|
|
The murder of Bonny Lee Bakley just a month before her 45th birthday was one of those crimes that would have gone un-noticed in ordinary circumstances. She was an unemployed drifter with a squalid his-tory of prostitution, a mail order porn busi-ness, and an aggressive outreach scheme that lured lonely men, misfits and outcasts of every description, to send money in exchange for promises of marriage and companionship or - most often - kinky sex of any imaginable sort. Mostly, the promises went unfulfilled, leaving thousands of men on the margins of society - losers and loners and lowlifes - to seek revenge any way they could. A murder victim with such a lifestyle is still a victim. But the fact that innumerable men had a motive to kill her, combined with the fact that she partied among a class of people who are known to be uncooperative with police, would normally consign the matter to the "cold cases" file within hours. Most large city police departments consider themselves lucky to solve half the murders in their jurisdictions. With so many unsolved, those involving high-risk victims like Bonny Bakley are recognized as difficult and get little investigation unless other cases involving similar victims, who have met similar deaths, suggest a serial killer at work. |
But Bakley was more than just a rip-off artist in the sex-trade. She was also a stalker of celebrities to the point of ob-session. According to those who had met her over the years, there was nothing she wouldn't do to insinuate herself into the life of a famous person - any man who had achieved fame, no matter how temporary or how far in the past. For many years in the 1980s, she ruthlessly pursued country singer Jerry Lee Lewis to the point that he had a road assistant punched her out, breaking her nose. By the 1990s, Bonny Bakley had to know her days of attracting men were all but over. With a battle-scarred face and grossly over-weight, she had little left to offer except quickie sex in parked cars. But ironically, that served her purpose better than she could ever have imagined. With the help of fertility-enhancement drugs, she managed to get pregnant while in-volved with several men, including at least two celebrity targets. When the baby was born, and later turned out to have been fathered by actor Robert Blake, Bakley managed to pressure Blake into an unwanted marriage that was to have disastrous consequences. Bakley was found bleeding from two gunshot wounds in the actor's car on the night of Friday, May 4th, 2001. But was Blake the shooter? |
||