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Bonny wanted to be cremated and shipped back to New Jersey, but Forest Lawn wound up being her final resting place. It seemed appropriate somehow. Forest Lawn is home to Bette Davis, Jack Webb, Lucille Ball, Freddie Prinze, Charles Laughton and a host of other stars. Her soul might long for the nudist colony of her youth, but the groupie in her had to feel right at home, sandwiched for eternity between tough guys like George Raft and Telly Savalas, and pop idols Ricky Nelson and Andy Gibb.

“Bonny wanted more than anything in the world to be hooked up with a movie star,” said Anthony Helm, the Memphis attorney who represented Bonny for more than a decade. “I hate to say that she was an airhead, but she reminded you of someone who was shallow. Yet the more you talked to her, the more you got the idea that your first impression was wrong.”

She was both brassy and painfully shy, stopping at nothing to get next to a star, but struck dumb once she achieved her goal. Now she had been struck dumb forever.

A pool media camera provided footage to the networks of the somber funeral proceedings of May 25, capturing Robert Blake’s first public appearance since his wife’s murder. Delinah held the baby while a dour Blake spoke. Blake looked dapper but withered in the warm spring morning, and his thatch of jet-black hair contrasted with the stretched white leather of his badly lifted facial features. The naturally grim expression he constantly seemed to wear looked like the scowl of a scarecrow. He had very little to say beyond a vow to never let little Rose ever forget her mother.

“I stand before God to make this pledge,” he said just before the casket was lowered. “As long as I have breath, I will do everything to make my daughter Rosie’s life the best I can.

“It’s because of Bonny that Rosie was born. It was her will, her conviction, not mine, her dedication that brought Rosie into this world, and for that, I thank God and I thank Bonny.”

He made no public vow to track down her killers the way O.J. Simpson had once done, but neither did he anoint her grave the same way that he once did his father’s. Even so, Margerry Bakley nearly gagged on the opposite side of the country as she listened to him speak.

“There’s no love at that funeral,” she told Fox News moments after Blake’s speech.

For more than a week, Bonny’s mortal remains had become the prime pawn in a growing feud between the Bakleys and the Blakes. It began when the Los Angeles County Coroner released the body to an L.A. funeral home. The original plan called for a large but tasteful New Jersey funeral following an autopsy, with Bonny making her final journey to her rural roots. Arrangements were made, but no one anticipated a media mob scene so intense that the funeral director couldn’t even get close enough to his own parlor to get Bonny’s body out of the hearse. After Blake’s private investigator Scott Ross witnessed the crush, he advised his client to forget about going back to New Jersey.

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” Harland Braun told the Associated Press. “Emotions in this case are running so high.”

Blake called off a family-only service for his slain wife, and for a time, no one knew what was going to happen to Bonny.

“We had a private religious service planned,” Braun said. “A priest was coming and Robert was going to be there with his three children. But now we’re afraid if he showed up there would be a riot.”

As consolation for burying her in L.A. instead of in New Jersey, Blake offered to pay for Bonny’s relatives to fly in for the funeral, but bickering broke out over the cost. Whatever rapprochement that might have been achieved collapsed overnight. None of the Bakleys showed. In the final irony of her life, Bonny was buried by strangers amid celebrity corpses, receiving more media attention in death than she had ever hoped to receive while alive.

In the weeks following the slaying, Blake and his bodyguard never discussed Bonny. “We look at the sky, we watch the birds. We don’t talk about it,” Earle Caldwell told CNN. As far as any suspicions he might have about Blake’s responsibility for his wife’s death, Caldwell said it “never even crossed my mind.”

“I interviewed Caldwell,” said the AP’s Linda Deutsch. “He was very loyal to Robert. He said that to his dying day he would swear that Robert didn’t to it.”

Meanwhile, Harland Braun’s anti-Bonny juggernaut rolled on. It came as no surprise that Braun played into the hands of the New York Post, which weighed in with the single most egregious headline during the month after the murder. On June 1, one day before Rosie’s first birthday and six days after Bonny was buried at Forest Lawn, the Post carried a report that Harland Braun’s investigative team had spread out across the U.S., scouring for even more skeletons in the Bakley family’s closets. The headline read:

Blake Bids to Shovel More Dirt on Wife’s Grave

Braun leaked tapes, letters and Bonny’s damning FBI file to the press over the months that followed, making sure that no one would ever forget how sordid her life had been. By midsummer, his campaign to dehumanize Bonny had its desired effect. Virtually any conversation regarding the Bakley murder anywhere in the country began with the words, “Nobody deserves to be murdered, but …”

And slowly, Robert Blake faded from the headlines.

