Hollywood & Crime: Did Robert Blake Get Away with Murder?
He was a former child star and Hollywood stalwart. She was a nine-times married con artist. And then came the murder trial.
There’s a very bleak joke that men in Hollywood who kill their wives don’t go to jail for it; they just pay a fine. We’ve certainly got more than a few examples of that on record, from O.J. Simpson to Dominique Dunne to myriad sh*tty abusers who got the public to side against their victims. One of the reasons women seldom come forward with their experiences of domestic violence is that we know the trial will become an attack on her character rather than a study of the evidence. When the woman isn’t alive to defend herself, it’s even easier to smear her. If you’re rich and famous enough, anything you (allegedly) do to a woman can be justified.
By the time he retired in 1997, Robert Blake had been in the acting business for close to 60 years. He’d gotten his start as a child star at MGM, appearing in the Little Rascals shorts, before graduating to dramatic roles on film and TV as an adult. He landed his best role in 1967’s In Cold Blood, as the real-life murderer Perry Smith, famously covered in Truman Capote’s book. Of the same name. You name it, and he did it on the big and small screen: Westerns, cop shows, comedies, ripped-from-the-headlines TV movies, and, maybe most famously, David Lynch’s Lost Highway. All of his scenes in that film deeply disturb me.
In 1999, Blake met Bonny Lee Bakley. A high school dropout who ran a mail-order business selling nude pictures of women, including herself, she had gotten in trouble with the law on several occasions, mostly for trying to cash in bad cheques and for owning various social security cards with different names. By the time she met Blake, she'd been married nine times, two of which had been annulled. One of the marriages was to Glynn Wolfe, a Baptist minister who proudly held the record for the most monogamous marriages, having married 31 different times.
