawyer. And he got a very good lawyer, got Tom Mezzero.

Speaker 39 I was against Mr. Blake giving any public interviews.

Speaker 25 This was the interview to get.

Speaker 20 Everyone wanted it. Barbara Walters landed the interview with Robert Blake.
Of course.

Speaker 58 Robert.

Speaker 20 What did he have to say?

Speaker 20 And what would happen when a highly skilled interviewer would confront him, as so many people wanted him to be, confronted on what this relationship was and where he was at the time of the killing?

Speaker 59 I'm glad to see you.

Speaker 7 Hi.

Speaker 7 I'm okay. Good.

Speaker 5 What have you been doing today until I came?

Speaker 30 I used to do this for a living.

Speaker 5 I know you used to do this for a living. I'm going to sit here and you're going to sit there.
And we're going to have to put a microphone on you.

Speaker 5 Let's start, gentlemen.

Speaker 60 Oh, you're a boss.

Speaker 48 Chuck, give me an idea when you're in.

Speaker 6 No question, you're the boss.

Speaker 7 Well...

Speaker 5 They're used to me by now. Robert, you've been in jail now for almost a year.

Speaker 5 How are you doing?

Speaker 50 I'm a prisoner.

Speaker 50 I'm in a cement box. in a jail.

Speaker 5 When you came back to the car and found your wife shot to death, what did you think? What did you feel?

Speaker 61 When we asked Robert Blake for an interview, he said no, but he invited us over to his home and said that we could interview his friend. And this is what happened.

Speaker 62 The way that Robert Blake came into this world is is very unusual. He came into the world despite the odds against him.
His parents wanted to abort him. They didn't want him to be born

Speaker 62 because

Speaker 62 he was the

Speaker 62 result of an affair that the mother was having with his uncle. Am I getting this right? He's going to tell you if you're going to be there.

Speaker 7 He's there. I know he's going to tell you.
It's fing difficult. Okay.

Speaker 9 Just keep everything rolling.

Speaker 7 Okay.

Speaker 26 I'm just just going to jump in here.

Speaker 11 I didn't know that you were going to

Speaker 10 start

Speaker 26 getting this heavy.

Speaker 26 But this is the bottom-line truth.

Speaker 44 It's a 60-year plug.

Speaker 17 The wire sticking out.

Speaker 7 Can I do that?

Speaker 26 I thought that was a part of my brain. There's about three-quarters of my brain that I'd be happy to get rid of.

Speaker 7 Okay, we good?

Speaker 7 Okay.

Speaker 26 Nutley, New Jersey.

Speaker 26 My grandmother and grandfather had a bunch bunch of kids.

Speaker 26 Tony was one of the brothers and Jimmy was one of the brothers. And my mother married Jimmy, although she was in love with Tony

Speaker 26 and started sneaking over to see Tony. And she eventually got pregnant by him and he left.

Speaker 26 She hated what was in her stomach

Speaker 26 because it belonged to Tony and Tony had deserted her. And Jimmy hated what was in here because he knew it was Tony's.

Speaker 26 And I knew that both of them hated me.

Speaker 25 So you have this incredibly dysfunctional family and what do they do? They go to Hollywood to try and make it in the movies.

Speaker 63 Hollywood, California became the movie capital of the world.

Speaker 46 Huge movie studios sprang up and began to turn out millions of feet of entertainment a year.

Speaker 26 I was four and a half years old and my lunatic father packed up the family with all the possessions and all our junk and we drove for eight days and eight nights across the country.

Speaker 25 And they start working as extras in the studios, most notably at MGM. And that's how Blake got discovered.

Speaker 20 He is really cute. He is really adorable.
And he's good at what he does because he does lots of little things and you just sense that he is doing doing exactly what they want him to do.

Speaker 25 Blake may have been unwanted in his own family, but the camera loved him and he loved the camera. So very quickly, Blake starts getting speaking parts.

Speaker 26 If you talked, everybody on the set paid attention to you,

Speaker 11 which I interpreted as love.

Speaker 25 At the studio, he was supporting his entire family. At home, he says his father was beating him badly.

Speaker 26 But I'm still here, and you're still pounding a beat.

Speaker 11 Smoke that.

Speaker 26 So, anyway,

Speaker 26 they were going to make me a star. Hello, everybody.

Speaker 25 MGM saw him as a new star. And proof of that is they changed his name from Mickey Gubatosi to Bobby Blake.

Speaker 58 We honestly believe that Bobby Blake is as great a boy actor as Jackie Coogan in the kid.

Speaker 25 They cast him in his first feature film in the title role as Moki. Good night, son.

Speaker 25 Now I've got an own mother.

Speaker 26 When Donna Reed hugged me, that was the first time

Speaker 11 that I felt

Speaker 9 loved.

Speaker 47 In Moki, he showed a range of emotions that impressed the studio.

Speaker 25 Young Bobby is on the brink of stardom,

Speaker 25 And then his father completely blows it by picking a fight with the head of the studio.

Speaker 28 And Louis VeMaire had him physically thrown off the lot.

Speaker 28 And that's the end of the story.

Speaker 18 So Blake leaves MGM and ends up going to May kind of low-budget Westerns. He gets loaned out, though, to other studios where he does start to meet Hollywood legends.

Speaker 25 He worked with Humphrey Bogart in the Treasure of the Sierra Madre.

Speaker 3 Lottery, senor.

Speaker 64 Beat it. I ain't buying no lottery tickets.
Go on, beat it.

Speaker 63 4,000 pesos to big price.

Speaker 54 Get away from me, you little beggar.

Speaker 25 And his mentor was John Garfield.

Speaker 65 Wouldn't you like to be a tight cop?

Speaker 26 When I played John Garfield as a boy in a picture called Humoresque, I had this scene where I had to start crying.

Speaker 7 Well,

Speaker 26 I was dry as the Mojave Desert. There was nothing.
I just couldn't get going. But Garfield came around and he started talking about himself.
And while he's talking,

Speaker 26 he starts crying.

Speaker 47 And I start crying.

Speaker 26 And then he said

Speaker 26 the best line that I ever heard in my life

Speaker 26 about acting or art or music or anything.

Speaker 26 He said,

Speaker 10 life

Speaker 26 is a rehearsal.

Speaker 26 Your performance is real.

Speaker 25 He played cowboys. He played neurotic thugs in B movies like The Purple Gang.
Get out of here, you hear me? Leave me alone!

Speaker 9 In 1960, Robert and I played drug addicts in a play called The Connection.

Speaker 37 And Robert played a guy called Ernie who was angry about his life and what was going on.

Speaker 9 His monologue was so real,

Speaker 9 you felt he was going to crack any moment.

Speaker 25 He married an actress, Sandra Kerr. They had two children, children, Noah and Delena.

Speaker 18 His big break is in 1967 when he plays Perry Smith in the film version of In Cold Blood.

Speaker 18 Blake reached down into himself, into his own experiences, to create this character who was vulnerable and also murderous, but who you, as a viewer, ended up having mixed feelings about.

Speaker 66 I guess the only thing I'm going to miss in this world

Speaker 7 is that poor old man

Speaker 26 and his hopeless dreams.

Speaker 18 His performance was acclaimed and he was offered everything after that.

Speaker 20 You would have thought that, you know, on the basis of this, he'd be a star because this is a star-making performance. But it doesn't seem to have happened that way.

Speaker 25 He turned down the wild bunch. He turned down Midnight Cowboy, the same role that made a star out of Dustin Hoffman.

Speaker 25 What's amazing is how often he followed a big success with a string of failures, sometimes spending years before the next important project.

Speaker 26 Some of the movies that I've made

Speaker 11 have been

Speaker 26 what I consider

Speaker 26 just fun,

Speaker 10 a lark.

Speaker 26 Elliot Gould was a big star. He was a giant star.
And I didn't have a job. And Elliot Gould was going to make this movie called Busting about two cops.

Speaker 68 And Robert Blake, I felt, had a lot more experience than me, and I thought he would be a great partner for me.

Speaker 26 He was funny, and he loved to improvise. There was a scene where we both get beat up.

Speaker 31 And we're both sitting in the cop office

Speaker 6 and I say, I understand that vitamin E will cleared us up almost overnight.

Speaker 69 Thank you.

Speaker 7 Okay, well.

Speaker 20 It's funny.

Speaker 18 So by 1975, he's off Hollywood's radar. He's not being thought of for any kind of big roles.

Speaker 25 Then he was offered the role that fixed him forever in the public's imagination as a tough guy. The image led to fame, fortune, and jail.

