According to the charges filed, Blake approached Caldwell, who served as a chauffeur, bodyguard and handyman for the actor, several months before the killing to ask for his help. Caldwell then allegedly began keeping a shopping list of items that might be needed for disposing of a body, including two shovels, a sledgehammer, old rugs, duct tape, Drano, lye and pool acid. In one cryptic passage in the complaint, Caldwell is alleged to have tried to ambush Bakley, jumping out of some bushes and brandishing a gun, while she and Blake walked along a river during a vacation last April. The assumption by Braun and other legal experts is that by charging Caldwell, who police acknowledge was not even in Los Angeles on the night of the murder, prosecutors are hoping he will provide evidence against Blake in return for leniency.

It is known that Blake submitted to gunpowder testing on the night of the killing. The results have never been disclosed, and one L.A. criminal attorney suggests that winning a conviction may be more difficult if no traces were found -- good news for Blake, whose lawyers insist that if gunpowder had turned up, the actor would surely have been arrested immediately. All in all, concedes one LAPD homicide detective, the physical evidence may not be quite as airtight as investigators would like. "It's a circumstantial case," he says. Which may place a considerable burden elsewhere, namely on the two men who, according to the complaint, Blake tried to recruit to kill Bakley for him. The court papers do not name the men, who are cooperating with police, but one of them appears to have been Gary McLarty, 61, a well-known Hollywood stuntman who met Blake when they worked on the 1980 movie Coast to Coast. McLarty wasn't talking last week, but his son Cole, 29, also a stuntman, says his father met at a restaurant in the San Fernando Valley with Blake, who "proposed money or something for my dad to do something to his wife. . . . He just left it at that." His father, adds Cole, didn't take the offer seriously: "He just walked out and thought that (Blake) was crazy." Cole says that investigators learned of his father's alleged involvement by tracing Blake's phone calls. But Braun, for one, maintains he is not overly concerned. "It's totally fabricated, or maybe Robert was bemoaning (Bonny) and said something like, 'I could kill the bitch,'" he says. "Being Hollywood, these things get exaggerated."

Were it not for Hollywood, Blake would likely not be in this trouble. Born Michael Gubitosi in Nutley, N.J., in 1933, Blake was the onetime child star of abusive parents who he claimed locked him in a closet and "made me eat on the floor like a dog." He became an adult star with his portrayal of the sensitive killer Perry Smith in 1967's In Cold Blood and then went on to lasting fame as Baretta, a street-tough detective who lived with a cockatoo named Fred. But Blake remained a Hollywood hard case, a man whose volatile temper and demands tested the patience of those who cared for him. "Complex doesn't even begin to capture his personality," says Baretta creator Stephen J. Cannell, who has had an on-and-off friendship with Blake. "If you were in business with him, you just had to strap in really tight, because you were going to get lurched around a lot."