Blood Secrets: Chronicles of a Crime Scene Reconstructionist (22 page)

Why make reservations and introduce Bakley as his wife that night when he had been showing up for years without reservations and for months with the woman without introducing her? Why hadn’t anyone noticed Blake returning to get his gun? Plenty of people remembered him coming in distraught and shouting that his wife had been shot—then drinking two glasses of water before returning to the scene of the shooting.

And there was more: Blake’s table had been bussed two minutes after he left—before he and Bakley would have reached the car and noticed the firearm was missing—and none of the busboys had noticed a handgun lying on the seat. Another Vitello’s patron reported having seen the actor in the men’s room earlier, vomiting, tugging his hair, and mumbling—though that’s not so surprising considering that Blake had long been in the habit of throwing up his meals to keep his weight in check, according to those who knew him well. Blake hardly allayed police skepticism about his innocence when he refused to take a polygraph test that night, claiming he was too upset and afraid the dreams he had been having about killing his wife would produce an inaccurate result.

Then again, odds were good that Blake wasn’t the only man having dreams about killing Bonny Lee Bakley. She was far from the most sympathetic of victims. As LAPD detectives soon discovered, the woman had a long and lurid history of bilking lonely-hearted men out of money through mail-order scams that involved sending them nude photos (usually of other women) along with promises of a future romance. She had also been arrested for credit card fraud, passing bad checks, and drug possession.

When it came to famous men, she was an aging groupie. She spent several years in Memphis trailing Jerry Lee Lewis in the early 1990s, then sued him for paternity of her third child—a daughter she named Jeri Lee Lewis. Paternity was never proven, though Lewis paid her a settlement. After that, Bakley headed to California, where she had a liaison with Christian Brando, son of Marlon Brando. Next she met Blake, had a fling with him, got pregnant, refused his pleas to abort, and finally talked him into marrying her for the sake of the child, Rose, born in June 2000. By all accounts, Blake was smitten with Rose but repulsed by her mother and the lifestyle she led. He let Bakley live in a cottage on his ramshackle Mata Hari Ranch in Studio City but got a court order barring her from doing anything illegal there.

She ignored it. Among Bakley’s belongings, police found a notebook listing Bakley’s scam victims, the pseudonyms she used when she wrote to each of them, and the amounts of money they had mailed her. Another notebook contained a list of stars and other rich men she had targeted for romance. Next to their names were notes about their worth and other personal details like the names of their mothers. Nearby was a stash of letters the dead woman had written bragging about her erotic adventures and describing her fondness for everything from sex toys to sadomasochism to meeting strangers in motels for trysts—claims her own friends substantiated. They had warned her to be careful, they said, but Bakley was cavalier. She joked that one day her dangerous games would probably catch up to her, but she didn’t stop.

Could another man have been harboring a murderous grudge against Bakley? Possibly. Blake’s bodyguard, Earle Caldwell, told police a menacing stranger with a pickup truck and a blond buzz cut had been staking out Mata Hari Ranch for weeks before Bakley’s murder.

Police never tracked the man down, but they did unearth the murder weapon—a World War II–era Walther PPK handgun with the
serial number partly filed off—in the Dumpster where the Stealth was parked. Attempts to trace it or link it to Blake were unsuccessful.

Still, Robert Blake remained suspect number one. On April 18, 2002, the actor who had once starred as a killer in
In Cold Blood
was arrested. A few days later, he was formally charged with murder, solicitation of murder, and conspiracy to commit murder. Caldwell was arrested, too, and charged with conspiracy to commit murder.

That was when prosecutor Shellie Samuels called my office and asked me to examine the evidence. She and two colleagues flew to Portland with Blake’s jeans, boots, socks, belt, and black T-shirt. I examined each of them using my normal protocol. Everyone in the lab dons fresh gloves, then we spread out clean butcher paper for the first piece of evidence, examine it inch by inch, photograph every section of it, make notes on any unusual characteristics that might relate to the crime, and—in Blake’s case—test it with Luminol for traces of blood spatter. We then reseal the item, sterilize each piece of equipment used, dispose of the old butcher paper, and change our gloves to eliminate the possibility of cross-contamination. We lay out fresh paper on the examining table for the next item and start the process over again.

