The Unsolved Murder of Bonny Lee Bakley

Bonny Lee Bakley was fatally shot while sitting in a parked car outside a Los Angeles restaurant in May 2001. While an unsolved murder alone would be enough to garner interest in her case, ​the fact that she was married to Robert Blake, best known as a child actor in The Little Rascals and for his later crime drama, Baretta, was enough to create even more interest in the case. She was Blake’s second wife and he was her tenth husband. It was his car she happened to be sitting in when she was murdered.

The following year, Blake was charged with her murder, solicitation of murder, conspiracy, and a special circumstance of lying in wait. In March 2005, a jury found Blake not guilty of any of these crimes. Later that same year, he was held liable in the wrongful death lawsuit brought against him by Bonny’s children. However, due to his exoneration in the charges against him, the murder is still classified as an unsolved homicide.

Bonny was a high school dropout, leaving school at the age of sixteen to make her way to New York City in pursuit of a modeling and acting career. She enrolled at the Barbizon School of Modeling, where she met Evangelos Paulakis. Paulakis was an immigrant and needed to get married to remain in the country. Bonny agreed, for a price, and they married, but she divorced him almost as quickly, leaving him to be deported. Bonny’s second marriage, at age 21, was to her first cousin, Paul Gawron. They were married for five years and had two children together before divorcing in 1982.

Bonny was a bit of a hustler, making money to support herself by running a mail-order porn business where she sent photos of herself and other women to men who paid for them. She ran ads looking for male companions and would often ask those who responded for money for expenses or travel. She was quite good at persuading strange men to fund her lifestyle, so good that she was able to buy several houses around Memphis, Tennessee, and one outside of Los Angeles, California. The money also afforded her a chance to resume her attempt to become a singer or actor, but she was ultimately unsuccessful in that.

Bonny was not exactly an upstanding citizen even outside the lurid nature of her “business” endeavors. She was arrested in 1989 for drug possession which resulted in only a fine. In 1995, she was arrested for passing bad checks, which resulted in a fine of $1,000 and a sentence to do weekend work on a penal farm per a plea agreement. In 1998, she was again arrested, this time in Little Rock, Arkansas, for having five driver’s licenses and seven social security cards with different names in her possession. She had been using the various IDs to open post office boxes that were used in her mail order scams.

Friends describe Bonny as a star chaser, saying she was “celebrity obsessed”. As confirmed by recorded phone conversations, she was consumed with marrying someone famous. In 1990, she was actively seeking the attention of Jerry Lee Lewis. She eventually managed to meet him and became close friends with his sister, Linda. In 1993, she claimed that she was the mother of his illegitimate child, a daughter named Jeri Lee. DNA tests would later show this to be false. By this time, Bonny had already left the child with one of her ex-husbands to raise, contributing financially to her support, so that she could move to California unencumbered.

There, she chased after other celebrities including Dean Martin, Frankie Valli, and Gary Busey. In 1991, she developed an interest in Christian Brando, the eldest son of Marlon Brando. The younger Brando had become a tabloid favorite after he was charged and tried for the murder of Dag Drollet, his half-sister’s boyfriend. He had pleaded guilty to a reduced charge of voluntary manslaughter and received a ten-year sentence for the crime.

While he was still incarcerated, Bonny began writing him letters and sending him photos. When he was released in 1996, they became romantically involved. Bonny became pregnant in 1999, giving birth to a daughter in June 2000. She named the child Christian Shannon Brando. It was later determined that Brando was not the father.

While Bonny was dating Brando, she had also become involved with Robert Blake, who she met at a club in 1999. When she confided to Blake that she was uncertain that Brando was the father of her daughter and that he might be the biological father instead, he demanded a paternity test. It confirmed that Blake, not Brando, was the father and the girl’s name was legally changed to Rose Lenore Sophia Blake.

Blake agreed to marry Bonny if she would sign a custody agreement that would allow only Bonny to visit Rose only under supervision and required her to get written permission for her friends and family to visit his property. The agreement further stated that if either decided to get a divorce, the other would retain custody of Rose. Despite her attorney’s protest that the agreement was one-sided, Bonny agreed to it and signed it in October 2000. The couple was then married in November 2000.

In another odd part of the arrangement, they resided separately, with Bonny and Rose living in a small guest house beside Blake’s main residence in Studio City, California. Blake didn’t trust Bonny and hired a private investigator to dig into her personal business. He discovered that she was still operating her mail-order scams while married to him, which didn’t sit well.

On May 4, 2001, Blake took Bonny to dinner at Vitello’s Restaurant in Studio City. After their meal, they went out to the car, but Blake left Bonny there to return to the restaurant, where he claims he left his firearm. By the time he returned, Bonny had been shot twice and was deceased.

It was later determined that the gun he retrieved did not fire the shots that killed her. The gun that did was found in a dumpster with the serial numbers filed off. Blake had only minimal residue on his hands, which could have been gotten when he returned to the car where Bonny lay shot. A forensics expert stated that he would have had much more residue, even if he had washed his hands, if he had fired the gun.

Additionally, Bonny had taped many phone conversations and one of them included former beau, Christian Brando, telling her that someone should put a bullet in her head. On the other hand, there were also calls where Blake berates her for lying to him about getting an abortion and saddling him with a child to get at his money.

On March 16, 2005, Blake was found not guilty of the murder of Bonny or a count of soliciting a former stuntman to murder her. The other count of the same charge was dropped due to the jury’s deadlock on the issue, though the count was 11–1 in favor of acquittal. His defense undermined the credibility of witnesses who claimed Blake had wanted to hire them to kill Bonny and suggested it was one of the many men Bonny had conned out of money with her mail-order love scams. They even brought up the possibility that Bonny was a drug addict and was prostituting her oldest daughter, Holly.

In the end, the prosecution failed to prove their circumstantial case that Blake had hired someone to kill his wife. Their disdain was evident when Los Angeles Country District Attorney called Blake a “miserable human being” and the jurors “incredibly stupid” when commenting on the ruling after the trial had ended.

On November 18, 2005, Blake lost in a lawsuit brought by Bonny’s oldest three children. They claimed that he was responsible for their mother’s death. It was likely the testimony of long-time bodyguard Earle Caldwell’s girlfriend that sealed the verdict. When asked if she believed Blake and Caldwell were involved in the crime, she hesitated for quite some time before finally leaning forward and speaking into the microphone, responding that she did believe them to be involved. In the end, the jury ordered Blake to pay $30 million to Bonny’s family, though an appeals court reduced this to $15 million.

Now, twenty years past the murder of Bonny Lee Bakley, no one can say conclusively who murdered her and there is not enough evidence to arrest another suspect in the crime. We may never know who killed Bonny, but many feel comfortable that the right man was placed on trial. Others aren’t so sure. What we do know is that there has been no true justice for the friends and family of Bonny Lee Bakely as long as her murderer continues to walk around free.