Actor wanted wife dead
2003-02-28 10:08
Los Angeles - A veteran Hollywood stuntman known as the "Whiz Kid" has testified that actor Robert Blake offered him $10 000 to kill his wife and had cooked up at least three ways to do it - including a scenario similar to her actual murder two months later.
Gary McLarty, who doubled for Blake on Baretta and in the 1980 film Coast to Coast, said the actor also showed him a small .45 calibre handgun, nude pictures of wife Bonny Lee Bakley and a way to sneak in at night and "pop" her.
But defence attorneys on Thursday attacked the credibility of McLarty - a stuntman for more than 30 years who admitted once shooting a man to death in self-defence and to using cocaine - and suggested that he made up the story after reading about Bakley's murder in the press.
McLarty, who was testifying for prosecutors in a preliminary hearing in the sensational case, became the second witness in two days to tell the court that Blake hatched a plan to kill Bakley - who was found shot to death outside Vitello's restaurant in suburban Los Angeles on May 4, 2001.
The hearing will determine if Blake goes to trial on charges that could send him to prison for life if convicted.
McLarty said Blake contacted him through another stuntman, Roy "Snuffy" Harrison, and arranged a meeting, first at a Los Angeles area restaurant and then at the actor's home. At the March, 2001 meeting Blake explained that he had impregnated Bakley and that she was demanding money, McLarty said.
McLarty, who performed stunts in such film as Jurassic Park, The Terminator, and Beverly Hills Cop said Blake also showed him nude pictures of Bakley, 44, and a two-story guest house behind his home where she sometimes slept.
On Wednesday, a private investigator who formerly worked for Blake testified that the actor hatched a plan in 1999 to kill Bakley when she would not get an abortion.