For a man under a stubborn cloud of suspicion, actor Robert Blake has seemed notably self-contained in recent months. Many afternoons the 68-year-old star of the '70s TV hit "Baretta" has been spotted taking his 21-month-old daughter Rose for a walk in his suburban Los Angeles neighborhood, waving hello and stopping to chat with acquaintances. "For a while there I saw him all the time," says one neighbor. "He'd walk straight down the middle of the road, pushing a stroller. He always looked very unassuming."
That composure belies the attention focused on Blake ever since his second wife, Bonny Bakley, 44, Rose's mother, was found shot in the head on May 4 just after the couple left a neighborhood restaurant. While police have never publicly named Blake as a suspect, Bakley's family has openly accused him of having a hand in her murder, insisting he killed his wife because he wanted out of their troubled six-month marriage.
Ten months later, however, investigators acknowledge the case has proved a difficult one to solve. "The bottom line is that all the evidence is very circumstantial," says one Los Angeles Police Department source. "That's the toughest kind of case to prove. Nobody saw anybody do anything. Everything is going to have to be tied together very carefully before any charges are going to be filed against anybody."
Publicly all that is known of the murder is the version Blake told cops: After dining at Vitello's restaurant, he escorted Bakley to his 1991 black Dodge Stealth, parked on a side street. Realizing he'd left his licensed handgun in a restaurant booth, he headed back to retrieve it. When he returned to the car, he found Bakley shot once in the head. Blake ran to a nearby house, where the owner put in a call to 911. He then went back to the restaurant to summon help. When police arrived, he was pacing up and down the street and occasionally vomiting.
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