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It's like playing pinball.

Speaker 71 Itchy red bumps start on my arm, then my back,

Speaker 71 sometimes my legs. Hives come out of nowhere,

Speaker 71 and it comes and goes. But I just found out about a treatment option at treatmyhives.com.

Speaker 32 Take that, chronic hives.

Speaker 71 Learn more at treatmyhives.com.

Speaker 72 It started with a phone call. in the early hours of the morning.

Speaker 58 Hi, one one, what is the address to your emergency?

Speaker 72 A terrified woman tells the operator she's been kidnapped, assaulted, and that she's trapped in a room with her attacker.

Speaker 30 He's fallen asleep, so she quietly and ever so carefully finds his phone and calls for help.

Speaker 70 Is there any way you can get out of the building? I don't know without waking him and I'm scared.

Speaker 72 This 911 call began an investigation that would turn the town of Ashland into a crime scene.

Speaker 17 We've got something big going on here. The first thing that hit my mind is a monster.

Speaker 72 A new series from ABC Audio and 2020, The Hand in the Window. Out now, wherever you listen to podcasts.

Speaker 25 In the 1970s, the cop show was king, and every network had to have its own cop show or shows.

Speaker 18 You had Mannix,

Speaker 18 Starsky and Hutch, Streets of San Francisco, Kojak,

Speaker 25 and of course there was Beretta.

Speaker 18 Everybody my age, if you say the words Beretta, they break into song.

Speaker 17 You'd watch those promos, Beretta, Thursdays at nine.

Speaker 55 Beretta does everything to save three runaways.

Speaker 18 So, Beretta was one of those police shows where the cop breaks the rules to make sure the bad guy's caught.

Speaker 74 Go ahead, move a little. I'll cut you a little.

Speaker 18 It was very much in time and feel of the 1970s, right? This is the new kind of cop.

Speaker 35 It was a hit, and the winner is Robert Bray Beretta.

Speaker 25 The show earned Robert Blake an Emmy Award in 1975.

Speaker 16 Let the good times roll.

Speaker 55 I saw him in Beretta.

Speaker 17 I watched Beretta as a kid.

Speaker 34 What I liked about Beretta is I liked his style.

Speaker 17 He was a fighter.

Speaker 38 Beretta had a lot of quirks.

Speaker 7 The man lived with a cockatoo.

Speaker 20 What was the deal with the cockatoo? I love you.

Speaker 7 He was brilliant.

Speaker 11 And he was called Lala.

Speaker 26 There were five or six birds and all of them did something else. But Lala was the genius.
And he also was a troubled animal because he was trapped in being a bird. He should have been a person.

Speaker 26 And if he got mad at you, you could see that he had that look in his eye and he would grab your finger and he'd look at you like, you want to argue with me?

Speaker 16 Say goodbye.

Speaker 6 Say goodbye. Hello.

Speaker 26 So he was kind of nuts half of the time.

Speaker 26 But you could get him to do anything. He understood the camera.

Speaker 25 Beretta was tough and certainly not afraid to use his fists when required. But he had a good heart and he was always on the side of the weak and the the vulnerable.

Speaker 26 I designed Beretta as my ideal self. It was a lot of things that I wanted to be, but people thought that was me.

Speaker 26 And they expected to find that when they met me. It just, it wasn't true.

Speaker 18 In the hierarchy of Hollywood, movies are number one, TV's number two.

Speaker 25 Blake considered a TV series a big step down for him, but he poured his heart and soul into it.

Speaker 38 She would come in in the morning, knowing his dialogue to a T, and because he had rewritten it the night before. And it would be better.

Speaker 67 I've never met a man that I didn't like.

Speaker 67 But I don't like you.

Speaker 38 He was a perfectionist. If he read a script and didn't like it, he would come into the office and throw it down on the table and say, who wrote this?

Speaker 26 Jimmy Garner, who was a dear friend, he said, Robert, you can't be a perfectionist on television. Stop trying to make it in cold blood because you're not going to get that done.

Speaker 11 But I wasn't built that way.

Speaker 26 And I drove myself crazy. Every script had to be better.

Speaker 6 Every direction had to be better.

Speaker 26 Every casting had to be better. I'd hire him and fire people right on the spot in front of the camera.

Speaker 25 It was too much for Blake, and he ended the show.

Speaker 29 Blake took several years off.

Speaker 47 He stayed in the public eye by appearing on The Tonight Show. He was on a total of 150 times.

Speaker 14 Will you you welcome Robert Blake? Robert Blake.

Speaker 12 Mr.

Speaker 25 Robert Blake. Robert Blake on the tonight show was famous for shooting from the lip.

Speaker 6 There was nobody around to stop me.

Speaker 18 There wasn't nobody could have stopped me anyway.

Speaker 68 You killed him.

Speaker 76 I was going.

Speaker 76 I knew I wasn't going to hit him because I was looking at his throat.

Speaker 64 And I was thinking, wouldn't it be nice if I had his Adams apple in my hand? I said, say, Jim, you can't talk no more.

Speaker 18 Hi,

Speaker 10 I said, look at him.

Speaker 4 Look at him.

Speaker 3 They think he's really like that. He's acting.

Speaker 25 His image as a troublemaker became cemented thanks to the Tonight Show.

Speaker 26 And I did Helltown.

Speaker 18 Helltown was about a priest who saved souls on the gritty urban streets of Los Angeles.

Speaker 63 Heavenly Father, let us go among them.

Speaker 26 I wrote it, I produced it, I directed, and I was responsible for the money and all kinds of things. And it was about a priest.
And I thought I was doing God's work. It was just, I was crazy.

Speaker 26 And I had a nervous breakdown on camera.

Speaker 11 And I walked off the set. And I walked off the show.

Speaker 26 I was always at least 50% self-destructive. But when I wasn't working, I couldn't stand the way I felt.

Speaker 8 Bipolar?

Speaker 8 I was tripolar.

Speaker 9 I would quad polar.

Speaker 7 Who the hell knows what kind of polar I was?

Speaker 26 I had 35 different feelings in five minutes.

Speaker 77 I was nuts when I was away from the camera.

Speaker 25 Blake went through a messy divorce and he went back into therapy. Blake quit acting entirely for eight years and got into politics, supporting Cesar Chavez

Speaker 25 and working against nuclear power.

Speaker 26 I didn't need a lot of money.

Speaker 7 I was already a millionaire.

Speaker 11 But I was lost. I was lost in life.

Speaker 18 So in the late 90s, Blake is acting very, very rarely. He works out, he plays his guitar, he goes to jazz clubs, and he's a figure on the periphery of Hollywood, but he's not working at all.

Speaker 18 So one night he goes to a nightclub called Chadney's, and this blonde woman approaches him, and it turns out her name is Bonnie Lee Bakely.

Speaker 18 It would have been a good night to have stayed home.

Speaker 19 Bonnie Lee Bakely.

Speaker 21 She was...

Speaker 22 a professional con artist.

Speaker 36 She was involved in pornography.

Speaker 27 She had over 50 aliases.

Speaker 19 She had been married countless times.

Speaker 50 Ten times?

Speaker 36 Eleven times?

Speaker 78 I believe it was eight or nine times.

Speaker 74 I heard six, I heard ten.

Speaker 50 Bonnie wanted to be famous or be married to somebody who was famous.

Speaker 18 The word grifter was always attached to her. This con artist who just moves from place to place, basically robbing lonely men of their money with the promise of romance and sex.

Speaker 25 Bonnie and Lee Bakely always wanted to be in show business. She tried to sing, she tried to dance.
At one point, she went into a studio and made a record.

Speaker 25 Hello, my name is Leigh Bonnie.

Speaker 25 I'd like to tell you my story.

Speaker 18 Unfortunately, Bonnie was not blessed with any noticeable talent. When Bonnie found that she was not succeeding in show business, she decided to put ads in swinger magazines.

Speaker 18 She would use different names in different professions and come up with a variety of reasons as to why she needed money.

Speaker 18 There was one ad that said, My name is Julia and I'm a nursing student and I need money to pay for tuition. She'd send them sexy pictures of herself and they would fall for the babe.

Speaker 6 How does

Speaker 25 a woman who comes from very meager beginnings manage to con so many men and so many well-known men?

Speaker 25 Bonnie grew up in rural New Jersey and actually her mother gave her to her grandmother to raise.

Speaker 78 My father was an alcoholic. My mother had given up other children for adoption.
It just was not a good environment.

Speaker 18 She said that at just 10 years old she was already having sexual experiences with men.

