Prosecutor: Blake Killed His Wife

Robert Blake murdered his wife after two stuntmen he solicited refused to commit the crime, a prosecutor told jurors Monday in opening statements for the actor's trial.

The prosecution began laying out its case to the jury 3½ years after Bonny Lee Bakley, the 44-year-old mother of Blake's then-baby daughter, Rosie, was shot after they ate dinner at his favorite restaurant.

Deputy District Attorney Shellie Samuels rapidly described the circumstantial case against the 71-year-old actor, including the allegation that he solicited the stuntmen.

"Unfortunately for the defendant, neither of the stuntmen that he contacted was willing to do the deed for him," Samuels said. "The defendant told one of them, Ronald 'Duffy' Hambleton, that if he, Duffy, wouldn't do it, the defendant would have to do it himself. And the evidence will show you that that is exactly what he did."

The prosecution claims Blake despised Bakley and didn't want her to have contact with Rosie. Blake had married Bakley after tests showed that Rosie was his daughter.

"This was not a marriage made in heaven," Samuels told the panel.

Blake, star of the "Baretta" TV series and the movie "In Cold Blood," insists he left his wife sitting in his car while he went back into the restaurant. He said he went back to retrieve a gun he carried for protection and had left behind, then returned to the car and found Bakley wounded.

Blake and Bakley dined at Vitello's restaurant in Studio City on May 4, 2001, and left together around 9:30 p.m., walking to Blake's car a block and a half away. The murder weapon was found in a trash container in front of the car, Samuels told the jury.

"Sometime between 9:30 p.m. and 9:40 p.m. on May 4, 2001, Bonny Lee Bakley was shot twice while sitting in the defendant's car and she died shortly thereafter, at the hospital, of her wounds. The question we are here to address is, who shot and killed Bonny Lee Bakley?" Samuels said.

The murder weapon could not be linked to Blake. There were minimal traces of gunpowder residue on his clothes, not enough to show that he fired a gun.

The case came together when Hambleton and Gary McLarty, former stuntmen who had worked with Blake, came forward and said he tried to hire them to kill his wife. They were the prosecution's star witnesses at a preliminary hearing last year.

However, the stuntmen have been shadowed by allegations of drug use and mental illness.

It was unclear whether defense lawyer M. Gerald Schwartzbach would be able in opening statements to present evidence to that effect. Schwartzbach asked permission at a hearing Friday to address evidence showing Hambleton had a history of using methamphetamines and that McLarty, who is bipolar and has other mental problems, had used cocaine for 20 years.

CBS News Legal Analyst Andrew Cohen notes that thus far prosecutors has focused upon Blake's motives for killing his wife and upon all of the conversations he apparently had with people suggesting how they might murder her. Prosecutors say one of those scenarios involved Bakley being murdered as she left a restaurant, which of course is precisely what happened.

The theme so far from prosecutors is that Blake wanted his wife killed -- which goes to motive -- and that he was so bent on it that he approached several people to try to arrange her murder. Those people all turned him down, prosecutors say, so Blake had to do it himself.

It's been a steady and unspectacular opening by prosecutors, says Cohen. Nothing terribly fancy. Lots of visual aids in the courtroom so jurors can follow along with the timeline, which prosecutors say demonstrate that Blake had the motive to kill his wife and plenty of opportunity to do so.