Blake Slammed by First Wife

Did a California jury make a mistake in not convicting Robert Blake of murder?

Recently revealed testimony from the freshly acquitted actor's civil trial suggests the onetime Baretta star may have had a penchant for knocking off those closest to him.

Blake's first wife, Sondra Kerr Blake, admitted under oath in a May 2004 deposition that she had heard Blake put out a contract for her life in the 1970s, it was learned Wednesday.

Her deposition is part of a wrongful-death civil suit filed against Blake by four children of his second wife, Bonny Lee Bakley, who was murdered in 2001.

The oft-delayed civil trial is expected to get underway later this month.

Kerr Blake, who was married to Blake for 20 years, said friends shared with her Blake's plot to have her killed, according to the shocking testimony.

"I found out from several different people that he had put a contract out on me and the other man I was seeing at that time," Kerr Blake said in the depo, according to the New York Daily News.

Kerr Blake testified that she was filled in on Blake's allegedly murderous scheme by director Bernard Kowalski and his wife, Helen, and also by a friend of Blake's manager at the time. She said she never questioned them on how they learned of the plot.

Specifically, she alleges Blake wanted her and her then-boyfriend, actor Steve Railsback, offed in the same house where Charles Manson's followers had killed actress Sharon Tate and four others in 1969.

At the time Blake purportedly took out the contract, Kerr Blake and Railsback were shooting the 1976 television movie Helter Skelter about the Manson murders, in which she played an inmate and Railsback starred as Manson.

By having them killed at the estate, Blake hoped to make their deaths look like retribution for making the movie, Kerr Blake testified.

The actress also said Blake once told her: "I always thought it was my father who I was like, but it turns out it was my mother...She's a killer. She's a killer just like me."

While Kerr Blake took the witness stand during Blake's criminal trial, she never mentioned the alleged plot to kill her to the Van Nuys jury that let Blake walk earlier this year.

In March, the panel of Blake's peers found the actor not guilty of murder and solicitation of murder in the shooting death of Bakley.

Soon after his acquittal, Blake's lawyer at the time, M. Gerald Schwartzbach, told reporters he hoped to settle the civil case against his client.

"I think it's in everyone's best interest to see if this can be resolved, and we're going to attempt that," he said in March.

But settlement talks went nowhere, as Eric Dubin, a lawyer representing Bakley's family, has been waiting for his day in court for years. Durbin is adamant in his belief the 71-year-old killed Bakley and wants to prove as much in court ("I don't believe anything that comes out of Robert Blake's mouth," Dubin once told reporters).

"Robert Blake realizes the importance to his future acting prospects of not being proven a murderer in a court of law," Dubin told the Associated Press in March. "He also wants to avoid the stigma that O.J. Simpson got after his civil conviction."

Despite the blockbuster allegations presented by Kerr Blake in her deposition, Durbin said Blake didn't seem overly distressed.

"He winked and smiled at me like we were at the beach," Dubin said of Blake's reaction to his ex-wife's testimony.

The civil proceedings against Blake begin in earnest Aug. 29.