Speaker 18 Growing up, Bonnie lived near a nudist colony, which one day a week, it was known in the neighborhood, had a day that you could swim with your clothes on.

Speaker 18 When she was 11, she and her sister Marjorie went there, only to find out that the day they'd gone was in fact the day they had to take their clothes off.

Speaker 18 Marjorie never went back, but Bonnie went back all the time after that.

Speaker 78 Bonnie was swimming there a lot, and that's where Bonnie got her start in the taking of nude photos. She was underage.

Speaker 78 People were taking photos of her and selling them.

Speaker 25 At 21, Bonnie married her first cousin, a guy named Paul, and they had a daughter, Holly, and a son.

Speaker 18 Bonnie's children didn't mind what she did for a living. Her daughter, Holly, did an interview with Barbara Walters at one point, and of course, Barbara asked about it.

Speaker 5 Describe her as a mother.

Speaker 79 She was everything to me. She was my best friend.
She supported me in anything I wanted to do. She allowed us to grow and learn any way we wanted to.

Speaker 5 Your mother was described in the press as a con woman.

Speaker 49 Yes.

Speaker 5 Help me with that.

Speaker 79 She did do things that most people wouldn't approve of, but it wasn't all that she did. She was a shrewd businesswoman.

Speaker 79 She ran the business.

Speaker 5 What was the business?

Speaker 79 Well, for the most part, she sold pictures of naked women, a little bit of pornography, and she'd spend time on the phone

Speaker 79 asking for plane tickets or just whatever she wanted.

Speaker 5 What'd you think of your mother?

Speaker 79 I thought she was great. I love her.

Speaker 74 I will tell you that her kids loved her. She was a hell of a mom.

Speaker 18 So as Bonnie gets older, her cons become more elaborate.

Speaker 39 She would lure lonely older men into a trap where they would put her on their will,

Speaker 39 where they would put her on life insurance policies. And once she had built them, whatever she could get from them, she would disappear.

Speaker 18 One of her involvements was with a retired lawman. He discovers that there's case after case, man after man, of people who've been fleeced and hoodwinked by her from all over the country.

Speaker 18 The cases fill 400 pages of a manuscript he puts together and that he entitles, Ubiquitous Bonnie, Mistress of Sham, of Lust, Greed, and Deceit.

Speaker 77 He told his niece that at some point someone was going to pull a bullet in her head.

Speaker 18 To establish her different aliases, Bonnie starts stealing credit cards and forging driver's license. This ends up in her getting charged with fraud in 1998 in Arkansas.

Speaker 51 One of Bonnie's stranger hobbies was that she would record her telephone conversations.

Speaker 78 If you talked to Bonnie, you were being recorded. It was an obsession.
I don't exactly know why, but she always figured she could use them later.

Speaker 80 I got three years' probation just for having different IDs, you know.

Speaker 80 And it wasn't even like I was really used them for anything totally, you know, too, too illegal either, you know.

Speaker 25 In the 1990s, Bonnie moved to Memphis because she wanted to be Jerry Lee Lewis's girlfriend.

Speaker 20 Jerry Lewis recorded great balls of fire. He was the killer.
He's one of the great rock and rollers of all time.

Speaker 66 Bonnie Lee was very, very determined.

Speaker 17 She just had her way of working her way in.

Speaker 17 She was just everywhere.

Speaker 66 Bonnie Lee, as far as I know, never had a physical intimate relationship with Jerry Lee Lewis.

Speaker 78 Bonnie wouldn't have been with him if they weren't sleeping together.

Speaker 66 Bonnie was going around saying she was pregnant with Jerry Lee Lewis's love child, as they call it. We all laughed because we knew better.

Speaker 20 It would have been

Speaker 7 a miracle for her to have his baby, trust me.

Speaker 19 He was sterile, he couldn't have any children.

Speaker 20 A subsequent DNA test proved that he was not the father.

Speaker 20 But she told the world that Jerry Lee Lewis was the father of her baby, and in fact, named the child Jerry Lee.

Speaker 18 After Jerry Lee Lewis, Bonnie decides she wants to set her sides higher, so she decides to pick up stakes in Memphis and move to Hollywood.

Speaker 77 She started stalking Dean Martin.

Speaker 18 He's an older guy, he's 78 years old. He ends up dying before she can actually get close to him.

Speaker 25 So Bonnie focused on someone she'd been pursuing for a while, Christian Brando, the troubled son of Marlon Brando.

Speaker 25 Bonnie had been interested in Christian Brando since 1991, when he'd been convicted of shooting his sister's boyfriend in the face.

Speaker 78 What she did was she sent nude photos to him, FedExed him to him while he was in jail. And then they met when they got out, when he got out of jail.

Speaker 78 That was it.

Speaker 62 That's all it took.

Speaker 18 So Christian Brando wasn't the only person that Bonnie has her sights on.

Speaker 25 She was about to meet Robert Blake.

Speaker 20 On that first night, Robert Blake had no idea who Bonnie really was.

Speaker 18 She will be famous, but not for the reasons that she ever, ever would have wanted.

Speaker 18 Give it up for Chicago.

Speaker 22 Sebastian Maniscalco's new stand-up special, It Ain't Right, is now streaming on Hulu.

Speaker 12 30 years ago, Jeff Bezos, complete nerd, Bezos now, ripped to shreds on his super yacht, and the boxes keep

Speaker 7 coming.

Speaker 22 Watch Sebastian Maniscalco, It Ain't Right, now streaming on Hulu and Hulu on on Disney Plus for bundled subscribers. Terms apply.

Speaker 20 Coming to Disney Plus and Hulu.

Speaker 12 Cassidy, get us home.

Speaker 14 Jonas, brother, you got it.

Speaker 75 It'll be the best Jonas Christmas ever.

Speaker 52 Can't wait to see you guys. We love you.

Speaker 20 If they can only make it home.

Speaker 23 What's going on? Our tour plane burned down.

Speaker 18 We cannot miss Christmas.

Speaker 32 You lost all three of your passports?

Speaker 25 It's Christmas. Anything can happen, right?

Speaker 20 A very Jonas Christmas movie, now streaming on Disney Plus and Mulu with a TVPGDL.

Speaker 5 You met Bonnie Lee Bakely in 1999. What was your life like when you met her?

Speaker 26 I had no real life going on.

Speaker 6 I was in some sort of a strange transition. My kids were grown and gone.
I had plenty of dough to last me the rest of my life.

Speaker 5 Okay, so in comes this woman, Bonnie Bakely, whom you met where?

Speaker 6 A jazz, jazz club.

Speaker 5 Describe it, you mean.

Speaker 6 She was pretty. What I used to do, to sound pathetic, I used to go out at night to jazz clubs.
Once in a while, I was particularly lonely.

Speaker 52 I was still Italian.

Speaker 6 I'd meet a woman,

Speaker 6 and we would have sex.

Speaker 6 And I probably never saw her again.

Speaker 5 Is this Bonnie?

Speaker 7 Yeah.

Speaker 6 I didn't know her name. I didn't know anything about her.

Speaker 19 While she was seeing Kristen Brando, she was also seeing Robert Blake.

Speaker 18 And she was using an ovulation prediction kit because she wanted to get pregnant.

Speaker 17 So, of course, she did get pregnant.

Speaker 18 She wrote in a letter to Robert Blake: I hate to tell you this, but the pill did not work for me.

Speaker 19 Blake did not want her to have that child.

Speaker 73 It's just going to make it all so much more difficult all the way down the line.

Speaker 73 Well, what about if, um, couldn't I just maybe like give temporary custody to my mother or something?

Speaker 65 I beg your pardon. Couldn't I just have it and give temporary custody to my mother or something like that?

Speaker 65 Have the baby and give it to your mother? Temporarily, yeah.

Speaker 65 I'd rather you didn't have it.

Speaker 56 She frankly was telling both the men that it was their child.

Speaker 18 She can't decide whether or not she wants the baby to be Robert Blake's or Christian Brando. Christian Brando is good-looking and handsome, but Robert Blake has more money.

Speaker 18 Brando, of course, is also someone who went to prison for shooting someone in the face.

Speaker 6 I wanted to know if the baby was healthy and if the baby was mine. She said, the baby is healthy and you're the father.

Speaker 5 That's all there is to it. But how come she said later that it was Christian Brando?

Speaker 6 Because Bonnie said a lot of things at a lot of times.

Speaker 56 When the baby was born, Bonnie Eli Bakely named the baby Christian Shannon Brando.

Speaker 18 So Robert doesn't know if he, in fact, is the father of the child, so he convinces Bonnie to bring the baby to Los Angeles. And that's when he sees the baby for the first time.

