The Rock Store, a popular biker hangout 30 miles northwest of Los Angeles, probably wouldn't be most people's idea of a family eatery. But nearly every Sunday morning for the past year actor Robert Blake brought his young daughter Rose in for breakfast. Almost always dressed in pink, Rose -- who will turn 2 in June -- charmed the staff, who could see how tenderly the supposed tough-guy Blake treated the toddler, cooing and baby-talking to her and wiping her face with a wet napkin at the end of the meal.

"At one time (in his life) he was really wild," says Veronica Savko, who owns the Rock Store with her husband, Ed, and has known Blake for 25 years. "I think, for whatever reason, Bobby just needed love."

At the moment, a few legal breaks wouldn't hurt either. One year after his wife, Bonny Bakley, 44, was found shot to death on a street in suburban Los Angeles minutes after having dinner with Blake, the former Baretta star now stands accused of being the killer. In announcing the arrest of Blake, 68, along with his handyman-cum-assistant Earle Caldwell, 46, who was charged with conspiracy in the murder, L.A. police asserted that investigators had uncovered more than enough physical and circumstantial evidence to make the case stick in court. Underscoring their confidence, prosecutors charged Blake with murder with special circumstances, in this instance "lying in wait" to murder Bakley, meaning that he could face the death penalty. "This was a hit by a husband," said LAPD Capt. Jim Tatreau, who supervised the investigation.

Ever since the night of the murder, Blake -- for whom even the twilight of stardom seemed to have faded -- was the subject of much lurid speculation and suspicion. But almost none of it could rival the noirish ingredients contained in the court documents. Prosecutors say that Blake had been plotting his wife's killing for months, simply because, as one police official put it, "he was trapped in a marriage he wanted no part of." According to the official felony complaint, he tried repeatedly to line up men -- one of them a Hollywood stunt performer -- to do the job for him, offering to supply them with an untraceable weapon, directing them to possible murder sites in Arizona and California and instructing them to shoot Bakley in the desert, and then bury her in a grave Caldwell would have already prepared. When those efforts fell through, say court papers, Blake finally decided to handle it on his own, shooting Bakley -- a veteran con artist who fleeced men through lonely hearts magazine ads -- in the head as she sat in his Dodge Stealth near Vitello's restaurant in Studio City on May 4, 2001. (In one eerie echo, the pilot of the 1975-78 Baretta series had Blake's fictional fiancee being bumped off in front of an Italian restaurant.)