Vitello's Italian restaurant- Studio City, CA
Posted by: 
calgriz
N 34° 08.974 W 118° 22.722
11S E 372899 N 3779598
It is a favorite Italian restaurant with Mr & Mrs Robert Blake since they lived in this neighborhood. But someone shot Mrs. Bonny Blake, after she had a Vitello dinner with her husband, while she sat waiting in the Blake's car parked nearby.
Waymark Code: WM825Y
Location: California, United States
Date Posted: 01/12/2010
Views: 12
Vitello's Italian restaurant is a favorite with Robert Blake, the actor who played TV cop "Baretta" back in the 70's. In court & press reports according to the restaurant's owner, Robert ate here twice a week, and even had an mushroom & pasta plate on the menu named after him ("Fusilli ala Robert Blake"). On a Friday, May 4, 2001, at approximately 9:40 p.m., a mysterious unknown someone shot Blake's wife, while she sat in their black sports car. It was parked only a block and a half away from the restaurant, where they had just finished having dinner. According to Mr. Blake, he had briefly returned to Vitello's to retrieve a handgun he had left behind (he had a police permit), and when he returned to the car, he found Bonny Lee Bakley Blake dying from a gunshot to her head. He ran to a nearby house for help and the police were called.
According to early acounts from Blake's defense lawyer, Bonny Lee Bakley turned out to be a petty crook and con artist who bilked lonely men out of money with false Internet email promises, and who was obsessed with Hollywood celebrities. She bragged of supposed relationships with other stars. Robert Blake had married the Bonny (four months before the shooting incident) mainly because she had given birth to a child. She said she was unsure if the child was Blakes, but DNA tests proved it was. Before the murder, she was living in a separate guest house at Blake's home (nicknamed "Mata Hari Ranch") in the neighborhood. Two days after the murder, Blake moved out of the home in Studio City, and moved in with his adult daughter in gated community of Hidden Hills.
On April 18, 2002, almost a year after the incident, the police arrested Robert Blake at his daughter's home in Hidden Hills. Almost three years later, in 2005, after spending much of that time behind bars, Blake was found not guilty by a jury of his peers in Burbank, CA..
INFO LINKS:
http://www.iamnotastalker.com/2008/06/08/leave-the-gun-take-the-cannoli/
http://www.vitellosrestaurant.com/
http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P1-104272630.html
http://www.lycos.com/info/robert-blake--wife.html
http://www.murdermysteries.com/real/crime_scene.htm