Speaker 18 And that's when his heart basically opens up and he falls in love with his child.

Speaker 6 The first time I touched Rosie, she was my daughter. And right then and there, I named her.

Speaker 6 I said, you're Rosie Lenore.

Speaker 5 You were 66 years old. This is a baby from a woman that you're not in love with.
You had grown children. Why did you want this baby so badly? What did she mean to you? What did she mean to you?

Speaker 6 You're not serious.

Speaker 5 Well, this is a baby that you were not sure was yours.

Speaker 6 This was my baby.

Speaker 5 You just knew that.

Speaker 11 This was my daughter.

Speaker 7 I knew. Of course I knew that.
Of course I knew that.

Speaker 7 So you think I'm a monster too? No. That I can't pick up my own baby and know that she's mine?

Speaker 37 No, Robert.

Speaker 7 I knew the second I put my hands on her.

Speaker 7 And I asked God to take care of her right at that minute.

Speaker 7 That no matter whatever happened for the rest of my life, I'd never ask him for the time of day.

Speaker 82 She was my baby. She was my daughter.

Speaker 25 DNA test proved it was Blake's baby. Blake did not want Bonnie raising the baby.

Speaker 18 Who would trust Bonnie Bakely to be the mother of their child? Robert Blake didn't trust her at all.

Speaker 20 They both were highly suspicious of each other.

Speaker 18 So at one point, Bonnie taped Robert Blake in a telephone conversation where she tries to bait him into saying that he wanted to sell the baby for money. Why?

Speaker 18 So that perhaps she can use it later on to extort money out of him.

Speaker 80 This following tape is just to prove that Robert Blake wants to sell my baby. I have no intentions of doing so.

Speaker 63 I'm just trying to prove it in case it's necessary.

Speaker 50 I don't know how to describe it. I mean, she just creates fiction out of whole cloth.

Speaker 80 You know, you told me about those people that wanted to, you know, buy the baby for $100,000.

Speaker 83 What people? What baby? What are you talking about?

Speaker 80 So I'm just telling you, you know, what I know. And,

Speaker 80 you know, I was like thinking it over and you know, like, but I didn't have time to think.

Speaker 70 What

Speaker 83 are you talking about?

Speaker 80 Well, I was all stressed out and I didn't have time to think about it.

Speaker 83 I don't know what you're talking about.

Speaker 80 The baby. You said that the...

Speaker 83 I would never sell my child. What are you crazy?

Speaker 70 What then?

Speaker 80 Nuts. Well, why'd you ask me then to do it? I never asked you, Jack.

Speaker 83 What?

Speaker 80 How can you never mind for me?

Speaker 83 You are really getting weird.

Speaker 50 Anyone who knows Robert would know he would never do that.

Speaker 82 A little baby girl?

Speaker 21 He's going to sell his baby?

Speaker 19 Robert grew to love the baby very much.

Speaker 75 And he accepted responsibility as a father.

Speaker 18 He married Bonnie.

Speaker 50 I think he was fearful of, of, you know, if he wasn't constantly in Rosie's life, what might happen to her?

Speaker 40 He was resigned to the fact that he had to live with her, but she was living in the back house, so she wasn't really involved in his life, and he was just doing his own thing.

Speaker 25 Around this time, Blake starts noticing a black pickup truck parked on his block at odd times.

Speaker 75 Inside is a guy with a crew cut.

Speaker 18 Blake became concerned that this man was someone who had been victimized by Bonnie and was looking to cause harm to Bonnie.

Speaker 25 Bonnie was an agent of chaos. She left a trail of broken hearts and angry men.
One of those men was Christian Brando, and she kept telling him the baby was his, even though she knew it was Blake's.

Speaker 3 Eventually, he found out.

Speaker 58 It's not my kid. You know that?

Speaker 80 No, I don't know that for a fact.

Speaker 58 No, so why don't you come out and f ⁇ ing say it?

Speaker 80 No, I don't know that for a fact.

Speaker 58 Well, why does it wind up in the National Inquirer? You're making a bunch of it up and it winds up in the National Enquirer. What is the deal with that?

Speaker 17 It really bugs me.

Speaker 80 I don't know.

Speaker 58 You have no idea what you do to people with this.

Speaker 17 No idea.

Speaker 58 You know what? You know what?

Speaker 58 It kind of hurt.

Speaker 58 Think about it.

Speaker 58 You're lucky somebody ain't out there to pull a bullet in your head.

Speaker 29 It sounds like a made-for-TV murder mystery, but this who done it is all too real.

Speaker 26 You bastards, I was still here. I didn't die in that box.

Speaker 6 You got it?

Speaker 26 I'm still here.

Speaker 36 Robert Blake was a star.

Speaker 29 The wife of actor Robert Blake was killed Friday.

Speaker 18 She will be famous, but not for the reasons that she ever, ever would have wanted.

Speaker 20 Robert Blake and Bonnie Lee Bakeley have been married for just five months. It would so appear that Bonnie had achieved her goal of marrying a celebrity, but this would not be a traditional marriage.

Speaker 20 They wouldn't live together. She married him because he was a celebrity, and he married her because she had his baby.

Speaker 13 He took her out to dinner at Patello's, which was his favorite Italian restaurant.

Speaker 20 He goes there so often that there's even a dish on the menu named after him.

Speaker 13 They had a pleasant evening, according to him.

Speaker 20 They pay for their meal and they walk out together. Blake would tell police that he would go back to Vitello's because he forgot something at the restaurant.

Speaker 13 And he came back, and Bonnie was dying.

Speaker 13 She had been shot. She was sitting in the passenger seat with blood on her head.

Speaker 19 On May 4th, 2001, 9.30 at night, I heard a loud banging on the door.

Speaker 34 When I opened that door, I was just stunned to see Robert Blake. He starts going into a tirade of, you gotta help me, you gotta help me, you gotta get an ambulance, you gotta call 911.

Speaker 43 My name is Sean Stanix.

Speaker 43 Do you know who the actor Robert Blake is? Yes. He walked up here and he's screaming severely.

Speaker 43 I know him from the neighborhood here.

Speaker 27 He was in my house and he was pacing back and forth and his eyes, they looked black and dilated.

Speaker 73 She's conscious.

Speaker 44 Is she conscious, Robert?

Speaker 42 No, she's not conscious.

Speaker 44 She's breathing.

Speaker 58 Is she breathing?

Speaker 44 Yeah, they're coming, they're coming.

Speaker 34 I thought we were going to go out together and try to help and he leaves. And I go, where are you going? He says he's going to go get help.

Speaker 34 I open the door, I sit in next to her, and there's just a massive amount of blood everywhere.

Speaker 8 It's probably about a minute or two minutes before he came back.

Speaker 34 When I saw Robert Blake had a gun, I thought to myself,

Speaker 81 we're in deep.

Speaker 20 Wife of actor Robert Blake.

Speaker 29 Wife of actor Robert Blake was killed Friday as she sat in the couple's car.

Speaker 20 Police had several suspects in the days following Bonnie's murder, including Christian Brando, Marlon Brando's son, who was apparently irate that she had lied to him about who Rosie's dad was.

Speaker 20 She'd also been scamming men men for years, so there were those possible suspects, but they immediately zeroed in on Robert Blake.

Speaker 20 Over the following months, police eliminate Christian Brando as a suspect and focus the investigation on Robert Blake.

Speaker 13 And then suddenly the word spread that something was happening and he was going to be charged. And the police called a press conference.
I was there.

Speaker 53 This morning, detectives secured arrest warrants for Robert Blake.

Speaker 13 And I raised my hand and I said, who was the shooter?

Speaker 24 Who do you believe in the shooter?

Speaker 53 And he said, without missing a beat, Robert Blake shot Bonnie Bakeley.

Speaker 26 They announced to the world they were going to Hidden Hills to arrest me. And there were thousands of people around.

Speaker 24 You were looking at a live picture there?

Speaker 20 They were coming to arrest him.

Speaker 13 Reporters galore, cameras galore.

Speaker 68 That would be Mr.

Speaker 29 Blake being loaded into the car right now.

Speaker 31 He was booked on two counts of soliciting murder and murder with special circumstances.

Speaker 13 The LAPD had been blamed by many people for the loss of the O.J. case.

Speaker 50 They wanted to make up for the public perception that they had blown the O.J. Simpson case.

Speaker 27 Over the strenuous objections of his lawyers, Blake decides to do that interview with Barbara Walters.

Speaker 5 But your hands are okay now. You're not.

