Robert Blake in Court for Wife's Murder

The actor Robert Blake threatened to have his wife "whacked" because she had become pregnant against his wishes, according to a friend and former policeman who had acted for him as a private investigator.

William Welch made the allegation during the preliminary hearing of the charge that Blake murdered Bonny Lee Bakley.

Bakley was shot dead in May 2001 as she sat in Blake's car outside a Los Angeles restaurant where they had just dined.

Mr Blake claimed that he had left her alone in the car because he had left his handgun in the restaurant, and returned to find her dead.

The murder weapon was found near by, but with no fingerprints on it.

Mr Blake, 69, a child actor who went on to star in the 1960s films Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here and In Cold Blood, is best known for the 70s television series Baretta. He has been in custody awaiting trial since his arrest last year.

On Wednesday he appeared in a television interview recorded in jail with the doyenne of interviewers, Barbara Walters, in which he said he was innocent.

Mr Welch, a former officer in the Los Angeles police department, said Mr Blake had been very unhappy when he discovered that Bakley, with whom he had had a brief affair, was pregnant. Bakley, 44 when she died, had a long criminal record for fraud and made a speciality of starting relationships with elderly men.

Mr Welch suggested paying her off but, he said, Mr Blake disagreed, saying: "I thought about this and I figured it out. This is what we're going to do. We're going to hire a doctor and we're going to abort her. And if that doesn't work, we're going to whack her."

The court was played a tape- recording of a conversation between Mr Blake and Bakley in which he expressed his anger at the pregnancy.

"You double-crossed me, you double-dealt me and that's who you are," Mr Blake said.

"You have to live with yourself and I don't know how you do it. You swore to me on your life that, no matter what, I didn't have to worry and that was a rotten, stinking, filthy lie and you deliberately became pregnant."

After baby Rose was born, the prosecution said, Mr Blake became anxious to get rid of Bakley, whom had he married six months before her murder, and keep the baby.

It alleges that he offered money to two stuntmen he knew to kill Bakley

The actor's bodyguard and handyman, Earle Caldwell, 46, is charged with conspiring to murder and is free on $1m bail, put up by Mr Blake.

The defence case is that there is only circumstantial evidence against Mr Blake.

His lawyers argue that Bakley had made many enemies by her fraudulent activities and in running a mail-order sex company.

Judge Lloyd Nash will decide whether Mr Blake should stand trial and be granted bail at the end of the hearing, which is likely to last two weeks.