35

Margerry Bakley learned of her sister’s death when tabloid reporters showed up at her apartment door in Dover, New Jersey, shortly after midnight on May 5, 2001.

“CNN was on. My mother was on the other line. The doorbell’s ringing and it’s the Star magazine. And my mother goes, ‘The son of a bitch shot her. He killed her. She’s dead.’ And as she was saying that, CNN was [broadcasting] the loading of her body into the ambulance.”

In Memphis, Paul Gawron had a similar reaction: “I got a phone call from somebody in L.A., a newspaper, some reporter, and he said, ‘Bonny’s been shot.’ The words out of my mouth was, ‘Oh, my stars!’ My first thought was, ‘He did it. He actually did it. She was afraid and he did it.’”

Some were not so quick to pass judgment though, and they weren’t just Robert Blake’s lawyers. Bonny had a most unique background. She had made any number of enemies in her fast and furious forty-four years. Upon reflection, three months later, Gawron began to consider the same range of suspects as Blake’s attorneys and wondered if they might have a point.

“I wouldn’t exempt her own family, tell you the truth,” Gawron said.

Someone broke into attorney Anthony Helm’s office and stole a phone log and a dozen of Bonny’s porn shots from one of his filing cabinets the day after her murder. Helm, who had handled Bonny’s legal problems for more than a decade, reported the theft to the Memphis police when the tabloids began calling.

“Indirectly I got an offer from a tabloid through an attorney,” he said. “It involved $100,000 for the photos.”

Helm turned the offer down, but began wondering if the thief who broke into his office had received that same offer.

“I never thought something like this would happen,” Helm said. “I may have been a little bit naive.”

“I’d be the first one to apologize if it wasn’t true too, but I know he did it,” Margerry Bakley said shortly before she signed her own contract with the tabs. “Blake murdered my sister. It’s as simple as that.”

The Star paid Margerry $20,000 for her exclusive story and Judy Howell earned enough to pay cash for a new Chrysler P.T. Cruiser. For months afterward, Bonny’s mother, Marjorie Lois Carlyon, would not speak to the press because she too had signed a lucrative, exclusive contract with the National Enquirer.

“I feel Blake was planning Bonny’s murder from the day after they got married,” Carlyon revealed in the pages of the Enquirer. “I am 100 percent sure that Robert Blake was responsible for murdering my daughter.”

Gawron too joined the gravy train. He released to the tabloids one of Bonny’s secretly recorded phone conversations with Blake. In the months that followed the murder, Bonny’s daughter Holly, her brother, Joey, and her half brother, Peter, would also sell testimonials to the highest bidder. As a single mom with no job and no income, Margerry made no apologies.

“It’s what Bonny would have wanted me to do,” she said.

Besides, like the coverage of O.J., the Bonny Bakley story was tailor-made for the tabloids. If anyone was going to be vigilant and get to the bottom of the murder mystery, Margerry reasoned, it would be the tabs. It wasn’t going to be the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal.

The Good Samaritan in whose arms Bonny Lee Bakley died could have cleaned up too, but he chose not to.

“It’s been a painful time for me,” said Sean Stanek. “I know I could make a lot of money on this if I wanted to and totally cash in on my fifteen minutes of fame. I mean Kato [Kaelin] just got a knock on his door from O.J. and he had million-dollar offers. Well, I was covered in Bonny Blake’s blood. It was a horrible experience to go through.”

For his part, Noah Blake appeared for free on Larry King Live, defending his father by saying Bakley “was afraid and wanted him to carry” the gun.

“My dad is innocent, period,” Noah said emphatically, even though he seldom saw his father and had never met his late stepmom. “He doesn’t need to prove that. He is not obligated nor is he obliged to address a thousand-trillion rumors. He was scared for himself. He was scared for me. He was scared for my sister. He just had no idea what had happened and he was really scared. He still is, you know, pretty shaken up about this.”

Delinah was less forthcoming. Except for a controlled postarrest interview she gave to the producers of TV’s Biography series for a largely fawning profile of her father and his long career in Hollywood, Blake’s unmarried elder daughter remained mum.

Sondra was the least candid of any of the Blakes. While she consented to a round of interviews on the morning news programs, she was accompanied by feminist attorney Gloria Allred, who cut off all but the most innocuous softball question. Once she gave her generalized vote of support for her ex-husband, Sondra shrank back into the same traumatized cocoon of silence that she had occupied for twenty years.

But Blake’s lawyers more than made up for the family’s silence.

“The only thing Robert should be sentenced to do is free public service TV spots for Planned Parenthood,” said attorney Barry Felsen, the entertainment law partner at Goldman & Kagon, the law firm where Robert Blake did most of his legal business for almost thirty years.

“He should go on camera and say, ‘Always use a condom,’” continued Felsen—an ironic sentiment that was echoed by Blake’s son, Noah, who took some delight in turning the tables on a father who had admonished him for years to always use contraception.

But Felsen didn’t just lecture his client on birth control. Before Ron Ito could get Blake alone in an interrogation room, Felsen had put in a call to Harland Braun.