Speaker 18 There's nothing like a televised interview of someone who hasn't spoken before, accused of a crime, because it's as if the nation is now the jury.

Speaker 18 They can look at this guy and say, I believe him or I don't. And that's a thrilling television experience.

Speaker 5 You made almost a dozen movies in which you either played a murderer or somebody in jail.

Speaker 48 I ain't gonna be my lawyer, you hear me?

Speaker 5 Do you think that today

Speaker 5 there are people who say he is that tough guy?

Speaker 6 No. the cops invented that person and shoved it down the press's throat and the press loved it.
They walked up and down the streets saying $15,000 for anything bad about Robert Blake.

Speaker 39 I think the police and the prosecutors were mixing performance and theater and film with reality.

Speaker 20 No longer a big star, Robert Blake admits to Barbara Walters that he's effectively a pariah.

Speaker 6 I moved to Hidden Hills, a gated community where I had lived 20 years before, and I had lots of friends. I went there

Speaker 6 and nobody would talk to me.

Speaker 21 People crossed the street when they saw me coming.

Speaker 3 The kids next door wouldn't play with Rosie.

Speaker 82 I would go to have coffee with her and people would get up from the seats they were sitting in and move someplace else.

Speaker 20 While Blake is in jail, his older daughter, Delena, takes care of baby Rosie.

Speaker 5 Do you think of killing yourself?

Speaker 6 No. I think about dying.

Speaker 6 And I think,

Speaker 6 you know, it'd be better if I was gone. You know what scares me? If I walk out of here, Barbara,

Speaker 7 where do I go?

Speaker 10 Where do I go?

Speaker 82 I feel like the people that love me are better off without me.

Speaker 5 You could see Rosie?

Speaker 6 Yeah, that would be good for me.

Speaker 8 I'm not sure it would be good for her.

Speaker 6 Here's a little girl that's got a good life now.

Speaker 6 And am I going to come in and confuse her?

Speaker 13 When I went to see him, he was quite distraught about being apart from the little girl who he had become very close to. Rosie had become his life.

Speaker 5 Robert, you did this interview because you wanted to talk to your daughter. Yes.
What do you most wanted to know?

Speaker 37 Talk now to Rosie.

Speaker 6 There is something in me and something in every person, including you, Rosie, that's special, that's a gift from God.

Speaker 18 He does not look like someone who intentionally set out to kill his wife.

Speaker 5 Robert, are you innocent?

Speaker 6 Of course.

Speaker 6 Of course I'm innocent. Of course I'm innocent.

Speaker 5 What if you are found guilty?

Speaker 26 What are they going to do to me?

Speaker 6 What are they going to do to me that they haven't done already?

Speaker 6 They took away my entire past. They took away my entire future.
What's left for them to take? You're going to take my testicles and make earrings out of them?

Speaker 20 When you think of him, you think of this combative guy who was always looking for someone to fight.

Speaker 23 Next time you see me, you're going to die.

Speaker 20 And then, in the 21st century, the person he was fighting was the law.

Speaker 20 An all-new season of The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives is now streaming on Hulu.

Speaker 71 Mom Talk started as a sisterhood, and that's gone to flames.

Speaker 32 New secrets and lies are coming out. This is going to be catastrophic.

Speaker 67 We're fighting for our marriages, and the girls are just putting us through hell.

Speaker 3 They make everything about themselves. I can't.

Speaker 32 Hopefully, this doesn't end in a bloodbath.

Speaker 20 Watch the Hulu original, The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, now streaming on Hulu, and Hulu on Disney Plus for bundling subscribers.

Speaker 68 Terms apply.

Speaker 68 Two rings surrounded by a steel cage.

Speaker 68 Oh, my God, are you kidding me? This is going to be a war.

Speaker 60 Stream Survivor Series War Games, November 29th at 7 Eastern on the ESPN app.

Speaker 15 97.1, KLSX, the FM Talk Station. Now, here's your host, Eric Dubin.

Speaker 73 What is happening, Southern California? Good morning.

Speaker 78 Eric Dubin used to do a radio show out of Orange County.

Speaker 31 I was listening to the show.

Speaker 15 Welcome to Legally Speaking, your chance to ask questions of a high-powered trial attorney.

Speaker 74 That's how Marjorie Bakely found me. She liked my aggressiveness, my tone, the fact that I was fearless.

Speaker 27 So Eric Dubin becomes the lawyer for the Bakeley family. He files a wrongful death suit.

Speaker 20 Typically in a criminal case, a defendant is simply trying to get a not guilty verdict. But in this case, Robert Blake was also facing a civil case.
It puts him in a really tricky spot.

Speaker 8 In a civil trial, you could be deposed.

Speaker 27 You could be called as a witness.

Speaker 39 The problem is that prosecutors or other lawyers can twist what you say. This was a disaster.

Speaker 39 Eric Dubin showed up with a deposition.

Speaker 74 There's nothing stopping Mr. Blake from telling the truth today.
They bring this man behind a plexiglass and it was Robert Blake. I think my first thought was,

Speaker 74 oh my God, it's Beretta.

Speaker 20 As any good attorney would do, Tom Messero was insisting that Blake not say a word.

Speaker 67 I have previously announced in open court in this proceeding that I am not going to permit Mr. Blake to respond to any questions.
I am going to, on behalf of Mr. Blake, assert all of Mr.

Speaker 67 Blake's constitutional rights and privileges under the United States Constitution and the California Constitution. Amen.

Speaker 39 Blake wanted to testify because he felt he had nothing to hide.

Speaker 48 It was my

Speaker 48 general understanding

Speaker 48 that I was going to talk and that when there was a question that you didn't like,

Speaker 48 you were going to object to it.

Speaker 67 No, Mr. Blake.
That's my understanding. I am not going to permit you to respond to any questions in this deposition.

Speaker 20 You have Blake sort of fighting with his own lawyer, which is just legal Bizarro World.

Speaker 67 Mr. Mezner, can we just start with the depot before you make your record? Mr.
Blake, I'm not going to allow you to respond to any questions in this deposition.

Speaker 67 And if plaintiff's counsel keeps interrupting me, I'm going to terminate the deposition. We haven't even started the deposition yet.

Speaker 39 I got rather abusive with Mr. Dubin, to put it mildly, and I wouldn't let him speak.

Speaker 74 Tom Mezner and I got in a huge fight. Mr.

Speaker 67 Dubin,

Speaker 70 I'm not going to be lectured.

Speaker 67 Mr. Dubin, don't touch me.

Speaker 67 I'm not going to be lectured by you on the law.

Speaker 20 At one point, so many people are talking over each other that the court reporter can't keep up.

Speaker 63 Sorry, I cannot take both of you.

Speaker 85 You're both speaking at the same time. I'm sorry.

Speaker 67 Mr. Mezreau, you can't keep cutting me off.
Mr. Dubin, you're not going to lecture me on the law, can't you?

Speaker 85 I can't, I can't. I'm sorry.
I just, I can't get both of you. I can't get what you're saying, sir.

Speaker 67 What are you so afraid of, Tom? I'm not afraid of anything. This is a circus and a clown show that you put on to get publicity.

Speaker 24 Mr.

Speaker 74 Blake's lawyers terminated a deposition. Mr.
Mazreau would not let him say anything.

Speaker 20 In the end, the civil case is delayed, and now Robert Blake can focus exclusively on the criminal case.

Speaker 74 Today is the first day that the American public gets to hear about the case in a court of law.

Speaker 20 The preliminary hearing is the prosecution's effort to demonstrate they have enough evidence to take the case to trial.

Speaker 20 Part of the prosecution's evidence will be a tape-recorded phone conversation between Robert Blake and Bonnie Lee Baker.

Speaker 42 I know who you are, and I know what you are.

Speaker 42 You didn't get deliberately pregnant. You didn't lie to me.
You didn't double-cross me. That was all in your amount.
I'm supposed to forget about that.

Speaker 39 No, I didn't think they incriminated Mr. Blake at all.
I mean, she became pregnant. She was two-timing him with Christian Brando.

Speaker 39 It was not evidence that somebody was a murderer or had a motive to kill. It was ridiculous.

Speaker 20 The heart of the prosecution's case is testimony from two retired stuntmen who say Robert Blake tried to get them to kill his wife. And when they said no, prosecutors say he did it himself.

Speaker 39 Gary McClarty was a very respected, successful stunt man in Hollywood. He'd been in a lot of big films.

Speaker 20 Gary McCarty did the stunt of riding up the stairs in Animal House.