By mid-July, another scandal had caught the middlebrow imagination of Americans: the mysterious disappearance of Congressman Gary Condit’s young intern Chandra Levy. For the balance of the summer of 2001, the Blake scandal faded indirectly in proportion to the nation’s growing interest in Condit and Levy.

None of the gaggle of reporters and cameramen who jostled the funeral director for a look at Bonny’s casket or crowded in to catch Robert Blake’s parting words at the funeral even noticed when Blake belatedly applied for and won guardianship of his daughter. On July 13, 2001, he got from Bonny in death what she was never willing to relinquish in life: full custody of Rosie.

At the same time, Margerry asked the courts to name her administrator of Bonny’s estate, but Blake challenged her, both in L.A. and in Memphis. After all, he was the one, he claimed, who had kept up the payments on Bonny’s rental in Thousand Oaks, which was more than Margerry or anyone else in the Bakley family was doing.

“Based on Margerry Bakley’s extensive criminal records involving theft and fraud and illegal business activities, I fear and believe that if the court appointed her special administrator, she would not administer the decedent’s estate in the best interests of my daughter, Rose, or the other heirs,” Blake wrote in a three-page court declaration.

“You can never win against money unless you have it, and I don’t,” said Margerry, adding tearfully, “He does.”

Amid the last of the media fanfare, Blake moved out of his sprawling Mata Hari Ranch, as he had always called his Studio City home, and moved into Delinah’s Hidden Hills hideaway, where omnipresent media trucks could not park. By summer’s end, the Bakley case was history.

“I think it’s a cold trail,” said Harland Braun.

“I don’t think he did it,” said comedian Mark Canavi, who had been present on that warm August night in 1998 when Bobby met Bonny. “It’s one of these things that’s going to remain unsolved.”

In August 2001, Blake put his beloved Mata Hari Ranch⁷⁰ up for sale. Very much a do-it-yourself home, it had a perpetually unfinished ambience and a brooding quality that neither landscaping nor new coats of paint could ever erase.

For Blake, almost nothing of his former life remained. Before he moved away from the Dilling Street neighborhood he’d called home for seventeen years, Blake had become a pariah. Many former neighbors shunned him. He became even more of a recluse, relegated to a gated community at the northwestern end of the San Fernando Valley, far from the public eye.

In the meantime, the sixty-eight-year-old actor’s friends, family, acquaintances and enemies alike wanted to believe that Bonny’s real killer might simply have gotten away with murder. The idea that so pathetic a creature as Robert Blake might be responsible was just too repugnant to contemplate.

“He’s all alone and lonely,” said Blake’s former next-door neighbor. “He’s crying all the time and says his neighbors have turned against him.”

By September 11, when the disastrous terrorist attacks occurred, the last traces of Blake’s former life vanished. In a letter dated September 27, 2001, Blake returned his concealed-weapon permit to the Culver City Police Department.

Dear Chief (Ted) Cooke:

What with the stock market, lawyers’ fees, and other matters, I am unable to maintain the residence in Culver City.⁷¹ I am therefore voluntarily surrendering my gun permit.

I want to thank you for being a decent, stand-up human being. When I was a boy, there were more like you, but they don’t seem to make them anymore. My best to you and yours.

Sincerely,

Robert Blake

In the fall, Braun resurfaced briefly to give the syndicated entertainment/news program Extra! his latest theory: an armed robbery suspect who had been arrested in June on an unrelated case might have been Bonny’s killer.

Meanwhile, Ito and Tyndall whittled a little bit more off of the case paperwork each day. They kept in touch with Margerry, Judy and the rest of Bonny’s telephone cabal. Sixty days had, indeed, turned into sixty weeks. The only public voice besides Margerry’s that still occasionally sounded off about the forgotten case was Cary Goldstein, the Beverly Hills divorce lawyer who had helped Bonny force Blake to marry her.

“I have spoken with a source inside the investigation who has informed me that the case is definitely not cold. He said it is hot,” Goldstein would tell reporters from time to time.

And though they all printed his words, no one really believed them.

Until the afternoon of April 18, 2002, that is, when Brian Tyndall and Ron Ito came calling at Robert Blake’s Hidden Hills hideaway, an arrest warrant in hand.

70. Originally listed for $1,098,000, the price on the 4,909-square-foot home dropped to $950,000 by December and $850,000 as of February. It finally sold in the spring of 2002 to a star of NBC’s E.R.

71. Blake owned rental property in Culver City, which allowed him to obtain his permit on the pretense that he actually lived within the city limits.