Bonny Lee Bakley

Bonny Lee Bakley (June 7, 1956 – May 4, 2001) was the second wife of actor Robert Blake, who was her tenth husband.

The couple divorced in 1982.

Bakley began a mail-order business sending nude pictures of women, including herself, to men.

She also ran "lonely hearts" ads in magazines advertising for a "male companion".

After communicating with the men who answered her ads, she would ask for money for rent or travel expenses.

Bakley's business and scams eventually afforded her enough money to buy several houses in Memphis, Tennessee, and one house outside Los Angeles.

She pursued a Hollywood career as a singer and actor under the stage name Lee Bonney, but was unsuccessful.

Due to the nature of Bakley's mail-order business and other dealings, she was arrested several times.

In 1989, she was arrested in Memphis for drug possession and fined $300.

In 1990, Bakley began pursuing singer Jerry Lee Lewis.

Bakley eventually did meet Lewis and even became close friends with Lewis' sister, Linda Gail Lewis.

In 1991 she became interested in Christian Brando, the eldest son of Academy Award-winning actor Marlon Brando and former actress Anna Kashfi, who had become a media fixture when he was tried for the murder of his half sister's boyfriend, Dag Drollet.

Brando pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of voluntary manslaughter and was sentenced to ten years in prison.

While he was in prison, Bakley began writing him and sending photos.

In 1993, she claimed that the daughter she gave birth to, Jeri Lee, was Lewis' child.

However, DNA tests later disproved her claim.

After Jeri Lee's birth, Bakley decided to relocate to California.

She left Jeri Lee with her ex-husband Paul to raise, but continued to financially support the child.

In California, Bakley pursued other celebrities, including Dean Martin, Frankie Valli (Bakley claimed they dated when she was a teenager; Valli denied the claim), and Gary Busey.

In 1995, she was arrested for attempting to pass two bad checks from an account of a Memphis record company; she was fined $1,000 and sentenced to work on a penal farm on weekends after she plea bargained down to lesser charges.

After his release in 1996, Brando and Bakley began a romantic relationship.

In 1998, she was arrested in Little Rock, Arkansas, for possessing five driver's licenses and seven Social Security cards with different names.

Bakley used the IDs to open various post-office boxes in order to run her "lonely hearts" scam.

Bakley had a history of pursuing celebrities, with her friends and relatives describing her as "celebrity-obsessed."

Tapes of Bakley's phone conversations reveal that she was starstruck and determined to marry someone famous.

"Being around celebrities," she once said, "it makes you feel better than other people."

In 1999, Bakley discovered she was pregnant and initially thought that Brando was the child's father.

Bakley was fatally shot while sitting in Blake's parked car outside a Los Angeles restaurant in May 2001.

In 2002, Blake was charged with Bakley's murder, solicitation of murder, conspiracy and special circumstance of lying in wait.

In March 2005, a jury found Blake not guilty of the crimes.

Seven months later, Blake was found liable in a wrongful death lawsuit brought against him by Bakley's children.

Officially, Bakley's murder remains unsolved.

Bonny Lee Bakley was born in Morristown, New Jersey, to arborist Edward J. Bakley and his wife, Marjorie Lois Bakley.

Bakley had three siblings: Margerry Lisa Bakley, Joe Bakley, and her half-brother Peter Carlyon from her mother's second marriage.

She was raised by and lived with her grandmother in Glen Gardner, New Jersey, while her mother operated an antique business at 6 Kossuth Street in Wharton, New Jersey.

Bakley dropped out of high school at age 16 and decided to go to New York City to pursue a career in modeling and acting at the Barbizon School of Modeling.

There she met an immigrant named Evangelos Paulakis, who needed to get married in order to stay in the United States.

Bakley agreed to marry him for a price, but then almost immediately ended the marriage; Paulakis was deported.

At age 21, Bakley married her first cousin Paul Gawron.

At roughly five years, this would prove to be the longest of her ten marriages, and they had two children together, Glenn and Holly.