Followers of celebrity justice will receive their latest fix tomorrow when Hollywood actor Robert Blake returns to court in Los Angeles accused of murdering his wife.
The twists and turns in the case so far have made it one of Hollywood's most keenly watched courtroom dramas. Blake, star of 1970s tough-guy detective show Barretta, is alleged to have shot 44-year-old Bonny Lee Bakley after a dinner at a Studio City restaurant in May 2001. But at a pre-trial hearing this month his lawyers claimed Marlon Brando's wayward son Christian was the real killer.
Soon afterwards Blake, 70, parted company with Thomas Mesereau Jr, his third defence attorney since his 2002 arrest, and nobody seems certain whether he will be turning up in court tomorrow with a fourth one. The patience of Judge Darlene Schempp is wearing thin. Blake's decision to change lawyers again threw the trial timetable into disarray and final jury selection, set for last week, had to be scrapped.
'She wants to get this thing going,' said John Springer, a Court TV journalist. 'If Blake is delaying, he can't hold up the system for ever. This is the last chance he'll get to change lawyers. The judge will set a new trial date and Blake will have to be ready.'
Prosecutor Shellie Samuels will argue Blake felt his wife had trapped him into marriage by getting pregnant and refusing an abortion. After failing to persuade two acquaintances to act as hitmen, he allegedly shot her as she sat in their car, dumped the gun, then acted the role of a grieving husband.
Blake is expected to counter that there was no shortage of people who might have wanted his wife dead, including several previous husbands, men she fleeced through a mail-order pornography business, and Brando, who had already served five years in jail for the unrelated 1990 manslaughter of his sister's boyfriend.
Brando, Mesereau contended, acted out of jealousy after discovering that a daughter Bakley said was his turned out to be Blake's. At the pre-trial hearing a witness claimed to have heard Brando say 'someone should put a bullet' in Bakley's head.
Regardless of the outcome - which could see him jailed for life - Blake will face a civil wrongful death suit filed by Bakley's family, similar to that won by Nicole Brown's relatives after OJ Simpson's 1995 acquittal for murdering his former wife. Unlike Simpson's criminal trial, cameras will be allowed only to cover the opening statements, closing arguments and the verdict, because Schempp said she feared witnesses might become tainted by evidence they saw on television. But with so much evidence having already been examined in court pre-trial, and with newspapers and TV stations having scrutinised every last spit and cough in the case at length, experts believe there is little more that can be squeezed out.
'The most important thing is to get this trial going,' Springer said.
