Brando, 'Cherry' and lonely hearts
Detective says he investigated others besides Robert Blake
By Lisa Sweetingham
Court TV
VAN NUYS, California (Court TV) -- Robert Blake may have been suspect No. 1 in his wife's murder, but that didn't stop the lead investigator from considering hundreds of other potential clues, the detective testified on the stand Thursday in the "Baretta" star's murder trial.
"Did you follow up every clue you were aware of that [the murderer] could have been someone else?" prosecutor Shellie Samuels asked LAPD robbery homicide detective Ronald Ito.
"Yes, I did," Ito said. The detective arrested Blake in April 2002, nearly a year after Bonny Lee Bakley was shot to death some 10 minutes after the couple had dined at an Italian restaurant nearby.
Ito, who rounded out a third and final day of testimony, has been criticized by Blake's defense as having pursued the actor as a suspect at the expense of finding the real killer.
The defense theorized that plenty of other men had a motive to kill Bakley: men who were burned by the 44-year-old's lonely heart scams, in which she conned customers of her mail-order porn business to send money for bogus medical bills and travel expenses.
However, Ito told jurors that investigators looked at letters, photos, envelopes and other documents pertaining to Bakley's porn business. Of the 510 letters they examined, Ito said, about five or six were written to Bakley in a threatening tone. Police investigated, and subsequently cleared, the writers of those notes.
Ito also testified that he assigned LAPD robbery homicide detective Robert Bub as "clue manager," the investigator who sifted through more than 250 clues that came in via phone and e-mail.
One clue, Ito said, involved a streetwalker named "Cherry." Her name drew snickers in the courtroom, leading some in the gallery to comment that it sounded like something from an episode of Blake's former detective show "Baretta."
"Detective Bub checked with Hollywood Vice regarding a person named Cherry, a prostitute who was said to be with a trick at the scene of the crime," Ito said.
It was later learned that her full name was "Busti Cherry," but she was never found and the anonymous tip led nowhere, Ito testified.
Blake, in his typical dark-blue suit and light-blue dress shirt, sat quietly at the defense table. The defendant, who rarely betrays emotion, sometimes evinces a facial tic -- a puckering of the lips or furrowing of his brow ? but mostly he watches his defense attorney while repeatedly patting down his white hair with his right hand.
Brando, stuntmen at issue
Ito's testimony touched briefly on some of the other players in the Bakley murder drama, including Bakley's other lover Christian Brando -- Marlon Brando's son -- and stuntmen Gary "Whiz Kid" McLarty and Ronald "Duffy" Hambleton.
The stuntmen, who allege that Blake offered them money to murder Bakley, were expected to testify this week, but because of Ito's lengthy cross-examination, they were rescheduled to next week.
"Why did you investigate Christian Brando as a suspect in this case?" defense attorney Gerald Schwartzbach asked Ito. The lawyer attempted to skirt a defense theory that was ruled off-limits by the judge -- that Brando played a role in Bakley's murder after learning that her newborn daughter was fathered by Blake.
Ito explained that Brando's name came in as a clue, but he was in Washington at the time of the murder, had an alibi and was cleared as a suspect.
Ito also conceded that stuntman Hambleton had more than two dozen tabloid magazines in his residence when detectives came to interview him, at least seven of which contained articles about Bakley's murder. The defense contends that Hambleton got his information about the murder from the periodicals.
The detective admitted that he visited stuntman McLarty at the psychiatric ward of a Glendale Hospital in September 2004 after the witness allegedly suffered from paranoid delusions and hallucinations, possibly due to drug use.
The defense previously complained to the judge that prosecutors failed to hand over discovery materials on Ito's visit with McLarty in the hospital, but the detective explained that he had nothing to surrender.
"I made no notes, and I didn't take a statement from him," Ito testified. "We didn't discuss this case."
Blake, 71, is charged with one count of murder with the special circumstance of lying in wait and two counts of soliciting Hambleton and McLarty to murder Bakley.
He faces life in prison if convicted.