While he limited his practice to criminal law, Braun’s client list could easily pass for that of an entertainment law firm. Over the years, his celebrity clients included Roseanne Barr, the late Chris Farley, Steven Seagal, rapper Eazy-E, actors Ed O’Neill, Gary Busey and Harry Morgan and former NBA star Dennis Rodman. He also represented L.A. congresswoman Bobbie Fiedler in a political bribery case, several of the cops in both the Rodney King beating case and the LAPD’s Ramparts scandal, as well as Elizabeth Taylor’s doctor, who had once been accused of overprescribing medication.

But Braun’s specialty since leaving the Los Angeles County D.A.’s office in 1973 was murder—the more high profile, the better. Even his enemies sang Harland’s praises.

“He speaks in sound bytes,” said Deputy District Attorney Lea D’Agostino, whom Harland once addressed as “scum” during the highly publicized Twilight Zone manslaughter trial of the mid-1980s. “People think we should be mortal enemies, but we’re not. If I were in trouble, I’d certainly want someone who is as dedicated on my team.”

Even before the LAPD’s Scientific Investigation Division trucks were rolling toward Dilling Street on May 5, Braun hired Woodland Hills private investigator Scott Ross to run a parallel investigation to that of the police. It wasn’t that Braun didn’t trust the LAPD to do its job. He simply wanted to give them plenty of fresh leads to investigate—and if there was ever a woman with fresh leads to investigate, it was Bonny Lee Bakley.

The detectives’ chief dilemma at the moment was that they had too many suspects, and Braun knew it. Braun went on the offensive, carting box after box of Bonny’s belongings to Parker Center, claiming that her porn business alone proved that Ito and his fellow detectives would be rushing to judgment if they singled out Robert Blake as their sole suspect. As he came across mailing lists containing the names of hundreds of men Bonny had fleeced over the years, he boxed them up and sent them along with the porn. While he was at it, Braun called a press conference and distributed media releases. For those who asked—and for those who wouldn’t—he happily flipped through photo albums stuffed with snapshots of Bonny at her horniest and most hirsute. He provided audiotapes of her conversations about bilking men and meeting stars and, last but not least, he laid out just a sampling of the hundreds of men who had good reason to want to see Mrs. Blake erased from the planet.

As if that wasn’t enough, Braun also went after her family, claiming they were the worst kind of grifters. One of the first questions his newest client asked him was whether he thought Bonny or one of her friends or relatives might have contracted to kill Blake.

“Of course,” Braun answered. “There’s no moral content to any of these people. Once she’s in Hollywood, what does she need Robert Blake for? She gets rid of him, she’d be Mrs. Robert Blake. She’s established herself.”

Once he had the Robbery Homicide Division scrambling to paw through and catalogue the entirety of Bonny’s porn trove, Braun suggested that Bonny did herself in, hiring a hit man to off Blake only to wind up double-crossed. Was it so far-fetched that a woman such as the ubiquitous Bonny Lee Bakley might pay, say, half of a $50,000 murder contract up front and become the victim herself when the hit man figured out that $25,000 in hand (especially from a rip-off artist like Bonny) was worth a billion in the bush?

Harland spun a theory that made Blake the unwitting stepping-stone to far bigger Hollywood fish. Bonny’s scams might have yielded even more money, power and notoriety, Braun said, if she could have used Blake’s name to gain entrée to higher Hollywood circles. She certainly hadn’t abandoned her criminal ways, the lawyer reasoned.

The plain fact, he claimed, was that once Ito’s team looked beyond Blake or his bodyguard, Earle Caldwell, as possible suspects, “you got too much evidence. It’s all over the country. You wouldn’t know where to start.”

Braun called Bonny “hypervigilant” and blamed her paranoia on stalkers, not her husband. She hid her car at the back of Blake’s house and used Caldwell as her own bodyguard, he said. In the months before her death, Blake and Caldwell both told Braun that a young man with a crew cut had been parking his black four-door pickup down Dilling Street and had been watching the house. In addition, Caldwell told Braun that Robert “was getting weird phone calls.”

Somebody was after Bonny, Braun said, and it wasn’t Braun’s client.

Strategically, the flip side of slamming Bonny was that it was humanizing Robert.

“Once he found out it was his child, you’ve got to understand, this is a Sicilian⁶⁹ guy whose blood is important,” said Braun. “So if this child was his blood, I mean, this is an old-fashioned guy. This is not a guy who’s going to not pay child support. This is a guy that will sacrifice his own happiness for his blood.”

Furthermore, the police had been unable to connect Robert to the crime with fingerprints, fibers, blood, gun residue, hair or the murder weapon. “If he had done it, the physical evidence would be there,” said Braun.

Those who knew the sandy-haired lawyer with the trademark tortoiseshell half lenses understood that kicking Robbery Homicide’s institutional ass was not personal. Braun learned early to spin the media. In 1981, two doctors who discontinued intravenous feeding of a critically brain-damaged man were charged with murder. It could have been just another plea bargain, but Braun went public with it and prompted a firestorm of publicity on the right to die with dignity. Braun won. Since then his media massaging had made him very nearly as big a star as many of the celebrities he represented.

69. “My father is not Sicilian,” said Noah Blake. “He’s Neopolitan.”