Speaker 86 What did he say to that, that somebody at night could come in while she was sleeping and somebody could go in there and dispose of her?

Speaker 81 He said that he wanted to pay $10,000.

Speaker 20 The other stunt man is Ronald Duffy Hamilton, whose most famous stunt was in a George Lucas movie called THX 1131.

Speaker 26 He wanted to know

Speaker 26 basically

Speaker 26 what it was going to cost him for my services. I obviously had no intention of giving him a figure.

Speaker 35 Today, Blake's attorney, Thomas Mesero, continued to try to break the credibility of the witnesses.

Speaker 39 My strategy was to thoroughly eviscerate them on videotape. We discovered that there was a history of drug abuse with the two stuntmen.

Speaker 51 You've used cocaine for years, True?

Speaker 77 Not years. I have used it.

Speaker 51 When did you last use it?

Speaker 81 A few months.

Speaker 23 Didn't you say this morning you never did any drugs?

Speaker 59 I experimented with drugs and I have used regular store-brought drugs or those prescribed.

Speaker 23 Is methadrine a prescription drug?

Speaker 59 It possibly could be. I don't know.

Speaker 23 Did you get it with a prescription?

Speaker 9 No, I didn't.

Speaker 27 In these situations, typically far more likely than not that it goes to trial.

Speaker 18 Your motion to dismiss is denied.

Speaker 20 Not surprisingly, the judge decides that the case is going to go to trial. The standard is relatively low.
But what is surprising is what happens with bail.

Speaker 20 In a murder case, you don't typically get bail.

Speaker 51 I am going to set bail at a million and a half dollars.

Speaker 39 All you have to do is look at his facial expression when he's given bail to know how miraculous that what this was for him.

Speaker 35 With those words, Robert Blake looked stunned. It took a few seconds to sink in, and then his eyes filled with tears.
After almost a year in jail, it appears he will be out on bail.

Speaker 13 Tom Mesero managed something that was almost like a miracle, which was getting him out of jail on a murder charge, on bail.

Speaker 73 Back it up.

Speaker 14 I'm gonna go sleep for three or four days.

Speaker 64 I never thought I'd make 11 months in a cement box, but I'm here.

Speaker 27 This preliminary hearing televised

Speaker 27 Tom Mesero a new star.

Speaker 20 Tom Mesero quits and ends up representing Michael Jackson.

Speaker 39 Mr. Blake and I had a falling out.

Speaker 20 He's a few months away from a trial. His lawyers just quit.
A lot of the public thinks he did it. This is not where Robert Blake wants to be right now.

Speaker 20 The 90s and early 2000s were the era of court TV.

Speaker 20 That's where I got my start. It was one high-profile case after another.

Speaker 20 and one high-profile lawyer after another.

Speaker 20 When Tom Mesero left the case, Robert Blake could hire just about anyone he wanted, and he ended up hiring someone who

Speaker 20 was not particularly well known.

Speaker 50 The first 25 years, at least, of my career were representing poor people, getting paid next to nothing, but that was meaningful.

Speaker 50 I never thought I'd be retained to represent Robert Blake in this Los Angeles murder case.

Speaker 37 Who am I? Robert, how are you feeling?

Speaker 50 I believed in his innocence from the first time I met him.

Speaker 1 More than three years after his wife was fatally shot, opening statements are set forward.

Speaker 32 The trial of actor Robert Blake is finally could face life in prison without the possibility of parole if convicted of first-degree murder in this case.

Speaker 27 The case was almost entirely circumstantial. It was based on two witnesses, highly unreliable.
It was based on very little actual hard evidence.

Speaker 33 Deputy District Attorney Shelly Samuels told jurors that Blake killed his wife Bonnie Lee Bakely because he wanted their baby Rosie, but he didn't want her.

Speaker 32 The evidence will show that the defendant became obsessed with the child and with keeping the child away from Bonnie.

Speaker 26 I could have sued her for child custody. I could have done a lot of things and I would probably have won.
I didn't have to marry her. It was the very best thing to do for Rosie.

Speaker 33 The prosecution says Blake solicited two stuntmen to murder Bakeley.

Speaker 20 Prosecutors introduce evidence that Duffy bought a prepaid phone card so he could talk to Blake and the conversations couldn't be traced.

Speaker 74 There was a calling card that linked him to two of the men with like 30 plus calls leading up to the day of the murder.

Speaker 18 So Blake says, yeah, I reached out to the stunt men, but not to kill Bonnie. He wanted them to chase away a guy that he thought was stalking him and Bonnie.

Speaker 26 I was getting really worried about what was going on in front of my house.

Speaker 77 Now it was true I had a gate and it was locked and all like that.

Speaker 26 But a truck started showing up regularly, sometimes during the day, sometimes during the night.

Speaker 26 It was during the day when I walked out there, they drove away and I said, what's going on here?

Speaker 26 I figured it had to do with Bonnie because she burned a lot of people. Why not let the pros handle handle it? I hired him a lot of times.
Duffy Hamilton worked for me a lot.

Speaker 26 Gary McClarty doubled me on Bretta, so why not?

Speaker 20 And the defense had a witness who could help back it up, McClarty's own son, Cole.

Speaker 27 Cole McClarty gets up on the stand and testifies that Gary McClarty comes to him a few days after talking to Robert Blake and says, Robert Blake's going to pay me $10,000 to rough up this stalker, and I want you to help me.

Speaker 27 So then Cole goes and tells his mom, and his mom is like, what, what, what, why are you, no, what are you getting involved in this criminal act for?

Speaker 20 That's important because it backs up Blake's team's defense that, yes, Robert Blake had contact with McClarty, but no, it wasn't about killing Bonnie Lee Bakely.

Speaker 18 The other stuntman, Duffy Hamilton, admitted to using a little meth, but the defense dug up a lot more evidence.

Speaker 50 Duffy lived in a house in the desert in San Bernardino County.

Speaker 40 He had methamphetamine linger all around his house, in a china hutch, in a kitchen cabinet, and in a bowl beside a bowl of jelly beans in his dining room.

Speaker 18 Although he denied it, Duffy was using so much meth that he once hallucinated that 20 armed men had invaded his house, and he actually called the police for help.

Speaker 20 So the witnesses are a problem for the prosecution, but the bigger problem is they can't link Blake to the murder weapon.

Speaker 32 There's this gun that was found in the dumpster that is the murder weapon.

Speaker 27 The murder weapon was found in a dumpster right near the car. It was a Walther P-38.

Speaker 20 Blake admits he had a gun with him that night, but it was a completely different gun. He had this one for protection.

Speaker 20 He says he went back into the restaurant to get it, and that's when Bonnie gets shot.

Speaker 18 Two guns, one scene, lots of confusion.

Speaker 50 They weren't fine, and that's what he's going to do.

Speaker 20 Prosecutors didn't believe he ever went back to the restaurant.

Speaker 74 Nobody saw Blake go back into Vitello's, including the cashiers and the hosts that he would have to walk by.

Speaker 27 The defense said it was possible for Blake to return to the restaurant without being seen.

Speaker 50 You can see right here the booth where Robert had dinner.

Speaker 50 So, if there's not somebody at the front counter, he runs into the restaurant, grabs the gun, and is back out of the restaurant within 15 seconds, perhaps less.

Speaker 50 The testimony that you're going to hear in this case about gunshot residue

Speaker 50 is going to indicate that Mr. Blake was not the shooter.

Speaker 27 In this case, the gun residue was a very, very big part. Why? If Robert Blake is firing that gun, you expect him to have a lot of gun residue on him.

Speaker 27 If he doesn't, then it stands to reason that he didn't fire the gun.

Speaker 40 We had our lab, Francic Analytical, test fire the murder weapon.

Speaker 50 When fired twice, there were 737 particles that were definitely gunshot residue on the hands of the person who fired the gun. Bonnie was shot twice.
Robert had no gunshot residue on him.

Speaker 74 Blake had minutes to go behind an alley and wash his hands.

Speaker 40 There was no sink near the car at the time she was killed. There was no soap available for him to wash his hands.
And the entire area was examined. So there are no gloves in the vicinity, anywhere.

Speaker 50 It would have have been physically impossible. Conclusion is he never fired that weapon.

Speaker 81 I'm glad to see him.

Speaker 27 Then there was the Barbara Walters interview.

Speaker 27 The prosecution brought up the Barbara Walters interview early in the case, and that opened the door for the defense to use it to really humanize Robert Blake.

Speaker 6 From the second I touched Rosie, it's all about her.

