Hollywood Memorial

Bakley’s early life is checkered by a criminal record. She was convicted in Little Rock, Arkansas for possessing false identifications. In 1989, she was convicted of drug possession in Memphis, Tennessee and later in 1995, convicted of passing bad checks. FBI records show that in 1994, while under investigation for fraud, Bakley told agents of a con she ran on a college student, sending her then thirteen year old daughter to seduce the man. Bonnie soon made a living running a lonely-hearts scheme, sending nude pictures of herself to men with the promise of visiting them if they sent her money. Bakley also had a history of pursuing celebrities. Her friends and relatives all described her as ‘celebrity-obsessed.’ She claimed to have had an affair with rock legend Jerry Lee Lewis and borne his daughter in 1993, but DNA tests later disproved her claim. Lewis has denied ever having a relationship with Bakley. Tapes of Bakley’s phone conversations reveal that she was star struck and bent on marrying someone famous. ‘I like being around celebrities,’ she once said, ‘it makes you feel better than other people.’ Her lonely-hearts fraud, however, continued to be lucrative. She was able to marry several of her victims swindling a number of men out of their savings and life insurance. Eventually, she obtained enough money to buy two houses and several undeveloped lots in Memphis and a house outside of LA; additionally, her lonely-hearts fraud funded her unsuccessful Hollywood career as a singer and actor under the stage name Lee Bonny. In 1999, Bonny Lee Bakley met Robert Blake at a birthday party. At the time she was seeing Christian Brando, before becoming acquainted with Blake. Blake slept with Bakley, later claiming that she had assured him that she was taking birth control pills. Friends of Bakley later said that she was, rather, taking fertility pills at the time. She was soon pregnant with what would be her fourth child. Initially, Bakley believed that Christian Brando was the father, but later told Blake she wasn’t sure, and that it might have been his. When a DNA test determined that it was Blake, not Brando, that was the father of Bakley’s youngest child, Blake agreed to marry her. It was his second marriage, her tenth! Their marriage was somewhat unconventional. Bakley lived in a small guesthouse beside her husband’s house in the Studio City. It is rumored that Blake only married her to eventually get custody of their child, whom Blake wanted his childless daughter to raise. On May 4, 2001 Blake took Bakley to an Italian dinner at Vitello’s Restaurant on Tujunga Boulevard in Studio City. Afterward, Bakley was murdered by a gunshot to the head while sitting in the car, which was parked on a side street around the corner from the restaurant. Blake told the police that he had gone back to the restaurant to get a gun he left at the table and was there when the shooting occurred. Loving wife of actor Robert Blake, who buried her in loving memory at Forest Lawn in Hollywood Hills, not far from where she was murdered. Blake was later acquitted of her murder. Only in Hollywood!