Bonny Lee Bakley Legal Issues: Why was Bonny Lee Bakley arrested several times?

Bonny Lee Bakley was born June 7, 1956, and lived until May 4, 2001, and was the second wife of actor Robert Blake, who was her tenth husband. Bakley was fatally shot while sitting in Blake’s parked car outside a Los Angeles-area restaurant in May 2001.

In 2002, Blake was charged with Bakley’s murder, solicitation of murder, conspiracy, and the 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 when 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. The couple divorced in 1982.

In an effort to support herself, 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.

Bonny Lee Bakley Legal Issues: Why was Bonny Lee Bakley arrested several times?

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 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.

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.