Blake’s garments revealed no traces of blood. But would Bakley’s killer, whether it was Robert Blake or anyone else, have gotten bloody blowback on his clothes? Probably not. Here’s why: I went to Los Angeles and examined the blood-covered Dodge Stealth, which had been submitted into evidence there, and measurements showed that when Bakley was shot the blowback traveled only about eight and a half inches. Remember, high-velocity mist is very fine and light, so it never flies farther than four feet from the bullet’s point of entry, even when a high-caliber weapon creates the wound.

Next we traced the trajectory of each bullet based on Bakley’s injuries. We started by working backward from the termination point of the bullet lodged in the left side of her head to its entry point in her
body—a hole low on the right side of her jaw. Then we did the same with the shoulder wound. Both bullets remained lodged in Bakley’s body, and both would have been fatal. To understand the path the bullets took, we envisioned an imaginary steel rod running from each termination point back through each entry point. If Bakley had been seated in a normal upright position, the rods would have run downward through the car door to a point of origin on the pavement.

But there were no bullet holes in the Stealth’s door. Whoever shot Bakley fired through the open car window. That meant she saw her killer pointing a gun at her and leaned to her left toward the driver’s side in a classic defensive posture. She didn’t have enough time to do anything else to protect herself. In my opinion, the first bullet struck her in the head and the second hit her shoulder, though I couldn’t be certain. Expirated blood covering the gearshift showed that she slumped farther to her left after she was hit and exhaled blood onto it in her last few minutes of life.

To help the jury understand all this, I filmed an actress sitting in a car reenacting Bakley’s movements in response to what I judged was the order of the shots. Then I worked with animation specialists to create a computerized video reconstruction of the crime, which we played during the trial.

Of course, none of this implicated or exonerated Blake. It simply helped jurors comprehend exactly what happened during Bakley’s murder.

The tensest moment for me came not on the witness stand, but after I testified and the trial broke for lunch. The courtroom was on the eighth floor, so I ducked into an empty elevator and pressed the button for the ground level, intending to grab a quick sandwich. The doors were just closing when someone thrust an arm between them. They slammed on it, then reopened. There stood Robert Blake. We gazed at each other for a second, then he stepped in, the doors closing
behind him. Both of us stood there in stone-faced silence, staring intently at the ceiling, the elevator buttons, the floor, anywhere but at each other. It was the longest elevator ride of my life.

Not surprisingly, Blake’s case proved a gold mine for tabloids and gossip magazines. The irascible actor went through a revolving door of high-profile defense lawyers, partly because of his insistence on granting jail house interviews to famous-name reporters Barbara Walters and Diane Sawyer. When his counsel changed, it sent jury selection back to square one. Then during the trial itself, two colorful former stunt-men from Blake’s
Baretta
days, a private investigator, and a hood-turned-minister all stepped forward to say that Blake had offered them money to “whack” or “snuff” Bakley.

On March 16, 2005, Blake was finally acquitted of murdering his wife, though the jury remained deadlocked eleven to one on the solicitation of murder count until the judge dismissed the charge. Blake’s longtime bodyguard, Earle Caldwell, was also acquitted.

When he finally walked out of criminal court a free man, Blake was seventy-one. The following year, Bakley’s relatives brought a wrongful death suit against him in civil court. I was again asked to provide an analysis of how the crime unfolded based on blood spatter and bullet wounds, though I didn’t have to testify. Blake lost the case and was ordered to pay his late wife’s relatives $30 million. He declared bankruptcy less than three months later.

Blood doesn’t always tell a story. Sometimes it does no more than confirm what is already obvious to police at a crime scene. I’ve been
asked to examine evidence in several high-profile murders to see whether critical clues might lie hidden in the blood spatter but found nothing that would change the direction of an investigation or trial. That was true in the tragic deaths of both Ennis Cosby and Tejano singer Selena Quintanilla-Pérez.

