Legal Strategy Being Formed in Blake Case

Although actor Robert Blake has yet to be formally charged in court with murdering his wife, Bonny Lee Bakley, the battle lines in the case are clearly in view.

For Blake’s defense lawyer, Harland W. Braun, the task is clear: Persuade potential jurors that Bakley was such a sleazy individual that hundreds of people had a motive to kill her, and consequently take the focus off his client.

For prosecutors Patrick R. Dixon and Gregory A. Dohi, the goal is equally clear: Keep potential jurors focused on the evidence that ties Blake to the crime and convince them that Braun is offering nothing more than implausible scenarios about phantom killers.

Although the California Supreme Court has issued several major decisions on “somebody else did it” evidence, there is still room for debate. Lying ahead in this case may be a ferocious legal battle over just how much Braun can “dirty up” Bakley in court in an effort to suggest someone other than Blake killed her.

Within days after Bakley, 44, was shot in the head outside a Studio City restaurant in May, Braun had already begun focusing on her salacious past--including the operation of a mail-order lonely hearts business in which she conned men out of money by promising sex and nude photos.

Shortly after Blake, 68, was arrested Thursday night, Braun pushed the envelope even further. “Everyone who ever came in contact with her had a motive” to kill Bakley, Braun said, casting an extraordinarily wide net of suspicion.

Braun’s aggressive strategy makes sense given the circumstances, said veteran defense lawyer Barry Tarlow. Bakley’s past “is clearly a nightmare for a prosecutor,” he said, because it means that there are potentially dozens of other suspects.

But the strategy also involves risks. Nearly a year ago, Braun gave police a trunkload of material on Bakley and said the material might lead them to the killer.

On Thursday night, Capt. Jim Tatreau of the Los Angeles Police Department’s robbery-homicide division said detectives had meticulously checked those leads and many others--interviewing 150 witnesses in 20 states, gathering 900 items of evidence. That probe eventually led the investigators back to their initial suspect and the conclusion that Blake murdered his wife. Tatreau said Blake shot Bakley after they ate dinner at Vitello’s restaurant. Even though there is no eyewitness, the authorities have a compelling circumstantial case, Tatreau said.

Throwing down the gauntlet to the police “was a risk and a double-edged sword,” said Loyola law professor Laurie Levenson. “Now it makes it harder for Harland to say that the police did not do a thorough investigation.”

The LAPD “took their time and attempted to eliminate every red herring a good defense attorney would raise as reasonable doubt,” concurred Los Angeles defense lawyer Andrew M. Stein.

Even Johnnie L. Cochran Jr., O.J. Simpson’s lead defense lawyer, said on ABC’s “Good Morning America” that the LAPD “can’t be accused of rushing to judgment” in the Bakley murder--precisely what he had accused the authorities of doing in the Simpson case.

Indeed, before a bailiff has called the court to order even once, the Blake case is being played out for hours nightly on television against the backdrop of the 1995 O.J. Simpson trial, in which the former football star was acquitted of murdering his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald L. Goldman despite DNA evidence pointing to Simpson.

Significant Differences Between the Cases

There clearly are significant differences between the Blake case and the Simpson trial, a saga that took on epic proportions and generated more media coverage than any prior trial. Simpson was a true celebrity, a former Heisman Trophy winner at USC, then a National Football League star, television commentator and Hertz pitchman who drove a Bentley, had a glamorous blond wife and frequented swank restaurants from coast to coast.

Blake, on the other hand, was an aging actor fading into obscurity, best known for playing a detective in the mid-’70s television series “Baretta.” He was living quietly in the San Fernando Valley with a woman he married only after DNA tests revealed that he had impregnated her. They occupied separate houses on adjoining land that Blake owned.

One major difference between the two situations is that there is no race angle in the Blake case: a white man is accused of murdering a white woman.

In addition, police say they have two witnesses who will testify that Blake solicited them to kill his wife. And they have charged Blake’s bodyguard, Earle Caldwell, with being part of a conspiracy to murder Bakley. In the Simpson case, there were no other defendants.

There is one particularly unique element to the Blake case: Both the police and Blake’s lawyer say he had a motive to kill his wife.

“We believe the motive is Robert Blake had contempt for Bonny Bakley,” the LAPD’s Tatreau said. “He felt he was trapped in a marriage that he wanted no part of and, quite frankly, the situation was not to his liking at all.”

After Blake was arrested Thursday night, Braun conceded that his client had a motive to kill Bakley, and he repeated that Friday in an interview with The Times and on “Larry King Live.”

“I have never said that there is not a motive,” Braun said. “She turned his life upside down. She got him involved in a marriage he did not want to be in.”