Speaker 50 What its significance was was extraordinary because Robert was able

Speaker 50 to sound incredibly honest and emotional.

Speaker 73 Robert, how are you feeling?

Speaker 35 Fine, thank you. Robert Blake was confident as he walked in with his legal team.

Speaker 32 With the cast of characters straight out of Central Casting, the people have proven what they have promised.

Speaker 27 If you do justice, you will end this nightmare for Mr.

Speaker 50 Blake and you will give him back his life.

Speaker 24 As to the verdicts, then, would you please hand them to the bailiff?

Speaker 24 The Robert Blake murder trial, a verdict expected any day now.

Speaker 32 If convicted, he could spend the rest of his life in prison.

Speaker 50 The most terrifying moment of a trial for me is when the jury comes in to render a verdict.

Speaker 84 We, the jury, in the above entitled Action, find the defendant, Robert Blake, not guilty of the crime of first-degree murder of Bonnie Lee Bakeley.

Speaker 50 But what was like when they said not guilty? Oh, just enormous relief.

Speaker 8 Robert Blake, found found not guilty.

Speaker 18 A jury acquitted the actor Robert Blake in the murder of his wife.

Speaker 20 The people who weren't following the case that closely were shocked. But the people who were watching the trial every day were not that surprised.

Speaker 20 The lack of physical evidence, the problems with the stuntmen's credibility was too difficult for the prosecutors to overcome. Why did you decide Robert Blake was not killed in wife?

Speaker 31 They couldn't put the gun in his hand.

Speaker 50 As the jury foreman said, they couldn't put the gun in his hand. And that was the gunshot residue.

Speaker 76 L.A. District Attorney Steve Cooley is calling that jury, quote, incredibly stupid.

Speaker 13 The district attorney made the mistake of going on camera saying he thought the jury was stupid.

Speaker 25 You have offended me by even thinking for one second that I am stupid.

Speaker 13 Coming on the heels of the OJ verdict,

Speaker 13 They just couldn't accept it that they had lost.

Speaker 16 Barbara Walters, God bless you, darling. I'd have never got out of the joint with you.

Speaker 26 I promised her in jail. You get the first interview afterward.

Speaker 26 And so I was acquitted. They put me on a plane and I did Barbara's show.

Speaker 1 Buckle up, folks. Good morning, America.
Robert Roberts back with a very special guest host this morning.

Speaker 5 Have you changed as a result of all of this?

Speaker 6 People right now either love me or hate me. The other day I went to the farmer's market and everybody was hugging me and stuff, but there were people on the outside saying, murder, murder.

Speaker 7 But

Speaker 6 it's hard to go from being Saddam Hussein to sea biscuit and try to catch up with...

Speaker 5 You do have a way with words.

Speaker 6 I've never been a tough guy in my life.

Speaker 6 My bark was out there to keep people away from me because I was scared. And what I was really scared of is somebody hugging me.

Speaker 37 And now?

Speaker 17 Now it's just the opposite.

Speaker 50 I hug people that don't even like me.

Speaker 5 When you heard the verdict and you've said,

Speaker 5 I am blessed,

Speaker 5 if you could have one blessing now, just for you.

Speaker 37 I want the same thing you want.

Speaker 52 I want a date for New Year's Eve.

Speaker 11 And she said, Happy New Year, Robert.

Speaker 28 And I said, Happy New Year, Barbara. And we went out and had breakfast.

Speaker 20 That great mood didn't last for long because the civil trial then begins within a few months.

Speaker 20 The 71-year-old actor arrived for the beginning of jury selection in his wrongful death lawsuit.

Speaker 64 I think you've got enough entertainment around here without me.

Speaker 73 There isn't a ping-pong tournament. There isn't a cool game.

Speaker 14 Nothing for you guys to cover on the planet.

Speaker 20 Attorney Eric Dubin, who represents Bakeley's heirs, turned down an offer from Blake to settle the case before trial for about $250,000.

Speaker 74 I'm only thinking a couple days to pick a jury. It shouldn't be that difficult.
The defense lawyer was a guy named Peter Azell, who I believe at the time was in the Super Lawyer magazine.

Speaker 74 And someone told me he hadn't lost a case since 1970. I have confidence in the judge and the system.

Speaker 25 It should be no problem.

Speaker 17 For a criminal case, this enter is beyond a reasonable doubt. For a civil case, it's preponderance of the evidence, a much lower standard.

Speaker 27 In the criminal trial, he didn't have to testify. In the civil trial, he did have to testify.
And you can see this from his deposition. This is a guy who could fly off the handle.

Speaker 75 Don't get cute with me.

Speaker 6 Now I'm not going to tell you again. I never instructed anybody

Speaker 77 to harm Bonnie

Speaker 69 in any way.

Speaker 74 Okay, we'll get to that.

Speaker 6 No, we got to it right now.

Speaker 6 I never instructed anybody to harm Bonnie in any way.

Speaker 74 Wasn't it sure you hated Bonnie at the time of her murder?

Speaker 69 That's a lie. I'm asking you, did you hate that? I said that's a lie.

Speaker 27 When Robert Blake testifies in the civil trial, he goes off.

Speaker 32 Colorful and combative exchanges as Robert Blake told his side of what happened the night his wife was shot and killed.

Speaker 41 He was Beretta on the stand, essentially.

Speaker 32 The fiery actor frequently raised his own objections to questions and even attempted to take over for the judge by sustaining his own objections.

Speaker 13 He just dug himself deeper in a hole.

Speaker 78 Blake was yelling at everybody and threatening everybody, and the jury got to see who Robert Blake was.

Speaker 32 Jury deliberations are expected to begin in Robert Blake's civil case.

Speaker 50 The jury deliberated for eight days and returned a verdict which stunned everyone.

Speaker 35 This is Robert Blake as he walked into court this morning before the verdict.

Speaker 74 The first question was, did Robert Blake kill Bonnie Lee Bakeley? And they said yes.

Speaker 35 Blake looked stunned as the juror said his liability is $30 million.

Speaker 74 Well, hopefully I'll take a shot, cashier, shack, or cash. I'll leave it at whatever he wants to do.

Speaker 78 The numbers were good, and the jury got that right.

Speaker 50 The appellate court cut the damages in half.

Speaker 74 Eventually, it was settled for a confidential amount.

Speaker 27 I think what was interesting about this jury is they didn't seem to have unanimous agreement on what actually happened involving Robert Blake.

Speaker 80 Did you, as a jury, believe that he pulled the trigger, or do you just think that he caused her death?

Speaker 54 To this point, who knows? I mean, we're not sure.

Speaker 50 There was outrageous juror misconduct in the civil case. One of them was relying on the Bible.
There was a juror who had a hearing impairment. He was being told by other jurors what the evidence was.

Speaker 27 There were some jurors who talked about deciding the case beforehand.

Speaker 6 A lot of the jurors didn't like Blake to begin with.

Speaker 25 It was, I don't like Blake.

Speaker 77 He left his wife in the car just constantly before the testimony even began.

Speaker 86 It was just the way he was acting. I mean, you know,

Speaker 86 he could have been a lot better, a lot nicer to people.

Speaker 50 They hear about Robert Blake and they think about O.J. Simpson because there's a public perception that OJ got away with murder.

Speaker 77 They all agreed that this is a sending a message out.

Speaker 39 They're sending a message out to the world.

Speaker 77 Just because you're famous, you can't get away with it.

Speaker 50 I received a telephone call from a lawyer who said he had a client. He gave me significant information that suggested that someone completely unrelated to Robert had been involved in the murder.

Speaker 27 There's a witness in this case who thinks he knows who the killer really is.

Speaker 27 There had always been two theories of this case. For the prosecution, it's that Robert Blake ambushed his wife and killed her.
For the defense, it was that somebody from Bonnie's dark past killed her.

Speaker 20 Bonnie had been scamming men for literally decades. So there were a lot of guys out there who might be pretty angry about the way that they'd been treated.

Speaker 18 So one of the guys who was angry with Bonnie was Marlon Brando's son, Christian, and he was angry because Bonnie had told him that he had fathered her daughter, Rosie, but he hadn't.

Speaker 20 While the defense was preparing for the criminal trial, a woman who knew Christian Brando came forward, Diane Mattson.

Speaker 24 A so-called bombshell witness said to testify at Blake's murder trial about a conversation she overheard between Duffy Hamilton and Christian Brando, one where Brando allegedly said of Bonnie Bakely, someone ought to put a bullet through that bitch's head.

Speaker 20 Diane Natson worked for Christian Brando.

Speaker 27 She was his assistant, and she overheard a lot of his calls because he always used his speakerphone.