Twenty-seven-year-old Ennis Cosby, son of comedian Bill Cosby, was shot to death on a service road off the 405 Freeway in Southern California as he tried to change a flat tire on his Mercedes around one
A.M.
on January 16, 1997. Cosby was en route to his friend Stephanie Crane’s home when the tire blew and he called her for help. She drove to meet him and used her car’s lights to illuminate the roadside, making the tire change easier. While she waited, a man suddenly appeared at her door and in a heavy accent ordered, “Get out of the car or I’ll kill you.” Instead, she hit the gas. Seconds later, she spun her car around and, to her horror, saw her friend lying in a pool of blood as the man sprinted away.

I was lecturing for the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office when it happened, and LAPD homicide detective Vic Pietrantoni asked me to inspect Cosby’s bloody clothing as well as images from the crime scene and tell him whether any signs in the blood pointed to a setup involving Stephanie Crane. Did the victim’s split lip suggest a scuffle before the shooting? Did the fact that the shooter stood next to Crane’s driver’s-side window or the fact that she drove off while Cosby was being shot suggest that she had helped to set him up? Was this a possible dispute between people who knew each other and had arranged to meet off 405 in the middle of the night? Did the fact that Cosby’s body had been turned onto his back mean anything?

But the blood patterns bore out exactly what was reported and what the murderer himself later confirmed. An eighteen-year-old opportunist thug from the Ukraine spotted a young African-American man with an expensive car, decided to rob him, and just as casually
shot him in the head because he took too long to hand over his wallet, never knowing he was the son of one of America’s best-loved actors. Stephanie Crane had no involvement in the crime. The assailant flipped his victim over to pick his pocket, then kicked him in the mouth as a final insult before fleeing. After bragging about the killing to co-workers, Mikhail Markhasev was arrested, tried, and sentenced to life in prison plus ten years. He later apologized to the Cosby family. In one of those odd small-world twists, Detective Vic Pietrantoni’s wife, Deputy District Attorney Anne Ingalls, led the prosecution team.

Had there been more to the murder, we would likely have seen evidence of a conspiracy such as additional tire tracks, footprints from co-conspirators’ shoes, signs that a struggle took place, or wounds from more than one weapon.

The blood patterns were equally straightforward in the murder of Selena Quintanilla-Pérez, shot to death by her fan club president, Yolanda Saldívar, on March 31, 1995. When the twenty-three-year-old singer discovered that her supposed number one fan was embezzling money from a chain of boutiques the Quintanilla family ran, she fired her. The two met at a Days Inn in Corpus Christi, Texas, ostensibly so Saldívar could hand over some business documents, but as Quintanilla-Pérez was leaving the hotel room, Saldívar shot her in the back. The injured star stumbled to the front desk and told the staff what had happened before collapsing. She died from loss of blood at a nearby hospital a few hours later.

The defense for Saldívar wanted to know if I could find anything unusual in the blood spatter that might mitigate the circumstances or suggest self-defense, but the scene was a simple one to analyze from the crime scene photos. As you know, we work backward in crime scene reconstruction, from point Z to point A. Here, a trail of blood terminated abruptly in front of the hotel desk. The droplets, with their characteristic directional spines, showed that the victim had staggered
to the lobby from the hallway. Her path led back to the interior of a guest room doorway, where high-velocity blood spatter on the carpet, walls, door frame, and door showed that the initial injury was a gunshot wound and that—calculating the dead woman’s height and the height of the bloodstains—the bullet entered the victim’s body in the middle of her back. There was no indication of a struggle, no hint in the blood of any other activity that might have altered my reading of what happened. The police interpretation of events was on the mark from what I could see. I told the defense there was nothing I could add. Saldívar was found guilty of the murder.

In many other homicides, though, blood tells a riveting story. There is no better example than what most Americans call “the O. J. Simpson Case.”

When Nicole Brown Simpson’s white Akita wouldn’t stop barking late on the evening of June 12, 1994, neighbors in L.A.’s wealthy Brentwood enclave went to see if anything was wrong. They found the dog wandering Bundy Drive in front of Brown’s
¹
condo around eleven
P.M.
The Akita was almost frantic—whining, barking, and pacing incessantly. Thinking it might be injured, one man bent down to take a closer look and saw that the animal’s fur and paws were caked with something red. Alarmed, another neighbor peeked over the fence that sheltered Brown’s condo from the street.