Police Documents Implicate Blake

The documents, mostly affidavits and search warrants unsealed by police on Tuesday, allege the former Baretta star had solicited five people to kill his wife, Bonny Lee Bakley, including her brother and two stuntmen. The papers also contain statements by witnesses implicating Blake as the trigger man in the May 2001 slaying of Bakley outside a Studio City restaurant, suggesting Blake did the deed himself after failing to hire a hit man.

Blake, who remains jailed without bail, has pleaded not guilty to the murder.

Ronald "Duffy" Hambleton, one of the actor's former stuntmen who twice denied any knowledge of foul play when police interviewed him last year, finally copped to investigators in November that Blake offered him a large sum of money to murder Bakley, according to an affidavit.

Hambleton said Blake pulled out a .25-caliber semiautomatic gun the actor claimed was impossible to trace, and together the two of them scouted out locations for the killing, including the back alley and vicinity around Vitello's restaurant, where Bakley was later killed. Hambleton also said Blake bought a prepaid phone card from 7-Eleven for Hambleton to phone him without leaving a record of the calls.

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> The pair met two more times to discuss the murder, according to the police reports. Hambleton described how the 68-year-old Blake envisioned the hit: The couple sits in their parked car in a remote area, when the assassin sneaks up, kills Bakley and then takes her body to the desert for burial.

Gary McLarty, the other stuntman who had doubled for Blake on Baretta and other projects, told police that Blake solicited McLarty to "bump her off" while she slept in her apartment because he knew McLarty already had previously shot and killed someone. "How's $10,000 sound?" the document quotes Blake as offering.

The stuntman, however, said he turned Blake down because he didn't want any more legal hassles.

Thwarted by the two stuntmen, Blake purportedly tried to contact a third would-be assassin, stunt coordinator Bobby Bass, who once instructed O.J. Simpson how to use a knife for the TV pilot Frog Man. But Bass, stricken by Parkinson's Disaease, refused to meet with Blake. (Bass committed suicide last November.)

Even Bakley's own brother, Joe, said Blake approached him to "eliminate" somebody for $5,000. Joe told police he played along but never knew who it was Blake had targeted.

According to the affidavits, a fifth person, William Welch--an old police detective friend of the actor--gave a statement to police indicating Blake had hinted two years before that he was furious at Bakley for getting pregnant and wanted her to abort their child. "If that didn't work, we are going to whack her," Welch quoted Blake as saying at the time.

The documents also assert that Blake's codefendant, 46-year-old bodyguard and handyman Earl Caldwell, was supposed to do the job, but "lost his nerve" a week before Bakley's death.

Blake's attorney, Harland Braun, downplays the documents, claiming the prosecution won't be able to corroborate the stuntmen's stories. "There's no physical evidence," he adds.

Well, not much at any rate.

While the witnesses' accounts certainly gave police probable cause, it wasn't until March, when investigators found a prepaid telephone card Blake allegedly used to call the men, that they had enough physical evidence to link him to the crime.

Blake was arrested in April on murder and conspiracy charges and has been locked up at Men's Central Jail in downtown Los Angeles ever since.

His next court appearance is slated for June 18, when a judge will likely determine whether Blake should be released on bail. In court papers filed Wednesday, Braun asked the judge to throw out the "special circumstances" charge that Blake ambushed Bakley, which would allow Blake to post $1 million bail.

"Blake feels that the allegation of special circumstances [of lying in wait] is for the sole purpose of denying bail and is, therefore, an abuse of prosecutorial discretion," the petition reads.

Blake, who's charged with four counts of murder and conspiracy, faces a sentence of life in prison without parole if convicted.