But Braun also emphasized that “there are a lot of people who had a motive to kill Bonny Bakley.... This is a whodunit based on circumstantial evidence. It’s about Robert’s relationship with Bonny and Bonny’s relationship with the rest of the world.”

Defender Questions Tactic on Motive

Defense lawyer Howard Weitzman, who successfully defended auto mogul John DeLorean in a 1984 drug trial, said he was stunned by Braun’s statements.

“I don’t believe I have ever heard a defense lawyer” concede motive at this stage of a case, he said. “The jury will not have to look for a reason” Bakley was murdered.

While this may have been a surprising move, it was the right one, said defense lawyer Mark Geragos. “You don’t fight the facts on that. No one who knows the story will believe there was no motive,” he said.

And this may not be as much of a problem for Blake as it appears on the surface, said Tarlow, the former president of California Attorneys for Criminal Justice.

“My dear friend, Bobby Lee Cook, the great lawyer from Summerville, Georgia, once told me ‘the best defense in the world is the SOB deserved to die,’” Tarlow recalled.

“Obviously, Ms. Bakley did not deserve to be killed by anyone,” Tarlow quickly added. “Nevertheless, her colorful and outrageous lifestyle will become the center of the defense of the case.”

That past included frequenting bars in search of a celebrity husband, and a trail of men in several states who contend they were tricked out of large sums of money by Bakley.

Among those left in the lurch was DeMart C. Besly, author of a 400-page manuscript titled “Ubiquitous Bonny: Mistress of Sham!” Besly, a Montana widower, said that within moments after he and Bakley tied the knot in Elko, Nev., in 1988, he handed her a roll of quarters and then she vanished.

“I shall always consider Bonny’s desertion a blessing,” Besly wrote. “Her modus operandi was to snare elderly men by dangling sex as bait, hopefully to acquire their property, then conveniently slide them into an early grave.”

Braun has also suggested that Bakley may have been slain by a “hit man” she hired to kill Blake but who turned on her. He also said she could have been murdered by a robber who was operating in the San Fernando Valley at the time of her killing.

‘Third Party’ Evidence Could Be Debated

If the case goes to trial, there could be a heated courtroom skirmish over just how much of Bakley’s troubled past Braun can bring before the jury members in an attempt to persuade them that someone else--known in the law as a “third party”--was the killer.

The California Supreme Court has ruled in a series of cases that any relevant evidence that raises a reasonable doubt of a defendant’s guilt--including evidence tending to show that someone other than the defendant committed the crime--is admissible.

However, such evidence may be excluded at the judge’s discretion if there is a substantial danger of undue consumption of time or of prejudicing, confusing or misleading the jury.

To be admissible, such evidence does not have to show substantial proof of a probability that a third person committed the crime; it only has to be capable of raising a reasonable doubt of the defendant’s guilt, the state’s high court ruled in People vs. Hall in 1986.

However, the court cautioned that “we do not require that any evidence, however remote, must be admitted to show a third party’s possible culpability.... Evidence of mere motive or opportunity [of another person] to commit the crime ... without more, will not suffice to raise a reasonable doubt of a defendant’s guilt; there must be direct or circumstantial evidence linking the third person to the actual perpetration of the crime.”

That is a tough hurdle to clear and Braun may not make it, said defense lawyer Stein.

“You have to have evidence that connects the third party to this case.... I don’t believe any trial judge is going to allow Harland to do character assassination on Bonny Bakley,” he said.

But Geragos said all the material Braun turned over to the police months ago gives him “ample opportunity to meet the threshold for third-party evidence.”

So far, the prosecutors have said nothing about this issue in public.

However, Cary W. Goldstein, a Beverly Hills attorney who represents some Bakley family members who plan to sue Blake in civil court for wrongful death, has decried Braun’s tactics as an attempt to smear a woman who was murdered. Braun’s theories, Goldstein said, are “baseless diversions designed to create reasonable doubt.”

Los Angeles defense lawyer Gigi Gordon said that however the judge rules on the third-party evidence issue, Braun, armed with Bakley’s life history, already has done “a real good job” of framing the debate for potential jurors.

“All of this is out there,” Gordon said. “Even I, who am desperately trying to avoid hearing about this case, keep hearing about it whenever I turn on the television. And the impression is that this is a woman who was a parasite and created nothing but misery in her wake.

“None of this means it was OK to kill her,” Gordon emphasized, “but in the back of their minds people may think, ‘I wouldn’t want her in my life.’”

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Times staff writers Andrew Blankstein and Ann W. O’Neill contributed to this report.