He played an iconic cop on TV. Did Robert Blake get away with murder?

This is read by an automated voice.Please report any issues or inconsistencies here.

See more from the L.A.Times in Google Search.

Set us as preferred On the night of her murder, Robert Blake took his new wife to dinner at Vitello’s Italian Restaurant in Studio City.It was a place where diners squinted at fading celebrity glossies on the wall and said, “Isn’t that the guy who—?”By May 2001, the 67-year-old actor was becoming one of those hard-to-place faces.

People who watched television in the 1970s had seen a lot of him.He’d been a regular on “Hollywood Squares,” a frequent guest on “The Tonight Show,” and — most influentially — one of the decade’s coolest make-believe cops.As plainclothes detective Tony Baretta, he swaggered through four gritty seasons in muscle shirts and a newsboy cap, with a snappy street patter and a pet cockatoo.

It won him an Emmy in 1975.Blake later claimed to despise the job as a waste of the serious talent he should have used in film.His most acclaimed performance had been in the 1967 adaptation of “In Cold Blood.”With unsettling realism, he played Perry Smith, a rootless misfit from an alcoholic home who participated in the robbery-turned-murder of the Clutters, a Kansas farm family.

“I thought Mr.Clutter was a very nice gentleman,” Blake says in the film.

“I thought so right up to the time I cut his throat.”Blake portrayed Smith as a man doomed from the start.In a memoir, he wrote of how intensely he identified with the character: “Perry and I were intertwined like vines over the same grave.”But the actor never found an equal role, partly because his talent was married to a deep self-destructive streak.

His public persona was a volcanic, semicrazy tough guy who said just what he thought and hated the Hollywood game.He spoke of his love-starved childhood, of a mother who never touched him and a dad who locked him in closets.“I would stop on the freeway with a baseball bat and s...