American actor Robert Blake, who played the insane killer Perry Smith and popular TV cop Tony Baretta in Truman Kopot’s In Cold Blood, has died before his career was ruined by a Hollywood murder case. He was 89 years old. He died at his home in Los Angeles on March 9, after a long battle with heart disease. Hollywood Reporter niece Noreen Austin.
Blake began his career as a kid in the 1940s film Our Gang comedy shorts at MGM.
On May 4, 2001, Bonnie Lee Backley, Blake’s wife and mother of his youngest daughter, was fatally shot at close range by two gunshots while sitting in the family car after eating lunch at a restaurant.
The actor said that he went back to the restaurant to retrieve the pistol that was left there.
Four years after the artist spent a year in jail, the jury acquitted Blake of murder and found him innocent of instigating the murder of his former undercover. The men met on the set of the 1975-78 ABC drama Baretta.
After the process, he told reporters: “I was a rich man. I’m broken now.”
During the trial, it was revealed that Bakley was a swindler who had dozens of nicknames, defrauded thousands of men and had been married 10 times before. Blake married him in November 2000 after a DNA test confirmed that he was the father of their daughter, Rosie.
At the same time, Blake was found guilty of her death in a civil suit and ordered to pay $30 million to Bakley’s four children. He filed for bankruptcy in 2006 and never acted again. In fact, his last role was in David Lynch’s Lost Highway (1997).