Blake Jurors Zero In on 17-Minute Period

After seven days, jurors deciding Robert Blake’s fate have given no indication that they are anywhere near a verdict on whether the actor murdered his wife.

And while experts say it is dangerous to predict how a jury will decide a case based on the questions they send to the judge during deliberations, jurors in Blake’s case have limited their inquiries to a single topic: a 17-minute period on the night of May 4, 2001.

It begins at 9:23 p.m., when a waitress swiped Blake’s credit card to pay for dinner for him and his wife, Bonny Lee Bakley, at Vitello’s restaurant in Studio City.

It ends at 9:40 p.m., when police dispatchers recorded a 911 call summoning medical help for Bakley, who lay mortally wounded in Blake’s car.

Blake told police that after he paid the dinner bill, he walked Bakley to his car, parked about 1 1/2 blocks from the restaurant. He said he then remembered leaving at the restaurant the handgun he carried for Bakley’s protection and returned to Vitello’s to retrieve it. No witnesses testified to seeing the actor go back to get his gun.

When he returned to the car, Blake said, he found Bakley bleeding from the head. Blake said he ran to one house, knocked loudly on the door and got no answer. He said he then ran across the street and frantically pounded on another door, finally getting a neighbor to call 911.

Los Angeles County Deputy Dist. Atty. Shellie L. Samuels contends that Blake didn’t have enough time to do all that he said he did.

Jurors at the Van Nuys courthouse have had just two communications since they started deliberating March 4: They asked to hear testimony read back that bears on the 17-minute period, and they asked if they could see the “timeline� that prosecutors constantly referred to during the three-month trial.

But no written timeline was introduced as evidence, the jurors were advised. They must sort through the testimony of dozens of witnesses to come to their own conclusion about what happened and when during those crucial moments.

“They are deciding a hard case,� said Laurie Levenson, a former federal prosecutor who teaches criminal law at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles. “I think they will be able to support a verdict whichever way they go.�

With only circumstantial evidence linking Blake to the slaying, the focus on the timeline is one key to the murder allegation.

To bolster her theory, Samuels called on a couple from the Studio City neighborhood, Rebecca Markham and Andrew Percival.

They testified that they left Vitello’s about 9:30 the night of the slaying after eating dinner. They smoked cigarettes in front of the restaurant for a few minutes, then began their 1 1/2-block stroll home.

The couple said they saw Blake walk briskly from the direction of the restaurant and stride past them toward his car a block away. When they got home, the clock on their cable TV box read 9:41 or 9:42 p.m., they testified -- a minute or so after the 911 call was made from a neighbor’s house.

The prosecutor argued that after Markham and Percival saw Blake, the actor went directly to the neighbor’s house -- not needing to return to his car to learn Bakley was dying because he had inflicted her fatal wounds minutes earlier.

“There was not the time to do the things he said he did -- to go back to the car, to see that she’s bloody, get hysterical, go across the street, knock on the door, wait for an answer, get no answer, and then run across to [neighbor] Sean Stanek’s,� she said.

Defense attorney M. Gerald Schwartzbach says that the timeline supports Blake’s alibi -- that he returned to the restaurant to get his gun.

“This is the exact timing you would expect if Mr. Blake had been telling the truth to the police,� Schwartzbach said.

Schwartzbach argued that if Blake found Bakley at 9:39 p.m., he would have had time to first run to one neighborhood house and then another, where the occupant called 911.

No matter how much emphasis jurors place on the prosecution’s timeline, Schwartzbach warned them in his closing argument that the timeline is still murky.

“All we know is that Mr. Blake and Miss Bakley left some time between, say, 9:23 and 9:40,� he said. “That’s really all you know for sure.�

Blake, 71, has pleaded not guilty to the slaying. He faces life in prison without parole if convicted of murder.

The prosecution argued that Blake tried to hire two Hollywood stuntmen to kill Bakley and that when they refused, he pulled the trigger himself.

Prosecutors said Blake despised the 44-year-old Bakley because she trapped him into marriage by becoming pregnant. They said he killed her to protect their now 4-year-old daughter, Rosie, from Bakley and a mail-order porn business she ran.