Speaker 40 She was present when Christian Brando was having a phone conversation on speakerphone. They talked about the fact that Ms.
Bakely had played Mr. Brando, and at one point, Mr.

Speaker 40 Brando said, somebody ought to put a bullet through her head, and everyone agreed.

Speaker 27 He's on this phone call with a couple different guys, including a guy named Duffy. The same Duffy who accused Robert Blake of soliciting him to kill his wife.

Speaker 20 But when the police asked Christian if he knew Duffy, he denied it.

Speaker 50 Why was Christian Brando denying that he knew a retired stump man by the name of Duffy? Why would he deny it? Unless he thought it was going to incriminate him in the murder.

Speaker 18 So Blake's lawyers are very intrigued by this connection between Christian Brando and Duffy, but they don't know exactly what the significance is until someone named Brian Allen comes comes forward and starts to connect the dots.

Speaker 56 In my neighborhood of Willow Glen, in Laurel Canyon, is a cast of characters from wealthy behind-the-scenes movie people to some celebrities, as well as some people that would be considered undesirable.

Speaker 56 They did drugs, they did meth, they did whatever. I realized that I had some information that I felt was very relevant to the murder.

Speaker 56 I knew a man named Mark Jones who was one of these individuals that there was no question he had a drug abuse problem.

Speaker 50 Mark Jones was a transient who lived on the same street that Brian Allen lived in. He was a meth addict.
He was a very handy guy and Brian used to have him do handiwork around his house.

Speaker 56 In early 2001, I saw Mark Jones carrying a gun that I later learned was a Walter P-38 and fit the exact description of the murder weapon used against Bonnie Lee Bakeley.

Speaker 27 In the weeks before Bonnie's death, Brian Allen says that he had seen that gun in Mark Jones' hand several times.

Speaker 27 And he also realized that he had seen Duffy Hamilton on his block looking for Mark Jones.

Speaker 56 Well, once I realized I could identify that Mark Jones had possession of a weapon that looked to me the same as the picture, I could identify Duffy Hamilton as being part of these cast of characters that visited Willow Glen.

Speaker 56 I then realized that there was more to give to the police. So months went by, and I was a little surprised to not hear further from the police department.

Speaker 56 But then I got a call from a private investigator from the defense team.

Speaker 50 I was excited because I thought Brian had credibility, but I thought, my goodness, how are we going to prove this?

Speaker 27 So the defense starts digging, and they find that other people have seen a gun that looks like the murder weapon in the possession of Duffy Hamilton.

Speaker 50 And Duffy's son had seen some of his father's guns,

Speaker 50 and one of them looked exactly like the murder weapon.

Speaker 20 Duffy Hamilton was known to have a gun that looked just like the murder weapon. Mark Jones was seen with a gun that looked just like the murder weapon.

Speaker 20 And Duffy and Mark knew Christian Brando.

Speaker 40 So when you combine all that, it's hard not to see how this evidence creates reasonable doubt.

Speaker 50 It was pieces of a puzzle that fit together. What at first seemed bizarre to me ended up being a very, very credible story

Speaker 50 that strongly suggested that either Christian Brando or someone associated with Christian Brando

Speaker 50 had been involved in Bonnie's murder.

Speaker 27 The defense put all this stuff in a motion and brought it before the judge, trying to get it into the criminal trial.

Speaker 40 So you've got to bring a motion asking for permission from the court to introduce this evidence. The evidence has to be strong enough to create reasonable doubt for the court to admit it.

Speaker 50 But the judge denied our motion.

Speaker 20 Brian Allen did testify in the civil case, but it didn't impact the verdict.

Speaker 40 We know that Christian Brana used meth. We knew Duffy Hamilton used methamphetamine.
It's certainly possible that the plan to kill Ms. Bakely

Speaker 40 had so many holes in it and was so flawed that it could have been contrived by people who were tweaking on methamphetamine.

Speaker 50 I've come to believe that Duffy hired somebody to kill her.

Speaker 50 He either did it at the instruction of Christian or to gain favor with Christian.

Speaker 84 I'm curious about who you think killed Bonnie Bakely.

Speaker 56 I do believe that Mark Jones was the shooter. Mark Jones became a different person shortly after Bonnie Lee Bakely's murder.
He said he was very depressed about some things.

Speaker 50 Mark ends up committing suicide after Bonnie's killed.

Speaker 56 The suicide happened only four weeks after the murder.

Speaker 56 Now, looking back on it, I could see he was somebody who had tremendous remorse, and the fact that he committed suicide seemed to further validate that.

Speaker 18 In 2009, Christian Brando died of pneumonia. A few years after that, Duffy Hamilton died of natural causes.
So, the people who might know what happened are now dead.

Speaker 18 And in the end, we may never know what really happened on that night.

Speaker 25 The other unanswered question is: what happened to that little girl Robert Blake loved so much, Rosie? Her life now may surprise some people.

Speaker 78 But he did it. He was angry and he did it.

Speaker 36 I think some people, if you ask them, where's Robert Blake, they'd say, in jail, because they thought he was convicted.

Speaker 70 Gonna take a sentimental journey to relieve old memories.

Speaker 25 After the civil trial, he ended up living in a simple two-bedroom apartment in the valley.

Speaker 35 This I stole from Universal.

Speaker 26 I built that over there.

Speaker 64 All this I built. That doesn't mean it's anything fancy.

Speaker 50 It cost him all of his money. He went to bankruptcy.

Speaker 8 I believe he lives off of his pension.

Speaker 25 His life is a far cry from his glory days.

Speaker 25 Rosie was adopted by his older daughter, Delena, and her husband. She's 18 now and has been brought up out of the public eye.
Amazingly, he still makes news.

Speaker 56 Congratulations on the recent news of your marriage.

Speaker 18 TMZ tried to interview him when he married an old girlfriend last year. They divorced after a year of marriage.

Speaker 26 Counting every mile of railroad track that takes me back. Never thought my heart could be so yearning.

Speaker 26 Why did I decide to roam?

Speaker 25 He hasn't worked as an actor in over two decades.

Speaker 26 I'm compulsively creative. You can see this crazy house that I live in because I can't stand for two pieces of furniture to match or a fork and a spoon to match.
I can't think for anything to match.

Speaker 26 I have to invent stuff. That's what I do.
That's the only thing I'm good at.

Speaker 11 And I could have gone on the road.

Speaker 26 Everybody out there still knows me and still loves me. Morning, Miss Boyd.

Speaker 14 How are you doing?

Speaker 26 They might be in wheelchairs, but they're still my people.

Speaker 11 And I could go out there.

Speaker 26 I could go out there tomorrow. I get offers to go out and do plays.
I can go out and do Captain Quig anytime I want.

Speaker 9 But it hurts.

Speaker 7 It hurts what happened to me.

Speaker 50 He was innocent and it is a tragedy that his remarkable career and reputation have been ruined.

Speaker 25 Even though he was acquitted, for many people, a cloud of guilt still hangs over him.

Speaker 9 Sometimes people's exteriors belie who they really are.

Speaker 11 Who they really, really

Speaker 7 underlayer, layer, layer, layer are.

Speaker 9 That little boy that went through all that stuff with that insidious father and all the experiences he had at MGM and how he is today.

Speaker 26 I'm not giving up. I didn't stick a gun in my mouth.
I'm not juicing. I ain't taking dope.
You say, well, why don't you work? Cause I'm half dead.

Speaker 75 It's a real tragedy he hasn't acted all these years. It's hard to tell if that's because of the way the world is or because of the way Robert Blake is.

Speaker 26 I keep waiting for God to jump in.

Speaker 26 But he doesn't owe me anything.

Speaker 26 Because I've been paid in full a thousand times over.

Speaker 26 If you live to be a thousand,

Speaker 11 you'll never be anybody

Speaker 11 with more miracles in their life than me.

Speaker 26 Gonna take a sentimental journey, sentimental journey home.

Speaker 2 You've been listening to the 2020 True Crime Vault, and you can find all new broadcast episodes of 2020 Friday Nights at 9 on ABC.

Speaker 87 It's one of Britain's most notorious crimes, the killing of a wealthy family at Whitehouse Farm. But I got a tip that the story of this famous case might be all wrong.

Speaker 56 I know there's going to be a twist, won't they? A massive twist.

Speaker 39 At every level of the criminal justice system, there's been a cover-up in this case.

Speaker 87 I'm Heidi Blake. Blood Relatives is a new series from In the Dark and The New Yorker.
Find it now in the In the Dark podcast feed.